PhD work

Focus

Your focus isn’t broken, it just needs time

Educational research, PhD education, PhD work, , , , ,

My recent book, Writing Well and Being Well for your PhD and Beyond  includes a chapter on thinking towards writing which includes a focus practice using a rubber duck, a walking practice, and more information about focussed and diffuse thinking modes; and another chapter on recharging that gives advice on what to do when your brain gets tired after practising some deep thinking. For years, I advised students and researchers who were convinced their brains were broken because they couldn’t do eight hours of deep work every day, five days a week. I’ve never been able to focus like that, and my research suggests that’s normal and fine–which might be reassuring for you too!

We all know that it’s a challenge to focus, to go deep and still and clear and to stay there, to think hard thoughts or read long books or write longform. Many books, podcasts, news articles and research careers tackle this issue, from classics like Cal Newport’s Deep Work, or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow, to recent work like Gloria Mark’s Attention Span. 

A number of recent panicked bestsellers claim our focus has been stolen, our children’s brains rewired, and that our ability to concentrate is deeply broken. Most prominently among these are  Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus. They argue modern inventions like our phones and the internet and traffic are why it’s hard to concentrate. 

But fear we have lost the ability to focus is as old as civilisation. 

So what can do to help ourselves focus?

Anyone who has ever worked in a bustling office, or cared for children, or taught in a classroom knows interruptions come from other humans. That’s why, across Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Europe, societies keep inventing hacks to help us focus, whether that’s hermitages, meditation, pilgrimages or libraries. 

HERE’S how you can use each one of those techniques to help you and your students relearn to focus in everyday life. 

1. Become a hermit

Hermits withdraw from society, they give up power and responsibility, and the pursuit of a comfort, profit, or prestige. Some hermits live on their own, and others with a small group of like-minded people. They live in country huts, caves, or up on pillars. You can be a hermit for a shorter period of retreat. Cal Newport famously tells the story in Deep Work (2016) of the person who bought a first class round trip plane ticket to Japan. And then there’sSarah McLachlan who spent months in a cabin before she was ready to write the songs for Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (Pitchfork 2017). 

Writing retreats and writing groups give us examples of how we can do this in our everyday life. We set aside a time and a place to focus, we remove distractions of the the day-to-day demands of life, and we wait. Being a hermit is supposed to be uncomfortable, restrictive and ascetic – so if it feels difficult or itchy, we are doing it right. If we persist, eventually the hermitage becomes a place where we can find focus. 

2. Learn to meditate

Meditation is a practice of focus. Itt is different from  mindfulness, which can be more of aboutawareness and intention. When you learn to meditate, you have to learn how to hold a thought, image or phrase in your mind. And then how to bring yourself back to the thought every time your brain wanders. And it will wander. This is why most traditions use all of the senses to help hold and return to focus: songs, breath, bells, candles, incense, intricate images or patterns, beads on strings. 

We don’t do a lot of just sitting and thinking in every day life, so it helps to start short and slow and build up to more challenging practices. In this case, we are learning to focus to have our own thoughts and insights, so classes or a guided meditation recording may not  be so useful.

If we are practising on our own, then, it helps to surround ourselves with as many focus tools as we need. Have the right chair, the right fidget toy, a picture of the thing we want to think about, thinking music, a colouring in book or some knitting. Set a timer for 2 minutes. I find the first 30 seconds are always a mess, and you may too. Keep breathing and wait. After 2 minutes, get up and stretch. Come back tomorrow. Start being small but consistent, and then once you can do that, start extending the time. You’ll be fine. 

3. Walk it out

Going on a journey, preferably on foot, changes us. Whether we take our horses to Canterbury as Chaucer’s characters did in medieval England, or we walk the Narrow Road to the Deep North as Bashō did in Edo Japan, we not only leave our everyday lives behind, but we have the repetitive rhythm of steps and the physical experience of progress to get our thinking moving. There’s a reason that traditional universities have gardens, courts, avenues, and other walkable spaces: places for people to pace and stride and wander, as they talked it out with a colleague or worked it out in their head. 

