The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 239
Jennifer Gonzalez, Host
GONZALEZ: This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to Episode 239 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast. In this episode, we’re going to talk about how to avoid the pitfalls of multitasking in school.
While many people have probably gotten the memo that multitasking isn’t great for our brains, strains our mental health, and ultimately doesn’t even work, that’s not stopping a whole lot of us from trying to do it all the time. Sometimes this isn’t a huge deal — it might make us irritable or reduce our productivity. But other times it could threaten our relationships — alienating friends and family who struggle to get our full attention — or even our safety, like when we try to multitask while driving.
Most of this has been pretty widely publicized by now, but multitasking also sneaks into our classrooms and interferes with learning, and it’s happening in ways you might not even recognize. In today’s episode, I’m talking about this problem with cognitive scientist Megan Sumeracki. Megan is the co-author of the book Ace That Test: A Student’s Guide to Learning Better, and a team member on the fantastic site called The Learning Scientists, where a group of scientists share all kinds of useful information about how we learn. She was also my guest on episode 232 about metacognition. Today we’re going to look at some of the sneaky ways multitasking creates pitfalls in schools, and what we can do to avoid them.
Before we get started, I’d like to thank Alpaca for sponsoring this episode. Interested in knowing how your teachers are really doing, right now? I’ve always believed that asking teachers and students for feedback is one of the simplest and most powerful ways to improve a school’s culture. Earlier this year at SXSW EDU, I discovered something new that really caught my attention: it’s called semantic pulse surveying and it’s from a company called Alpaca. You might have heard them on episode 230 of the podcast back in June! I tried it myself, and it was so different from the usual surveys we’re used to. Instead of picking from a 1-to-5 scale, I just tapped words that described how I was feeling — words like joyful or refreshed or like half-hearted or drained — and I instantly thought “teachers will feel seen and heard with this.”
What’s great is that these surveys are super quick and anonymous, but they give school leaders deep insights into how their staff is really doing. Pair that with Alpaca’s teacher recognition packs, and you’ve got a system that not only listens to teachers but celebrates them too. If you want to make a real difference in your school’s culture, check out Alpaca at alpacapacks.com/pedagogy and get a special 15% off just for Cult of Pedagogy listeners.
Support also comes from The Gilder Lehrman Institute. Are you a K-12 teacher, community college instructor, or education professional looking to advance your career with a master’s degree that fits your busy schedule? The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and Gettysburg College have partnered to offer an affordable, fully online, and fully accredited master’s degree program specifically designed for educators like you. Join them this spring and learn from the nation’s most distinguished historians, including Ned Blackhawk, David Blight, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and Alan Taylor. With flexible courses available year-round, including 6-week summer options, this program is designed to work around your schedule. Applications for the Gettysburg College–Gilder Lehrman MA in American History are now open. Visit gilderlehrman.org/MA to learn more.
Now here’s my conversation with Megan Sumeracki about the pitfalls of multitasking.
GONZALEZ: Hey, Megan. Welcome back.
SUMERACKI: Hi. Thanks for having me again.
GONZALEZ: So you were recently on the podcast talking about metacognition, and now we are back to talk about multitasking. But before we do, for anybody that didn’t listen to that episode, just give us a quick recap on, you know, what is your background, who are you in education, and tell us about your book.
SUMERACKI: Yeah. So I am a cognitive psychologist. I specialize in learning and memory. I’m a professor at Rhode Island College in Providence. And so as a professor in higher education I — especially at a place where teaching is valued — so we do research, and we teach, and we do service. But in addition to all of that, one of the things that I am the most excited about and the thing that I really put a lot of energy into is The Learning Scientists project where myself and a team of other cognitive psychologists from around the world, we are international with Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel who is in Scotland. We run the website learningscientists.org and we try to make information about the science of learning as freely available and accessible to teachers, students, parents, anyone who wants it as possible. And we do a lot of communication with teachers. So, you know, what research, what research can we explain that might help? What are the, what are the issues you’re having, and can we try to fill in some of those gaps based on evidence? What issues are you having that isn’t being addressed? What questions can we ask in cognitive psychology at the varying levels of research that we do to try to address it. And, you know, what are things that we’re not paying attention to? So it’s really a back-and-forth, it’s a conversation about how we can use the evidence that we have to make learning more effective and efficient and fun. Not that fun is a measure of learning, but we want learning to be fun too in the classroom, and then, you know, what can we do to try to fill in, to fill in those gaps? And so that’s The Learning Scientists project.
GONZALEZ: Okay. And then you’ve got a book that was published last year, “Ace That Test.” What is that book?
