#71 Lower the content demands when introducing a new routine

It will help students limited attention focus on the right thing

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💡 A tip to try in class this week 💡

The start of the school year is a great time to introduce new routines to your students. But when routines are unfamiliar, students have to dedicate a large proportion of their limited attention to the routine’s structure - in other words, the rules of the routine. This leaves little attention to think about the content of the routine - the things you actually want them to be thinking about to help them learn. Using an unfamiliar routine as a vehicle to ask students to think hard about tricky content will achieve little, as neither the structure nor the content will receive sufficient attention.

So, the key when introducing a new routine is to initially keep the content demands as low as possible so students can focus on, and quickly automate, the structure.

Peps Mccrea has a great diagram to illustrate this:

Here are some examples:

1. To develop the routine for responding on mini-whiteboards, initially ask students to write their favourite food or their name, hover and show you, instead of asking them to write the answer to a quadratic equation.

2. To develop the routine for an effective Turn and Talk, ask students to tell each other the names of their siblings instead of discussing whether an integer can be negative.

3. To develop the routine for checking for listening during an I Do, first explain what you did over the summer and check if students are listening instead of checking they are listening to your explanation for how to plot a cumulative frequency diagram.

Practising with low content demands is a fast-track towards routine automation. When the routine is familair, students only need to give minimal attention to the structure and can dedicate their remaining attention to the content. Thus you can ramp up the difficulty of the content, get your students thinking hard, and hence get them learning.

What do you think of this idea?

What would you need to change to make this tip work for you?

When could you try it for the first time?

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🏃🏻‍♂️Before you go, have you… 🏃🏻‍♂️

1. … tried last week’s tip about asking students to write their names on their mini-whiteboards?

2. … read my latest Eedi newsletter about the power of an imaginary coach?

3. … listened to my latest podcast with Ollie Lovell about a recent lesson he taught?

4. … read my Tips for Teachers book?

5. … considered booking some CPD, coaching or maths department support?

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