I find the pilgrimage is a useful model for focus because it reminds me that focus is hard work and I can’t do it indefinitely. By the time my legs are tired, my brain will also be tired. So then I am reminded to stop focussing and recharge instead. 

We do not need to walk to go on a pilgrimage, but we do have to get up from our desk and move elsewhere. Some people find that they think well in the car or on trains. Or we might replicate the enclosed centrifugal journey of university courtyards in laps of a pool or velodrome. But this is not merely moving for exercise. It is important to start your journey with a clear intention: a problem to solve, an idea to generate, words to find. At the going out and at the coming home, return to your intention and check that you have made progress, even if you have not fully arrived. 

4. Go to the library

Obviously we go to the library for a whole range of activities and services: we borrow books, consult archives, attend story-times, use the computers, consult librarians etc.  But we can learn from the many students who pack into libraries just before their final exams to study, because libraries are a fantastic place to focus. Libraries are thinking infrastructure. Need a quiet place to put your head down? Need a place where other people are also putting their heads down? Need something to put into your brain first so it has something to chew on? Need a reminder that thousands of other people have also had ideas and the persistence and focus to think them and then write them down? Libraries have you covered.

Favourite way to focus

My favourite way to focus in a library is to use a book to think with/against/alongside. As a writer and an academic, I’m often reading and reacting to other people’s ideas. It’s easy enough to read in snippets, or to let myself get sucked into a fascinating fictional world when I’m on holiday, but if I’m tired and busy and bored, I find my brain keeps sliding off a difficult text I need to read.

I deal with that problem, by going to a library with the book and a notebook. I take notes about what the book says, but also about my feelings, my reactions, my original thoughts sparked by the book. I have pages of notes with marginalia expressing how annoying someone’s writing style is, how shoddy their research is, or how wrong their conclusions. The library helps me focus long enough to clarify and explain what I don’t like about the book, which is important as when I need to explain why I think a book is great. 

Each of these ‘tricks’ makes focus easier, but none of them make it effortless. Focus takes time, there’s friction in the process. It can’t be sustained indefinitely, because focus is hard work, 

It’s not magic

Focus is not a magic trick. And not everything is worthy of the magic of focus. Keeping a vague eye on the pot of soup bubbling on the stove and the songs on the radio and the chatty Teams messages from your colleagues does not need deep thinking. Save your brain for the hard, serious, chewy stuff.  

When you need to go deep, you don’t need to wait for the lightning of inspiration to strike you, or the panicked hyperfocus of a looming deadline. You can detach yourself briefly from the world, set up your environment to support your focus, and practise learning how to pay attention. 

In this post, I’m arguing that there’s nothing wrong with our ability to focus, but we can take some sensible steps to support deep focus, including (re-)learning how to do it. Focus feels hard and messy because it is hard work, and it’s where we address the hard problems. As we practise it more often, we’ll build up our focus muscles and increase our focus tools, but we will always have to practise falling in and out of focus. What matters is not our diamond mind, but our commitment to returning to try again. 

Katherine Firth is the inaugural Head of Lisa Bellear House, a residential hall at the University of Melbourne, and a senior lecturer in research education and development at La Trobe University.

education PhD

Education PhD: What now? Twists and turns in a journey and where you might find yourself next

PhD education, PhD work, , , ,

Brandishing three university degrees and four decades of Australian and international work experience as a journalist/corporate writer, I sensed I finally had enough academic confidence pre-pandemic to tackle postgraduate research.   

Plus, my occasional stints of K-12 teaching since 2011 left me with a niggle I needed to explore. How on earth can you do out-of-field maths or science teaching and do it well; successfully even? 

Not knowing much about the difference between a Doctor of Education (DEd) and a PhD in education, I opted for the former. Over six months, I worked with my would-be supervisors to refine my proposal for an out-of-field maths teaching project. Hit submit, then waited four months. 

