As part of our Catalyst journey (System-wide approach to Teaching and Learning), teachers at St John's have been learning about Cognitive Load Theory. 

Cognitive Load Theory (CLT)  was recently described by British educationalist Dylan Wiliam as 'the single most important thing for teachers to know' (Wiliam, 2017).

CLT is built upon two commonly accepted ideas. The first is that there is a limit to how much new information the human brain can process at one time. The second is that there are no known limits to how much stored information can be processed at one time. 

"There are three key resources that we all draw upon in order to think: the environment, working memory, and long-term memory. 

The environment represents everything outside of our minds, it is the internet, books, magazines, knowledge readily shared by others, and more. The key thing to know about environment is that it is an unlimited external store of information.

Long-term memory is where all memories are kept. This includes memories of life events, factual information such as country names and memories of processes. As far as researchers are aware, there is no limit to long-term memory that can be reached within a human lifetime. Therefore, long-term memory is an unlimited internal store of information.

In addition to the environment and long-term memory, we also have working memory. Working memory is the site of consciousness, the part of memory where all thinking takes place. Unlike the environment and long-term memory, the capacity of working memory is limited to somewhere in the vicinity of four to seven 'elements' of information. In effect, there are only so many elements of information that you can juggle in your mind at one time. Thus, working memory is our limited thinking system. 

These three memory components are related within the process of learning, remembering, and forgetting. The following diagram represents some of the key interactions between the environment, working memory, and long-term memory." (Lovell, 2020, p.18-19)

Lastly, in Cognitive Load Theory, the words cognitive load represent anything that takes up working memory capacity.

Sounds~Write, Daily 5 and Maths Daily 3 at St John's are all used to limit the cognitive load on students so that there is more opportunity for students to move their learning into their long term memory.