Posted on by Dr James Shea

Working memory: could it be that it’s just poor resolution rather than 4-7 items?

We’ve all had the lecture. You can only hold so many items in your working memory because there are only so many slots. It’s in the Core Content Framework (CCF) for trainee teachers. It’s in the Early Careers Framework for recently qualified teachers. And it’s in all the NPQs. If I undertake sequence of colour, number, or items of information tests on you then, after between four and seven items, depending on context, you cannot remember the sequence accurately. Here is what it says in the CCF:

And so we break down instructions into small ‘chunks’. We think about capacity all the time and use it for instructional coaching. Granularity is key. But that idea of working memory having a limit, having only so many slots, is not the only idea in psychology. There is another theory which has just as much validity as the fixed idea. An idea that suggested we could be using many more items than 4-7 in teaching and it would still work. Welcome to the world of low resolution memories…

One competing idea is that the limit on capacity is based on resource rather than a fixed number of slots. It’s nothing new – it’s been around as long as the ‘slots’ idea and instead of slots, it says that working memory is a fluid pool of resources. In other words, you can remember a few things with precision, but that when you overload working memory the result isn’t a total failure to remember additional items, but a degradation in the quality of the memory of all eight items. It’s like pouring your working memory into 8 jars instead of 7. It’s spread around more thinly. The more items, the more pixelated (to use a modern term) the memory. If you want sharp resolution, then keep the number lower, if the outline is important and you’ll be adding resolution over time then the detail isn’t so important at the start. For example, an important part of kinesiology is knowing all 206 bones in the human body. But you still start with the skeleton of all 206. You will probably then divide the skeleton up into groups of more than 4-7 bones. You add detail as you go down so that magnitudinally, the memory can zoom out and in as it is needed. In many ways, it makes good sense to start with a very poor pixelated skeleton memory and then build detail up, rather than start with small detail of 4-7 items. Having the ‘whole’ in your memory, no matter how grainy, can work well when adding detail later on and being able to construct the fine detail into the whole picture.

Where else might this begin to make sense in teaching? Well, certainly in English. One of the first things you do before teaching an extended text is to teach students the plot. If you are teaching pupils The Merchant of Venice then you teach students about the pairs of characters, the love interests, the racism, the basic plot around the borrowing of 300 ducats by Bassanio, through his friend Antonio, to pretend to be rich in order to woo Portia (Bassanio really doesn’t come out well in this play), the cross dressing and even the idea that Portia is played by a man who cross dresses back into a man to play the young lawyer. It’s a fiendish plot and one of Shakespeare’s more simple plays! But we absolutely teach the plot first using name tags, bags of gold and solid drama pedagogy. And all those items are not only more than four to seven items but the pupils won’t remember much of it…in great detail. However, as we go through the play and its key scenes, so we will add detail and so that grand plot will come together just like the skeleton with the 206 bones. Once that has happened, then our pupil can zoom in and out of the play examining themes, character evolution and key quotations at ease as they consider the play through the lens of a question. They can recall the large plot of more than 4-7 items and also add detail to each subsection of the plot. This idea is reinforced by one the earlier ideas about resolution rather than slots from this paper by Frick (1988) which found the parsing of knowledge (separating knowledge into items) did not happen as the knowledge entered working memory, but at the point of recall, something he calls the ‘process of recovery’.

Working memory is a finite resource. But rather than see it as restricted to 4-7 parsed slots, begin to see that depending on context and the pupil’s individual strength of working memory, resolution is that which is affected rather than number of items. And then, even further, start to think about delivering something that won’t be recalled immediately in fine detail. Deliver a whole worked example in its entirety first and then go through each section of the worked example in detail.

One issue for us all is why the CCF eschews this contrasting idea of resolution from its literature review. You can still overload working memory, but you are only overloading its ability to create memories with fine resolution. And then Frick would say the parsing happens on the recall, not on the initial learning so there’s further debate there.

There is clearly a place for lower resolution memories in teaching in terms of bigger and more complex sets of data. By adopting the idea of resolution you begin to work with magnitudinal ideas. You can move along the magnitudinal spectrum and allow pupils to zoom in and out of schemata seeing both overarching and complex pictures whilst they are also able to focus and recall fine parsed detail. It’s an important refinement to the idea of working memory and cognitive load and we have to, as teachers, consider how that affects the way we approach our teaching.

Copyright © Dr James Shea and Dr Gareth Bates 2023

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Internal School Avoidance- how pupils avoid paying attention

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In the classroom, a pupil uses attentional control to learn. They suppress their other thoughts and instead focus wholly on the thing being taught. Well, that’s the idea. Unless they don’t. And we’ve all been there. Sitting up, listening, tracking the speaker, nodding and wholly zoned out. We are as guilty as any other when it comes to not offering attentional control from time to time.

