How to get every pupil focused on learning

In the book Why Don’t Students Like School?, Professor Daniel Willingham writes that “people are naturally curious, but we are not naturally good thinkers; unless the cognitive conditions are right, we will avoid thinking”.Given that he also reminds us that “memory is the residue of thought”, this poses something of a challenge for teachers: if we want pupils to remember what they have been taught, they need to think about it. But people avoid thinking.Well, we can start by not making it easy for our classes to avoid thinking by throwing endless distractions in their way.We might have interesting displays at the front of the class that catch the eye, we may allow pupils to chat about their day as they work or we could often be less than strict about a no mobile phone policy – all of these things encourage pupils to avoid the hard business of thinking about their work in favour of anything else. Our minds seek distractions and sometimes we teachers provide them.