Research School Network: Overcoming overload How can leaders ensure their professional development programmes don’t place excessive cognitive demands on teachers?

Picture this.

You have a new mixed-age class who you plan to deliver a lesson to. Despite knowing they all have different prior knowledge and experience, you plan to deliver the same content to all. The lesson will be an hour long, and will consist almost entirely of teacher exposition, with no questioning, no practice, and no checking for understanding. It will be heavy on content, packing everything the class need to know about the topic into a single session. After the lesson, you will tick the content off your ​‘to do’ list and plan the next lesson, which will take place in three months’ time.

I think we can all agree that this sounds like a recipe for disaster. While some of the class might take something from the lesson, we can’t be sure what and how they might apply in the future. The content-heavy approach might also have resulted in some of the class ​‘switching off’ part-way through.

But is this really so different to how many schools have historically approached teacher professional development? If you read that first paragraph again, and imagine a ​‘class’ of teachers instead of children, does it still seem so detached from reality?

The EEF’s ​‘Effective Professional Development’ guidance report, published in 2022, gave us pause for thought in how we approach teacher development in our schools. It encouraged us to consider the mechanisms of what makes professional development effective, and supported the use of a balanced approach which includes mechanisms aimed at building teacher knowledge, motivating teachers, developing teaching techniques, and embedding practice. It’s clear that our example at the start was anything but balanced in its approach.

One way in which the example falls short, is in its failure to manage teachers’ cognitive load, which was one of EEF’s ​‘mechanisms’. To avoid ​‘overloading’ teachers, we need to either remove less relevant content, or focus only on the most relevant content. As Sweller et al. (2019) explained, ​“Human cognitive processing is heavily constrained by our limited working memory, which can only process a limited number of information elements at a time”. Using a ​‘drip-feed’ approach, rather than cramming everything into one session, can help with this.

A new report from Steplab on ​‘Professional development and cognitive load’ takes this further. It suggests seven ways in which those designing professional development for teachers can take cognitive load into account. These are:

1. Chunking and automating processes
2. Systemisation
3. Planning in advance
4. Narrowing and re-focusing attention
5. Using external reminders and cues
6. Managing emotions
7. Delaying responses

For example, when ​‘chunking and automating processes’ relating to new teaching techniques, leaders designing PD should encourage teachers to focus on one new skill at a time and to rehearse this technique in a simplified context initially. This might include working with a group of ECTs by initially sharing details of a technique, breaking this technique down into steps, then giving the teachers time to rehearse in pairs before incorporating the technique into their classroom practice.

And ​‘narrowing and re-focusing attention’ might involve supporting teachers develop mental models that allow them to quickly process and make sense of complex classroom situations. For example, a teacher might be struggling to manage disruptive behaviour in the classroom. By watching a video clip of a teacher using non-verbal cues, it can support the teacher in focusing on what makes the technique effective.

Being a teacher is a challenging job. Designers of professional development need to avoid the mistakes seen in the example at the start of this blog, and consider how cognitive load is managed to ensure that teachers have the mental space to consider how best to teach.

Boguslav, A., Goodrich, J., and Lovell, O. (2024) Professional development & cognitive load. Steplab: London. Accessible from: https://resources.steplab.co/c…

Education Endowment Foundation (2021) Effective professional development (Guidance Report). EEF: London. Accessible from: https://educationendowmentfoun…