SUMERACKI: Yeah. Yeah, so that book is, we wrote it for students. We wanted to, we talk a lot to educators. We wanted to focus on students and really sort of outline, okay, what are the things that students can do? Strategies that are evidence-based. How can they use them in flexible ways? And there’s lots of examples, little vignettes, and then there’s retrieval practice questions at the end, so getting them to bring to mind what they know from memory, which we know promotes, tends to promote learning. And it focuses on strategies, and it focuses on other things that they may want to pay attention to, like metacognition, which we talked about a couple of months ago, and multitasking, attention, you know, exercise, sleep, nutrition. Lots of different, lots of different things. And so it’s really a guide for students that, that they can jump around and read whatever chapter is relevant. We’re finding too that educators and teachers are interested in this book, seeing how we phrase things for students. And then especially for teachers of students that are a little bit younger and maybe reading this book and taking more ownership of their learning doesn’t make as much sense, they can read the book and try to use the practical tips and the vignettes to guide students to do things that are effective and efficient in the classroom, but then also to kind of help teach them about some of these things.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. And so today we are going to be focusing on multitasking. I think a lot of people listening already know what this is. We probably all kind of struggle with it, but we are going to be positioning it as a complete myth. So what is it, and why is it a myth?
SUMERACKI: Yeah. So to really understand the myth of multitasking, we need to understand the difference between automatic and controlled processes. It’s really the difference between a conscious effort to do something, something where our mental resources are focused on the thing that we are doing. And then doing something more unconscious without that controlled attention. And so we can do two things at once. We can multitask in a way, but only if we’re automatizing one or both of them. So let me give you a couple of examples. I can, I can blow dry my hair in the morning and brainstorm examples that I could use in my class that day. I can do those two things at once because blow-drying my hair is automatic and really doesn’t require conscious attention. And then as I’m thinking about examples, that’s where my main focus is. And so in that way, I am quote-unquote multitasking because one is automatized.
GONZALEZ: Right.
SUMERACKI: It’s also okay if my brainstorming is interrupted a few times while I, you know, make a shift or if some, you know, my daughter comes running in the room, right? Like, there’s lots of things going on.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: And so, you know, it’s not, I don’t need completely, you know, no interruption to do some brainstorming, not at least at that phase, right?
GONZALEZ: Right.
SUMERACKI: I’m just sort of thinking about that, and then also doing the thing that’s automatic. I can listen to a podcast and take a walk at the same time. Walking doesn’t really require conscious attention. I can do that automatically. I can fold laundry, and I can watch TV at the same time. Folding the laundry’s pretty automatic. I have to check in every once in a while, but that’s fine, you know, as long as it’s okay that I miss a little bit of the story for TV or I use pause or, I mean really, let’s be real, if I miss a little bit of the story on a TV show, it’s not the end of the world, right? I can do those things at the same time.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
SUMERACKI: But the idea that we can do two processes that require attentional control at the same time, that’s a myth. If we’re doing two things that require attentional control, one of a few different things is going to happen. So one is that one thing ends up on autopilot and doesn’t really get processing attention when it should.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: So I can’t prepare for my class and listen to a podcast story at the same time. What’s going to happen is I’m not actually going to listen to the podcast story or I’m not actually going to fully prepare for my class, right?
GONZALEZ: Right, yep.
SUMERACKI: One of those things is going to end up on autopilot. I could try to do both, but what, if I am doing both, the other thing that could happen is I end up switching back and forth.
GONZALEZ: Right.
SUMERACKI: Switching back and forth is not the same as doing things at the same time.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: We can sometimes switch back and forth very rapidly.
GONZALEZ: Right.
SUMERACKI: But there’s going to be a cost associated with that.
GONZALEZ: I think I’ve seen this most often and most recently. I mean last night I was out to dinner with a friend, and she kept getting on her phone.
SUMERACKI: Yep.
GONZALEZ: And she thought she was still in the dinner, and she really wasn’t. Like, she wasn’t there. And I’ve been in the same situation where I’ve had to pay some attention, and I kind of feel all of my brain energy go into my phone for a minute, and I realize I didn’t catch what the person was saying. It’s, it really is impossible to hold both of those things at the same time.
SUMERACKI: Yeah. My phone distracted me a couple weeks ago. My husband and I were watching a movie, and I am very bad at just sitting and watching anything on TV. I cannot just sit. I have to crochet or do something else.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: But I try really hard not to lose focus because my husband is like, he sits and he’s like in it. He’s there for the cinematic experience. And I don’t know how he does that. He doesn’t know how I do my thing either. If there’s ever words on the screen, he has to say, “Okay, we’re reading now.” So, but there was a couple weeks ago, I don’t know, I just got distracted at the very beginning, and we’re like three minutes into the movie, and I was like, I don’t understand what’s happening. And he was like, “Are you kidding?” And I’m like, “Can you just rewind?” And he was like, “Are you kidding?” I’m like, “I am not kidding. I need you to rewind.” So, you know.
