Students want to learn, but sometimes they don’t know how to; if it gets too hard or too intense too quickly then they give up, fade out or disengage – the same can be said of staff. There has been a lot of interest recently in cognitive load theory (CLT) and its application; Dylan William cited it as the ‘single most important thing for teachers to know’ (2017). Our working memory can only cope with a certain amount of information at any one time and can therefore be overloaded, and the cognitive load is the amount of effort required to complete the task at hand. The theory, initially elaborated by Sweller (1988), can be summarised as an approach to optimising the load on students’ working memories in order to maximise their learning. It is often represented as a simple equation of ‘task demand’ divided by ‘available resources’, with the resources being either internal (what students already know, for example) and external (what you can control, such as planning and
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