I’ve just downloaded the second edition of Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Children Like School? to Kindle, and after a busy couple of months feel like I should deal with something that’s been on my mind for a while: cognitive load theory.
A little while ago I attended an online presentation by Guy Claxton, promoting his latest book The Future of Teaching and the Myths That Hold It Back. The whole presentation, and the book itself are perhaps food for discussion at another time, but one thing that Claxton (and I’m overall an admirer – he inspired my own interest in educational research many years ago) said when answering a question about cognitive load really didn’t jibe with my experience: “You rarely encounter working memory phenomena in a PE lesson, or an English lesson, or a Drama lesson.”
It is a cliché of Drama teaching to bemoan students who produce “sub-Eastenders” [or whatever your national soap opera is] storylines and performances, during devising work or when introduced to new methodologies. I increasingly feel that this is precisely evidence for (or a symptom of) what Claxton calls “working memory phenomena”, but most of us know as “cognitive overload”.
Willingham describes working memory as “the part of your mind where you are aware of what is around you” in contrast to long-term memory which is “the vast storehouse in which you maintain your factual knowledge of the world…All of the information in long-term memory resides outside of awareness.” Working memory is, he says, where information from the long-term memory and from the environment combine together in new ways.
The problem with working memory, which is what leads to cognitive overload, is that it has a very limited capacity. Estimates vary. Way back in 1956 George Miller’s paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” suggested that most people will find it hard to hold more than about seven items in short-term memory at a time. In 2001’s “The Magical Number Four in Short-term Memory”, Nelson Cowan suggested that this may be as low as four.
The good news is that the size of these items doesn’t seem to matter, so we can hold four (or seven..or nine) disconnected sentences in working memory with same ease as we can hold four discrete words or four non-sequential letters of the alphabet. The bad news is that, because working memory is where we put all this information together to new long-term memories, or larger memory schemas, if we are forced to work with too many separate pieces of information at one time, we simply can’t handle it.
Claxton’s main issue with Willingham’s explanation seems to be that “the metaphor has changed”. He suggests that rather than thinking of working-memory as a space where thinking occurs, the current way that it is viewed is “as a kind of activity or a mode of operation that certain kinds of mental task require”. That is to say that working memory is best viewed as a verb, not a noun.
He goes on, however, to list a series of circumstances under which “working memory phenomena” occur, including when information arrives too rapidly and in too complicated and fragmented a fashion to process in real time, when two or more things have to be done at once that can’t be fit together, when there are environmental and psychological distractions. His focus, because working memory is now a verb rather than a noun, an action rather than a place, is on the speed at which information arrives rather than the amount of information arriving: “When so-called cognitive load is exceeded…that’s probably because the teacher hasn’t judged her tone and pace quite right”.
At this point in The Future of Teaching I lose track of exactly what Claxton’s arguments are. He quotes Paul Kirschner’s description of cognitive load theory: “the main takeaway…is that our brains are limited in how much they can take up at one time.” and follows this up with a “well, who knew!” So, up to this point I thought he was saying that he disagreed with the cognitive load theorists, but Kirschner’s description seems to tally precisely with what Claxton has proposed as his opposing point of view, and now he appears to be criticising it for being just plain common sense. I clearly need someone to explain this all too me again…but quite slowly.
But, to get back to Drama, I think that the kind of bland soap-inspired work that teacher’s rail at is an outcome of cognitive overload.
I’ve recently been working on a topic on the theme of child labour, to tie in with 2021 being the United Nation’s International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour, and the 12th of June being the 2021 World Day Against Child Labour. We began working on building up a presentation in the classroom, gathering verbatim text on child labourer’s experience, finding videos of the work done by child labourers to create individual mimed movement sequences, creating group movement sequences from collected images of children playing, and researching facts about child labour. The plan was to combine these together to create a montage of images exploring the theme, with music, and experiment with the use of contrast to heighten the emotional impact.