GONZALEZ: There’s your metacognition working though.
SUMERACKI: And it could happen on accident. I was like, “We can either rewind or you can just, like, pause and tell me what happened.”
GONZALEZ: Tell me.
SUMERACKI: And he’s like, “Forget it. I’ll just rewind.” I’m sure he was not happy with me. But, you know, this also tends to happen when we’re more tired.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: So there’s a cost with switching back and forth. I’ll give another really clear example that I think, I hope will resonate with many of us: Texting and driving. We can automatize our driving.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: But what we cannot automatize is the focus that we need to catch things out of the norm. So as long as everything works exactly the way we expect it to work, going on autopilot’s okay.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: But that’s not necessarily going to be true, right?
GONZALEZ: Right.
SUMERACKI: And so when we’re texting and driving, we are rapidly switching back and forth between attending to the road and texting. And if something comes out in front of you or if someone stops in front of you or any of these things while your attention has to be, happens to be shifted to the text, then you, then you’re going to be in big trouble.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: And of course there are safety features with vehicles now, right. Like they beep and they warn you and they try to get you to pay attention so that you’re not on autopilot.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: And those are good things, but we really, it’s important to put the texts down. And it is not just about hands-free. I know that in the law in many states, at least within the U.S., is it’s okay if you’re using voice-to-text. It’s okay if you’re on the phone and you’re speaking, you know, you’re speaking to somebody, but your hands are free. It’s really not about the hands. I mean obviously if you drop your phone, and then you’re like, you know, down trying to look for it on the floor of the car while the car’s still going, that’s not great. But really, it’s more about our attentional focus and our attentional control than what our hands are doing. Anyone who drives stick shift, a manual vehicle, knows this. Your hand is always on the stick. You’re fine with just the one hand on the wheel, right? It’s not about your hands. It’s about your attentional control.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: I read somewhere that texting while driving increases the rate of accidents by like 23 times. I don’t know where I got that number. I’m sure it’s somewhere in the ballpark of accurate. So, you know, switching back and forth, there’s a cost associated with that. And sometimes we don’t switch back and forth, right? So your friend with the dinner probably not switching back and forth, probably too much on the phone. And even if she was switching back and forth, that’s not what you’re there for, right?
GONZALEZ: Yeah. It’s not quality, yeah.
SUMERACKI: Yeah. So that’s, that’s why this is a myth.
GONZALEZ: Okay. And so now we’re going to sort of, like, push this into education, in the classroom. How, how can teachers apply this information when we are dealing with students?
SUMERACKI: Right. So a lot of the things that we need to do in school are controlled or should be controlled. They take conscious effort.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: Learning requires not, actually I shouldn’t say learning requires conscious effort or thinking, but a lot of it does.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: Right? And so we need to put in that conscious effort. And to do that, we need to try to avoid multitasking. One example that comes to mind, and I don’t know if teachers still do this. This is a situation where I simply, I’m a little bit out of touch with what’s happening in K-12 right now, but I know when I was a kid, we would often have to read aloud. And we would, you know, one, you know, one student would take one paragraph and then the next student, and so you could figure out where you were going to fall.
GONZALEZ: Yep.
SUMERACKI: And so what do you do? While everybody else is reading aloud, you’re counting the students and counting the paragraphs and finding what you need to read and making sure you can pronounce all of the words. And while you’re doing that, your brain is focused on this task of reading the other paragraph. You don’t hear what everybody else is saying.
GONZALEZ: Correct.
SUMERACKI: Now if the purpose of reading out loud is to practice speaking aloud, to practice reading, maybe that’s okay. We’re really just all taking turns practicing. But if we’re supposed to remember and try to understand the content of what’s being read —
GONZALEZ: Right.
