It is better to know how to learn than to know
Dr Seuss
We have all been there. We all know that feeling. We planned and perfectly presented a coherent, well-resourced, and creative lesson. At the point of teaching, it felt like a teaching and learning triumph. However, a week goes by, and we return to our subsequent lesson, only to find in our follow-up that our little learners have only gone and lost the vast majority of the learning that had appeared to take place. They perhaps, at best regurgitate some disorganised facts, at worse they look at you bright-eyed, but with blank faces.
We don’t need research to tell us that teaching is complicated. What research does increasingly tell us is that there is a multifaceted link between what we teach and how children learn and most importantly, that it is not straight forwards. It is an invisible process after all, one that is both hard to pin down and comprehend. I know it has subjected me personally to many a sleepless Sunday night…
However, we mustn’t fear, as the mystery of learning is well and truly unlocked through developing our understanding of Cognitive Science and in particular Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory (CLT). CLT provides us with some clarity to the complexity of learning. It a theory that is not new, but something which is increasingly being supported by an abundance of really readable and readily available literature and brought to life through colourful diagrams and illustrations (thank you Oliver Caviglioli).
What we know to be true is this, when we start thinking CLT, we unlock the potential to begin to understand how to overcome some of our children’s learning hurdles. It comes as no surprise that CLT has been named as potentially the single most important string to our teaching ‘bows’. However, understanding it is one thing, but thinking practically about CLT within our classroom practices still remains somewhat tricky (for me included!).
For starters, we need to ascertain the difference between short and long-term memory, so we can understand what we are working with. This bit is simple really, short term is finite, whereas long-term memory can be seen as infinite.
Failure in learning happens when and if subject knowledge is incomplete. What happens next is our children are unable to fall back on the long-term memory and the working memory becomes overloaded, leading to working memory failures.
These failures manifest in different ways including:
- curtailed recall
- failure to follow instructions
- place-keeping errors
- abandoning the task
(Gathercole and Alloway, 2007)
So we know how this failure happens and have probably just had many real life examples spring to our minds.
However, in order to unpick how to reduce cognitive overload, we could need to get right to the nitty-gritty and think intrinsic, extraneous, and germane cognitive load.
I have scratched the surface of understanding these below:
Intrinsic cognitive load: the demand we put on children’s working memory when new learning is unleashed. Their working memory’s ability to process this is both dependent on the nature (we’ll unpick this a little more later) of the information and the child’s prior knowledge. It is the ‘what’.
Extraneous cognitive load: the demand placed by how information is presented. These are often processes that are not necessary for the task or learning but come about because of how we deliver the learning. It is the ‘how’.
Germane cognitive load: defined as the way in which learning transfers into long-term memory. It is where children need to permanently place this new knowledge. You could argue, it is the ‘where’.
Understanding the infrastructure of CLT is certainly helpful. But for us humble teachers, I believe the real magic lies behind uncovering, practically, how to use our understanding to then transform these into teaching tools that endeavour to combat cognitive overload in action!
So time to turn our attention to some small and subtle suggestions as to ‘how’ we can go about translating our understanding of CLT to nudge how we think about our children’s learning processes in action…
Firstly intrinsic cognitive load. Here we must accept that although it is vital to make our children think hard, it needs to be done in manageable steps. Think small steps, think bite-sized nuggets of knowledge. Alongside breaking down subject content when introducing new topics, we must allow time for regular check-ins to reflect upon and observe children’s understanding. It is also vital that we unlock prior knowledge as part of this. Connections must be created. In short, we need to simply find ways to not overwhelm our children too early on in, during the introduction of new work.
Secondly, minimising extraneous cognitive load. Here we must stop children from becoming distracted by information that is irrelevant to the aim of our learning journey’s destination. For starters, please pluck away the fluff and faff from the worksheets and power points (me included!) Instead, enable children to make sense of new material by referencing to mental models of pre-existing knowledge. We’ve got to move away from our teacher-temptation of designing engaging tasks. This is not defying memorable experiences or the use of high quality resources. We simply must just ask ourselves whether what we are putting in front of our children carries a risk of them becoming distracted by things that are unrelated to the learning. Coe rightly reminds us that ‘engagement with a task is a poor proxy for learning’; we simply mustn’t confuse the two.
Germane cognitive load is a tricky one to think about practice. This is a very time-dependent process, whereby our learning experiences achieve a permanent record in our memory, we probably best know it best as consolidation. Daily repetition and exposure to our fundamental curriculum concepts is a good place to start here. Time to really think here about what knowledge children need readily available.
Arguably the easiest and quickest win with CLT lies within extraneous cognitive load. The key to its success is down to how accessible we enable new learning and information to become, based on its presentation. All things considered, I think that’s a pretty quick fix in any classroom, mine included!
I have touched on the tiniest slither of the minefield that is CLT and what it could mean for both our classroom and most importantly our children. It is also important to reflect upon how the science of learning can very much overload our (the teachers!) brains too! We try hard to not get confused or lost in its complexity, but keep at the forefront of our minds two things:
What is means for us as teachers?
What is means for children as learners?
So if nothing else, here are some headlines:
- Present instructions clearly
- Avoid using too many sources of information simultaneously
- Take simple steps
- Make connections
And don’t blur the lines of engagement with learning…