3: Managing Cognitive Load in the Classroom

It has been a six-lesson day and there are still lots of jobs to do, but it's time for an afternoon of professional development. This time you'll be learning about managing student cognitive load. You hope to high heaven that the facilitator doesn't fall victim to the ultimate irony... cognitively overloading you! In this episode, I talk about cognitive load theory, and how I went about addressing it in professional development. Literature etc. I consulted for this episode includes: Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12 (2), 257–285. Ward, M. & Sweller, J. (1990). Structuring effective worked examples. Cognition and Instruction , 7 (1), 1-39. Sweller, J., van Merriënboer, J. J. G., & Paas, F. G. W. C. (1998). Cognitive architecture and instructional design. Educational Psychology Review, 10 (3), 251–296. Paas, F., Renkl, A., & Sweller, J. (2003). Cognitive load theory and instructional design: Recent developments. Educational Psychologist, 38 (1), 1–4. Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41 (2), 75–86. Moreno, R., & Mayer, R. E. (2007). Interactive multimodal learning environments. Educational Psychology Review, 19 (3), 309–326. If you have a topic you would like covered, write to me: hello@spongeeducation.com . Visit the website:

You can listen to 3: Managing Cognitive Load in the Classroom online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

3: Managing Cognitive Load in the Classroom is an episode from Diary of a Teacher by Sarah Durack.

This episode is 17:21 long.

This episode was published on Aug 23, 2025.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from Diary of a Teacher when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.