SUMERACKI: — then that’s not going to work super well. Another time when this comes up, at least for me, is if I’m at a meeting or a group or something where, you know, it’s structured and we’re given the task of introducing ourselves, and that’s fine. I know my name. I know where I work and my background, what I do. But if I have to think of a fun thing about myself or I have to, you know, come up with two truths and a lie or something, I am spending all of my cognitive focus trying to figure out what those things are. And I guess, you know, maybe in advance I could think about it and maybe I should just have one ready. But I don’t, I don’t have, like, a fun thing. I’m always trying to decide which of two things that are loosely fun and mostly boring I should actually say out loud. And then I’m focused on that, and I don’t, I don’t hear anybody else’s names. And even if I go first, I’m then like kicking myself over which one I practiced for the next three people. I don’t know who the people are.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
SUMERACKI: And so trying to avoid giving people multiple cognitive tasks, even if one is maybe kind of invisible. If it’s still taking our mental —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: — our mental energy or mental focus away, then we’re not, we’re not listening or focusing on the other one that can be automatized. I can’t automatize figuring out a fun thing about myself, but I can just, like, kind of tune out and stop listening.
GONZALEZ: I feel like, I feel like having more of an awareness of this could really also help in terms of classroom management. Because I think sometimes kids get in trouble for not listening when what they’ve actually been asked to do is, I mean this is a piece of advice I always give to teachers is to not hand out a piece of paper and then just start talking.
SUMERACKI: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: Because they’re either going to have to read the thing that you told them to read or listen to you, but they can’t do both. And so I’ve seen kids get reprimanded for not doing one of the things they were supposed to do when what they were — it was an impossible task that they were being given.
SUMERACKI: Right.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: Or, you know, putting up PowerPoint slides or, you know, slide decks and having a bunch of words and then talking.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
SUMERACKI: A lot of times we’ll say, “Oh, PowerPoints are not the best way to engage students.” And it’s not, the PowerPoint isn’t necessarily the problem.
GONZALEZ: Right.
SUMERACKI: Part of the problem is if we’ve got a bunch of bulleted words, and I’m supposed to be reading but also listening.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
SUMERACKI: That can be really tricky, right?
GONZALEZ: Yes.
SUMERACKI: So giving the time to read and then, you know, do the next thing. Or, you know, the slides can actually be great because taking notes is another cognitive task and you don’t, this is why —
GONZALEZ: Right.
SUMERACKI: — we could get into a whole other thing about typing versus handwriting, you know. Typing we can transcribe and sometimes that’s good. Most of the times, it’s not. It’s better to put things into your own words, but if you’re trying to listen and watch and look at visuals and you’re trying to put things into your own words and quick jot it down and also the person in front of you is opening up social media on their computer, and then you’re distracted. There’s just so many things going on that it’s very, very difficult. And this kind of launches us into another big one in education: Phones, tablets, computers, just screens of any kind. They are very distracting. And, you know, smartphones have been designed to draw you in. That is, that is what the researchers at Apple and all of these other big companies — it’s not just Apple. It’s Google, it’s all of them, Facebook, Meta, all of them. That’s what their goal is, right, to try to draw you in and grab your attention.
GONZALEZ: Right.
SUMERACKI: And they do a very good job of that.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: And so when there’s a phone around, there’s some research showing that even the notification going off is enough to pull your attention. So again, it’s not just when you’re looking at it.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: It’s not just when you have it in your hand and your eyes are on the screen. If you’re thinking, I wonder what that is?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: I wonder, is it the daycare? Is it the this or that?
GONZALEZ: Yes.
SUMERACKI: Is my friend mad at me? You know, whatever is going on, when the notification is going off, even if it’s not your notification, even if it’s someone else’s, it pulls your focus away. And that can cause problems. Now a lot of teachers may not have control over the phone policies or the tablet policies for individual students in their class or even, you know, as a whole for the class. But, you know, trying to get those away as much as possible and to talk to kids about this is going to be helpful. And I would say, honestly, giving, this seems to work in my classes, and this is anecdotal not based on research that I know of, but giving them a phone break can sometimes help, that they know that they’re going to be able to check it in, you know, 20 minutes.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
SUMERACKI: And fine, just, we need to, we need to be here while we’re here, and we need to try to push it away while we’re not.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: And this is difficult. I mean we’re fighting a, we’re fighting a battle that feels like a losing one —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: — with the phones, but I think that there are things we can at least try to do or at least being more aware can be helpful. And if a classroom in general is just very distracting, right? You mentioned, you know, passing something out and then other instructions or things that they’re looking at or reading. People talk, noise, different things, that can be difficult. Some, especially for students that have, you know, some sort of accommodation or designation if they’re neuro, they’re not quote-unquote neurotypical, if they’re neurodivergent in some way, like ADHD or something along those lines. That means that they’re going to have trouble sort of focusing and filtering those things out. And so there’s individual differences in how well we can do this, but everybody is going to struggle with doing two cognitive tasks at once if one of them shouldn’t be automatized.
GONZALEZ: Right.
