Coral Gables Senior High School teachers are using experiments, artificial intelligence tools and storytelling to help students engage with challenging material.

An Oct. 16 report by CavsConnect, the school’s student newspaper, highlighted approaches used by Elizabeth Kiely, Aaron Miller and math department chair Lisa Barrocas.

Learning through experiments

Kiely pairs chemistry lectures with hands-on laboratory work, including titration experiments. She told CavsConnect that allowing students to follow procedures and work through mistakes helps them become more independent learners.

AI and storytelling

AP history teacher Miller uses NotebookLM to organize information and Class Companion to provide feedback on student work. CavsConnect reported that he uses the tools to supplement instruction while preserving students’ critical thinking.

Barrocas uses an invented character, “Turtle Frog,” to illustrate triangle congruence and similarity, and a fictional family tree to explain quadrilaterals. Sophomore Emily Rodriguez told the newspaper that a classroom demonstration helped her recall geometry concepts during an exam.

What attention surveys show

The local examples come amid wider concerns about student focus. In a Cambridge international education report drawing on more than 3,000 teachers, 88% perceived students’ attention spans as getting shorter.

A separate study of U.S. kindergarten through second-grade teachers, based on a survey conducted in 2022, found that 75% of teachers who had taught before the pandemic reported shorter student attention spans since its start.

Those findings describe teachers’ perceptions. They do not establish a measured decline at Coral Gables Senior High or prove that any particular teaching method caused the change.