Last week I wrote about why it might be useful to think about schools as ecosystems and to view school improvement through an ecological lens. In extending that metaphore I discussed the concept of carrying capacity, the maximum level of activity a system can sustain without consuming the resources on which its future health depends. In ecosystems, carrying capacity is constrained by the availability of energy, nutrients and space. In schools, the equivalent limiting resource is attention.
This got me thinking about another way of understanding the same constraint: economics. Ecologists and economists are both interested in scarcity, just from different directions. This post will discuss attention from an economic perspective.
If a headteacher wanted to spend £100,000 on a new management information system they would need to make a business case, go through a procurement process and get it approved by governors. They’ll need to be able to explain where the money will come from, what else it could have been spent on, ideally, how they’ll know whether it’s been worthwhile? Everyone accepts that if we’re spending public money, this is a resoanble process to go through.
But, if the same headteacher decided to launch a new programme of book scrutiny., the financial cost would be negligible. But that doesn’t mean there are no costs. First there’s the time spent planning and discussing what the scrutiny process should look like, then there’s the time dedicated to launching it on an INSET day. Departments will then need to discuss how they will meet expectations. And this is all before teachers begin preparing books because they know the scrutiny is approaching. Leaders will need to spend time reading the books, writing reports and agreeing next steps. The findings will then probably reappear in line management meetings, with reminders sent out before the next scrutiny. And so on. Individually, each activity may not seem especially costly but collectively, they will occupy a hundreds, if not thousands of hours of thinking and action.
Quite rightly, schools are meticulous about accounting for money, with every significant expenditure needing to be justified. Do time and attention deserve the same discipline?
Well, according to William Ocasio, organisations become what their members collectively pay attention to.1 In schools, what leaders look for occupies teachers’ minds, just as what teachers look for occupies students’ minds. Attendance, belonging, curriculum coherence or retrieval practice all gain prominenince the more they’re discussed. Over time, patterns of attention become patterns of behaviour, and patterns of behaviour are cemented as culture.
School leaders decide where hundreds of people’s attention will be directed every day. Each time staff are asked to think more about one priority, they’ll inevitably think a little less about something else. In economic terms, every shift in priorities carries an opportunity cost.
Opportunity costs only exist when resources are scarce. Economists use the term scarcity to describe the limited availability of a resource. Every use of that resource means forgoing an alternative use. Spending on one project means there’s less money to spend on another. Time works in the same way, which is why teachers forever complain that there’s never enough of it.
We focus on time because schools are frantically busy places, especially at pinch points in the year. On any given day, teachers might teach five lessons, log behaviour incidents, report safeguarding concerns, answer emails, contact parents, mark students’ work and prepare for tomorrow’s lessons. Every task feels important and nothing can be easily ditched. Schools respond by trying to protect time. Teachers are given non-contact periods, time is set aside for trainign on INSET days and schools try to juggle the calendar to avoid too many meetings piling up in the same week. All of these decisions reflect an awareness that time is scarce but that’s not quite right.
One year I had two free periods every Friday afternoon. Every week I’d make an optimistic list of everything I intended to achieve. Every week I’d sit down convinced I was finally going to catch up. By half three I knew that list was coming home with me.
Although there were no extraneous demands on my time, I’d find myself popping down to staff room for a coffee and get chatting, or I’d start thinking about a new scheme of work. Then I’d remember an email I’d forgotten to send, or wonder whether I’d followed up a conversation with a parent. Before I knew it, it’d be the end of the day and, once again, I’d have achieved nothing. I had the time I needed but I lacked the ability to keep my attention on one problem for long enough to make progress.
It turns out this isn’t just a personal failing. Research into task switching suggests my experience is far from unusual. Rubinstein, Meyer and Evans found that switching between tasks carries a reliable cognitive penalty. Each time we switch between tasks we not only lose time, we also increase the likelihood of mistakes as we force our mind to reconfigure itself for the new task, even when we know exactly what’s coming next.2 Further research by Sophie Leroy suggests the cost doesn’t end once we’ve made the switch. When we leave one task unfinished, part of our attention remains attached to it, a phenomenon she calls “attention residue”. Some of our thinking is still occupied by what we’ve left behind.3
Task switching isn’t always something we choose to do. Schools can be designed in ways that make it almost unavoidable. A teacher may have plenty of non-contact time on paper while spending much of it repeatedly disengaging from one problem and reorienting themselves towards another. These switching costs accumulate, leaving attention fracturing into dozens of jagged pieces. Research has found that, after an interruption, knowledge workers took an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to their original task, often after completing several other tasks first.4 The result is that all too familiar dismay at having worked hard without ever having achieved anything. And once attention is fragmented, its scarcity changes the way we think.
In their book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Mullainathan and Shafir draw on a wide range of experimental and real-world evidence to show how scarcity narrows attention. In one series of studies, they asked participants to think about an expensive car repair before completing tests of fluid intelligence and executive control. They found that those on lower incomes performed significantly worse after they’d been reminded of their finacial situation, suggesting that the immediate demands of scarcity consume the mental resources available for other, more rarified tasks.5 This narrowing of attention results in an effect they call tunnelling: when a resource becomes scarce, immediate demands dominate our thinking, making it harder to focus on longer-term, more strategic concerns.
