Building Routines to Manage Cognitive Load
Creating procedures around daily classroom activities reduces the mental burden for students, leaving more brain space for them to think deeply about content.
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Go to My Saved Content.Working memory is limited—it can only tend to a certain number of items at a time. In a typical classroom where there are lots of things going on, there’s serious competition for that brain space. Establishing predictable routines can be invaluable for reducing the cognitive load that a busy classroom generates, preserving students’ working memory so they can put their mental energy toward learning instead of logistics. Explains Jim Heal from Learning Science Partners, “Routines are great because they allow students and teachers to focus on the content of the lesson rather than the procedures that are required to get to the content of the lesson.”
In Brittany Kelleher’s calculus class at Cedaredge High School in rural Delta County, Colorado, she has routines in place for almost all aspects of her classroom—everything from how students enter the room and find their seats to how they manage group work. “When students are working together,” she explains, “I will say, ‘This is the person that’s going to go first, and then we’re going to move clockwise from there.’ And it’s not because I need to micromanage the class, it’s because that’s not something I want them to have to spend their time thinking about.”
She also helps preserve students’ attention by using a color-coding system and numbering the steps of complex math problems so that students can clearly identify where they might be getting lost.
“In a sense, she’s removing all the noise,” says Heal. “None of that procedural noise ought to affect the fact that I want you to pay attention to these ideas.”
For Kelleher, having well-established routines has great payoffs—even beyond reducing the cognitive load on her students. “We get to spend considerably more minutes in every single class period thinking about math concepts because it comes down to how well are we utilizing each minute in class,” she says. “How are you designing lessons so that students are utilizing those minutes for the thinking you want them to be doing? And it just adds up over the course of a year.”
For more strategies, read Ian Kelleher’s article for Edutopia, “How to Reduce the Cognitive Load on Students During Lessons.”
This video is part of our “How Learning Happens” series, which explores teaching practices grounded in the science of learning and human development.