A news headline reads, “I Tried the 5-Second Rule for Procrastination and Here’s What Happened.”
Season 4 of Stranger Things closes with the protagonists watching their city being overtaken by demonic dark clouds from the Upside Down.
A push notification lights up your phone with a new message.
What do these scenarios have in common? Anticipation-induced dopamine.
Modern media has a firm grip on our attention, and one of its most reliable tools is anticipation. Essentially, dangle an unresolved question over a person’s mind and they’ll stay attentive to find out how it ends.
Those familiar with Charles Duhigg’s habit loop know how this works (Duhigg, 2012). Dopamine floods our brain when we complete a survival-linked behavior, like eating sugary or fatty foods, for instance. But after repeated exposure, our brain starts releasing dopamine in anticipation of the behavior, not just at its resolution. It’s this anticipation-induced dopamine that focuses attention and increases our motivation, cuing emotions like curiosity, drive, and even hope.
A push notification can make you drop everything to check your phone—hoping it’s a funny reel, only to find a reminder to schedule your colonoscopy. Over the decades, media companies have saturated every screen with this cycle.
This is the world we live in. It’s the only world our students have known—except, often, at school. Students move from their phones into classrooms where the best anticipation-building they encounter sounds like, “Write this down because it will be on the test” or “You’ll need to know this if you want to succeed in college.” If we really want to grab students’ attention, we need to think more like the media industry seeking immediate engagement.
You might feel discomfort with the idea of clickbait teaching. How am I supposed to compete with multibillion dollar media companies? Let’s face it: You’re already competing. Every lesson, every day. When it comes to the attention economy, we can get bitter or we can get better.
Here are three techniques that any media company, teacher, or school leader can use to capture and hold an audience’s attention.
When it comes to the attention economy, we can get bitter or we can get better.
Predictions (The dramatic headline)
Dramatic headlines create information gaps: They raise a question or conflict without resolving it, prompting our brains to fill in the blanks. That gap-filling triggers curiosity and exploration (we click the link to read the rest of the article) (Gruber & Ranganath, 2019). Predictions are one of our most versatile attention tools. Have students predict:
- What comes next in an acronym or a process. “Tell the person next to you what you think the ‘T’ stands for in our acronym.”
- What happens next in a story, scientific experiment, or historical event.
- What’s coming in the next phase of learning—today, tomorrow, or at the end of a unit.
Stories (The cliffhanger)
Storytelling is one of our most ancient pedagogical tools, and for good reason. Stories build anticipation through causal relationships. Mix in the human knack for empathy—where we see ourselves in the story—and we can’t help but find out how a narrative resolves.
Take anything you teach and ask, What would this sound like as a story? If I’m introducing aerial perspective in an art class, can I tell the story of da Vinci gazing upon the Tuscan countryside, noticing something profound about the distant hills? If I’m teaching refraction, could I describe a child standing with a spear over the water, preparing to strike down on a meaty fish—only to pause and adjust his angle based on how the light is striking the water? Wherever there are causal relationships, there’s a potential cliffhanger.
Props (The push notification)
Push notifications cue anticipation through symbols—hearts for “likes,” speech bubbles for comments, paper airplanes for messages. Each one promises social affirmation (a major dopamine source) to motivate us to engage with the app.
The pedagogical equivalent of this is the prop lesson: a sensory object or symbol, placed where students can see it, that they have to unpack or decode with effort. Examples:
- A math teacher enters class wearing giant polka-dot boxers stretched over her pants, socks stretched over her dress shoes, and a T-shirt straining over a huge puff coat. (She’s about to teach order of operations.)
- A mysterious box sits at the center of the room that reads, DON’T OPEN UNTIL 1:12 P.M.!(Inside is equipment for a lab or simply a homework reminder.)
- An emoji equation on the board: [dollar sign emoji] - [gold bar emoji] = [handshake emoji] (Students are about to learn what happened with the gold standard in 1933.)
Look at your next lesson and find a symbol or object. Place it somewhere—and say nothing. Let the anticipation build.
Welcome to the Attention Economy
We’re competing every day, every lesson, nearly every minute for student attention. We can shake our fists at the sky or shove our heads in the sand—or we can adapt. We can use the same principles media companies have mastered to keep students attentive and curious enough to reach deeper learning.
Tell more stories. Craft more prop lessons. Orchestrate more predictions. You won’t believe what happens next.
