Working Out and Working Memory

I joined the YMCA about a month ago.  While I know how obnoxious it is to talk about your workouts at the gym all of the time, I keep seeing things that align with education and cognitive science and can't help but make these connections.  So, I'll try to do it sparingly, but you should expect that there will be more posts making the connections between fitness classes and academic classes.

The first thing to jump out at me at indoor cycling classes was the power of social norms, but I'll write about that some other time.  The one that has struck me over and over again is the connection to working memory.  For those that don't know, working memory is what you can hold in your conscious mind simultaneously, and for most of us, it is about four items.    

I've taken spin classes from five or six different instructors, and while they all have a slightly different approach, one thing they all talk about is form.  You get a better workout if you have your body positioned correctly and use your muscles in the correct way.  But problems can arise when these instructions are delivered in a rapid-fire way.  "Hands light on the handlebars, elbows bent, shoulders relaxed, abs tight, not hunched over, feet horizontal, legs moving in a smooth circle" is a lot to process at once.  By the time I get to the direction of my feet, I've forgotten that my elbows are supposed to be bent.  One day, this will all be one chunk in my mind, labeled "riding posture," but it isn't yet.  A better approach might be for those teachers to focus on the legs and feet at the beginning and then wait until after the warm-up or after the first song to address your upper body.  This might sound weird, but a poster on the wall with a picture of a rider in proper form or some basic reminders like "elbows bent, feet flat" could be useful as well.

Academic teachers, we can learn from this.  When you deliver instructions, do you say a lot of them quickly?  If so, it is unlikely that students remember the first or second step by the time you get to the last step.  Better to give only a couple at a time, letting them get those down before you deliver the next ones.  Or perhaps you could project the instructions, so they have something to refer back to when they have forgotten what comes next.  For those who teach young kids who have not yet learned to read or English language novices, a picture of what you want (seated student with a pencil, a sheet of paper, and a calculator) would be helpful to their working memories.  The picture is also easier to remember and doesn't require your presence or repetition the way verbal instructions do.

I have one instructor who described a working memory scenario without realizing it.  She said, "Can you stay at 90 RPMs?  Not go above it or below it but stay at it?  Can you stay at the point where it is just hard but not your maximum?  When you are at maximum work, you are less likely to quit, but when you get down to where you are working hard but don't have the mental distraction of all-out effort, you are more likely to quit."  What she described as "the mental distraction of all-out effort" really means full working memory.  When you are working right at the limit of cognitive load, you don't have the mental space to think about what it would take to quit or pay attention to the clock.  When you have backed down to 85% of your maximum, you have freed up the space to wonder about how much longer you have.  

This is instructive to academic teachers as well.  Some people use cognitive load theory to assert that we should make things easier for students or reduce the rigor of our classes.  That is not, however, what the theory implies.  Understanding cognitive load and working memory should help us to identify the perfect level of load.  There is a sweet spot where we keep our students working RIGHT AT or just below their maximum capacity.  If we are too far below it, they have the space for their minds to wander and consider quitting because it is uncomfortable.  If we are above it, they are incapable of sustained work, and they give up.  Learning, at its best, is difficult but not impossible.  

I'll talk more about working memory and cognitive load in the future, but for now, let's remember the lessons from working out and find the best ways to deliver instruction at the right level for our students to learn.