Schools can create a kind of attentional scarcity, with the same tendency towards tunnelling. So, if a book scrutiny is coming up, teachers will think about the state of their exercise books rather than about teaching the curriculum. Or, if an inspection is looming, senior leaders start thinking about accumulating evidence rather than school improvement. Attention narrows onto whatever is most pressing until what’s urgent crowds out what’s important.
Expertise, interruptions, routines, stress and fatigue all influence how much attention is available for what matters most. An experienced teacher can deal with low-level disruption, explain difficult concepts and adapt lessons to students’ needs more effortlessly because the thinking required has been automatised. Novices have to think through every decision consciously. Even though experts and novices have the same hour available, an expert will have far more attention left for anything unexpected.
And even experts are undermined by interruptions, stress and fatigue. Each interruption breaks concentration, each stressful decision occupies working memory and each hour of sustained effort exhausts cognitive resources. Creating more time certainly helps, but it won’t result in more attentional capacity. Creating time is a scheduling challenge whereas as protecting attention is organisational design challenge, depending on predictable routines, coherent systems and stable priorities. For teachers and leaders to be effective, they need not just time but the conditions that make sustained thought possible.
Protecting attention is therefore as much a leadership responsibility as creating time. Every new initiative, policy or priority reshapes where that attention is directed. Each new school improvement initiative draws on a scarce resource. But because attentional costs are easily overlooked, we struggle. to understand why well planned, evidence informed strategies fail to pay off. So how can we better calculate attentional costs?
Economists distinguish between price and cost. The price is what you pay to acquire something, whereas the cost includes everything required to own, maintain and use it. In schools, we’re good at calculating prices but routinely ignore costs, because they’re parcelled out in small instalments. We don’t notice a single email explaining a new policy, a departmental discussion about what it means in practice, or a line management conversation checking how it’s progressing. Individually, each of these may only occupy a couple of minutes. But when they’re added up over the course of a year, they amount to a substantial investment in organisational attention.
Organisational tunnelling is easy to see from the outside. At the moment, many schools have their collective attention focused on the educational buzz word du jour: belonging. It’s dominating conference programmes, all over school improvement plans, shaping staff development and — most importantly — featuring prominently in inspectional reports. Whether this emphasis is justified isn’t the point. Once an issue becomes the focus of collective attention, it draws attention away from everything else.
In his classic, 1937 article, “The Nature of the Firm,” the economist Ronald Coase observed that organisations incur costs simply by coordinating people’s activities. Communicating, coordinating, checking, clarifying and following up all consume scarce resources. He referred to these as transaction costs. In schools, these costs are often paid in attention. Deciding what you want to happen is easy. The hard part of school improvement is making sure staff think about the right things, at the right times, so that new ways of working become routine.
The way many schools approach instructional coaching illustrates the point. The strong evidence base and relatively low financial costs of instructional coaching make it an attractive investment, yet embedding it can take years. Coaches need training; teachers need repeated opportunities to observe, practise, receive feedback and refine their practice. Leaders, meanwhile, calibrate expectations, monitor implementation and induct new staff. It’s not that coaching doesn’t work but that the effort required to make it pay off isn’t something schools have thought through.
Dean Fixsen et al’s research on implementation suggests that what we tend to think of as implementation is really only adoption.6 Successful implementation comes from the gruelling commitment to coaching conversations, observation, feedback and refinement needed to change everyday practice. Obviously, this all requires a substantial investment of attention and whether that investment pays dividends depends on the outcomes. If a coaching policy establishes routines that reduce cognitive effort and develop greater expertise, the initial investment will be repaid through more effective use of attention. If not, the attentional costs continue accumulating without generating much return.
As we know, not every investment of attention pays off. One of the most predictable mistakes we make is to continue investing simply because we’ve already invested so much. This is the sunk cost fallacy: allowing past expenditure to justify future expenditure. Althought the attention already spent can’t be recovered, will investing more attention produce worthwhile returns? If we’re serious about school improvement, we need the courage to find out if our investments are paying off by asking questions like these:
Is the initiative becoming easier to sustain?
Are routines replacing reminders?
Is expertise replacing compliance?
Is less attention needed to achieve the same or better outcomes?
If the answer’s no, you may be accumulating attentional debt without generating attentional returns.
School improvement is a bit like buying a house. The purchase price is only the inital outlay. The real cost emerges over time through mortgage payments, maintenance and repairs. The attnetion required to adopt a policy is its purchase price. The cost is measured in everything that follows. How many meetings will it generate? How much monitoring will it need to become routine? How often will you need to return to it? These are all investment questions and wise investment requires an understanding that although two initiatives might look likely to produce similar improvements, they can demand very different burdens on attention over time.
How to calculate Attentional Return on Investment
All this is to say that only those initiatives eventually begin paying back our attention invested in them are worth the resources they consume. A well-designed behaviour system is a good example. Introducing a new policy and seeing it through requires a large upfront investment of attention. Teachers have to agree expectations, students have to learn routines and leaders have to reinforce them consistently. If the system is well designed, though, the investment starts to pay off relatively quickly. Because predictable routines replace continual decision-making teachers have more time to focus on students’ needs and students have more space to focus on the curriculum they’re trying to master. Time hasn’t been created, but attention has been released.
After the paywall:
The formula for calculating AROI
attentional debt
leadership incentives
An AROI checklist
