Microbe of the Day: Activities for Sparking Curiosity and Sustaining Attention

We all wish for attentive and curious students—but we don’t always design learning experiences that foster curiosity and attention. In his book Distracted. Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It (2020), James Lang shares three examples of activities designed by professors to spark curiosity and capture attention. These are perfect for introducing students to your subject in the early weeks of the term—and can be used for sustaining curious attention over multiple weeks. Although discipline-specific, they can be adjusted to a diversity of disciplinary contexts and course formats.  

Puzzle it out

The early weeks of a course are the best time to establish a culture of curious attention. On the first day of class, history professor Cate Denial uses a puzzle activity to introduce her students to the complexity of history-making. She divides students into groups and hands each group a “document packet”—an incomplete portfolio of sources related to a historical event that students are tasked with organizing in a meaningful way. Each group puzzles out relationships between portfolio pieces, creates cohesive explanatory narratives for the source set, and compares their narratives with those produced by other peer groups. In the process, students begin to understand history as a dynamic, messy, creative endeavor. “The puzzle of this first-day activity,” Lang explains, “leads Denial and her students to the mystery at the heart of her courses, and at the heart of their discipline” (p. 135). Mini-versions of this opening-day activity (like projecting two images on a screen and giving students a few minutes at the start of class to puzzle out connections) could be used as a weekly opener to sustain curious attention. What hands-on “puzzles” might you design to activate student curiosity in your discipline? 

Microbe of the day 

Sparking curiosity in the first minutes of class can become a regular feature of your course. Microbiology professor Aisling Dugan starts every class session by projecting a picture of a microbe (along with its name and scientific classification) and inviting students to spend several minutes looking up everything they can find about the “microbe of the day” on their phones or laptops. The opening activity not only sets the tone for the rest of the session, but it allows Dugan to channel student excitement about each new microbe to make connections with previous and forthcoming course material. This curiosity-sustaining routine can be replicated in any disciplinary context: what might a version of Dugan’s “microbe of the day” look like in your course? 

Look again!

While Dr. Dugan asks students to apply the same set of questions to a different microbe every week, art history professor Joanna Ziegler has her students apply a new set of weekly questions to the same image. Ziegler’s students write thirteen papers on the same work of art over thirteen consecutive weeks. They consider distinct aspects of the piece, expanding and deepening their understanding with each iteration. This intensive attention-training project requires learners to slow down and find new facets of a seemingly familiar object. (An added benefit of the exercise is creating a tangible record of each student’s growing knowledge and sophistication.) While not all of us have the luxury of dedicating this much time to attention-building practice, a weekly one-minute micro-essay examining an object/image/equation from a new angle can probably be squeezed into most courses without compromising content—and with benefits to student attention and focus. What item might merit repeated examination by your students?

The early weeks of an academic term are a great time to establish curiosity-fostering routines. By combining the comforts of repetition with the excitement of novelty, such routines can help sustain curious attention for multiple weeks. And, if weekly activities don’t fit the format of your course, you can still use similar activities as low-stakes practice opportunities or mid-lecture attention refreshers. Lang reminds us that curiosity is a powerful antidote to distraction: “When I am curious, I have an immediate goal: I want to learn more. The stronger my curiosity, the more I focus my attention—and the less I feel tempted by distraction” (p. 144). By helping students stay curious, we make it easier for them to focus on learning—while refreshing our own sense of curiosity in the process.