No luck: “Margaret’s substantive experience is as a journalist/editor. Her proposal is not aligned with her teaching experience. I appreciate that Margaret recognises this, identifying herself as an out-of-field maths teacher. However, the new Faculty of Education is clearly focussed [sic] on alignment between qualifications, experience, teaching and research.” 

Ouch. 

What Margaret did next

Next, I enrolled in Deakin University’s Graduate Certificate in Education Research, earning high distinctions for all four subjects. A solid record to get into a PhD at that university. After submitting my application, I checked in multiple times over four months, getting a confused message that they were assessing me for a scholarship – for which I hadn’t applied. Finally in December 2022, I was in. Part-time, online; a great fit with my freelance writing. 

But what was the point of me sharpening my academic writing claws?

It’s part therapy to process my teaching stints (and I’m returning to that fold next year, too). I’m keen not to put all my eggs in one basket, not to just be a writer in the age of generative artificial intelligence. Elegant academic writing entrances me. 

So, I’m all ears for post-PhD options. Which is why I found this symposium last month fascinating.

Yes, it is true some education PhD graduates may return to school classrooms – but a panel at Deakin University in October revealed other career options. 

Higher degree research symposium

This discussion was part of the Higher Degree Research Symposium on Digital Technology and Education, hosted by Deakin’s Research for Educational Impact (REDI) Centre.

Panel members were:

  • Professor of School Development and Governance Mathias Decuypere, Zurich University of Teacher Education, Switzerland
  • Dr Luci Pangrazio, ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow, Senior Lecturer at Deakin University, and Chief Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child
  • Recent PhD graduate, Dr Jessica Laraine Williams, transdisciplinary academic, physiotherapist and artist at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, and
  • Mike Stevenson, Head of Product at Educatordata.com, Mike has previously worked with institutions and edtechs like UTS, RMIT, Deakin, Murdoch, and SEEK.

Earning a PhD is a significant academic achievement, yet it opens a complex landscape of career options amid a changing academic job market. The three panel members pursuing academic careers shared their insights on this path. All panel members acknowledged that an academic career is just one option, with about half of Australia’s PhD graduates working outside academia. That aligns with global trends. 

Navigating the Winding Road to Success in Academia

Former high school English teacher Luci Pangrazio explained her choice to leave a tenured senior lectureship for two consecutive postdoctoral research roles, eventually securing a prestigious DECRA fellowship on her second attempt.

“I didn’t really have an academic career in mind, but after I obtained my PhD I went into an ongoing teaching-research position at Monash and successfully applied for a $25,000 grant to lead a project on a small time frame. I had my PhD published as a monograph, so this set me up to go for a research-only post doc,” she said.

Shortly after, Dr Pangrazio was offered a three-year postdoc at Deakin, working with the academic who had marked her masters’ thesis.

“It was a really difficult decision [to leave a permanent role], but I decided to take the risk,” said Dr Pangrazio. 

This led to an Alfred Deakin postdoctoral position, something of a consolation prize after her initial DECRA Fellowship application was unsuccessful. She secured a DECRA on her second try.

“My PhD supervisor said if you believe the work you are doing is worthwhile, you just have to keep trying and not be put off by bad reviews or rejections” said Dr Pangrazio.

Thinking beyond disciplinary boundaries

Dr Jessica Williams from Swinburne spoke about the need for PhD graduates to harness personal values and develop multiliteracy across disciplines.

“Think at the core what motivates and drives you.

“My journey through health sciences, humanities, social sciences, and education spanned a decade while I practised as a physiotherapist in hospitals, aged care, and management. But I’m no longer doing clinical work, as you can’t do everything.”

Dr Williams describes her PhD thesis as an exploration of boundaries: “It operated in the synergies, divergences and tensions of disciplines, which means you sit in the tension, the frissons. We can work productively in collaboration.

You can build a bridge

“It taught me the power of multiliteracies across disciplines; the need to use the right lexicon to bridge potential gaps or hesitations with employers in industry or academia. If you speak their language, you can build a bridge,” said Dr Williams.