Then, of course, before we could move forward, we were put back into lockdown and all classes moved back online. Most of the students were back at home, working in small rooms, but some were still in the boarding houses, working in communal prep rooms. In hindsight, I should have stretched the task out more, taken time to reshape the “play” movement sequence to fit the new space, and continued developing it as a group task.
Instead, I turned it into an individual task. In the first lockdown students had really shone when given individual performance tasks to prepare and record on video, and I thought we could tick the “use of ICT” box at the same time. In the classroom, we would have had a socially distanced group performing the play movement sequences while individual students came out of the sequence to perform their work mime and verbatim speeches. This turned into creating a slideshow of images of child labourers and children playing, setting it as a virtual background, performing the work sequence and verbatim monologue in front of it, topping and tailing this with the facts about child labour they had researched, adding a music track, and “if you want to” titles or captions.
What was I thinking? Of course it was too much for them! In my head it worked, but in my head these were the students who had worked through the first lockdown through progressively complex film-making tasks and were ready to move on from there. In reality these were students who hadn’t done any film-making tasks since the end of the first lockdown nearly a year ago, plus a substantial number who had joined the school in September and in January, who hadn’t done any of that at all.
I was asking them to process new contextual information about child labour, new ways of sequencing information, new performance techniques, and learn new slideshow-making and video-editing techniques all at the same time. They tried, some fell at the first fence, some limped home, and the resulting work was a struggle to watch. And none of that was the fault of the students, it was all down to me.
Whether you call it “having to do too much all at once”, “cognitive overload” or “working memory phenomena”, I think the same issue lies at the heart of the “Eastenders” phenomena. We often set tasks that are too big, to be completed in too short a time. Often for “good” reasons, which are often assessment-related.
We want the students to demonstrate the skills they have been taught in an authentic context, not in isolation and out of context. We want them to demonstrate transfer of those skills into a different context. And, we need them to do that before the next progress report is due. We know that a task of this complexity requires more than one lesson, but we also know that if we extend it over two lessons, the student who is missing will be back and will need to be put into a group who will have to rework what they’ve done to integrate another person into it. We know as well that at least one of the students who is here this week will be missing next week, so their group will also have to rework what they’ve done. Then we have to question the validity of our assessment, which is no longer standardised, because some groups will have had two full lessons to develop their work and others will have had to start over the second lesson.
What’s the answer? Perhaps we need to ensure that students don’t have to create new stories to demonstrate new skills? When we are expecting them to demonstrate new skills and methodologies, we get them to work with familiar stories – take the story from last lesson and present it using this new idea. When we are introducing new stories, we explore them first using familiar techniques. When we are creating new stories we build them up block by block.
I think this is why the devising approaches of Frantic Assembly and the Paper Birds are so successful – work is created in small chunks. A scenario is created, then a technique attached to it, or a technique is practised, then a scenario attached to it.
This was the intention behind the child labour task. We had built it up in small sections, and were ready to put them together. What I failed to recognise was that when we moved from the classroom to Zoom, those pieces no longer existed in the form that we had developed them. The students no longer had four or five “chunks” of performance to piece together, they had the concepts of those four or five chunks that needed to be shaped into something else before they could be put together.
I keep promising to talk about “Eastenders” style performances, then moving away from them. I think that when students are faced with these massively complex tasks that need to be completed in a limited time, they default to relying on memory rather than thought. Willingham writes about how this is essentially the default setting for the human brain – remembering is far less effortful than thinking.
When the working memory is taken up with negotiating roles in the group, communicating in a language that is not your first with other members of the group whose experience of that language is at a very different level to your own, and with whom you don’t share any other common language, grappling with applying a range of new and familiar dramatic techniques and constructing a plot-line and the characters who populate it, and decide how best to structure and sequence its presentation, it is not going to produce innovative work.
Far from “rarely encountering working memory phenomena in a Drama class”, I think we are encountering it all the time. If we can find ways to reduce that cognitive load – and at the moment I’m inclined to think this means taking more time to do fewer things to a higher standard – maybe we can stop our students from succumbing to that sub-soap style that they so easily slip into.
International School Drama 