Using Cognitive Load Theory to Crack Addition (Part 3/3)

8th March 20195th March 2020Ben Harding

Using Cognitive Load Theory to Crack Addition (Part 3/3)

This blog follows on immediately from; Using Cognitive Load Theory to Crack Addition! Part 1 & Part 2.

We are picking up on children learning to add two 2-digit numbers together for the very first time in their life, and in the previous blog (Part 2) we looked at using Cognitive Load Theory to ensure that the child’s Working Memory (WM) is prepared for this moment. Here is a step by step guide to what this episode of explicit teaching looks like:

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Using Cognitive Load theory to Crack Addition (Part 2/3)

8th March 20196th March 2020Ben Harding

Using Cognitive Load theory to Crack Addition (Part 2/3)

There is a day in a child’s life when they first learn to solve ‘2-digit add 2-digit’ addition questions. Every child has this day! The child’s teacher wakes with great excitement. This is what it’s all about. Within this day there is an actual moment when the teacher starts their explicit instruction. This will be a beautiful moment since the child’s life is about to change…well, mathematically anyway! There are a lot of steps to teach in a child’s mathematical learning journey. They don’t all have equal weighting; some are more important than others and some are just crucial. This one is one of those crucial ones; tying shoelaces, riding a bike and ‘2-digit add 2-digit’.

Cognitive Load Theory is a ginormous beast of a pedagogical concept. At times it’s mightily complex and far from being visible in a moment, yet at other times it couldn’t be more simple, more clear and more beautiful. It is CLT that gets us to this beautiful moment!

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Using Cognitive Load Theory to Crack Addition (Part 1/3)

2nd March 20196th March 2020Ben Harding

Using Cognitive Load Theory to Crack Addition (Part 1/3)

Rocking up to teach 30 seven/eight year old children in an area of high social deprivation, the teacher walks straight in and presents a ‘3 digit add 3 digit’ question on screen:

Five seconds later, every single student holds up a little whiteboard displaying the correct answer; having processed the calculation entirely mentally.

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The 5 Megatruths of Great Teaching

28th February 20199th February 2020Ben Harding

The 5 Megatruths of Great Teaching

How fantastically big is this question, ‘What makes great teaching?’.

It’s quite a scary question for an actual teacher… because it challenges you to answer it! At first it sounds rhetorical, and perhaps we would all feel safer if it was. The question seems to be asking you to explain your professional worth and even your professional qualification. If you are given a few moments to jot down some bullet point answers, then you may struggle. Why? Well, if we listen to John Sweller (the TES referred to him as the ‘Godfather of Cognitive Load Theory’), then we can’t even begin to know about great teaching until we know about how the brain learns. Sweller says, ‘Without knowledge of cognitive processes, instructional design is blind’. In other words, we need to know about the brain in order to teach. No wonder ‘great teaching’, then, is so elusive. The brain is, after all, the most complex structure known to humankind.

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