PhD graduates can do this by “creating a narrative around their study skills, including experiences outside their PhD, and showing how it translates to broader disciplines,” she said. Start by exploring journals beyond those typically read by your education peers and “go beyond the silo”.

“Act with integrity. Identify work settings and cultures that align with your values. It’s a dynamic process.”

For Williams, a “throwaway post” on LinkedIn caught the attention of her discipline head at Swinburne University, who encouraged her to apply for a lecturing position.

“Make sure you’re visible online; share what you’re doing on a platform like LinkedIn. I had to weigh up how beneficial it would be, so I curate how much time I spend there.”

Pangrazio agreed, noting that she’s active on social media, especially Twitter/X, which has helped her connect globally and build a profile for sharing her published research.

“Be open to new experiences and opportunities. Sometimes a brief conversation at a conference has led to an email six months later inviting me to co-author a paper.”

Exploring geographical borders

Switzerland-based Professor Mathias Decuypere transitioned from the “nice, fun, safe haven” of his PhD years into a challenging postdoctoral life.

“My postdoc experience was really not the nicest in the world. I had two years of teaching, admin, and research, but there’s only so much you can do because postdocs are rare. There’s hardly any funding available, as most of it goes to doctoral students.”

Professor Decuypere’s strategy was to build his profile and “make his research, topics, and methods visible to the world.” At the same time, he advises to “not stick to an academic career whatever it takes – there are so many other options out there”.

“Be ready to answer immediately—to industry, policymakers, schools, or academia—what your research aims to accomplish.”

This requires a conscious uncoupling—essentially, stepping out from under the wings of PhD supervisors. Figuratively, he advised attendees to “kill your supervisors.”

“You must commit to a certain kind of treason towards your supervisors as you reach a stage where you no longer necessarily adopt their views.”

Diversifying opportunities

Panel member Mike Stevenson encouraged PhD students to not have all their eggs in one basket, be that academia or industry. Instead, they should consider making career ‘investments’ in both.

“You may want to be a dedicated researcher, but you could find yourself in a variety of roles. Think about what you can do this week with a spare five minutes to advance another path. Keep learning, improving, and collaborating with others,” he said.

Stevenson encouraged PhD students to think ahead, “You don’t want to invest in these things when you need them, so start now. When the time comes to try a different path, you have your parachute ready.”

EducatorData.com provides data analytics for the education sector, for educators, administrators, and policymakers.  EducatorData.com offers accessible analysis, data visualisation, reporting, and benchmarking, enabling education sector professionals to analyse trends and make informed decisions for their community. 

Stevenson highlighted the slow growth in the Australian academic job market where combined teaching and research roles are flat from 2019 to 2023, contrasting it with substantial growth in teaching only roles.

What else can you do?

However, he noted that while combined teaching and research roles averaged an FTE of ~0.9, for teaching only roles offered an average FTE of ~0.75, saying: “You might secure academic teaching roles that are only about three-quarters of a full-time position, so consider what else you can do.”

For instance, the Educatordata.com team includes both PhDs and non-PhDs, but does not require a PhD for any role. The focus is on the person and how their ability, perspective and experience can contribute. 

“Consider which of your academic skills are transferable. An academic path might not be the best choice for your bank balance, so you could use your skills elsewhere to earn more, return to teaching in schools, or stay connected to academia.”

Stevenson proposed PhD candidates and graduates had a wealth of skills and experiences they could draw on from their studies that could evidence their ability to have a positive impact in business, government, community, and not-for-profit organisations. But it required thinking differently.

“Working in industry requires adopting a different mindset, with colleagues who aren’t part of your supportive PhD community and haven’t shared your experiences.”

Stevenson said success in moving across industry and academia throughout your career comes down to being able to adapt to different cultural environments and not being defined by your credentials but instead by how you can help.

“Reflect on your priorities and where you might best fit,” he said.

Margaret Jakovac is a part-time PhD student at Deakin University, Victoria, using netnography to explore self-perceptions of success of out-of-field teachers of mathematics and/or science. By day, she writes under the surname Paton.

