Chapter Five
Telling is not explaining, and showing is not modelling. This chapter is about helping teaching work framed around how attention and memory actually work.
Rooted in the work of Rosenshine, Sweller, Mayer and others
The infographic
The strategies
Each strategy below is written exactly as it appears on the card.
Rosenshine: present new material in small steps with practice after each. Use animations to chunk information and reveal content gradually. Let students process before continuing.
Find this under Explain difficult ideas · Reduce unnecessary cognitive demand · Inclusive practice: working memory and cognitive demand
Willingham: anchor new ideas to concrete examples first. Use images, video or objects to make the abstract visible before naming it. Move to the abstract once the concrete is secure.
Find this under Explain difficult ideas · Support access and participation · Inclusive practice: language and explanation
Rosenshine: connect to prior knowledge before introducing anything new. Use a retrieval starter or concept map on screen to activate what students know. Link before you launch.
Find this under Explain difficult ideas · Help pupils connect prior and new learning
The EEF found clarity matters more than delivery method. A diagram under a visualiser can outperform a polished video. Choose the tool that makes the idea clearest, not the newest.
Find this under Explain difficult ideas · Use technology with greater purpose
Listening is not learning. Use live polls or mini whiteboards to check understanding at every step. Rosenshine: reteach before moving on. The explanation is the start, not the finish.
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The EEF: technology works best when it supplements teaching, not replaces it. A screencast works alongside classroom explanation, not instead of it. Supplement, never substitute.
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Sweller: working memory holds about four items. Every screen element competes for those slots. Strip slides to essentials. Press B to blank the screen when you want attention on you.
Find this under Explain difficult ideas · Reduce unnecessary cognitive demand · Inclusive practice: working memory and cognitive demand
Sweller’s split attention: separate text and diagrams force learners to search between them. Integrate labels directly into the image. Use annotation tools to build the diagram live.
Find this under Reduce unnecessary cognitive demand · Inclusive practice: working memory and cognitive demand
Sweller’s redundancy effect: narrating text on screen forces double processing. Say it or show it, not both. Use the B or W key to blank the slide while you talk through the idea.
Find this under Reduce unnecessary cognitive demand · Inclusive practice: working memory and cognitive demand · Try this tomorrow
Mayer’s coherence: remove every word, image and sound that does not support learning. Strip clip art from slides. Cut background music. Every element on screen must earn its place.
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Mayer’s signalling: bold, arrows and highlights direct attention to what matters. Use annotation tools to signal live during the explanation. Without it, learners search alone.
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Mayer’s segmenting: break content into chunks. Use slide animations to reveal one idea per click, not auto-play. Let working memory process before the next chunk arrives.
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Paivio’s dual coding: the brain processes words and images through separate channels. Design every slide with both: a key visual paired with minimal text. Two routes to the same idea.
Find this under Explain difficult ideas · Support access and participation · Inclusive practice: language and explanation
Mayer’s modality: people learn better from images with narration than images with text. Record a narrated screencast over a diagram. Let the voice do what text would overload.
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Mayer’s spatial contiguity: place words near the images they describe. Labels sit beside the diagram, not in a separate list. Use slide design to keep related information together.
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Use animations to reveal content one step at a time. One idea per click, building the full picture gradually. Progressive reveal aligns the display to the pace of your explanation.
Record short screencasts with narration over visuals. Mayer: images plus voice outperforms text-heavy slides. Keep each video to one idea. Brevity beats completeness every time.
Mayer’s pre-training: teach key terms before the main explanation. A vocabulary slide or pre-lesson video builds familiarity first. Learners who know the words can focus on the ideas.
Find this under Explain difficult ideas · Reduce unnecessary cognitive demand · Support access and participation · Inclusive practice: working memory and cognitive demand · Inclusive practice: language and explanation
Rosenshine: model the process, not the product. Use a visualiser or screen share to think aloud live. Narrate your decisions as you work. Make invisible expertise visible to all.
Find this under Make modelling clearer · Make thinking visible · Inclusive practice: language and explanation · Try this tomorrow
A visualiser turns any desk into a modelling stage. Show handwriting, annotate text, build diagrams under the camera. The EEF found this among the most promising classroom technology.
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Sweller and Cooper: students learn more from worked examples than equivalent problems. Record a screencast of the example so students can pause and study the method at their pace.
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Atkinson: alternate worked examples with practice. Display an example on screen, then set a parallel task. Example, try. Example, try. Interleaving builds understanding faster.
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Rosenshine: begin with full support, then fade. Show a complete example, then a partial one with gaps, then independent practice. Use fillable templates to structure the fading.
Find this under Make modelling clearer · Build independence · Inclusive practice: working memory and cognitive demand
The EEF found simulations let students manipulate variables and see consequences beyond physical limits. Use to extend your explanation, not replace it. Technology serves pedagogy.
Find this under Use technology with greater purpose
The thinking
Telling is not explaining. We’ve learned through Rosenshine’s principles of instruction that distilled decades of research on effective teaching into a sequence that small steps, worked examples, checks for understanding, and scaffolds are removed as competence grows, helps.
Sweller’s cognitive load theory explained why this works, because working memory is narrow and easily overwhelmed, and good explanation manages that load rather than ignoring it.
Mayer’s multimedia principles then show how words and images should be combined, and how they should not.
I’ve integrated technology throughout the various categories, sharing ideas on how it can be used, when appropriate. Technology can often help, but it isn’t always the answer. You’ll always know your students better than anyone else, so keep them and your classes, front and centre in your thinking.
Working memory can overload. When explaining things with your class, it’s important to remember your role is often an act of load management.
In practice
Visualisers, screen recording and well-designed slides can help you model thinking step by step and replay it, which suits the way novices need to see a process unfold. Paivio laid it all out for us with dual coding theory, Sweller gave us cognitive load theory, and Mayer took these to give us the cognitive theory of multimedia learning. From this, we know to narrate a diagram rather than captioning it, cut the decorative extras, and never make the eye choose between competing sources at once.
The commonest mistake is the busy slide that feels rich but teaches little, because it forces split attention precisely when the explanation needs space. Design the explanation for how attention works. Pedagogy sets the rules; tech supports and enhances but doesn’t replace or offload.
Use technology to support explanation and modelling, never to replace or become the process.
Pedagogy informs the approach; technology enhances and supports.
Further reading and evidence
The wider evidence around this area, kept deliberately short. No single study validates all 24 strategies; these are the traditions the thinking comes from, and good places to read further. How this site uses evidence.
Use this for professional learning
Bring a real explanation, and make it clearer. A 30 minute activity for a department, phase or professional learning group, using this guide as it stands.
The model behind this, and how to run it across a school or trust, is on the professional learning page.
