*speech begins*
"William Tyndale released the English-translation-of-the-
...the same things are happening in Education right now! The goat of Cognitive Science has entered the green grass gardens of Education (with a big E)"
Sorry, who are you?
"The time has come, comrades, to throw off the shackles of Project-Based Learning, Discovery, and all that kind of stuff!"
Sorry, can you elaborate on all that kind of stuff? If it smells like a fad, sounds like a fad, maybe it is a fad?
"Right, let me break it down for you, sir... behold the holy GIF of Cognitive Load Theory!"
Sorry, I'm an auditory learner can you explain it to me?
LEARNING STYLES DON'T... *breathes heavily* okay, okay one thing at a time.
*settles down on the edge of the stage*
So... your mind is like a computer, you take information in from the environment through your senses and this information is processed. Certain specific outputs or behaviors such as decisions, words, thoughts or actions occur.
Got it. That sounds pretty obvious?
Well, not really, until recently, psychology has had the idea that we have a kind of "CEO" inside our head making decisions, being reasonable, evaluating, judging, creating in a very conscious and very deliberate way. ... All those things at the top of Bloom's Taxonomy. Turns out, the processes that lead to thoughts appearing there in your head happen without much, well, thinking involved.
Thinking happens without thinking? Thoughts think themselves? That makes no sense.
Well, it's more like this, concepts and ideas blend into each other under the surface of our conscious awareness and then they "pop up" as complete thoughts and we are aware we are having them. So when we are "analyzing" or "evaluating" the quality of the thoughts that result from this process depend to a large extent on how rich the contents of our underlying conceptual apparatus are.
Yes yes! Bloom's, I did an inset the other day about how remembering things is terrible, and creating things is terrific! We've recently moved to a model of project-based learning so the school can be more authentic and engaging. We are all about the 21st Century Skills and future jobs, don't you know!
Well, yes. That kind of has been the status quo for a while but here's the problem, what are you teaching when kids are working on those projects?
21st Century Skills of Course! We give them open-ended problems that they must collaborate and be critical-thinkers to solve. They must investigate critical questions and research the content, presenting back their findings.
Right so I'm afraid here it gets tricky... as I said above there is a pretty settled view in cognitive science that there is no CEO self. There is no "mini-me" inside your head that you can send to the thinking gym to work out his thinking muscles. We rely heavily on memory when solving problems. The memories float up into your mind, and you pay attention to the one that's most helpful in the situation. The more concepts and information relevant to the problem that you can recall easily, the most likely you are to be able to solve the problem in front of you.
Right, but what about engagement and thinking? Groups, collaboration and racking your brainpower over how to use glue guns and raw imagination to create a new and sustainable purpose for a used toilet roll!? Surely something good is going on in the mind there!
Well yes, it might be fun, but it's just not definite that they'll be learning anything, and you need to be okay with that.
Of course, they are learning something! They are making cool things out of used toilet rolls.
Don't confuse the product with the learning. If you assess by getting students to build cool things, it will likely look like they learned because they made the cool products, but what about six months down the line?
Nah, this one, I know. When kids find out something for themselves, they are more likely to remember it. That's an established educational fact.
Really? Are you sure? Recent thinking suggests memories are connected together in something called a schema. New things you learn are constructed within a network of other things you already knew. If you let kids discover the answer, the process of building a schema can be quite haphazard. For learning to be retained over the long-term (which is what we want), you need to specify as clearly as possible what the "it" is, and then keep coming back to it over the year in a structured way.
Wait, what was that Cognitive Load Theory thing? It sounds like another FAD. CLT. Teachers are tired of all this jargon. Do we need another acronym?
It's actually pretty straightforward. We have something called working memory and within our working memory - nor more than a few seconds long - we pay attention to what is happening in the present. Whatever we think about, we can remember. If we are being intentional about trying to learn something, recalling different elements of *it* and connecting *it* together in different ways will be more successful.
Buuuuut... if there are too many steps to follow or too many variables to keep in our mind at one time, we can become frustrated. When there is a problem presented to us, we rely quite heavily on what we already know about it!
Wait, what is "it"? What definition of learning are you using here? For me, Education is about connecting things!
Well *it* can be whatever you want *it* to be. It could be learning to multiply fractions, serve in volleyball, reproduce the essential features of a cell, or practice a new vocal technique in the choir.
Sounds like this CLT wants to take us back to the dark ages of facts, facts, facts, and the slipper if you get it wrong, my lad!
Nah... this can also be a useful theory for learning any new thing. It doesn't have to be facts. Let me give you an example. My cross-training place usually works like this - the teacher gives us seven different exercises - we spent fifty seconds on each activity, doing each one once. We then take a one-minute break and repeat the circuit of seven exercises.
When the teacher gets to explaining the last exercise, I have often forgotten the first one! This represents the "capacity" of my working memory. Working memory just doesn't last for a particularly long time. In this case, it doesn't matter, because in between explaining each exercise, I could "check back" by recalling what the first exercise was. These exercises are familiar to me, so hearing the name or seeing the equipment lying on the floor means I remember what I have to do. Sometimes the teacher will put variations on the exercises, but because I have had these activities repeated so many times, it's not hard for me to grasp the changes. I can connect the latest exercise to the old one because the old one is stored in long term memory.
Right, okay, how does your sweaty gym experience link to Pedagogy?
So yesterday I had a horrendous time in my gym. I spent the whole of the cross fit class trying to work out what on earth I had to do; very little time was spent actually exercising. The teacher had a new idea for a routine. Instead of 50 seconds and 7 exercises per round, he decided to do 12 exercises and 7 repetitions of each one. Now he had to explain 12 different exercise stations in a row! I have a reduced attention span at the best of times. Because there were now 12 stations to explain (not the 7 I was used to), his explanations were fast, so I didn't have the time to check back on what the exercise-before-last was. By the time he got onto explaining number 8, I had no idea what 4 was let alone 1!
