Cognitive approaches

Welcome — this topic is your teacher’s cheat-sheet for translating cognitive theory into lesson plans that actually work. Below I’ll pull together key ideas about memory, attention and information processing (drawing on Piaget, Ausubel, Kolb, constructivism and recent brain findings) and give you practical design moves you can use tomorrow. Casual, practical, and classroom-ready.

First listen the Podcast:

Big-picture takeaways (in one paragraph)

Learners build knowledge on existing schemas in long-term memory, while working memory is limited and easily overloaded. Attention is the gatekeeper — if students aren’t paying attention (emotionally or cognitively), nothing else matters. How students process information (surface vs deep; serial vs holistic; Kolb’s cycle) determines whether they memorize facts or understand and transfer knowledge. So design lessons that activate prior knowledge, manage cognitive load, support focused attention, encourage deep processing (reflection, application), and scaffold the transfer to new contexts.