PhD

Want to do a PhD now? Here’s what you should know

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Research in schools is messy. Things change fast and decisions need to be made on the fly. As PhD students doing research in schools, we (Kate and Matt) learned that challenges quickly arise and that tough decisions need to be made.

Our PhD research took place in vastly different contexts. Kate went to Zimbabwe to research the proliferation of philanthropic edu-tourism, and Matt explored differences in the teaching of drama and maths at a school in a regional town in NSW. Despite these “worlds-away” classrooms, we experienced similar challenges and discovered a gap in the literature on education fieldwork for postgrad students.  

That’s what our new paper explores,and from that we have four key lessons for PhD students. 

Four key lessons

We started our PhDs by ‘going with the flow’ of doctoral study. This meant we designed our research with the support of our supervisors. We presented our research plans to a panel of academics. We gained ethics approvals to conduct our studies. We undertook recruitment procedures. We went into ‘the field’ to collect data at schools. Then the flow changed. 

Our paper explains how this early ‘flow’ became more like ‘rapids’ (Lonergan & Cumming, 2017) as we undertook classroom-based research in Australia and Zimbabwe.  

In our research, we faced challenges and had to act in the moment. One such moment was when the classroom teacher left the classroom Kate was observing. What do you do? If you leave the room, where do you go? If you choose to stay, how long do you wait for them to return? If the class begins to misbehave, do you step into a teacher role or do you stay silent? If, and how, do you have a discussion with the teacher and ask them not to do this in the future?  

Someone’s missing

In another example, the teachers participating in Matt’s study were both absent from school but failed to tell him beforehand. This encounter resulted in wasted time travelling to and from the school. It also highlighted that research involves adaptive responses and planning on-the-go.  

Together, our reflections throughout the paper shed light on some of the emotional challenges during fieldwork. Even though one of us was geographically close and the other was far away from our supervisors, we were both unable to access their knowledge in the moments of shifting plans.  

Four key lessons

Here are four key lessons we wish we knew before starting fieldwork: 

  1. Communication is key. Having clear expectations and conversations about the research with the school community is integral to the success of the research. Do not assume that everyone in the school community will understand the intricacies of your study – the reality is this is an ongoing part of the process.  
  2. Developing rapport with research participants is crucial. While it is important to ‘give back’ in research and avoid disruptions to schools, it is equally important to be on the same page with participants about your role/s within the research. 
  3. Plan for a range of different scenarios, be open to how you might negotiate them as they unfold. Anticipating changes to your research plan may help you cope when these changes happen and allow you to know which components of your research plan you are willing to change or remove.  
  4. Keep a diary. Your field notes are hugely valuable when it comes to writing up and reflecting on your research. And a daily diary reminds you of all the things you’ve achieved (big and little) when the going gets tough. 

Continued conversation

We hope that others find these key lessons useful in thinking more broadly about their data collection plans. We are also mindful doctoral students have a range of resources at their fingertips when preparing for fieldwork that should not be overlooked. PhD supervisors are vital in the learning and development of doctoral students. Methods textbooks abound. And, there is a range of very insightful blogs, such as The Thesis Whisperer and Patter. Our research brings attention to these resources and the need for continued conversations about fieldwork.  

Kathleen Smithers is a lecturer in the School of Education at Charles Sturt University, Australia. Kathleen has worked across a number of projects with a focus on the sociology of education and higher education. Her doctoral thesis investigated developmentourism in schools in Zimbabwe.

Matthew Harper is a PhD candidate and research assistant across a range of projects at the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre, School of Education, University of Newcastle, Australia. His doctoral thesis compares teaching practice and the student experience in high school mathematics and drama.

How it feels to slay the dragon: handing in my PhD thesis

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As I come to the end of my doctoral journey, having recently submitted my thesis, I have been asked a number of times by well-meaning friends and family about how it feels. I must confess that I have often wondered what it would feel like to finally ‘slay the dragon’ as my supervisor euphemistically put it. When I was finishing my Masters degree just a few years prior, it certainly felt a little like such a finality, much like the end of a relationship minus the tears and anguish. The conclusion of my Masters degree, for me at least, meant that the joy of writing, the creative thinking and the discussions that I had so valued had seemingly come to an end.