There are a variety of reasons pupils do this. Sometimes they are quite open about why they are doing it. ‘I’m tired.’, ‘It’s boring’, ‘I already know this’, ‘It’s too hard’ and ‘It’s too hot’ are all things pupils say to us. Sometimes they are discreet about it. They are are slow to get ready, slow to write, only answer questions in simple terms, make little effort in their spoken or written work. They are not paying attentional control. They can do it habitually in every lesson, or only in some lessons and indeed sometimes only for one teacher. There is a ceiling to how much behaviourist approaches to learning can improve this situation. But an issue it is. Because every educator you know will say they see this lack of attentional control on a regular basis from pre-school to post grad. And I want to personally honest here. I’ve been in meetings and talks where I am sitting up, listening, tracking the speaker, nodding and I’m actually away with the fairies. Sometimes my thoughts just go off on tangents. Sometimes I have other things on my mind. I’ve written before about anxiety and the way this affects our working memory and capacity to provide attentional control. If it affects us as adults it most certainly affects children. I have to be clear. I’m not focused on children who are trying hard to provide attentional control despite challenges. Those who have anxiety or other needs which are impairing their attentional control are not the subject of this blog. It is the many who could, but don’t. They waste time, they work slowly, they participate less than they could and they don’t focus their executive function on the learning happening.

A child not paying attention, avoids offering the attentional control required to make learning happen effectively. That avoidance can be space physical (a pre-school child might not want to move from one zone to the carpet zone), it can be subtle physical avoidance (a child might make getting ready to work take so long that the “Do Now” activity time has finished before they started) or it can be mental avoidance (they sit quietly, look at the teacher, track, nod, but make no effort to focus on the actual learning). One of these three things happen in pretty much every lesson I’ve ever observed. It’s incredibly common. However, I want to focus on attentional control avoidance because this countermands everything we are doing as teachers.

Using Baddeley’s model of working memory, the central executive brings together the visuospatial sketchpad and the phonological loop to form memories. However, this happens at a variety of levels. Imagine I am walking down the street thinking to myself. I don’t pay that much attention to the environment around me or the familiar route I am taking. However, I then get to a point where the road is closed blocking my normal route. I then need to find an alternative route in order to continue, it is the central executive that enables me to do this as it ‘switches’ attentional control. Pupils are doing similar things in lessons. They can glide through activities and teacher talk on autopilot – seemingly there, but not paying the level of attention required for strong learning.

We’ve all heard about the new focus on internal truancy. First there was external truancy where pupils skipped schools in unauthorised absences. Then we noticed they were dawdling between lessons, going to the toilets a lot – internal truancy, so we’ve cracked down on that and had numerous debates about locking toilets. But there is a swathe of pupils habitually and frequently not paying attention that are flying under the radar. They use classic avoidance strategies to appear compliant whilst keeping their learning minimised through not paying attention. It is a form of truancy that is so subtle, but it has a similar impact on lost learning. Why are we not cracking down on this as much as external or internal truancy? Because it’s really hard to force someone to pay attention if they don’t want to. It’s why a good teaching assistant is so helpful in a classroom. They can get through to the passive child and help them start to pay attention again. If they pay attention for the child that is not so good as a teaching assistant should not be doing the teaching. But they can intervene to help the child pay attention again.

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And are there answers? Well, yes.

I’ve written before about episodic curiosity. When a pupil wants to learn in your subject they apply maximum attentional control to every aspect of learning in your lesson. It absolutely supercharges their progress. You could take the same child and move them to a different teacher or school and they would still be making awesome progress due to that level of attentional control. I recall a pupil bumping along at sub 4 for all of Year 10 and at the end of the academic year they told me they wanted to be a solicitor and asked what English grade they’d need to make this dream happen (needless to say, my answer was a shock to them). What happened next astonished me. They started paying attentional control to every aspect of every English lesson. They asked for and completed extra work. In the exam they scored an 8. I can’t take credit for that learning. But it taught me about the power of having a pupil motivated to learn in my subject. It taught me about epistemic curiosity and how important that is. When I really want to learn something, I really pay attention and the same is true for pupils!

We seem to be focused on cleaning up the cognitive landscape to remove extraneous load. We are using knowledge of studies from psychology to make remembering easier. We are very focused, rightly so, on behaviour. And then we watch child after child, in lesson after lesson, not pay attentional control. And we, as teachers, see it very often. There is a ceiling to CLT in lessons and a ceiling to behaviourist approaches. Those ceilings are that a child can simply withdraw or mute their attentional control. They might as well have 60 days a year off school instead, because that is the impact on the learning of some of those with the most reduced attentional control. There are lots of answers already out there and each pupil is unique and their personal solution might be complex. But until we start focusing on this area, then we are consigning a huge amount of learning hours to the dustbin of internal school avoidance.

