The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 244
Jennifer Gonzalez, Host
GONZALEZ: This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to Episode 244 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast. In this episode, we’re going to talk about three ways you may be cognitively overloading your students.
Sometimes it’s the smallest details that separate effective teaching from teaching that misses the mark. When we make certain choices, often without even realizing it, we can turn a teaching moment from one that should be clear into one that’s confusing. Luckily, these choices are pretty easy to spot and fix once we know what to look for, and cognitive science can help us understand what’s going on. Today we’re going to look at three of these. More specifically, we’ll be looking at three ways you might be creating cognitive overload for your students.
My guest is Blake Harvard, who you might know from episode 223 — Why Students Give You the Blank Stare — or from his website, The Effortful Educator. Blake is an AP psychology teacher, but he has also studied cognitive science on his own for close to a decade now and has turned a lot of that study into helpful resources about how to better align our teaching with how students learn. This year, he has put what he’s learned into a new book, Do I Have Your Attention? Understanding Memory Constraints and Maximizing Learning (Amazon | Bookshop). In today’s episode. Blake and I are going to talk about three small things that many of us do in lessons that can cognitively overload our students. I think when you hear them, you’ll recognize them right away as something you either do or have figured out not to do, and if they happen to be a problem in your classroom, you’ll be able to fix them right away.
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Now here’s my interview with Blake Harvard about how to avoid cognitive overload.
GONZALEZ: Blake, welcome back to the podcast.
HARVARD: Hello. Thank you for having me.
GONZALEZ: So this is your second time, so some people listening have probably heard our other interview, but for somebody who’s brand new, just share a little bit about your education background. Who are you in this world that we’re in?
HARVARD: Sure. So I’m currently in my 19th year of teaching, so I’m hugging right up on two decades in the classroom. I’ve taught from seventh to 12th grade. Currently I teach at a high school. I’ve been at this high school for 13 years teaching AP psychology. You know, I started reading about cognitive sciences. And basically what my book is about, about eight years ago, I started a website, and then this snowball of things began occurring. I’ve spoken at the U.S. Department of Education. I’ve worked with ISTE, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, InnerDrive and a few other different companies and outfits there. All the while just trying to hone what I do in the classroom to make my instruction and to make my learning environment more effective and more efficient for my students. That’s, that is my intense focus for what I do as a teacher.
GONZALEZ: Yes. And the stuff that you put out really is very sort of tightly aligned with that. And so I was thrilled to hear that you wrote a book, because a lot of your stuff, kind of like mine, is sort of like all in pieces on a website. And so to know that it was going to be in this book, tell us about your book. And we just happen to be recording the morning that it is published. So when this comes out, it’ll already be available. So your book is called “Do I Have Your Attention?” Tell us about this book, how you came to be writing it, and what is the book’s purpose?
HARVARD: Right. So as you already mentioned, you know, this website I’ve had and I’ve published, I don’t know, hundreds of articles. They’re all kind of in pieces. And a publisher approached me and was like, hey, let’s put it together for a book. And yeah, it’s titled “Do I Have Your Attention?” And it’s focused on two parts. The first part being about memory processing, about how learning happens in our brain, what we know about that, and the different facets of memory. That’s something that I found was lacking in a lot of teacher preparation programs. I have a master’s degree in secondary education, and I learned none of this. And looking back on it, knowing what I know now, it’s like, how do I get through an entire program where I’m supposed to teach and instruct, and one of the main goals is for students to learn, and I don’t know how we learn. Right?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: That seemed like, whoa. How did we miss the boat on that? And the more teachers I’ve spoken to, yeah, they’re kind of in the same boat.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
HARVARD: So I wanted to put something together that really, in a really tangible and accessible way for teachers. Like, you can understand this. And it gives a different lens for how you decide, design your environment in your classroom and how you think about instruction, which is really important, right? One of the quotes that really is featured in my book that really stuck with me is that without knowledge of human cognitive processes, so how we learn, instructional design is blind. Right? So it’s kind of this idea that if you don’t know how the brain works, how do you know what you’re teaching fits in with what we know about how we learn?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: Right? So it was like, wow, yes. Right? So that’s kind of the driving force of the book. And like I said, in Part 1 it’s about memory processing and kind of, again, in a really tangible way, instructing on how, what we know about how the brain works. And then Part 2 looks at different learning strategies and how I use these in the classroom, right? I’m in the classroom five days a week. Right? So how we use, how these strategies have over, like, a century of evidence showing how they improve learning. I obviously include how I use these in my classroom. Here’s what it looks like for me. But they’re also easily accommodated for other classrooms, right, and not necessarily for a high school. And a lot of these studies weren’t just conducted with high school students. They’re university, there’s middle, there’s elementary school, there’s all the way up to 75-year-olds that are doing these studies on. So it’s not just, this is how learning looks in the high school or how the brain looks in the high school. This is good learning no matter the age, really.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. And I will say in case anybody that’s listening is thinking, oh, this is about cognitive science, it’s about learning memory, it sounds really sort of technical and scientific. It’s not. I mean you definitely bring the science in, but you do it in a very, very accessible way. It’s incredibly readable, simply written language. So nobody should be intimidated by the subject area. It shouldn’t be as revolutionary as it is, Blake. Like, you know what I mean?
