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A DIY Guide to Teacher Professional
Development
Stephen L. Chew ▪ October 16, 2023
This essay can save you money and make you a better teacher. Few graduate programs offer extensive
training in how to teach, and many offer none at all. When it comes to developing teaching skills, new
faculty are often left on their own unless they are fortunate enough to be on a campus with a good
center for teaching and learning. Luckily, the past 25 years have seen an outpouring of resources on
teaching in the form of books, blogs, journals, videos, and websites. Some must be purchased, but many
https://www.teachingprofessor.com
are free. The topics and quality vary considerably, as do the authors’ background and the target
audience. Some are based on research, others on personal teaching experience. It’s hard to know where
to start. Every issue of The Teaching Professor is full of tips, ideas, and perspectives, but they may not
apply to the problems you are currently facing in your teaching. The goal of this essay is to give you
credible, accessible resources that address the cognitive challenges of teaching you are experiencing.
Bill Cerbin and I published a framework of the cognitive challenges of effective teaching (Chew & Cerbin,
2021; for a general overview, see Cerbin, 2022). These are the challenges that teachers and students
must successfully negotiate for students to learn. There are nine challenges, and to help make the
framework easier to understand, I have organized them into four categories. Table 1 shows the
cognitive challenges associated with what students believe: student mental mindset, metacognition and
self-regulation,and student fear and mistrust. The table lists a description and an example of each
challenge. Table 2 shows the challenges arising from what students know, including lack of prior
knowledge, misconceptions, and transfer of learning. Table 3 shows challenges related to what students
can do. This category includes the constraints that the structure of human cognitive architecture
imposes on learning—specifically, constraints of selective attention and constraints of mental effort and
working memory. Finally, Table 4 shows the challenges associated with how students develop. They
include ineffective learning strategies and metacognition and self-regulation.[1]
Cognitive Challenges
Description and Example
Student Mental
Mindset
•
Students hold attitudes and beliefs about a course, such as how
interesting it will be and how hard they expect to work, that
influence their motivation and perseverance.
•
Stefani hates science but has to take a general education science
course, which is going to be a waste of time.
Metacognition and
Self-regulation
•
Students make judgments about their level of mastery of
concepts, and struggling students are often highly overconfident.
•
Tyson felt confident when he submitted his exam but was stunned
when he barely passed it.
Student Fear and
Mistrust
•
Students judge whether the teacher is supporting their learning or
weeding out students who don’t belong in the class, which
influences their motivation and perseverance.
•
Parisa made a C on her essay, and she knows it’s the teacher’s
way of telling her that she doesn’t have what it takes to succeed
in the class.
Table 1. What students believe
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Cognitive Challenge
Description and Example
Insufficient Prior
Knowledge
•
Some students may start a class with far less prior knowledge than other
students, which makes their learning much more difficult.
•
Elijah is the only student in his engineering class that didn’t take calculus in
high school, because it wasn’t offered there.
Misconceptions
•
Students often hold faulty or mistaken beliefs at the start of a course.
•
Because of videos he’d seen, Alvin thought that some people possessed
psychic powers but was surprised to learn there was no scientific evidence
for that belief.
Transfer of Learning
•
Students fail to apply what they learn to new situations.Tigran learned to
calculate means and standard deviations in his statistics class, but in his
research class, he claims he doesn’t know how to compute them.
Table 2. What students know
Cognitive Challenges
Description and Example
Constraints of
Selective Attention
•
Students can focus their attention on only a small portion of the
environment and miss anything outside that focus.
•
Devin constantly texts his friends during class, thinking he can still follow
the lecture. Later a classmate asks him about a concept covered in class,
and Devin has no recollection of it at all.
Constraints of Mental
Effort and Working
Memory
•
Students have two major limitations in cognitive processing: the amount of
concentration (mental effort) available to them and the capacity to hold
information consciously (working memory).
•
Emma’s teacher introduces eight new concepts in rapid succession. Emma is
overwhelmed and can’t keep the concepts straight. When she asks the
teacher to explain the concepts again, he rolls his eyes and simply repeats
what he said before.
Table 3. What students can do
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Cognitive Challenges
Description and Example
Ineffective Learning
Strategies
•
Students generally prefer the least effective learning strategies for long-
term learning.
•
Dawn thought that highlighting the key terms in her textbook would help
her learn them, but she couldn’t remember them on the exam.
Metacognition and
Self-regulation
•
Students need to learn how to use assessment and feedback to make
changes in their study habits to be academically successful.
•
Isadora failed the first exam but decided it was just a fluke, so she
prepared the same way for the second exam and failed again.
Table 4. How students develop
The framework is intended to give teachers the knowledge of how people learn that will make them
better teachers. It isn’t so much about the actual practices of teaching, but it does tell you what you are
trying to accomplish with those practices. Teachers can use the framework to plan for or diagnose issues
they encounter as they teach and determine ways to address them. Below, I list relevant resources to
learn more about each challenge.
