John Medina, in Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thinking at Work, Home and School, contends, “You’ve got seconds to grab someone’s attention and only 10 minutes to keep it. At 9 minutes and 59 seconds, something must be done to regain attention and restart the clock.” Medina calls it the 10-minute rule; the idea is that about every ten minutes, something in the lesson needs to change in order to regain students’ attention.

This can be done by breaking each Learning Activity into short segments with quick processing activities between each segment. Students might write a possible test question, complete a quick write, stand up and share a key idea with a partner, or act out a concept. As author Sharon Bowman points out, this keeps students alert and engaged because “the brain doesn’t have time to wander off the topic and think of other things” (Bowman, 2011, p. 138).