HARVARD: Totally.
GONZALEZ: This book should have been written 40, 50, 60 years ago, but here it is now.
HARVARD: I, yes, that’s exactly what I’m going for. That’s exactly what I’m going for. And an interesting, something I think a teacher in Nashville told me the other day. She’s an experienced teacher. She’s been in the classroom for years. And she said this book is just, it’s great obviously for the new teacher out there that needs kind of a focus. But it’s also great for the experienced teacher that’s been in the classroom for a while but has, is a novice when it comes to understanding how we learn, right?
GONZALEZ: Yes.
HARVARD: Which was, for me, was like, whoa, thank you. That’s exactly what I was going for, like that’s just perfect.
GONZALEZ: And that’s what’s going to be nice too is that for experienced teachers, they’re going to see so many things in there that are just aha moments. It’s not going to really be new information as much as like, oh, that’s why that always happens, or that’s why, you know? They’ll be able to apply it right away because these are scenarios that they will recognize, which is kind of what we’re going to talk about today.
HARVARD: Yeah, exactly. And it’s not, it’s not stuff to like, trust me, again, I live the teacher life. I got an email this morning saying, “We’ve got to have a faculty meeting because we’ve got to start using this new thing in our school.”
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
HARVARD: This is not that. This is to, it sincerely simplifies how you see the classroom, and it really gives you a focus on what really matters for my students’ learning and how to design the best environment and instruction for, to maximize student learning.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: That’s what it’s all about. It’s not another thing to do.
GONZALEZ: Right, right. So one of the concepts that you write about in this book is the idea of intrinsic versus extraneous load in a lesson. Can you explain what these are and how they can inform the way that we look at our teaching?
HARVARD: Yeah, certainly. So, you know, we’re not going to go too much into memory processing here, but the book goes a lot more in depth. But, you know, our memory is limited. There are constraints on memory, specifically working memory, which is anything, whatever you’re thinking about right now, right? If I asked you what you had for breakfast, and you’re thinking about that, that’s in your working memory, right?
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
HARVARD: So information that we don’t have in our long-term memory yet has to pass through that working memory. So when you’re teaching your students in class, right, and you’re talking about different concepts, ideas, terms, whatever. That information, they have to, No. 1, sense and pay attention to, which hence the book here. But then it’s going to enter that working memory. And working memory is extremely limited. It’s limited in how much stuff can fit in there, and it’s also limited in how long it stays in there. Information that enters your working memory will only stay in there for about 15 to 30 seconds. And either we kind of rehearse it and then it has a chance to move to long-term memory, or it doesn’t, right? It’s kind of like, it’s kind of like if your parents told you to go pick up some things from the store, and they told you to pick up these five things. And you heard them say it, right, but then you didn’t write it down, and you’re like, wait, what did they say, right?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: That sort of thing. That information got to your working memory, but then it was obviously never made it to your long-term memory. So that working memory is limited. And intrinsic and extraneous load have to do with No. 1, intrinsic load is kind of like, it is how heavy the information that they need to learn is. So it is inherent in the material. So if I’m teaching a simple concept in class, right, if it’s just, “Make sure you know this definition to this term,” then that has low intrinsic load. But if I’m teaching a complex concept, right, they’ve got to know lots of parts and moving things going on and the concept is vast, then that has a heavy intrinsic load, right?
