The Work Before the Work

It’s a Wednesday morning, and your intervention coordinator, let’s call her Maggie, has just gotten an email from her principal. “Please review our intervention groups, and make recommendations for changes.” In the principal’s mind, this should be a straightforward task. It’s all in the system, right?

In reality, it’s anything but straightforward. 

Maggie’s morning just got sent off the rails. She’s in a K-6 elementary school and there are 20+ intervention groups at any given time. 

She sits down at her desk and gets to work. Maggie opens up her student data platform, and navigates to the first intervention group. The view is beautiful. She’s decided that it will be most efficient if she can copy all of the group’s data into a spreadsheet, and then look at all 20 groups as a whole. Data copied. Data pasted. Next group.

Maggie opens the 2nd Grade Oral Reading Fluency group, and immediately pauses. The most recent progress monitoring scores were from three weeks ago. So Maggie reaches out to the teacher and asks her to update the scores. Next group.

The 3rd Grade Comprehension group is only slightly better. All of the progress monitoring data is there, but this teacher hasn’t been recording attendance consistently. Another email to another teacher.

Maggie has just spent the better part of 15 minutes, and she’s only got one group’s data. 

Realistically, she’ll spend at least two hours gathering all of the data before she can even begin her task of reviewing the intervention groups and making change recommendations. And that’s not even counting the interruptions, pauses or waiting for teachers to update their data. 

Maggie will put in hours of work before the real work begins. But, by the time she gets to the real work, her cognitive workbench is full. 

Three Kinds of Cognitive Work

When we think about Maggie’s morning, we are struck by how much work it takes to complete a seemingly simple task. But, there is so much more going on inside Maggie’s brain. Cognitive Load Theory, originally developed by John Sweller in the late 1980’s, gives a precise vocabulary for what’s happening on the mental workbench in Maggie’s brain.

According to Sweller, the amount of mental effort on this data analysis task is the sum of the amount of Intrinsic Load, Extraneous Load, and Germaine Load - all behaving differently, and calling for a different response (Sweller #).

Intrinsic load refers to the task itself. In this case, it’s making recommendations for intervention changes. This is the work worth doing. But, it’s also hard. Figuring out why a student’s oral reading fluency has stalled, determining if a student’s attendance is having a negative impact on their comprehension skills or working through whether or not the current intervention is performing as it should be - that’s all intrinsically hard, and it should be. But intrinsic load work is the work worth doing.

Extraneous load is different. This is the type of work that has nothing to do with the underlying difficulty of the intrinsic work, and everything to do with how badly the information around it has been organized. In Maggie’s case, there was a significant amount of extraneous work to do before she could even begin her task.

Germaine load sits in between. It’s the effort spent building a durable understanding that pays off the next time the task is performed. Call this “institutional knowledge” or “experience.” Germaine load is effort spent for a real reason, just aimed at learning rather than at the immediate decision.

The practical upshot is one of the more useful ideas in this entire field, and it’s simple enough to say in a sentence: you don’t reduce cognitive load by making the work easier. You reduce it by identifying which part of the load was never buying anyone anything, and removing that part specifically, while leaving the

genuinely hard thinking exactly as hard as it needs to be.

Protecting the Work Worth Doing

Because of all the extraneous work (and extraneous mental load) Maggie did, her mental workbench is full when she gets to the work she needs to do. This is a real problem, not just in education, but with life in general. 

What is the solution? We need to understand that there is only so much cognitive load a person can handle, and we need to design systems and tasks with that understanding in mind.

Data warehouse vendors know (or they should), that intervention reviews happen. Our products should be designed with that in mind. We know that schools are concerned about chronic absenteeism. Yet, a principal has to hunt around in the system to find the dashboard about absenteeism. Our products must be designed to reduce extraneous load. 

At ion, we’ve been thinking about this problem for a while now, and we’ve designed a tool, called ion Briefs, that we think will significantly reduce the problem of cognitive load on teachers and administrators alike.

Briefs

What if, on Wednesday morning, Maggie logged in to her email, and saw an email from ion saying “Here are the students who are struggling in their interventions, perhaps you should make a change.” She then clicks on a link that says “Explore the Brief,” and is immediately taken to a page with all of the relevant information already assembled, so she can skip most of the extraneous work, and move directly to the intrinsic work.

She might even be able to have those changes to the principal BEFORE he even asks.  

Or, another scenario. What if, on Monday morning, the principal of the high school opens his email, and sees an attendance brief from ion. Chronic Absenteeism this week, attendance rate this week, number of students chronically absent and number of students newly chronically absent. He can act on it as is, or click “Explore the Brief” and get to a page with all of the relevant information already assembled. 

Or, a classroom teacher in that high school, on Monday morning, opens her email and sees a “Week In Review” brief from ion. In it, she sees how many students have missing assignments, how many had below a 70% on their assignments, and what are the assignments that caused the most trouble for her students. She no longer has to remember the details from all of her 125 students, the brief tells her what she needs to know - and she can explore the brief further if she’d like.

Three scenarios, countless hours of extraneous work and cognitive load eliminated. 

That’s how we protect the work that needs to be done. Most data work is predictable, repeatable. Using technology, we can design systems that actually reduce real cognitive load. 

The question for school leaders is simple: How much of your educators’ time is spent doing the work—and how much is spent doing the work before the work?

At ion, we believe technology should do more than organize information. It should remove the searching, assembling, checking and remembering that consumes educators’ limited attention, so they can spend more of it on the decisions that actually matter.

That’s exactly why we built ion Briefs.

If you’d like to see what it looks like when the work before the work is already done, visit ion-k12.com/briefs and explore an ion Brief.

Work Cited

Sweller, John. “Cognitive Load During Problem Solving: Effects on Learning.” Cognitive Science, vol. 12, no. 2, 1988, pp. 257-285.