Image source: MS PowerPoint
Before you spill your coffee, let me explain.
There’s been much written and debated in recent years about Professor John Sweller’s cognitive load theory (CLT) and the idea that teachers need to understand barriers and enablers in shifting new knowledge from the fragile working memory space to longterm memory. For many, ensuring that new knowledge and skills set up camp in longterm memory is the definition of learning. Yes this can be debated but it’s a good working (no pun intended) premise. Exposure to new knowledge does not equate to learning. If it did, I would be far more knowledgeable today than I actually am, across a wide range of topics, as would most readers of this blog.
Enthusiasm for CLT and its applications has been high in explicit teaching circles, where teachers see their jobs as…well…teaching. CLT is the natural companion to explicit teaching, because explicit teaching assumes that school learning is hard and waving knowledge and ideas around the room like aromatic smelling salts will not translate into longterm retention and availability for future critical and creative thinking, both of which have a premium attached to them in modern education and are included in the Australian Curriculum.
If teachers are not teaching explicitly and are instead relying mainly on some form of student-led, discovery-based learning, they are not asking much of students’ executive functions and even less of their working memory. Recall that executive functions include our ability to focus (even, and especially when we are not intrinsically motivated to do so), to screen out irrelevant stimuli, to plan, organise, self-regulate, delay gratification, to reason and problem-solve, and think consequentially - all skills that are very much under construction in children and adolescents. Managing immature executive functions takes up an enormous part of every teacher’s day (and, by the way, it’s not irrelevant to the work of university academics either, but that’s a topic for another day). Examples include establishing students’ attention, getting them to sit still, to stop touching each other / other peoples’ belongings, to not call out unbidden, to not get up and walk around at random times, and to think about what might happen if they place a drink on the edge of a table….the list is endless. Immature executive functions mean that learning is hard - as explained by Professor Daniel Willingham in this podcast interview with Melbourne teacher, Ollie Lovell.
It’s little wonder then, that the eyes of some teachers glaze over when CLT is discussed. Sure, some students may be engaging with discovery/project-based learning in ways that are mentally taxing for them, but many will instead be doing busy-work. Busy work happens when students are engaged in self-directed and / or group projects of variable impact and quality. They might be browsing the internet and skim-reading, designing attractive layouts and headings on hard copy, filling out work-sheets, discussing how and where to get started on a project, or making a 3-D diorama about a topic of which they have only the vaguest grasp. Versions of these approaches play out in higher education too.
The most demanding thing some children are asked to do in class is to stay in their seat and not interrupt others or the teacher, and to “get involved” in group learning in some way. Learning, it is argued, is a social activity. Of course it can be, but the learning of biologically secondary knowledge and skills is fundamentally the grinding of mental cogs inside individual brains so that synapses are formed and specific memories are laid down for later retrieval, use, and editing,
It is very difficult under circumstances of student-led, discovery learning for initial teaching, to know what different children in the class are actually learning. It is also difficult to know how to attribute knowledge and skills to classroom instruction when (a) not much formal instruction is happening and (b) the more advantaged students will have had prior exposures that will be of benefit to them. How then, do we attribute learning to classroom experience? How do we ensure that education can put its hand on the social justice scales to improve the trajectories of those who are starting from behind?
All of this has come into sharp focus in recent weeks with the announcement that the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) is being independently reviewed after 4 years of operation. Funded by the federal, state, and territory governments, AERO exists to distil high quality evidence and make it accessible to classroom teachers. It also partners in research, including with the team I co-lead at La Trobe University. AERO does not exist to be everyone’s perfect solution to every education question, dilemma, or tension. In an ideal world, we might have an education equivalent of the Therapeutic Goods Administration, to ensure that practices are only rolled out in classrooms after sufficient scientific scrutiny. But this is not the case, and students are not afforded the same protection as patients; nor are educators treated with the same respect as health professionals, where tightly-reined autonomy and laser-like accountability go hand-in-hand.