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
HARVARD: Okay, so hold that. Extraneous load is how we get that information to them. It’s kind of like the instruction. So if, you know, there’s obviously different types of instruction. There’s just straight-up lecture. There’s “let me put you in a group and do this in a group,” right. There’s all sorts of different things you can do. And some forms of instruction have a heavier load than others.
GONZALEZ: Right.
HARVARD: Right? So knowing that working memory is limited in capacity, you’ve got to think about the intrinsic nature of the material, how complex it is, plus you’ve got to think about the extraneous load. How are you getting that information to them? And we can quickly overload a student’s working memory or any person’s working memory if we’ve got this complex concept and we’re teaching it in a complex way also.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: Right? So kind of the idea here is that if it’s a simple concept, right, or if they’re hearing this information, well, also consider if they’re hearing this information for the very first time.
GONZALEZ: That’s going to be higher intrinsic load than if they’ve heard it —
HARVARD: Yeah. Just right off the bat.
GONZALEZ: — kind of a lot, yes.
HARVARD: Exactly. Right off the bat, new information is going to have a higher intrinsic load because their brain doesn’t really have anything for it to latch onto, and we can talk about schemas and stuff like that.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
HARVARD: But it’s easier to add information to information you already have.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
HARVARD: But if you have no information or you can’t relate to it, it has a higher intrinsic load.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
HARVARD: So kind of what you want to think about is the higher the intrinsic load, the simpler my instruction needs to be, the more cut and dry it needs to be. And I say “dry,” and I don’t mean boring, I just mean the more straightforward and focused it needs to be.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm, right.
HARVARD: Because if I’m talking about a concept that is complex, and I’m presenting it in a complex manner, right, if they’re working in groups, and they’ve got to use these six instructions to do this properly while also focusing on the new material, that’s too much.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: Right? They’re either going to be able to focus on the material, the instruction, what they need to know, and they’re not going to complete the task well, or they’re going to focus on completing the task well and the material that they need to learn is going to be forgotten easily. So you’ve got to take into consideration the intrinsic and the extraneous load on your students, and you need to design instruction based upon that. Because if not, again, going back to that quote I said earlier, your instructional design is kind of blind there.
GONZALEZ: Right.
HARVARD: Yeah? So, you know, yeah. I’ll just leave it at that. I don’t want to go into more depth.
GONZALEZ: Well, and I think that the reason I wanted to lay that groundwork is because it leads into sort of the meat of what we’re going to really be talking about today, which is these three, this is something that you write about in Chapter 3. Subtle instructional choices that tend to create cognitive overload for students. And this is all about that extraneous load, these choices that we make in how we present the material. And so when I got to this part of the book, I thought this would be a perfect thing to share in our interview because I think that when teachers hear these three things, they’re going to be like, oh, yeah. I probably have done that before. And they’re easy things to weed out of your instruction to just reduce that extraneous load and make it easier for students to learn them. So if you’re ready, let’s get started with these three effects. Describe each one, explain why they create a problem, and then maybe we can even hear, like, an example of what it might look like in a classroom so that it jars the recognition even more for people listening.
HARVARD: Definitely. So yeah, these three effects. They’re part of a theory, cognitive load theory, which has a lot of different effects. I just picked out the three that I felt was kind of the most salient for most teachers in the classroom if they’re [inaudible] the book. But there’s much more to it if you want to look into it. So, and these effects, like you said, they’re simple things that, again, myself included, that we do and we don’t think about it, right? But there are things that we can, you know, they don’t need to overtake you and become your obsession of, “Oh my gosh. This has to be perfect every time in instruction.”
GONZALEZ: Right.
HARVARD: But, you know, these incremental kind of gains are huge for students. If I can, if I can make it just this much better, maybe that’s the difference between a student getting it and a student not getting it.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: Again, that’s kind of one of the main parts of the job here. So the first effect is called the seductive details effect. And, again, I am guilty of doing this myself. I think, so the seductive details effect is when you’re talking about a concept or an idea, and we want to add in all these extra details about it. So like, “Oh, I’ve got a fun story to tell you about with this.”
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: Or, you know, things like that. Those can be great, right? If there’s a story that can bring a term or something, a really dry definition to life, and they can, and students can relate to it, that’s great. But if we’re just telling a story to tell a story, again, that working memory is limited. So do you want them to focus on the material that needs to be learned? Or the vacation your family had to the Grand Canyon that kind of tangentially relates to it but not really? Right?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: And I know why we do this as teachers because we don’t want what we’re talking about to be boring. We want to make it interesting.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: And that, that’s great. I am certainly not saying, I’m not saying don’t do that.
