What do you really know about memory?
I was sat in a CPD session on Cognitive Load Theory not so long ago and several things seemed to strike me all at once:
CPD sessions on Cognitive Load Theory nearly always cognitively overload the audience- it's one of teaching life's great ironies.
Oliver Caviglioli's diagrams are somewhat ubiquitous now.
The key takeaway always seems to be that magical 5-7 things in the working memory shtick.
Most people delivering CPD on memory have misunderstood the research on memory - presuming they read it in the first place.
It's not their fault, of course. But it is a classic example of the CPD Rapids in action.
The CPD Rapids
Somewhere, in some academic cupboard in the hidden depths of a university, a very clever human conducts some very clever research - this is our gentle river of knowledge! They then write up in a way that is totally incomprehensible to all but the very clever colleagues who reside in this very clever sphere of research, package it up and send it downstream towards the collection of reading waterfalls that constitute the CPD Rapid.
At the top of the first fall, someone somewhere reads the research. The water then cascades down into the first pool at the bottom of the falls, where the research is churned and rolled and parted and sloshed until the reader has distilled it down into an easier-to-read chunk. Maybe they make a YouTube or write a book where they make the work easier to understand, thus sending the research off down river again towards the next set of falls in the rapids.
Then along comes a teacher or SLT, who reads this distilled version at the top of the rapids and decides to make a presentation. The research tumbles down the falls, crashing the information around into something that works for the presenter who, once again, dutifully sends the research on to the next set of falls.
Finally, at the final falls, the research is presented to some rather tired teachers who would be rather setting up their classrooms or marking - pretty much anything other than listening to the presentation. As the research crashed down the falls one last time, the meaning is crunched and tossed in one final pool of chunked information before being spewed out to the less-than-captivated audience, who walk away with half-remembered ideas and facts.
And the upshot of this?
Well, a rather warped version of working memory, if I'm honest.
Memory is Complicated
For example, the majority of teachers I speak with think of memory as a linear process: stuff goes into the working memory and some of it may end up in long-term memory, if we do it right.
But the truth is, as always, far more complicated.
Take the notion of procedural memory. For those of us who drive, I would imagine (or at least I hope) that the processes required to manoeuvre your car is relatively simple. Dare we say, instinctive? But this was not always the case. When you first learnt to drive, the process was far more laboured. You were relying more on your working memory to recall and remind yourself about how you should change gears or check your mirrors or make sure you go around the roundabout the right way.
And yet, despite all those experiences, I would be willing to bet that you don't remember most of that learning taking place. But I bet you would remember the more obscure memories than happened whilst you were out in your lessons. For me, I distinctly remember my instructor implementing a points system during lessons, with the highest amount - 50 points , on offer if I hit any man walking down the street with his shirt off. Obviously, this had little to do with the learning and this memory is far removed from the procedural memory of driving a car. To date, I have not scored a 50 pointer, much to the relief of the UK legal system.
Likewise, it has little to do with the general knowledge memory of how the car works. I have to consciously think about what side of my car the fuel cap is on, for example, but I don't have to really consider what angle my foot should be at to get the right amount of bite when I first pull away from a parking space.
Classroom Task Memory as an Example
What is more astounding, is how - even after sitting in a one-hour CPD session - most people will not have a good understanding of what constitutes as working memory. There seems to be this misapprehension that the 5-7 pieces of working memory means that we can only ever teach 5-7 bits of fact or only give 5-7 instructions. Ignoring the idea in recent research that this number is actually more like 4 items can be stored in working memory at any given time, the general understanding of what constitutes working memory in teaching circles is woefully inaccurate.
In a teaching scenario, we can take the rather innocuous task of the teacher writing a sentence on the whiteboard. Let's say:
“Macbeth was probably written in 1606 shortly after the Gunpowder Plot
There are several pieces of memory activity at play here.
Firstly, your students’ sensory memory will be taking a snapshot of the sentence on the board using their sensory memory. This snapshot will hold for less than a second whilst the working memory gets involved.
The working memory will focus on specific words, let's say “Macbeth” “written” “1606” “Gunpowder” and “Plot”, maxing out at (maybe) 7 words as it tries to make sense of the sentence.
At the same time, students’ Semantic Memory (a part of their long term memory) might be rummaging in your Prefrontal Cortex to retrieve information on the Gunpowder Plot, most notably the date of 5th November, 1605, bringing this information into their working memory as well. If successful in this, the student will then make the connection between the Gunpowder Plot (1605) and Macbeth being written in 1606, and might commit this to long term memory.
If they are later asked a question - when was Macbeth written - the working memory will be working hard on focusing on the teacher, decrypting the noises the teacher has made in asking the question, attempting to understand the question, searching for the answer, recognising the connection between Macbeth and Gunpowder Plot, retrieving the link between pre-existing knowledge of the date of the Gunpowder Plot, applying the connection to the pre-existing knowledge and then formulating the answer into a vocal response. That's a lot of heavy lifting.
In simple terms, the working memory is not as simple as only being given 7 facts in a lesson, yet this seems to be the message that a lot of teachers leave with. We insist on CPD that scratches the surface of an issue and expect teachers to understand the intricate details of what is quite a complex subject.
Basically, explaining working memory badly in a 45 minute CPD session isn’t going to help anybody.