Practice does not make perfect, it makes permanent. Whatever you practise to the point of automaticity, you make habitual and can do without active thought. This reduces cognitive load and frees up precious working memory capacity which can then be put to better use. So, what are the 10 most impactful routines that you can embed in your daily practice to help lighten the cognitive load?
1, Think backwards
You should have a laser-like clarity about the knowledge and skills you expect students to have learned by the end of each lesson and you should plan backwards from there.
If you can’t articulate what you want students to know and do at the end of each lesson, then it’s unlikely that students will know what is expected of them.
Ask yourself: What do I want students to know and do at the end of this lesson that they didn’t know and couldn’t do at the beginning?
Then: What do I need students to think about during this lesson in order for them to process and encode these knowledge and skills? How will you know if students have acquired these knowledge and skills?
Check in regularly with students to ensure they know what they are learning, why, and how that learning will be used and assessed later.
2, Think about the bigger picture
Look at each lesson not in isolation, but as one piece in a jigsaw. There needs to be a logic to the order and organisation of lessons so that what you teach today builds upon and extends what you taught yesterday and is built upon and extended by what you teach tomorrow. Over time, there needs to be increasing challenge.
In practice, each lesson needs to provide opportunities for students to activate their prior knowledge and then add to it, forging ever more complex schema in their long-term memory.
Sequencing in this way also allows you to articulate that bigger picture to students which, in turn, helps build intrinsic motivation. It also ensures that students have the requisite knowledge to be able to understand new concepts – because we all process new abstract information within the context of what is already concrete and familiar.
Ask yourself: What are the end-points of my curriculum? This could be a scheme of work, a unit or topic, a year or key stage, or an entire phase of education. What matters is that you know what you want students to know and do at the end of the sequence.
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This article first appeared in SecEd's annual supplement for early career teachers. Published in June, the free supplement offers 16 pages of advice to help new teachers survive and thrive at the chalkface. From professional conduct to safeguarding, from wellbeing tips to common challenges, and some useful classroom ideas to boot: Download your free pdf here.
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3, Think high...
... and teach to the top. This involves teaching the same ambitious, broad and balanced curriculum to all students, and having high expectations of what all students can learn – avoiding the temptation to “dumb down” because of their starting points or additional and different needs.
Thinking high also involves teaching a curriculum that is sufficiently broad so as to prepare students for what comes next but to teach it with appropriate depth so as to ensure genuine understanding and aid transferability.
Thinking high is about making sure all students, not just the higher-performing ones, are stretched and challenged – both in terms of the pace and pitch of teaching and in the feedback given. One great strategy to employ to this end is peer-teaching. If the students who have “got it” teach those who have not, then the “got its” are meaningfully engaged in retrieval practice and deepen their understanding of a concept by explaining it to someone else, while the others are retaught a concept from a new angle.
Ask yourself: What does excellence look like? What standard of work should I expect from the highest performing students? How can I model excellence and deconstruct it so that all students can see how to produce work of a high standard? How can I maintain the integrity of my teaching sequence without holding some students back or allowing others to flounder?
4, Think out loud
First, start each new teaching sequence – whether that be a new concept, unit, or topic – with clear and insightful explanations. The best explanations are chunked into small steps, make use of analogies and metaphors to compare new, abstract information to what is already familiar to students, and are dual-coded, combining verbal and visual information to aid students’ cognition.
Starting a new topic with teacher explanations enables you to take ownership of the information and ensures students do not waste too much time gathering information or developing unhelpful misunderstandings.
Second, you should model excellence and, while doing so, make your invisible thought processes and decision-making visible to students, thus ensuring your implicit expertise is explicit.
Third, you should engage the class in co-construction, producing a model together. Students provide the substance while you ask probing questions, drip-feed technical vocabulary, and pass the baton between students so they can comment on and add to each other’s contributions. You should also use questioning to engage students and provide on-going formative feedback.
Fourth, students should produce a model independently – so as to engage in the cognitive process by themselves – and gather and act on feedback.
Ask yourself: What key information do I need students to know upfront? What vocabulary do I need them to possess? How can I share this in an accessible way without overloading students’ working memories? How can I model excellence live in front of students? What steps will I demonstrate and how I will narrate my progress? How can I model metacognition and show students how I deal with setbacks and improve my work?
5, Think differently
Plan a variety of learning activities for students to engage in over time – with teacher explanations and modelling “chunked” with questioning, practice activities, or group discussions which aid students’ retention and increase their attention spans.
Each lesson does not necessarily need to be varied, but over a sequence of connected lessons, there should be opportunities for students to become increasingly independent and to engage in activities which allow them to own their learning.