GONZALEZ: Right.
HARVARD: Definitely do that, but just make sure No. 1 that the stories you do tell, when you bring it to life, I guess, that it does relate directly to what they need to know and that you point out to students, like, tell the story then tell the students, “So do you see how this relates to this concept?”
GONZALEZ: Yes.
HARVARD: Or tell me, tell your partner, how does what this story about my vacation to Grand Canyon, how does that relate to the concept we’re talking about here? Make sure that they stay focused on the right things because, you know, and obviously they don’t do this on purpose, but students are more likely to latch on to your story and forget about the concept that it was based upon.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: So you want to make sure that the details we give that bring the material to life tell those, instruct on those, but make sure that the students understand the concept that goes along with it, right?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: Another way we kind of see this is, you know, when we design different slides and Canva and presentations and stuff. And this one, again, guilty of this one too, is that we want to put funny little illustrations and things in there, right? They kind of somewhat relate to what we’re talking about but not. And I know that the students love to have the little pop and the colors and the illustrations and stuff, but again, if it doesn’t relate to what we’re talking about, what do you think they’re going to focus on on that slide: the words written down there or the funny cartoon?
GONZALEZ: Right.
HARVARD: They’re going to focus on the funny cartoon, which is I guess great, but is that what they’re going to be assessed on, the funny cartoon —
GONZALEZ: Right.
HARVARD: — that’s in the top left hand corner?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: Or are they going to be assessed on the material to be learned, right? So, and again, I’m not saying only put text on slides and it should be black and white. The end.
GONZALEZ: Right.
HARVARD: Make sure that the focus is on what we need to focus on and that’s kind of what the seductive details effect is getting at.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: Whether we’re instructing or it’s in presentation or whatever, make sure the material is the main thing, I guess.
GONZALEZ: Right. I mean, I think sometimes this is something that we can do for each other as peers is just show somebody your slideshow or tell them the story and see if, you know, another teacher can tell you, you know, how this connects? Because I push this stuff all the time, you know, anticipatory set, like open, get creative with your opening. But I have said that before too, that make sure it’s not so far off track that there’s not even a connection that’s clear to the thing that they’re supposed to be learning. And that’s a pretty subtle thing.
HARVARD: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: And as teachers, we think there’s this thing called the curse of knowledge, right, and it’s like as a teacher, I’ve presented it. It made sense to me.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: So it must make sense to them right. You know? And we fall into that trap. But remember, these students may be hearing this information for the very first time. Whereas your brain has well-developed schemas about this material, right, your prior knowledge is vast, theirs is not, right?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: And if you need to put yourself in their shoes of hearing information for the first time, ask them to explain some social media app to you, right? They’re going to tell you a ton about it in 30 seconds.
GONZALEZ: Right, yeah.
HARVARD: You’re going to go, “What? I have no idea. What is this? What’s this button? What does this do?” And they’re going to go, “Oh my gosh. I’ve already told you.”
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: That’s what they’re experiencing with the material in your class.
GONZALEZ: I love that advice.
HARVARD: Right?
GONZALEZ: Because that’s perfectly true, yeah. You know, one thing, you mentioning the slides. It’s reminding me of a shift that I made years ago from the decorative type of visual to more of a visual that helps people understand the relationship, so some type of a graphic organizer versus, you know, an illustration that’s just pretty or cute or funny —
HARVARD: Yes.
GONZALEZ: — but actually do something with the material that helps students understand the relationship between concepts. And there’s so many kinds of graphic organizers out there that can help you do that.
HARVARD: Oh, that’s exactly right, yeah. I am definitely pro-graphic organizer, right? I used one this week with my students talking about the nervous system and then the different kind of subcategories of the nervous system: central, peripheral, autonomic, somatic. And it helps them to see it in a graphic manner how each subcategory fits in with the other categories.
GONZALEZ: Exactly.
HARVARD: So the illustration itself gives information beyond just what’s inside the box —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: — what the material is. And that’s huge. And was very explicit with my students. Because I know they’ve seen hierarchies like that before. Like, do you understand how this works?
