I still remember the day that a promising student from my biochemistry class stopped by my office to tell me she didn’t think she wanted to be a science professor anymore. She had watched me navigate interactions with disrespectful students and noticed in other classes that some students treated their male professors differently. She worried that she would not be able to manage situations where students questioned her credibility because of her gender. In her own work, she sometimes struggled to focus on content and hesitated to speak up in the classroom, anxious that someone would challenge her as they sometimes did me and that she wouldn’t know what to do. The exclusion that she observed and experienced shaped what she imagined as possible for her future; it also affected her learning.
While it might be tempting to dismiss this student as an anomaly, experiences like this are all too common for many students. Students bring many different stories into the classroom with them, and interactions they observe can confirm their beliefs or fears about themselves and their place in an educational setting. Belonging is an essential pre-condition for vocational discernment and for learning. Students need to feel safe and to experience belonging to be able to respond to our invitations to explore their vocations and imagine their futures. Research shows that a lack of belonging—which can include experiencing or witnessing microaggressions—reduces a student’s capacity to learn.
How does belonging affect our capacity in this regard? Cognitive load theory, which describes the amount of mental effort needed to complete a task, can help us understand this troubling phenomenon. This theory asserts that there are limits to the capacity of our working memories, or the number of tasks we can manage at a single time. Cognitive overload of our working memory prevents us from taking in more information, making it difficult to continue to learn. Intrinsic cognitive load is the amount of effort required for performing a particular task. For example, solving an equation embedded within a word problem has a higher intrinsic cognitive load than solving the same equation on its own. Germane cognitive load is the productive mental effort required to do deep learning and to understand something new. Finally, extraneous cognitive load comes from the environment and often distracts from learning content or doing the task at hand. These environmental distractions can take the form of disorganized instruction or feeling like you don’t belong; they can contribute to a task’s unnecessary extraneous cognitive load.
As individuals practice and develop competence, a task requires less cognitive load, which reflects an important shift as we move from novice to expert in a particular area. Activities and practices that are informed by an understanding of cognitive load theory can help increase students’ ability to engage a task at the appropriate level and move to deep learning. To help students develop mastery, teachers can start by minimizing the intrinsic cognitive load as they introduce something new and then increase complexity to provide the right amount of challenge.
But teachers also need to attend to the extraneous cognitive load that comes from the environment of the classroom, and particularly from students’ experience of belonging. The higher cognitive load of concerns about belonging can suppress working memory, adversely affecting the individual’s ability to perform on cognitive tasks and even impact academic performance. These negative effects can be caused by experiencing microaggressions or even, as my student illustrated, by observing someone else’s negative experiences.
In the classroom, I have fostered belonging by making its development explicit so that it becomes a shared project. I scaffold participating in this shared work to reduce the cognitive load to an appropriate level for students. On the first day of a new class, I set aside time to share my vision for a space that works to encourage full presence and participation in learning both with and from each other. I then ask (what I believe to be) the most important question of the semester: what would have to be true for you to build and participate in a learning community like the one I described? Students respond to this prompt and develop a set of shared commitments for the semester.
What would have to be true for you to build and participate in a learning community?
As we develop these commitments, we talk through scenarios and discuss language that we could use if something goes wrong. We write out scripts that students put in the front pocket of their notebooks, which helps them manage the cognitive load needed to participate in this shared project. Throughout the semester, we remind ourselves of these commitments and practice using our shared language as often as we can. By the end of this process, students know what it means to be part of this learning community, which they helped develop, and have access to a toolkit that helps them take responsibility for living into this vision.
Accounting for cognitive load is good for learning, but what might it have to do with vocation? When we integrate a broad vision of vocation into our teaching, we can more fully support our students to reach their full potential, both intellectually and personally. Good pedagogical practices like the ones I’ve described shape and inform this vocational work we do with students. For many of us, it might be easy and exciting to curate the content of vocational discernment—the questions we might ask, the conversations we hope to facilitate, and the materials we can create—but more challenging might be the way we design these tasks to attend to the cognitive load they require. Cognitive load theory can also help us approach vocational exploration with students more broadly, including how we might scaffold the big questions of vocation by breaking them down into developmentally appropriate and approachable elements to engage with students.
Yet it is also important to remember that vocational work happens in the lived experience of the classroom—in students’ interactions with each other and their professors, in their invitations into the classroom, and in their experience of the learning environment. When we also attend to the extraneous cognitive load of our classrooms and welcome students into a shared project of belonging, we can accompany them on their vocational journeys in new and rich ways.
Rachael Baker is the associate director of NetVUE. For more posts by Rachael, click here.