Explicit teaching, underpinned by CLT has strong evidence to support it, but this has resulted in pushback from education academics who wish these things were not so. There’s a hollow ring in some academic corridors of “We want students to succeed. But NOT LIKE THAT”. This would be akin to surgeons persisting with open abdominal surgery over laparoscopic (“key-hole”) operations and then having to retrofit a rationale that sounds patient-centric, even though the reality is a personal preference for the well-learned and familiar. The court of public opinion would not find this acceptable, and nor would relevant regulatory authorities.
Part of the raison d’être for AERO is that Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programs have been resistant to calls for a sharpening of their content on learning / cognitive science. Instead, they advocate for “a range of approaches”, because “all children learn differently” and “teacher autonomy should be respected”. I’ve written previously about edu-myths, the fallacy of teacher/school autonomy, and teacher professionalism. If ITE programs had been operating in recent decades the way medical, engineering, and nursing programs (for example) do, AERO might not even have been established. Ironic, isn't it?
There has been a decades-long pattern of fads and fashions in education, interwoven by uncritical adoption of neuro myths and culminating in choose your own adventure in classrooms. It’s little surprise then, that schools fall for pseudoscience such as Brain Gym, Learning Styles, coloured lenses, Skippy the Frog, and so on. The bottom line? If professional educators stand for nothing, they fall for everything. My colleague Dr Caroline Bowen AM and I have a second textbook about to be published to support parents, teachers, and clinicians in an extraordinarily unregulated teaching (and therapy) marketplace. The problem of poor knowledge translation in practice is not unique to education but it is magnified in schools compared to health and other clinical settings. This is also a problem of scale, given that 98.6% of school-age children in Australia are enrolled at school, compared to the lower but unknown proportion who engage with clinical services because of learning difficulties (it is estimated that around 19.9% of students have learning difficulties in Australia, but the proportion who engage with formal services is not known).
Evidence matters in every encounter with children, as they are not in a position to give informed consent to instruction or services that align with adults’ preferences and habits, rather than empirical evidence, notwithstanding the fact that evidence is sometimes absent, weak, or contradictory. That, however, is not a license for free-range practice. It is a trigger for engagement with established bodies of evidence using scientist-practitioner models and collaboration with communities of practice, where a shared sense of curiosity fuels a feedback cycle of incremental change and self-review.
Change where it is occurring has been led from the ground up, with individual teachers doing their own research and locating evidence about more optimal ways of teaching. Ironically, in doing so, they are displaying the “twenty-first century critical thinking skills” that many in education advocate - albeit often uncritically - until of course they are applied with exacitude and precision by practising teachers to ITE lore.
This was all brought home to me a little while ago when a teacher approached me after a conference presentation. He said that for a long time, he had no idea why fellow teachers were so interested in CLT and couldn’t see how it could be relevant to his classroom teaching. Then he had an epiphany:
“I wasn’t actually teaching. I wasn’t actually pushing my students’ cognitive capabilities. I had them engaged in busy work that looked like learning. But I couldn’t have told you what they had learned from one of my lessons. Cognitive Load Theory matters to me now, because I teach explicitly and take responsibility for my students’ learning”.
So, there you have it - cognitive load theory doesn’t matter where there is no cognitive load, because there is no explicit teaching. But without cognitive load, students are less likely to learn the knowledge and skills that are central to academic and life success. And without a robust model of how to manage this load, teachers are left in the atheoretical wasteland of choose your own adventure, trial and error teaching. No wonder our achievement data in Australia is not shifting and too many students (especially those from equity and diversity groups) are left behind.
Ironically, the pushback on both AERO and Cognitive Load Theory is led by those who have already leveraged the benefits of educational success in their own lives, but are willing to jeopardise this for future generations, by not backing the strongest horse in the race.
You can read more about the AERO-Cognitive Load Theory nexus in this excellent piece by Dr Carl Hendrick:
Defending AERO: Evidence-Informed Teaching Isn’t Oppression, It's Empowering
(C) Pamela Snow (2025).