GONZALEZ: Right.
HARVARD: Do you understand that because the autonomic and somatic nervous systems are listed below the peripheral, that that means they’re in the peripheral nervous system, right?
GONZALEZ: Right.
HARVARD: So what is this graphic itself telling you about the information?
GONZALEZ: Talking them through that too and making it work harder for you so that, yeah.
HARVARD: Exactly.
GONZALEZ: Because a lot of times it’s just shapes, yeah.
HARVARD: Yeah. They just, they just see shapes and lines, right? And I’m working with AP psychology students at the high school, very motivated students. And, you know, I’m not saying all of them didn’t know that —
GONZALEZ: Right.
HARVARD: — but I’m sure that some of them were like, oh, oh, there’s a method to the madness here, right?
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yep.
HARVARD: He didn’t just give us something fun, like, pretty to do.
GONZALEZ: Right, yeah. It really does help though to talk people through your visuals sometimes and it makes them suddenly just pop and they come alive, yeah.
HARVARD: Yeah, exactly.
GONZALEZ: Hey, it’s Jenn. I’m going to interrupt this episode for just a minute to tell you about something I think will be a big help to you as an educator, whether you’re a teacher, a school leader, an instructional coach, or even someone studying to become a teacher. It’s something I’ve been publishing for the last ten years called the Teacher’s Guide to Tech, and it’s basically an encyclopedia of tech tools curated especially for teachers.
My team and I keep an eye on all the tech tools that are out there — the ones that are fresh and new and the ones that have stood the test of time, and we think about how they can best be used in classrooms. Then we sort them into categories, give you a really simple description of what each one does, provide a link to the tool’s website so you can check it out, and we also pick out a video that shows the tool in action so you can understand quickly how it works and if it will work for you. And because tech changes all the time, we have to maintain these listings to make sure they stay fresh and accurate. On top of that, we have a really nice collection of articles we’ve written that will help you explore more ways to use tech and fine-tune and troubleshoot things as you go along. Plus there’s a huge glossary of tech terms to help you stay current with the language.
In the past, this guide was published as a PDF that we updated once a year. Although this worked fine, that PDF would stay the same all year until the new edition came out. In January of 2025, we moved the entire guide to a fully online, subscription-based model — this allows us to update it all year round, keeping it fresh and new all the time! A year’s subscription costs exactly the same as the PDF used to cost, so we haven’t raised the price one bit, and it’s even more affordable if you get it as a group. To learn more about how this guide can help you become the most tech-savvy teacher in your school, visit teachersguidetotech.com.
GONZALEZ: All right. So that was the seductive details effect. The second one is the split attention effect.
HARVARD: Definitely, so yeah. The split attention effect. So this has to do, again, with presentation of material. What we want to do as much as possible in class is to create a situation where all the information the students need to understand a concept is right there. It’s in one place. Oftentimes what we do, especially with presentations, is we present part of an idea here, part of my idea on the next slide, part of an idea. Or we, we put, we space it out in time.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: When we split their attention either spatially because it’s in different places or in a time manner, that creates a situation where it’s harder for us to learn it, right?
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
HARVARD: So as much as possible, we want to get that information so they can see the entire concept in one go, right?
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
HARVARD: I know that’s not always possible.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: Again, I’m teaching some pretty complex concepts right now in my class about neural communication and hormones and neurotransmitters and stuff. And there’s just no way to get all of it into one spot. But if we can get, you know, entire chunks of it in one time, that’s way better than spreading it out, spreading it out, spreading it out. Because again, the more we do that, the more it’s difficult for the students to know, No. 1, so what do I need to know here? And then also, how does this fit in? How do these things go together? And again, a lot of the times, making those connections is what’s going to make the brain latch onto that information.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: So kind of considering it that way, that we don’t want to split their attention between different types of material or at different times if we don’t have to, right?
GONZALEZ: Yep.
HARVARD: Because that split in attention makes things more difficult to know. Another way to think about this is when we create some sort of presentation, some form of slides, we put a graphic up there. We put the text up there explaining the graphic, and then we verbally explain the graphic that’s on the slide with the text beside it also explaining the graphic that’s on the slide.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah.
HARVARD: Right? Now the students are caught in this. All right, I see this bar graph up here. I see the text beside it. And I’m trying to listen to you tell me about it. What do I listen to?
