What teachers consider when teaching your child in the classroom.

You may remember a TV commercial for Ultratune about an annoying noise coming from the back of the car. 

The woman’s face at the end says a lot about how the environment around us affects our capacity to concentrate and focus on what we need to do.

Over the last few years, staff at Emmaus have been taking part in professional development in the 'Science of Learning.' A specific emphasis has been on Cognitive Load Theory and the importance of understanding how our brains work in taking in information and being able to retain it for future use. This is the definition of learning. Cognitive Load Theory helps us consider the effectiveness of our environment, instruction and assessments to ensure the intended learning can be effective.

Cognitive Load Theory says that our brain can only process so much information at a time and so we need to be strategic about the information we focus on. 

Key principles of Cognitive Load Theory include:

• Short Term Memory
  • Very limited, only able to hold a few pieces of information at once. This is the reason why you can forget people’s names or phone numbers almost instantly.
  • If too much is happening at once, our Short Term Memory is overwhelmed and this is called cognitive overload. Once cognitive load is experienced, our capacity to process information reduces, limiting the ability to learn.

• Long Term Memory
  • Practically limitless. Needs to be organised, linking information together to be able to access it effectively.

• Intrinsic Load
  • The intended focus of the task. This is the thing we want students to focus on.
  • A good thing

• Extraneous Load
  • Things that require brainpower but aren’t the intended focus. 
  • A bad thing

• In the school environment, this can include:
  • Over-complicated or vague instructions
  • Noisy environments
  • Unhelpful seating arrangements
  • Visual distractions
  • Irrelevant information

• Students’ personal lives also have a significant impact, including sleep, health, relationships and broader life circumstances

The Ultratune TV commercial is a great example of extraneous load, the kids fighting in the back will dramatically impact your ability to concentrate on the intrinsic load of driving the car, reducing the quality of driving and increasing stress of the driver. After driving with the kids in the back, the driver is more likely to remember the distraction of the noise than the key aspects of what they observed while driving.

• Germane Load
  • The linking of new knowledge to existing knowledge. This is essential in building links in the brain called Schemas. Rather than knowing individual facts, learning is about piecing this information together and when information is joined together in a schema, an entire schema can be brought back into short term memory to use. The more links the better and this is what allows for creativity, linking information in new ways.
  • A good thing 

• If you hear someone’s name and link it to the fact that it is your friend’s sister and she works at your gym, you are more likely to remember her name.

Cognitive Load Theory also highlights that for learning to be effective, repetition is needed. Each time we bring something out of our long-term memory and use it, we adjust the memory and put it back into long-term memory anew. This builds new connections and strengthens the understanding and ability to access this information. 

Research shows that sleep between sessions of retrieving information from long-term memory dramatically improves the ability to retain the information. This highlights that in learning, slow and steady wins the race rather than trying to cram for an exam.

Staff are continually evaluating what we do in the classroom and how we can improve to help students flourish. The concepts of Cognitive Load Theory gives us a common language around key principles of learning and helps focus on the important things when evaluating our teaching. This gives us the best opportunity to improve the quality of education we can provide your children, so they can demonstrate the gifts God has given them.

I hope this article has helped you understand some of the things teachers consider in their classrooms. These principles are also useful in our everyday lives, understanding how we can more effectively dedicate our attention to whatever our intended focus is. 

Josh Brenkley

Director of Curriculum and Innovation (ELC-12)