How Do Online Tutors Keep Students From Being Distracted?

A screen is not less interesting. It is less accountable.

In a classroom a teacher's eyes move across the room and every student knows it. On a call, a student can look attentive with a game open behind the meeting window, and the tutor cannot tell. The problem is not that children have shorter attention spans online. It is that the cost of drifting has fallen to zero.

So the fix is not to ask for more concentration, which asks the student to supply for free what the classroom used to charge them for. The fix is to put the cost back, by making sure a student who has stopped following is discovered within about three minutes.

The moves that put the cost back

Question first, pause, then the name. 'Hamza, what is the next step' tells the other three students they can stop listening. 'What is the next step — ' followed by four seconds of silence and then a name means all four had to think, and they know that will happen again in two minutes.

Then make the thinking visible. Something written every three or four minutes, held up or seen by the page camera, is a harder test of attention than any question, because a student who has drifted has an empty page and cannot bluff it.

Cameras on, and it is worth being straight about why. It is not surveillance. A tutor reads confusion off a face and adjusts before the student says anything, and teaching into four black rectangles is teaching blind. The exception is a genuinely bad connection, and it should be said out loud rather than assumed.

• Pose the question, pause, then name the student.
• Something written and shown every three or four minutes.
• Segments, not a block: a ninety-minute class as three parts with a break, not one long stretch.
• Cameras on, unless the connection cannot take it.
• Small groups, so every student is spoken to by name several times an hour.

The half a tutor cannot fix

The room is the parent's contribution and it is worth more than most of the teaching techniques. A device on a table rather than a lap; a chair rather than a bed; the screen facing into the room so anyone walking past can see it. That last one does most of the work on its own, and it does it without anyone having to police anything.

The phone goes in another room. Not face-down on the desk, not on silent in a pocket — in another room. A phone within reach is a decision a thirteen-year-old has to keep making for ninety minutes, and it is unreasonable to ask them to win it every time.

Then close everything else on the device, turn off notifications for the hour, and give a student in a noisy house headphones. Half the distraction complaints we hear are two younger siblings and a television, which no amount of engaging teaching will out-compete.

When it is not distraction at all

A student who cannot focus for forty minutes on a topic three years above their working level is not distracted. They are stuck, and they have found the only exit available to them. No amount of structure fixes this, and every extra technique aimed at their attention makes the hour worse.

The tell is that attention collapses at the same point every week — not at minute fifty of every class, but at the moment the fractions appear. When a tutor reports a focus problem and the timing is that consistent, the answer is to go back and repair the missing fluency, even though it means teaching material below the student's year for a few weeks.

We would rather say that to a parent than sell another term of a class the student cannot access.