Posted on by Dr James Shea

Teacher well-being: it’s not about the doughnuts!

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Back in 2008, Gwyneth Paltrow started sending out a newsletter for her Gloop empire. It was founded on a simple premise: ‘being well’ was no longer defined by ‘not being unwell’. Being well means actively preventing harmful things from entering your body or mind as well as actively undertaking behaviour which leads to a healthier body and mind.

Dial back to the message being sent out to teachers in that 2000s era and it’s about ‘resilience’ and preventing snowflake teachers from wimping out of the hard yards of being a teacher. It was only when they noticed huge numbers of teachers leaving the profession that they started to really take these things seriously and we started to see initiatives about well-being and workload being brought in. And some of these initiatives have had an impact. Certainly the ‘deep marking’ years of triple coloured pens seem to be finally behind us. The ‘verbal feedback stamp’ has been ground down to a pernicious stubborn nub. But all of these things are not really getting to grips with just what we need to do with our profession.

If wellbeing is no longer ‘not being unwell’, what alternative definitions are there? Cambridge University’s Wellbeing Strategy and Policy offers “Creating an environment to promote a state of contentment which allows an employee to flourish and achieve their full potential for the benefit of themselves and their organisation”. The DfE offer an Education Staff Wellbeing Charter which says wellbeing is “A state of complete physical and mental health that is characterised by high quality social relationships” saying soberly and perhaps presciently “it is critical in recruiting and retaining high quality education staff now and in the future”.

When a teacher has to work extraordinarily long days and weekends, sacrificing time that could be spent with their family or on their health – the effect is not just tired teachers. It’s teachers without well-being. Teachers unable to achieve well-being directly because of their profession. It’s effectively like being unwell. These teachers know that their job is harming their personal physical health and they know it is harming their relationships with people important to them. In teaching, there’s little flexibility alas. You either work long hard hours or you move schools to a school that doesn’t make you work long hard hours, or you change profession. But don’t people in non-teaching jobs work long hard hours? Sure, but not every week, every weekend and week in and week out. And if they do, they’ve got a similar problem with well-being or it’s likely their employer are offering something else which people accept to offset the harm – such as a high salary.

When you see a school offering doughnuts, or well-being days – it is easy to think these are good things. However, it’s not really targeting well-being. A reduction in workload initiative which hands back time to a teacher to spend with their family is much more powerful as a well-being initiative. When teachers are stressed from work intensity, behaviour management issues or even toxic colleagues and managers then this causes cortisol levels to rise. Today, instead of having resilience to high cortisol levels, teachers are increasingly leaving the source of this stress and finding alternative places of employment. It’s why leadership and retention of staff is seen as so important. Whilst praise and appreciation of the hard work and sufferance undertaken by a teacher is sometimes well received, it does not remove the source of the workload or the stress. Teachers all pull hard on singular occasions – a school play or a parents’ evening. But when it happens every week the praise starts to wear thin.

In some trusts, the job descriptions and role outlines are clear – you are expected to have a worklife balance whether you are M1 or UPS. In some trusts, the job descriptions are the opposite. We all remember ”that” advert: “High energy and sacrifice are required to excel in this position. We cannot carry anyone. We need a commitment from our assistant headteacher to stay until the job is done.” The suggested hours of 7am to 6pm are beyond those with young children or upper pastoral care responsibilities. Should some roles really be exclusively for those without children or responsibilities?

That is not to say teachers cannot work hard without harming themselves. Going to see plays, visiting a museum, listening to a show on Radio 4, getting up early on a Saturday to travel to a ResearchEd event are all extra hours related to work, but they are not toxic hours. There is a balance to be had.

When I look at parts of the profession, I see harm to well-being and unwell teachers. We know that toxic people lurk in our profession. We know that no matter what Ofsted does to its inspection framework, its inspection process causes perpetual harm and a constant state of unwellness to those in our profession. It needs to rethink just how the process does this. Is it possible to protect children through safe-guarding and ensure high standards of teaching with less harm? The constant threat of inspection reduces well-being across the profession and some of Ofsted’s work clearly pushes teachers out of schools and out of teaching. It’s not about developing resilience and toughening up snowflakes any more. It is about cultivating healthy well-being and that means our profession is driving teachers away from teaching because these teachers want to be actively healthy and if they cannot achieve it in teaching they will leave and find a place where they can.