@TeacherToolkit
In 2010, Ross Morrison McGill founded @TeacherToolkit from a simple Twitter account through which he rapidly became the ‘most followed teacher on social media in the UK’. In 2015, he was nominated as one of the ‘500 Most Influential People in Britain’ by The Sunday…
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How can teachers better support students and their working memory?
There is very little information available on interventions for working memory deficits. This research presents five guiding principles to support teacher-interventions for working memory.
In an interesting article, Working with Working Memory (Westby, 2020) summarises the cognitive process, working memory used as an executive function to help planning and problem-solving.
This particular work unpicks students with specific language impairments who are known to have working memory deficits, drawing upon research published by Singer and Bashir (2018): Guiding intervention principles for students with verbal working memory limitations.
Five principles are offered as a framework for interventions that all teachers should consider as possible approaches for students with working memory limitations.
Principle 1
The absolute capacity of working memory cannot be directly manipulated
Various commercial products claim “that repeated practice with activities will, over time, increase working memory capacity.” Be wary of edtech companies that claim the same! Westby adds, “numerous reviews of these activities and programs, however, don’t show any objectively measured real-world outcomes.”
As ever, outcomes are defined as improvements in examination schools rather than for attendance, behaviour or engagement in class.
The researchers maintain that more dynamic interventions include: “listening, speaking, reading, writing and social interactions”, are more likely to support working memory deficit.
Principle 2
Increasing efficiency and automaticity with language frees up resources in working memory.
Understanding language requires attention, storage, coordination and problem-solving processes. Students with speech and language deficits are more likely to have difficulty acquiring these language patterns, especially when exposed to adults who already have proficiency in language use, but not so much in developing speech and language for children with any deficit. One can understand why explicit instruction is an important professional development area for teachers.
Knowledge, processing and ability can vary between people; the type and familiarity of the information can vary significantly. The demands of the task, the attention and emotional regulation required, and the characteristics of the learning environment can all factor.
The goal for teachers is not to increase working memory but to increase knowledge and automaticity.
Principle 3
Working memory can be supported through the use of visual anchors.
Graphic organisers and visual-spatial strategies (advance organisers) are mentioned in this section of the paper. Providing “visual representations of linguistic information can enable students to hold language externally so they can manipulate the information.”
The use of graphic organisers can potentially influence the effectiveness of processing. I am a massive advocate for dual-coding and using sketchnotes in teacher training materials.
Principle 4
Heightening linguistic structure can support working memory.
How teachers speak and write “can influence working memory and affect comprehension and learning.” I was somewhat aware of the following recommendations as a taecher, but they have become increasingly conscious in my mind as a public speaker. Teachers must adjust their:
- “rate of speech,
- use of emphatic stress to highlight keywords,
- utterance length,
- semantic and syntactic complexity,
- use of sentence parsing with micropauses to highlight
- functional grammatical elements, and
- use of gestures to visually emphasize and anchor meaning.”
The above are worth exploring in more detail …
Principle 5
Identify factors that influence student performance.
Several influences are discussed that teachers must consider to help students’ processing and classroom performance. For example, how do classroom interruptions break concentration? What background noises influence the classroom environment and impact on working memory? When tasks are selected, what burden do they impose?
“Tasks that have high cognitive load are inherently complex.”
It is recommended that teachers should modify curriculum materials for students who lack the language knowledge needed to access them. For many teachers, this will be obvious, but doing so daily is a significant workload challenge.
There are some things teachers can do as part of their teacher-DNA, which reduces their workload and increases impact, particularly for students with specific needs.
Download the paper.