It is perhaps no surprise that it would only take a little prodding by one of my course coordinators that led me to abandon my sensible and permanent teaching position to pursue a doctorate. In retrospect, this reminds me of Steve Jobs salutary advice during a commencement speech at Stanford University, when he was reputed to have said, “stay hungry, stay foolish”. In Jobs’ reckoning, it was crucial to follow one’s heart and intuition if one desired to be truly successful. It was perhaps not so much pursuit of success that drove me, but an itch I couldn’t quite scratch. I am driven by the need to deeply understand my world and my place in it.

I was simply hungry to know more.

Almost four years have passed since that beginning. It has been a time to savour in many ways, not the least because of the manifold joys of intellectual pursuit just for the sake of it. It has been a luxury in this sense, but it has also been a time full of challenge and struggle. A time of personal growth and also a time of foolish abandon. Foolish because no sane person at the age of 43 with family-in-tow should ever reasonably contemplate fulltime study to satisfy their intellectual curiosity. Even early on this foolishness was clear to me. I distinctly recall listening to a colleague who was also contemplating a PhD, but was pointedly pragmatic in wanting his work to be of ‘strategic’ value to his career. I am the type of person that likes to think they could eschew such pragmatisms. However, there is perhaps little profit in being otherwise, as conversations with seemingly vulnerable early-career and even more experienced academics have reminded me along the way. Even now, facing the job market again, perhaps I should have been more tactical at each and every turn, or at the very least more tactful.

I have perhaps been too provocative and even a little foolish.

When I first began this mischief of scholarly work, I stumbled across Lincoln and Denzin’s powerful argument that truly revolutionary work involved being brave enough to write ‘messy’ and ‘vulnerable’ texts that remained open to usurpation and openly conscious of its immanent contradictions. But as any well-seasoned academic would know, that’s simply not the point of the PhD. The discipline of the doctoral thesis necessarily effaces these slippages and ambivalences, which squeezes out the passionate voice of the neophyte idealist, insinuating instead the authorial voice of a freshly disciplined academic-in-waiting as sole conduit to the truths of our social reality. However, all is not so gloomy or final. It stands to reason that the disciplines of academic work cannot achieve full closure over all reckonings, or as Foucault suggests, a permanent provocation always remains.

Now that I have almost arrived at this so-called pinnacle of the academic journey (handing in my PhD thesis), it doesn’t feel much like an ending or even a pause. Nor does it feel like an achievement, where one simply needs to plant the flag atop the pile of rewrites, edits and the fragments of text that seemed to have swirled around in my head endlessly over these last years. Instead, the text that I wrote seems to have instead written me. I have not so much written a thesis, but become its product. In the end I did not so much write that messy and vulnerable text, but instead became myself what I intended for my work. I became that messy and vulnerable text. I can no longer leave behind this experience any more than I can leave behind my self. It is simply under my skin.

So where to now? And what have I learned, or what advice would I give? I have come to understand that one does not simply ‘pursue a doctorate’. I have learned that the task was not to slay some proverbial dragon or climb some lofty pinnacle. The task instead was to become; to become that messy and vulnerable thing I had hoped would carry my ideas. The task is to remain reflexively aware of one’s own contradictions and qualifiers, yet to also stay hopeful, hungry and foolishly curious about the world. This is a gift and a challenge in equal measures. Something I hope I can live up to in the years to come.

 

George Variyan is a doctoral student with Charles Sturt University working in the sociology of teaching, looking at teachers in elite private schools in Australia. George is also a Maths and Science teacher himself, and has worked in diverse school settings such as independent schools dealing with students at-risk, the elite private school sector as well as further afield in international schools. George currently lives in Perth with his young family, enjoying the warm climate and extended family nearby.