How Do We Manage the Economy of Student Attention?

By Reece Moore

“Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.” – Susan Sontag

Whether it’s pings from their laptops, vibrations in their pockets, or filling ‘empty’ time with ‘doom scrolling’, our young people are constantly bombarded with information, notifications, and stimulation. All of this vies for their finite attention, causing other priorities to slip. Teenage distraction isn’t new, but that distraction is now highly optimised and personalised.

This is a dilemma, not only for education, but also in how our younger generations connect, develop, and relax. According to a Pew Research Survey from 2025, >50% of U.S. teens between 13–17 say they visit TikTok almost constantly or frequently every day.

Jonathan Haidt, in The Anxious Generation, wrote “It’s as if we gave our infants iPads loaded with movies about walking, but the movies were so engrossing that kids never put in the time or effort to practice walking."

As educators (and parents) we must recognise the role that technology and social media have played in changing the modern ‘attention economy’ and learning landscape. A question we have to ask ourselves, which I do not have a definitive answer for, is do we lean into this battle for attention by making lessons and activities align more with the short-form content kids are constantly scrolling through, or do we stand true to traditional pedagogical routines that place emphasis on writing, reading, and persistent practice? Is it possible to do both?

My students commonly use a workbook with worksheets and articles to support their learning in the classroom. This has stemmed from an inductive realisation that if they have a screen in front of them that can access apps which schools cannot fully disable, then either me, the teacher, or the task I set is competing against multiple other possibilities that the student could do on their device at any given time. Therefore, we must take time and effort to teach our young people when and how to divide their attention to allow them to flourish. Simple design choices can foster sustained thinking, this is ‘pro-focus,’ not ‘anti-tech’.

Teachers have started to adapt by introducing more gamification, dual coding, and shorter tasks. There are real merits here: well-structured short bursts can reduce overload; dual coding can support memory; and game-like loops can increase feedback and repetition. The caution is that we can unintentionally copy the same logic as the attention economy, such as constant novelty, constant rewards, and constant switching. We want to avoid learning becoming the same as a social feed, which is something we discuss as educators on a frequent basis.

On top of this, generative AI introduces a different focus-sapper. If a student attends every lesson (or not), they could in theory choose to switch themselves off, removing that virtue of attention, knowing that ChatGPT can give them a bitesize summary of everything that lesson covered.

But there are options. As Zig Ziglar stated, “Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four-hour days.” An increasing role of teachers and parents is educating our young people about how best to spend their time. The attention economy has meant that as more algorithms pull at us and mould our focus, young people must be equipped more than ever to know exactly what is worthy of their time. They should ask questions about what they consume and when. In schools, that ‘direction’ can look like deliberately protecting deep thinking, explicitly valuing the failure/improvement cycle, and designing learning that sometimes moves fast, while making room for complexity and sustained concentration.

In Primary, we have begun utilising digital reading tools that personalise the story for the reader to boost that desire for reading for pleasure and improve literacy. Moreover, in Computer Science students produce both digital and physical representations of work to diversify their understanding and application of knowledge and push them to convey their understanding, taking from studies on project-based learning. In Languages, students commonly use Blooket, an interactive tool, to revise and consolidate knowledge. Finally, our exploration of AI as a tool for success has been supporting ELL students to gain a greater understanding of language application and reducing the attention load on them as they develop both language skills and friendship networks in a new environment.

If attention is vitality, then our school is one of the places where students can learn what is worthy of that vitality and how to sustain it.