Zak's Weekly Musings (September 7, 2022)

In our last Midweek Musing, we spoke about the importance of establishing routines as a means of freeing working memory and creating opportunities for deeper learning. This week, we’ll talk about how we can establish some basic routines in our classes in order to unburden students and pave the way for more conceptual, abstract learning to take place. 

Middle School is marked by the quirky, spirited, and mercurial qualities of our students, but most of all it's marked by our students’ cognitive maturation. 

Research shows students in middle school experience brain growth in the prefrontal cortex, which helps them make the transition from a concrete learner to an abstract learner. As students navigate the complex terrain of this change, our goal is to equip students with the tools to operationalize and optimize this natural evolution. The challenge is that there’s no day in the 7th grade when students arrive to school having acquired the capacity to think abstractly overnight. Moreover, there is no threshold that students cross that suddenly vanquishes concrete thinking. The journey from the concrete to the abstract is a circuitous and uneven one, which is what makes routine so powerful and indispensable. 

Routine and predictability – and their cousins structure and linearity – are tools in our arsenal that can help relieve our students’ limited working memory and equip them with some easily won confidence. Our working memory has a limited capacity. Our working memory either discards incoming information or sends it to our long-term memory. So, during a lesson, students’ working memories are constantly taking in new information. Students’ brains manage this information by sorting information into existing schemas, developed from what they already know, adapting existing schemas, or creating new schemas. This is where cognitive load theory comes in: the idea that with clearly defined guardrails, we can avoid overloading working memory, freeing up more sophisticated cognitive processing. 

There are plenty of ways to establish routine in our classes, but this week, I want to start with the most important five minutes of a lesson – the last five minutes. 

Researcher and educator Harry K. Wong found that students require about five minutes at the end of the period to reflect on, process, and ultimately synthesize their learning. According to Wong’s research when we teach up to the “bell,” students, on average, lose between 15-20% of their learning. This means that on those days when we try to squeeze every last second out of the class period, we are actually losing about 10 minutes of learning. By teaching during these last five minutes, instead of building in time for reflection, we end up losing weeks of learning over the course of the year. 

One simple way to accomplish this is with Exit Tickets. You can find an example of an Exit Ticket that I used when I was teaching in Johannesburg here. You can also find the Exit Routines that I used in Johannesburg here – these routines being how the last five minutes of every class was structured. Of course, if you’re looking for a simple resource from outside of our organization, take a look at this short video from Education First.