GONZALEZ: This is a pet peeve of mine.
HARVARD: What do I ignore?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: So this is also asking students to split their attention, right?
GONZALEZ: Right.
HARVARD: So another aspect of the split attention effect is if you’re using a graphic or an illustration, if the graphic itself explains itself, there’s no need to put text beside it. Right?
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
HARVARD: Now, but as a teacher, I understand. Again, I’ve put up bar graphs and pie charts and stuff. And again, it makes sense to me. I see it.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: I know that I’m also probably going to have to explain it a little bit too.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
HARVARD: So I’m going to leave the text explaining the pie chart out. I’m not putting that up there.
GONZALEZ: Right.
HARVARD: Because they’re going to hear it from me, and they’re going to see it.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: But they can’t read the text while listening to me while looking at the bar graph.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. I’m a big fan of building my slides with, and I don’t use any fancy animations, but with only introducing things into the slide when we’re ready to talk about it as opposed to having it all there. I think that the reason that a lot of people put a lot of this stuff on the slide though, because this is another issue, is that everybody wants you to share your slides. And so people feel that they have to put all the information in text on the slide, and I’ve been urging people over time to not share their slides but to have like a handout that has all the text that would have been on the slides so that they’ve got kind of notes that go with the presentation. But they don’t have to have everything right there on the screen.
HARVARD: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: Definitely. Yeah. And I feel that too. Teachers are sometimes like the best because they’ll share anything. “Hey, I’ve got this. I’ve done it.”
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: “I know how hard I worked to create it. You don’t need to work three hours to create this. Here, just use mine.” But we feel like we got to put text on there so they’ll understand it.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, otherwise the slide makes no sense, yeah.
HARVARD: Yeah. Put it in the notes section or something.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. There’s other ways of getting around having all of your words right up there, yeah.
HARVARD: Correct. And you can imagine. We’ve all been in meetings where they put up this slide or whatever, this graphic, and there’s so much information that you don’t, you don’t even know what to look at.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: Right? And we don’t want to overwhelm our students that way either.
GONZALEZ: Right, right. So the third one is the redundancy effect.
HARVARD: Yeah. So I already kind of went into this one with the split attention effect. So they’re kind of, you know, two sides of the same coin here. But the redundancy effect is that idea that we don’t want to read the text to the students when they can see the text, right? We can look at something and hear it. So we can look at a graphic and we can hear someone explain that graphic, and we can hold both of that, those types of information in our head at the same time.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: But what we can’t do is we can’t read something while also consciously paying attention to someone saying something to us.
GONZALEZ: Right.
HARVARD: Right? An easy way of thinking about it, I can’t read a book and listen to someone tell me a story.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: Right?
GONZALEZ: Right.
HARVARD: But I can look at a chart, again, or a graphic or an illustration and I can hear someone explain it to me. So we don’t want to be redundant in how we present the information to students.
GONZALEZ: At the same time, yes.
HARVARD: Because again, yeah, that working memory is limited. And they’re going to have to choose what they focus on, right?
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
HARVARD: Another topic I touch on in the book is multitasking and kind of the, like, from a cognitive standpoint, we can’t multitask.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: We cannot consciously pay attention to more than one stimuli at a time. We have to choose, right?
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
HARVARD: We have to choose. Do I listen to my teacher, or do I listen to whatever’s playing in my earbuds? Right? I have to listen, I have to choose, do I read what’s on the slide or do I, the text that’s on the slide, or do I listen to what my teacher’s saying? So we want to avoid situations where students have to choose —
GONZALEZ: Right.
HARVARD: — what to pay attention to.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: Because cognitively we can’t, we can’t do more than one at a time.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. It’s interesting because this isn’t going to be in the recording, but we had to pause a little while ago because your school announcements came on. And it reminds me of when I was teaching how in some schools and with some administrations, the freedom with which the front office feels it can just pop in at any time and shout across the entire building is frustrating as a teacher because you’re all supposed to listen to whatever that announcement is that’s important information that everybody needs to hear and if everybody’s teaching and actively learning bell to bell, then we’re going to be interrupted with whatever we were just learning. And the recovery time is significant.
HARVARD: Yeah, exactly.
GONZALEZ: You know, I got interrupted, so okay, now I’ve got to split my attention to this other thing, and then I’ve got to get back to the level of concentration I was just at. And that can be 10 minutes sometimes.