Pair work, group work, whole-class discussions, self and peer-assessment, and suchlike, are all great ways of ensuring students are active participants in the process of learning, not just passive recipients of information.
The trick is to gradually hand ownership of learning to students by starting a new teaching sequence with the greatest level of control and slowly passing the reins to students as they complete tasks for and by themselves.
6, Think repeatedly
Plan opportunities for students to engage in some form of retrieval practice – and thus the building of schema – in every lesson. The shape and form of this retrieval practice and when it happens within the lesson is dependent on the context. Pragmatism is key, but retrieval practice needs to take place frequently to prevent knowledge decay and to help students connect prior learning to new learning.
Thinking repeatedly is about engaging students in activities that require them to activate prior learning then add to it in order to spin ever-more complex webs of knowledge in long-term memory. These mental maps – or schema – help students to think more efficiently and effectively.
Retrieval practice does not have to be convoluted, nor does it have to involve lots of planning. One impactful form is “free recall”, whereby you greet students at the door and give each of them a blank piece of paper. When they sit down, the task is to write down everything they can remember from the previous lesson. You might use this to unpack prior learning and to unmask any misconceptions, but you don’t necessarily have to do anything. The simple act of students retrieving things from long-term memory and writing them down is good enough.
7, Think equitably
Teach all students the same curriculum, thus ensuring equality, but make sure that those students with additional and different needs are supported to access that curriculum through adaptive teaching strategies, thus ensuring equity.
Thinking equitably is about giving those who start with less more help to access the same curriculum as their peers. The “more” might take the form of task-scaffolding whereby students are given more detailed instructions, additional information such as a word bank, worked examples, or partially completed tasks (perhaps stem sentences) in order to help them get started.
The key is that any additional scaffolding you put in place falls away as quickly as possible, ensuring students become increasingly independent.
8, Think forward
As well as knowing the bigger picture of learning, students need to know how, when, and why they will be assessed and how prior learning will be activated and built upon. Students should only be assessed when that assessment will lead to feedback, and feedback should only be given when there is time given in lesson for them to process, question, and act upon it.
The results of assessments should then be used as learning opportunities – for example, in the form of whole-class feedback on the most common errors – rather than simply to draw lines in the sand. In other words, feedback should be formative with actionable next steps. The best feedback offers both feedback and “feed-forward”: it tells students where they are now, where they were, and what they need to do to make further progress.
9, Think habitually
Habits are key to helping new teachers develop automaticity and thus to reducing cognitive load. The more student habits we can establish, the lower the demand on working memory will be and thus the more able students will be to rise to the challenge of hard work.
Think: What do I want all students to do every lesson? Whatever can be standardised and practised to the point of automaticity, should be.
As a starting point, I’d suggest you practise how students enter your classroom, how you start lessons, how resources are handed out and returned, how students engage in class discussions (hands-up, no hands-up, active listening, commenting on what others say not how they say it or who they are, etc), how students self and peer-assess and peer-teach, how students respond to feedback, how students try to overcome difficulties by using coping strategies and wall displays etc before seeking help from you, and so on.
You might also think about the social norms you want to establish in your classroom and the rewards and sanctions you apply when students do or do not confirm to those norms – working within the confines of your school’s policies, of course.
Time spent practising daily routines at the start of the year or term will pay dividends later because you won’t have to repeat instructions or tackle low-level disruption/non-compliance.
10, Think and feel
The final classroom routine is perhaps the hardest to teach but the most important: showing warmth towards students and visibly caring about their success – something you’ll find is rewarded with their loyalty and hard work.
Warmth isn’t about being fluffy and soft, it involves having high expectations of students, both academically and in terms of their attitudes to learning, and explicitly teaching students the study skills they need to access your curriculum, engage with it, and make progress.
Showing warmth is also about listening to and understanding students, empathising with them, but not tolerating anything less than their best.
- Matt Bromley is an education journalist, author, and advisor with 25 years’ experience in teaching and leadership including as a secondary school headteacher. He remains a practising teacher. Matt is the author of numerous books on education and co-host of the award-winning SecEd Podcast. Find him on X @mj_bromley. Read his previous articles for SecEd via www.sec-ed.co.uk/authors/matt-bromley
The SecEd Podcast
Teachers everywhere, including early career teachers, can check out our recent podcast episodes offering tips, ideas and advice for excellent teaching:
- Great teacher questioning: https://buff.ly/4bpAnBe
- Get the first & last 10 minutes of your lessons right: https://buff.ly/4bIlREp
- Student curiosity and motivation in the classroom: https://buff.ly/3yx9D30
- High-impact classroom routines: https://buff.ly/3yz7kfR
- How to plan great lessons: https://buff.ly/3UOL9Kk
- The secrets to quality first teaching: https://buff.ly/44Kv7FG