What are you moving on to next?” I asked a child in the maths lesson I was observing at another school. “Varied fluency,” the child replied, without missing a beat.

There was a time when this would have surprised me. It is a term with which most primary and secondary maths teachers would be familiar, but I’d never heard a child use it before this instance. Yet, I have since become used to pupils repeating technical terms or buzzwords back to me.

On one occasion, I had observed a group of children who were playing at being teachers during their golden time. They were talking about AfL (assessment for learning). In this particular school, it was common practice to show a slide labelled “AfL” at some point during every lesson, and the children had obviously picked up on this. But when I asked if they could tell me what AfL actually was, none of them knew.

Likewise, the terminology of research is creeping into the classroom: retrieval quizzes, spaced sessions…It’s a matter of time before a child excuses themself from a lesson because they are feeling cognitively overloaded.

I imagine this trend has happened for two reasons: a desire among teachers to explain the learning process to children so that they can better buy into and use it; and an almost unconscious use of these words by teachers. Either way, is it actually useful for children to know such terms?

Confusing language

Many would argue that equipping children with technical language simply empowers them to talk about their learning. We know from copious research that metacognition is a key facet of learning, so it could be argued that enabling children to understand why it is they are doing something and how it is effective might be useful.

But do children really understand these terms? In my experience, not really. The child who parroted “varied fluency” had no clue what that meant; likewise, the children spouting “AfL”. So it seems pretty pointless.

We could, of course, teach them what these terms mean and perhaps there would be some benefit to this, but at what cost? Do we risk confusing them?

Cognitive-load theory, developed by educational psychologist John Sweller in the 1980s, suggests that academic success is likely to be improved when teachers give greater consideration to the role and limitations of working memory in learning, and when pupils are allowed to learn free from distraction. Writing in Tes in 2017, Sweller explained that “working memory can process no more than three to four elements of information and hold that information for no more than about 20 seconds without rehearsal. Beyond these limits, working memory ceases to function effectively.”

If teachers are continually asking children to process new terminology that is not essential to their understanding of a topic, while simultaneously learning core subject material, we are unnecessarily contributing to their cognitive load and reducing their capacity to learn that core material.

What’s more, spending lesson time covering the vocabulary of thinking skills - or other technical language that teachers learn and use during their training - allows for less time to be spent covering the things that really matter.

Having a six-year-old tell a group of visitors that they’ve been “analysing” and “evaluating” may be superficially impressive and might look good for the school, but if you dig a bit deeper, is that child learning what they actually need or want to learn?

Teaching our children these words isn’t impressive or groundbreaking; it’s a little pretentious. But that’s not to say technical language does not have its place. An example I always use is the names of the parts of an equation in maths: verbal and written explanations are such a key part of deepening children’s mathematical understanding that giving them the proper terms for the parts of an addition equation, for example, can be very beneficial. Being able to use the terms “augend”, “addend” and “sum” will make it easier for them to ask questions and talk about what they do or don’t understand than if they are limited to talking about “the first number” or “the last number”.

Ultimately, we should ask: “Will this help them learn what I want them to learn?” Most of the time with buzzwords and terminology, the answer will be no.

Shannen Doherty is a Year 4 teacher in South London

This article originally appeared in the 15 March 2019 issue under the headline “A cognitive load of mumbo jumbo”