Katie Brockhurst

The Attention Experiment: A digital wellbeing skill for phones and for AI, built on the evidence for metacognition and self-regulation.

Young people are asking for education on how to have a healthy relationship with technology, rather than another rule. Schools have the policy on phones. The Attention Experiment offers a skill that works when the phone is back in their hand.

It is built on a simple framework students can remember. Scroll. Loop. Notice. Choose. Four words and four movements that accompany them, that’s easy to learn, that lives in the body rather than the head.

A Scroll Loop is when the scrolling keeps going without you choosing it. You picked the phone up for one thing, the feed took over, and time disappeared. It is the design, not you and not them. Saying so out loud turns an automatic behaviour into an observed one, and choosing what happens next is what you do with that. No shame, no blame, and no lecture about screen time.

Metacognition and self-regulation is what the Education Endowment Foundation names as key to developing independent, self-directed learners. This is that evidence, pointed at phones and taught as something students can feel rather than something they are told.

The same addictive design now sits inside the AI tools students use for homework and increasingly for guidance. A prompt loop keeps us prompting like a scroll loop keeps us scrolling, but with a different cost. A scroll loop can cost time and attention. A prompt loop can cost thinking. Teaching about this takes the same shape: Prompt. Loop. Notice. Choose.

Sessions do not end when Katie leaves, setting up a simple seven day experiment, with everything provided and very little for a teacher to do. A week later they look back at what they noticed, what they tried, and what they would keep.

Katie Brockhurst has spent twenty years working inside social media and the attention economy, including heading up the social media team for The Common at Glastonbury Festival. She knows how platforms are designed to hold attention because she fell prey to them, and she has spent seven years researching and building this work, for schools, families and festivals.

Her written evidence to the House of Commons Education Committee on AI in education is published in the Government's Inquiry.

She is the author of Social Media for a New Age, a Business Book Awards finalist, a qualified Digital Wellbeing Coach with the Consciously Digital Institute, and trained with Europass Teacher Academy.