3-Read Friday #99
Cognitive load, testing, and ratio tables
Before we begin, you may want to check out my brand-new 16-part book series, The Tips for Teachers guide to… here.
Here are three blog posts that I found interesting this week.
1. The 60-Minute Mental Marathon: What Teachers Have to Juggle by Joel Kenyon
Joel argues that Cognitive load theory applies to teachers too, and schools must stop overloading them with performative admin that crowds out the mental bandwidth needed for actual teaching.
2. Is Testing the Next Frontier in Ed Reform? by Natalie Wexler
Natalie tells the story of how Louisiana’s discontinued Innovative Assessment pilot demonstrated that testing students on curriculum content rather than decontextualised skills shifted teachers toward knowledge-building instruction and narrowed achievement gaps—but the experiment ended before deeper changes could take root.
3. From Disparate Knowledge to Unified Fluency Freedom: Generalising the Ratio Table (Part 1) by Jon Fant
One for the maths geeks! Jon argues that ratio tables provide a unified proportional framework that allows students to derive area and volume conversion factors by squaring and cubing linear relationships, replacing fragmented memorisation with structural understanding.
Have a great weekend!
Craig