HARVARD: Yeah. So yeah. So they’ve tested that before, like, researchers have done, when, a lot of the times when people think they’re multitasking, what they’re actually doing is called task switching, which is what you just described. I’m going from consciously paying attention to one task to paying attention to another task. And not only does that make doing both tasks take longer —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: — but there is a deficiency in memory going back and forth from one task to the next. You are, from a cognitive standpoint, you are much better off focusing on getting the one task done and then going to the other, instead of going back and forth and back and forth. It’s not just “it takes longer,” but it takes longer and you’re not as likely to remember either one of the things you’re trying to multitask as well.
GONZALEZ: Right. So it’s just, it’s getting me thinking about, there’s a lot of little things that happen in classrooms, you know, sort of if we’ve got our students getting ready to start reading something and then a minute in, we say, “Oh, and there’s this other thing I just forgot.” Or like one kid has a question, and we go ahead and take it in front of the whole class. That’s messing with everybody’s ability to —
HARVARD: To attend, yep.
GONZALEZ: — to attend to what they’re, yeah. And so these little things. So the split attention, I just want to go back to that, since we kind of, like, let the redundancy effect get into that.
HARVARD: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: The split attention effect is more about, like I know in the book you talk about the graph and the text being there at the same time.
HARVARD: Yep.
GONZALEZ: So it’s got more to do with, am I — and separating, right?
HARVARD: Yes, yeah. Right. It’s more to do, yeah. The split attention effect just by its lonesome itself is that we don’t want to split the necessary information up —
GONZALEZ: Okay.
HARVARD: — either spatially, right?
GONZALEZ: Yeah, mhmm.
HARVARD: From one slide to the next if we don’t have to, or just in the timeframe in which we present it. Because the more time we put between presenting things, information, especially if they’re connected and they need to go together more —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: — our brain’s going to focus on other things.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: And for our students, they may not see that connection between these two concepts if we put time between it also.
GONZALEZ: Right, right.
HARVARD: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: All right. I have a feeling I’m going to ask you to come back and talk about other stuff, because there’s, this is just the tiniest, like, literally a paragraph of your book that we’re talking about, and there’s so much more. I did have just another question.
HARVARD: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: Just with everything that you have learned about cognitive science over the years. What is one piece of advice you would give to teachers? Either something they should do more of or something they should do less of.
HARVARD: So yeah. So this has kind of become my focus in my classroom, right? When I think about, again, designing my lessons, whatever I’m going to teach to my students, and it’s kind of this mantra. It’s less is more and more is too much, right? So the idea here is that I don’t know why, but I feel like as a teacher, the more complex, the more we get into something we’re teaching, we feel like we’ve got to jazz it up more. We’ve got to give more bells and whistles because this is so complicated. Right? But when we think about the brain, that’s the absolute opposite of what we should be doing, right? The more complex it is, the simpler, the more stripped-down instruction needs to be. So less, from that standpoint, is more. Less is more learning. But if you try to do more, that’s probably going to be too much.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
HARVARD: Right? Too much for learning. So just, again, it goes back to what you mentioned with intrinsic and extraneous load there. But like, that doesn’t go away. It doesn’t change, no matter what you’re teaching or who you’re teaching. And that, for me, if I had to, you know, summarize one thing that helps me to stay focused on what I need to be focused on in the classroom, that’s probably it.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. The book is “Do I Have Your Attention?” It is, by the time people listening to this, they’re going to be able to buy it wherever they want to, and I’ll be putting links in the blog post for this. Where can people go to learn more from you online?
HARVARD: So I am on Twitter, yes, it’s still Twitter, @effortfuleduktr. I’m on Bluesky, @blakeharvard.bsky.social. And my website is theeffortfuleducator.com. Just completely spelled out. And if you just go to Google, type in my name or type in “Do I Have Your Attention?” You can find my book pretty much anywhere.
GONZALEZ: Awesome. This is not the last time you’re going to be on this podcast, so I’ll just say we’ll talk to you later, and thank you so much, Blake.
HARVARD: Oh. Thank you for having me. It’s been fantastic.
For a full transcript of this episode and links to Blake’s book, visit cultofpedagogy.com, click Podcast, and choose episode 244. To get a regular email from me about my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, courses and products, sign up for my mailing list at cultofpedagogy.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.