The resources I share here all come from three open educational resources. There are many more
resources available, but I chose these because they are both credible and free to access. The first
resource is the website TakingLearningSeriously.com, maintained by Bill Cerbin. He provides an
expanded discussion of resources for each cognitive challenge. I’m going to abbreviate this website as
TLS. The next two resources are both extraordinary e-books published by the Society for the Teaching of
Psychology (STP). They are Applying Science of Learning in Education (Benassi et al., 2014), which I will
refer to as ASLE, and In Their Own Words: What Scholars and Teachers Want You to Know about Why
and How to Apply the Science of Learning in Your Academic Setting (Overson et al., 2023), which I will
refer to as ITOW. The editors of these books gathered leading pedagogical researchers and had them
contribute chapter summaries of their work intended to be accessible and useful for teachers. Tables 4–
8 list the recommended sources to start exploring each challenge and possible solutions in more depth.
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Cognitive Challenges
Resources
Student Mental Mindset
•
TLS: “Student Mental Mindset”
•
ASLE: “Helping Students to Get the Most Out of Studying” (Chew)
Metacognition and Self-
Regulation
•
TLS: “Metacognition and Self-Regulation”
•
ASLE: “How Accuracy in Students’ Self Perceptions Relates to Success
in Learning” (Ehrlinger & Shain)
Student Fear and Mistrust
•
TLS: “Student Fear and Mistrust”
Table 5. Resources for what students believe
Cognitive Challenges
Resources
Lack of Prior
Knowledge
•
TLS: “Prior Knowledge”
•
ASLE: “Prior Knowledge Is More Than Content: Skills and Beliefs Also
Impact Learning” (Ambrose & Lovett)
Misconceptions
•
TLS: “Misconceptions”
•
ASLE: “Student Misconceptions: Where Do They Come From and What
Can We Do?” (Taylor & Kowalski)
Transfer of Learning
•
TLS: “Transfer of Learning”
•
ITOW: “Different Goals Imply Different Methods: A Guide to Adapting
Instructional Methods to Your Context” (Koedinger, Rau, & McLaughlin)
Table 6. Resources for what students know
Cognitive Challenges
Resources
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Constraints of Selective
Attention
•
TLS: “Constraints on Selective Attention”
Constraints of Mental
Effort and Working
Memory
•
TLS: Constraints on Mental Effort and Working Memory
•
ITOW: “What Every Teacher Should Know about Cognitive Load
Theory and the Importance of Cognitive Load to Instruction”
(Ashman & Sweller)
Table 7. Resources for what students can do
Cognitive Challenges
Resources
Ineffective Learning
Strategies
•
TLS: “Ineffective Learning Strategies”
•
ASLE: “Test-Enhanced Learning” (Pyc, Agarwal, & Roediger)
•
ASLE: “Supporting Self-Explanation in the Classroom” (Chiu & Chi)
•
ASLE: “Spacing and Interleaving of Study and Practice” (Carpenter)
•
ASLE: “When and Why Introducing Difficulties and Errors Can Enhance
Instruction” (Clark & Bjork)
Metacognition and Self-
Regulation
•
TLS: “Metacognition and Self-Regulation”
•
ITOW: “How to Teach Powerful Strategies So That Students Self-
Regulate Their Use: The KBCP Framework” (McDaniel & Einstein)
Table 8. Resources for how students develop
These resources are a good starting point for developing your knowledge of the cognitive challenges of
effective teaching. The e-books I draw on here (Benassi et al., 2014; Overson et al., 2023) both contain a
lot of other great information relevant to teaching, such as optimal ways to create multimedia
presentations, how to design and use examples effectively, and how to give optimal feedback. There are
also many other books, articles, blogs, and websites that offer excellent, research-based information.
There is a lot of useful information in the resources. We should all continue to learn and improve our
teaching.
https://www.teachingprofessor.com
[1] Metacognition and self-regulation are listed twice, under both “What Student Believe” and “How
Students Develop.” The two concepts are linked, with metacognition relating more to what students
believe and self-regulation relating more to what students do on the basis of that belief.
References
Benassi, V. A., Overson, C. E., & Hakala, C. M. (2014). Applying science of learning in education: Infusing
psychological science into the curriculum. Society for the Teaching of
Psychology. http://teachpsych.org/ebooks/asle2014/index.php
Cerbin, W. J. (2022, May 20). Cognitive challenges of effective teaching. Psychology Teacher
Network. https://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/psychology-teacher-network/introductory-
psychology/challenges-to-teaching
Chew, S. L., & Cerbin, W. J. (2021). The cognitive challenges of effective teaching. The Journal of
Economic Education, 52(1), 17–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220485.2020.1845266
Overson, C. E., Hakala, C. M., Kordonowy, L. L., & Benassi, V. A. (Eds.). (2023). In their own words: What
scholars and teachers want you to know about why and how to apply the science of learning in your
academic setting. Society for the Teaching of Psychology. https://teachpsych.org/ebooks/itow
Stephen L. Chew, PhD, is a professor of psychology at Samford University. Trained as a cognitive
psychologist, he endeavors to translate cognitive research into forms that are useful for teachers and
students. He is the recipient of multiple awards for his teaching and research. Author contact:
slchew@samford.edu.
Download the tables as a Word document
