Automaticity: Saving Memory for Decision Making
The solution to this problem is automaticity, which is the over learning of information and skills to the point where they can be accessed or used with little mental effort. Skills that are automatic take up virtually no working memory space. For example, consider learning to drive a car with a stick shift. Initially, the process is quite mechanical, and a great deal of conscious effort is spent on simply depressing the clutch, shifting, and releasing the clutch without killing the motor. In time, however, the process is nearly effortless, and people can be engrossed in conversation while smoothly shifting through the gears; the process of driving and shifting has become “automatic.”
So, what does this have to do with essential teaching skills? The process of teaching is very complex and demanding. Teachers are expected to maintain order, have high levels of student involvement in learning activities, teach creatively, treat student as individuals, and complete a seemingly endless stream of paperwork. This is difficult if not impossible unless essential teaching skills are virtually automatic. Unless teachers’ questioning skills become automatic, for example, the models that are presented in Chapters 3 through 9 will be difficult if not impossible to use. As another example, if teachers are using considerable portions of their working memory to simply to simply maintain order in their classrooms, they will also find it difficult to implement these strategies.