Action Research · 2024–ongoing

Teaching After the Feed

Students today encounter most information through algorithmically ranked surfaces: feeds, recommendation queues, search results. These surfaces share a logic: novelty over return, rapid connection-making, compression of context, engagement over depth. The lesson does not share that logic. This is not a problem of attention spans. It is a problem of structural legibility.

When students sit down in class, they bring a perceptual habit shaped by systems optimised for salience. The lesson asks for something different: sustained looking, accumulation, return. Most teaching assumes that structure is self-evident. This research asks whether it is, and what happens when teachers design for it explicitly.

"The less we teach, the more something else does." Venkatesh Rao, Deep Teaching (2025)

The inquiry

This is an action research study conducted by Doğan Arslanoğlu, in one A-Level course. The same learning goals and assessment lenses are applied across two instructional cycles, each built around a different structural model. The question is not which model is better in the abstract. It is which teacher moves matter, under what conditions, and what students actually do with each.

The tools on this site are built directly from the research. Each one emerged from a concrete classroom problem: students moving too fast, students not returning to prior material, students unable to articulate what they noticed before reaching for interpretation. The tools make the structural logic of the lesson visible and operable.

Research questions

1. How do feed-like and archive-first instructional models affect student attention, comprehension, transfer, and revision?
2. Which teacher moves matter most within each model?
3. When does teaching with the feed support learning, and when does teaching against the feed better support depth and transfer?

Presentations

• Workshop · 2026Course Design in an Age of Algorithmic Attention

  A practical workshop for teachers building lesson microsites with AI tools. Covers the structural mismatch between the lesson and the feed, demos of Close Reader and Constellation Board, and an 18-minute build session.

Status

Proposal accepted. Research design in revision following committee feedback. One teacher, one A-Level course. Same learning goals and assessment lenses across both cycles.