To make matters more frustrating, I couldn't copy other people. Each person had to do the seven repetitions at his/her own pace! I couldn't even start *next* to somebody who knew what they were doing and copy them. Shucks, now I was going to have to face the horror of asking the teacher every time I got to a new exercise! He's going to think I am an idiot.
The point is if you give too many instructions at the same time, you end up spending more time thinking of the "how" than the "what". If this is incredibly well designed - say a computer game company created it - this can be quite fun. In a regular class, it's frustrating.
But isn't that part of the game? You are learning to manage multiple distractions. Real-life is like that!
When I am focused on learning a new skill, I need to concentrate on getting the theory behind it and make time to practice it deliberately. Life can be cognitively demanding. Perhaps that's why things are so stressful! So many competing priorities and feeling like you can never settle down and do any one thing properly. Shouldn't we teach children the value and importance of settling down and focusing on learning something, not bombarding them with multiple stimuli in the hope that somehow they learn how to cope? When I am "doing real life," I am not intentionally learning. When I am intentionally learning the principles of focus, deliberate practice, and repetition apply.
Math and language are powerful cognitive tools that allow us to participate in, create, and transmit culture and humanity. Perhaps coding will be the next big one...? Whatever is the case, children have a right to have mastered these things to be able to participate in human society. This is a human rights issue.
Whatever those things we want to learn are, they have a specific structure and set of assumptions. The structure and premises could always be different, Math could be changed, a given language could be different... but that isn't the work of the novice. If there was no structure of underlying premises, these tools couldn't work so well for creating shared understanding between people. For that reason, it requires focus, diligence, and practice to know those underlying assumptions. When you get to be an expert, you can play around a bit more.
Wait, but didn't you get a proper working out of your thinking muscles in the gym? Trying to keep all that information in your head at the same time and sort of logically working out what to do... this is good practice?
No. All I was doing was trying to remember what I had to do. I eventually clocked it by the time we got to the third round and was able to enter into the exercise, but by that point, the class was basically over. I couldn't develop my cross-training technique, because I was too busy thinking of what I had to do. I didn't want to look silly by not knowing what to do. I definitely didn't come out of that frustrating Gym class as a "better thinker."
Right, so your summary of cognitive load theory is don't get kids trying to think of too many things at once?
Well kind of... Analogously, running lots of programs doesn't, by itself, encourage a re-wiring of the computational capacity of the computer - in fact, it can slow down processing speed. In an age of digital distraction, we need to keep the main thing the main thing. Focus allows us to enter profoundly and authentically into the richness of content while avoiding as many extraneous processes as possible.
But hang on a second... neuroscience stuff? Using the brain to change the brain? Neuroplasticity? Metacognition? Those make me think we should be focusing on the mind working through a lot of possibilities and reaching conclusions because you know, neurons that fire together, wire together!
Well, something has to "pay attention." We are consciously processing information, and we can't assume free will doesn't exist or that there is no self. The point is that our attentional capacities have pretty hard limits. Whatever pedagogy means or doesn't mean, one key element of building an educational experience is that you are directing children's attention towards something. There is no need to increase the cognitive load to create new wiring in the brain. As they focus on what they are learning, neuroplasticity occurs. Think about it like this. Imagine your mind is plasticine, and you want to imprint X piece of knowledge or skill into it. You need a suitable mold, and you need to carefully push the edges of the mold into the plasticine of your brain. Paying attention to how you are paying attention and what you are thinking, is metacognition - it's the careful pushing of the mold and tools to help you maintain a steady imprint. If you are trying to do three or four molds simultaneously or with someone distracting you... well, you can imagine the result.
Metacognition just means paying attention to the process of learning and being aware of your own thoughts as you are learning. It can be done within the context of a regular class. Saying things like "kids close your browser window to avoid distraction," or asking, "where have you seen this type of problem before, and how did you approach it?" Or even, "now we are going to do a short quiz so you can practice recalling prior knowledge," are all examples of developing metacognition through instruction.
Importantly, recall practice, or bringing the contents of long-term memory into present awareness, is an excellent way of ensuring the memory is installed correctly. Just like that budget item you put in for but didn't order, if you don't use it, you will lose it. This is why planning out exactly what you want kids to know, getting serious about the "content" box on your planner, is so important. If we leave the content up to the individual kid and what they discover, we cannot strategically return to that content in a way that will ensure the knowledge is deeply embedded.
Using knowledge doesn't mean we always make something or do a PP, it means recall to your mind, think about the content and apply it somewhere sensible. Just make sure when you use it, you aren't taking causing more cognitive overload.
Jeesh, this is a lot to take in!
...and just remember that International students, in particular, have many things that can create extraneous cognitive load.
1) Schemas are culturally relative, and international schools are incredibly diverse. It's an excellent exercise too, for each department to think and talk carefully about what assumptions we are making about students' background knowledge and where it comes from and how we are going to approach that diversity of experience.
2) Related to 1, what content will the school choose to teach, and why? How will we decide? It's certainly easier to identify more "important" powerful knowledge to teach within the context of one culture, but what about an international one? If cognitive load theory is right, we cannot leave the content to chance, but that brings all kinds of conversations about power and privilege into play.
3) Language is itself, a schema. If someone is learning in a second language, cognitive overwhelm can happen even more quickly. If I am trying to work out what you mean, I am unlikely to have available the cognitive resources required actually to learn something!
I'm off to the pub. Thanks, though... it sounds like we don't need to worry too much about all this transformational learning stuff and just concentrate on planning our Curriculum well...
That would be a start!
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