SUMERACKI: And so thinking about those things, not just for some students but for all of us, and especially for some, can be, can be helpful.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. So we’ve talked about a couple of things that we can do to avoid the pitfalls of multitasking, sort of setting aside time for, like, digital stuff and just for checking, some phone breaks. What are some other things that we can do to just avoid this pitfall of multitasking?
SUMERACKI: Yeah. So just knowing that multitasking is a myth and thinking through those things like you already mentioned can be really helpful. Encouraging one task at once, even saying, okay, we’re going to do this first, and then this piece, right? So I’m going to give you time to read this and then we will, you know. That can be helpful. We already talked a little bit about sort of a phone break, if that’s appropriate. But taking cognitive breaks to refresh our attention, even if it’s not a phone break, but just time to kind of reset. Exactly how long is sort of up for debate. And I was, I was in meetings a little bit ago where, and there was a big debate. Should it be 5 minutes? Should it be 18 minutes? It depends. It depends on so many things. It can even depend on whether or not a child has gotten enough sleep or if they’re hungry. And so I think it’s impossible to know exactly how long is the right amount of time. But doing the best you can to figure that out or to at least, you know, give breaks when it seems appropriate. Sometimes students will actually get into a flow state, and interrupting and giving a cognitive break during kind of that flow can actually be harmful. So I think it’s not going to be possible to perfectly optimize.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: But being aware of these things and doing the best that you can is going to be, it’s going to have a big effect. And, you know, whether or not it’s 5 minutes or 7 minutes for these kids or 18 versus 20, those types of things are going to be a much smaller effect.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: Another concept worth bringing up here is kind of related to this idea of flow, is mind wandering. So some of the things we’ve talked about are quote-unquote invisible tasks, things where you’re thinking about something else —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: — when you’re, when you’re, the task that it looks like you’re doing is, is something different, right? So, you know, I was kind of looking at my phone and also sort of thinking when the movie was going on, and I missed, you know, what are apparently two crucial minutes in the beginning of the movie. I got to pay attention to the first two minutes, but I sure did. But, you know, sometimes mind wandering’s okay.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: So, you know, thinking about something else and letting your mind wander every once in a while, is not always bad. There’s some research showing that when you mind wander, sometimes creative problem-solving can fall out of it. And so, you know, we absolutely do need to focus sometimes, and it’s good to practice that focus, but letting our minds wander sometimes and not, not, you know, being too rigid about exactly what we need to focus on at any given moment can be, can be okay, and giving some time for creative thought or brainstorming or even just a little bit of mind wandering is not always a bad thing either. So it’s like anything else, right? It’s nuanced. There’s no silver bullet. Anyone saying that they’ve got a pill or a, you know, the one thing that’s going to lead to the best situation no matter what, that’s not, that’s not real life, right?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: There’s a lot of different variables.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. Megan, tell us where people can go to learn more from you and more about this.
SUMERACKI: Yeah. So we cover this in “Ace That Test: A Student’s Guide to Learning Better.” We have free resources on learningscientists — with an “s” — dot org. I mentioned this last time. There’s a blog with over 500 posts that are, that are freely available. We have a couple of tags in the archive if people are looking for kind of a focus on this. So there’s a tag for attention, there’s a tag for cognitive load. There’s also one for prior knowledge, which in some ways is related to this. If you really start to get into this, it takes more cognitive effort when you don’t have the requisite background knowledge.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
SUMERACKI: And so if, you know, when you’re starting to kind of think about multitasking and attention, and you start to get into the weeds, understanding differences in background knowledge can actually affect how much attentional resources are going to be necessary for different students to engage in different tasks. This is one of the reasons why, you know, new English language learners struggle more, because they’re doing that extra cognitive task of translating, and then doing those pieces, right? And so, and we’ve got a podcast that has over 80 episodes about learning, and so there’s lots of free resources there. And then, of course, we talk about it in the book.
GONZALEZ: Awesome.
SUMERACKI: There’s other books too, actually. If you go to our website and click “Books,” there’s three that I’ve written, and there’s a couple other ones that are written by other members of our team. And Althea Need Kaminske and her book “Five Teaching and Learning Myths — Debunked” tackles this one directly.
GONZALEZ: Awesome. That’s fantastic. Okay. Great. Well then, we will send people over there. And thank you so much for sharing all of this with us.
SUMERACKI: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. I always love chatting with you.
GONZALEZ: Thanks, Megan. Thank you.
For a full transcript of this episode and links to Megan’s book, visit cultofpedagogy.com, click Podcast, and choose episode 239. To get a bimonthly email from me about my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, courses and products, sign up for my mailing list at cultofpedagogy.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.