“Memory is the residue of thought.”

Daniel Willingham

Today’s sessions focused on two ideas that increasingly seem to sit underneath a lot of effective teaching: cognitive load and retrieval practice.

The starting point was fairly simple. Our working memory is limited. We can only process a relatively small amount of information at once, meaning that if we throw too much at pupils simultaneously, some of it is inevitably going to fall away.

I quite liked the computer analogy from the session: working memory is something like RAM, while long-term memory is closer to the hard drive.

The job of teaching, then, is partly about helping useful information make that journey.

Cognitive load: what are pupils actually thinking about?

We considered two particularly useful forms of cognitive load:

Intrinsic load is the difficulty inherent in what we actually want pupils to learn.

Extraneous load comes from the way that information or activity is presented.

The total demand placed on working memory comes from the combination of the two.

That distinction seems deceptively useful when planning.

Imagine I am teaching pupils to interpret a line graph. Understanding the graph is part of the learning. But if they are simultaneously struggling with unfamiliar vocabulary, trying to copy large amounts of text and looking backwards and forwards between several different sources of information, I may have added difficulty that has nothing to do with the thing I actually want them to learn.

So the question becomes:

This might mean pre-teaching vocabulary, modelling a graph before asking pupils to use one, breaking learning into smaller segments, or teaching individual components before bringing them together.

Worked examples can also reduce unnecessary demand while pupils are first learning something. Equally, the design of resources matters: an excellent diagram surrounded by huge amounts of competing text may actually make learning harder rather than easier.

There is an important warning here, though.

Reduce does not mean simplify forever.

If a pupil already has considerable expertise, endlessly scaffolding them can actually hold them back. The amount of support therefore needs to respond to what pupils already know.

Retrieval: getting knowledge back out

The second half of the session moved from getting information into memory towards getting it back out again.

Retrieval practice involves deliberately recalling previously learned information from long-term memory. That act of retrieval requires effort, but it is precisely this effort that can help strengthen future access to the knowledge.

This also explains why forgetting matters.

The work of Hermann Ebbinghaus demonstrated just how quickly newly encountered information can disappear. Forgetting is natural. Teaching something once therefore does not mean pupils will permanently know it.

We have to return to it.

That connects nicely with Rosenshine’s emphasis on reviewing previous learning and regularly revisiting material over time.

Retrieval does not have to mean a formal test either. It might involve:

  • a few questions at the beginning of a lesson;
  • flashcards;
  • retrieval grids;
  • entrance or exit tickets;
  • explaining something in your own words;
  • asking how or why questions;
  • mini quizzes using Kahoot, Blooket or Wayground;
  • or simply asking pupils to recall yesterday’s learning without looking at their notes.

The key, I think, is that pupils have to actually retrieve.

Re-reading an answer and thinking “yes, I knew that” is very different from closing the book and trying to drag the answer out of your own head.

Bringing the two together

Cognitive load and retrieval initially felt like separate ideas, but they actually fit together rather neatly.

When something is completely new, we need to be careful about how much information we ask pupils to process at once. We can model, segment, scaffold and reduce unnecessary distractions.

But once something has been taught, we need to keep bringing it back.

Perhaps good planning therefore involves repeatedly asking two questions:

That might be the bit I want to remember most.

Teaching is not just about presenting information clearly once. It is about deliberately managing what pupils think about now, while building knowledge they can still access later.