Photo credit: Darcey Baker
By Nick Latham, Senior Lecturer in Initial Teacher Education
Do you ever get that feeling in an airport where you’re trying to find out which flight on the screen is yours? You’re staring at the screen and there’s an announcement about looking after your bags, the café nearby has had a large and excited group (probably on a hen do) arrive and your phone has decided that now is the time that it wants to run an update as you check the time? No? Well, I certainly did when leaving Johannesburg airport after delivering sessions to teachers in KwaZulu Natal Province, ironically about the very thing I had just experienced: cognitive overload.
I have experienced cognitive overload both as a student and a teacher (and now at OR Tambo airport) as I’m sure we all have. This meant delivering these sessions to keen (if a little chilly – it’s winter in South Africa) teachers from schools in Madadeni Township with awareness of their cognitive load and not bombarding them with too much information too quickly. Like most teaching in education, teaching such a subject can get very self-referential; you are constantly aware that you should be doing the thing you are teaching whilst teaching it. Facilitating the cognitive load of the learners in our session was at the forefront of our minds when planning this session and it went down well according to the feedback we received both informally in the session and via our reflection forms.
The main content of these sessions focused on ways to reduce the cognitive load of students during the teaching of new material. We had structured the sessions in a way that we were introducing strategies in the order that they would be in lessons. We began with recall strategies and effectively activating students’ prior knowledge to prepare them for their new learning today. In South Africa, this is referred to as ‘from the known to the unknown’ (a phrase that many of the educators joined in with when we said it – clearly a popular one). We then focused on the gradual release model that is being utilised in many schools across England: I do, we do, you do. This involved me putting on my teaching hat and modelling the process as if the educators were my students – a process that, despite the cold, they engaged with as enthusiastically as I’d have hoped. The gradual release model helps students to engage with new learning without causing cognitive overload as the thinking responsibility moves gradually from the educator to the student. We then finished with a section on effective consolidation and how to aid the process of moving new learning from working memory into long term memory (which hopefully our sessions will!).
Another element we had to consider was our environment. Ben had taught sessions in South Africa before whereas I hadn’t been south of the Equator until our arrival. When discussing what elements of learning could lead to learners experiencing cognitive overload, the teachers across all sessions put forward that the children learning in a language that wasn’t their mother-tongue (for most in Madadeni, this is isiZulu) absolutely added to their cognitive load.
Another meta experience for us as this was also the case of the majority of the educators in the room despite their proficiency in English, it could not be ignored that we were not instructing in the language many would use amongst each other or when at home. We ensured that we had added a section about strategies to introduce new vocabulary at the start of lessons to learners as even when they are taught in their first language, new technical and subject specific words can add to a learner’s cognitive load. Our South African colleagues shared with us experiences and examples of these challenges: one science teacher informed us that the English words ‘energy’ and ‘force’ both translate to ‘amandla’ in isiZulu – adding an extra layer of difficulty to teaching about kinetic energy.
Throughout the sessions, the educators were able to give us insights into how they could apply the strategies into their own practice and still keep to the demands of the curriculum in South Africa. This was a wonderful experience working with some dedicated colleagues from a place where they face some similar and yet some very different challenges to teachers in England. This was my first involvement in the wonderful work that Project Zulu does and participating in it was a truly memorable, rewarding and challenging experience that has helped me to reflect more on my own practice.
