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We have all seen the stereotypical portrayal of the traditional school setting where a teacher stands at the front of the classroom and spends the entirety of class time giving a lecture and asking questions of the students. While few classrooms are this extreme anymore, there is still a large amount of time where students are expected to sit and listen to the teacher.
No matter how interesting the teacher, sometimes it can be hard for students to focus for very long on a lecture. This is not just because young people’s minds have a short attention span from social media, but because human beings are genetically hard-wired to prefer to watch interactive scenes rather than a single individual.
Research on Attention to Interactions
A newly released study showed that this preference for watching and paying attention to social interactions rather than individuals is not a new human development, but one shared with our genetic relatives, chimpanzees. (Crompton, et al.) Both human children and chimpanzees were shown videos of either individual actors or social interactions between multiple actors and both humans and chimpanzees preferred to watch the social interactions.
The subjects often would even ignore rewards given to them in order to continue to watch the social interactions, which simply shows the strength of their interest. Children ignored toys offered to them and chimpanzees would ignore food offered to them. Clearly social interactions are something important for not only modern humans, but something that has been worth focusing on for social animals for millennia.
Classroom Interactions
Unfortunately, classrooms are often students watching the teacher in front of everyone rather than seeing a social interaction. Certainly teachers try to engage students in discussion and this could be considered somewhat of a social interaction, but it can be difficult to get students to even engage at this level without first piquing their interest in the topic and allowing them to first build a base on knowledge that they can then develop and improve through that discussion with students. There is a lot more that can be done to make classrooms include more social interactions that don’t involve the teacher at all.
While having conversations with students is great, reformatting the layout of the classroom goes a long way to making it feel less like a one man or woman performance to a social interaction between everyone in the class including the teacher. Below are some ideas to try out that will increase the amount of social interactions that students can observe and be a part of.
The first, and most obvious is to include a lot of turn-and-talks, preferably with 3 or more students. While pair work can be great when students are engaged about a topic, students who are not terribly interested or engaged with the topic or unlikely to engage very well with the topic with their partner. When there are groups of three, especially when at least two of those members are engaged, this can help to further engage the third as they hear good discussion on the topic from their peers and will be more interested in this discussion than simply hearing their teacher drone on about it.
Another great option to add some social interactions for students to watch is through well chosen videos. While videos have a bad reputation in the teaching world as something lazy teachers employ, which is honestly often true, it doesn’t always have to be this way. Well chosen video content can be a welcome break from the teachers voice and they often include various social interactions about whatever topic is being discussed. While a class-long video with little student engagement is probably even worse than just a teacher’s lecture, having short videos interspersed between the turn-and-talks and teacher talking time can be a great way to add visual interest and get more professional voices involved.
While old classrooms weren’t able to always bring in guest lecturers into the classroom, these days, a simple YouTube video can bring in professionals from around the world to the classroom. Even better is when two experts are discussing a topic or demonstrating something with other individuals in a social interaction. These types of videos are better than just a single person talking about a topic. So while a long boring video of an individual lecturing about a topic is a lazy teacher’s tool, shorter videos with social interactions and demonstrations are one of the most valuable tools a teacher can bring into their classroom.
One other way teachers can add a bit of social dynamic to class is by increasing the social dynamic in their teacher talking time by including a student “helper” to be a part of a demonstration or explanation. Having a helper student up front helping to write things on the board, answer and ask questions, and be a part of demonstrations. While many teachers may feel that they already involve students by asking them questions and prompting responses from students at their desks, this doesn’t really involve an extended social interaction between two people, but is only a short attention boost for the individual being cold called to answer the question.
It will be much more effective to bring a student up to the front of the class and actually have an extended interaction with that student before having them go back to their seats will not only highly engage the student who has been brought up to the front, but also be a social interaction for the other students to watch, which the research above shows will be more effective in holding the entire class’s attention.
While some classes might find this easier, such as math class, where a student can come up and solve a problem on the board with the help of the teacher, other classes might be a bit more difficult to figure out how to involve a student for an extended period of time. With a little creativity, however, this can be applied at least occasionally to absolutely any class. History classes could have a short roleplay with a student where they have a mock debate where the teacher and the student play opposing historical characters or viewpoints. English classes could have the teacher display a student’s paper and edit it together. Science class could have a student be a helper for a science experiment.
There are endless possibilities, so it is important to be creative. While not always the most time efficient approach, this isn’t the goal. The goal is to increase engagement. So even if it takes a little longer, whenever possible try to include a variety of individual students for an extended period of time in the front of the class. This will not only be a benefit to the student being brought up, but according to research, this will be far more engaging for students than simply quickly explaining a topic in a short lecture.
Conclusion
Humans are a social species, and so it makes sense that we are most interested in social interactions rather than individuals acting alone. Our attentional resources are often limited and this is not simply due to societal changes from social media, a popular scapegoat. School is not built for the way humans have been built to pay attention since well before our species became modern homo sapiens.
Simply blaming modern society is a cop out, and teachers need to figure out how to include more social interactions into their classroom so that students can learn in the way their brains were designed to learn rather than what is easiest and most time efficient for the teacher. While not always possible, these ideas don’t need to all be implemented into every lesson. Instead, simply adding one or two of these ideas occasionally will have a good impact in adding variety to lessons and implementing a social dynamic in class that is more suitable to our social human brains.
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References
Crompton, C.J., Foster, S.J., Wilks, C.E.H. et al. Information transfer within and between autistic and non-autistic people. Nat Hum Behav (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02163-z
