Bracketology and the Brain

Give text the top seed in literacy instruction.

As a Michigan State graduate, I’m a big Spartan basketball fan. It’s a passion I’ve passed on to my kids, who think of March as the Month of (legendary Spartans coach Tom) Izzo.

Every year, we gather for Selection Sunday, when the 68-team March Madness college basketball tournament schedule is released (we’ll be tuning in this weekend!). We watch the revealed matchups and debate our predicted winners like the analysts on TV. Bracketology is serious business at my house, and bold moves are encouraged. We cheered when my son correctly picked 16-seed UMBC to upset No. 1 seed Virginia at the tender age of four—the first-ever upset victory for a 16-seed—and when he somehow went 8-for-8 in his Elite Eight picks another year¹. His sister has her own bracket lore—she confidently declared last year that Paige Bueckers wasn’t going home without a title, and UConn’s victory in the final proved her right.

But from the beginning, I taught them one rule: in each matchup, you get one pick. No hedging. No negotiating. No “a little of both.” One team advances. That’s it.

Over time, this family tradition made its way into my professional life. I now spend much of my time coaching education leaders in schools, districts, and at the state level who are trying to improve literacy at scale. These leaders care deeply and see many initiatives as worthwhile—and they want to do them all. But, just like in basketball, only one team or initiative can advance at a time. We have to make choices about what’s most important. We have to pick winners.

So I designed a March Madness–inspired activity to help drive home an important change management idea: prioritization. I hand them a bracket—sometimes filled with spring break plans, sometimes with summer activities. In each matchup, they must choose just one. Predictably, the negotiations begin.

“What if I bring the book to the arcade with my kids? Make it a combo? I think I can squeeze both in.”

I smile. “Nope. One pick.”

Eventually, the point lands. As Jenna Chiasson of the Louisiana Department of Education says, “We can do anything, but we can’t do everything.”

For leadership, that lesson is about prioritizing initiatives. In classroom literacy instruction, this same concept is about something even more fundamental: you can’t ask students to do everything all at once.

The bad news for basketball fans is that the tournament is almost impossible to predict. The good news for educators is that cognitive science gives us a pretty good compass for making better instructional picks.

The Text Is the Top Pick

In my work translating research into practice, I often look for mental models that help simplify complex ideas and guide better instructional decisions. The bracket sheet has become one of mine—especially when I think about the cognitive concept of working memory and the instructional concept that grows from it: cognitive load theory.

In a nutshell, working memory is the mental workspace where we hold and manipulate new information. It’s where thinking happens. And here’s the kicker: much like basketball’s Final Four, it’s quite limited.

Learning, as folks like Daniel Willingham have pointed out, can be broadly defined as what happens when new information enters working memory, is processed there, and—if we’re successful—is encoded into long-term memory. Long-term memory, unlike working memory, is vast and has loads of storage available. The main task of learning is the taxing process of getting information through that narrow working-memory gate.

Cognitive load theory, developed by John Sweller, explains what follows from this constraint. Because working memory has limited capacity, learning is most effective when we carefully manage how much—and what kind of—new information students are asked to process at once. In terms of reading comprehension, this means two things:

• First, students need enough cognitive space to actually make sense of what they are reading. If working memory is overloaded with competing demands, there is little room left for building meaning.

• Second, over time, we must help students build rich stores of knowledge and vocabulary in long-term memory. The more knowledge students carry into a text, the less strain reading places on working memory. What once felt taxing becomes much more manageable.

Which brings us back to the bracket.

If we only get one “top pick” in literacy instruction—one priority that consistently sits in the foreground—what should it be? The choice is clear: the text.

A Tale of Two Classrooms

There are two main kinds of reading comprehension instruction I regularly see in classrooms in my visits spanning across districts and states. I categorize them as “text-centered” and “standards-centered.”

To make this concrete, consider two third-grade classrooms I visited a couple of months ago in the same district. Both were teaching the same lesson from a strong curriculum. Both were using the same complex informational text about how the human eye works. But the lessons landed very differently.

In the first classroom, the teacher began like this:

“We’re going to read about our eyes and how they work. We’ve learned about pupils before. Today we’re going to figure out something cool they do in response to light. It’s called dilation. It’s a tricky idea—so we’ll use the illustrations and captions to help us understand it.”

The students were buzzing and excitedly pulled out their books. (Yes, kids love this stuff. I promise.)

In the second classroom, the teacher began this way:

“Today, we’re going to practice using text features to understand details in the text. Let’s review the standard we’re working on.”

Students read the standard from the board, then dutifully named illustrations, captions, and headings.

“As we read, remember to use text features to understand key details, and to be prepared to explain how they help you as a reader.”

At that point, I still didn’t know what text they were going to read. When they pulled out the same eye passage their peers were excitedly exploring down the hall, there were audible groans.

In both classrooms, students were technically using text features. But when I asked them questions about what they had learned, the difference was stark.

In the text-centered classroom, students talked about the knowledge they were building and the content they had learned. They said things like:

“Your eyes are an amazing organ. Your pupils actually get bigger and smaller depending on light. See this illustration? It shows how they change size—that’s called dilation.”

In the standards-forward classroom, I heard responses like:

“These are pupils. Here’s the illustration. I know they’re pupils because the caption says pupils.”

Both groups could point to captions. But only one group was engaged with the content and building meaning—and showing signs that words like organ and dilation were moving into long-term memory.²

So what explains the difference?

As Natalie Wexler has described, in one classroom the text was in the foreground and the standard supported meaning. In the other, the standard was in the foreground and the text had become a vehicle for practicing a skill.

Why Text-Centered Instruction Reduces Cognitive Overload

When we overload working memory with extraneous demands, learning becomes fragmented, shallow, or stalls altogether.

That didn’t happen in the text-centered classroom, where students’ cognitive resources were directed toward understanding a real and interesting phenomenon: how pupils dilate. Words like pupil, dilation, and organ had a chance to move into long-term memory, especially through the discussion and writing that followed.

And that matters.

Knowledge and vocabulary stored in long-term memory reduce strain on working memory in the future. The more students know, the less mental effort is required to comprehend increasingly complex texts. Reading feels more possible. More fluent. More successful (and more joyful!).

The standard of using text features to support comprehension was still present. But it supported meaning; it didn’t compete with it. The text was the main event!

Compare that to the standard-focused classroom. The teacher—who undoubtedly is just as well-meaning and was likely trained to emphasize standards mastery—unintentionally increased cognitive load and compromised learning. Students were asked to:

• Read the text

• Build meaning

• Recall the definition of a skill

• Apply that skill

• Explain how the skill was applied

• Track directions

• Monitor whether they were “doing it right”

All inside a very limited cognitive workspace.

That’s not rigor. That’s overload. It’s what happens when we choose to teach too many things at once—when we don’t make a choice and prioritize what supports student learning. And in my experience, based on observing literacy instruction in many districts, this type of standards- or skills-forward instruction is far more common than the text-centered approach. This isn’t due to lack of care or effort; rather, in many cases, teacher preparation and accountability systems have emphasized tracking standards and measurable skills, sometimes without integrating what we now know from cognitive science about learning.

However, there is a measurable cost to this approach, in terms of student knowledge. Instead of building a deeper understanding of how pupils respond to light, students learned to identify captions. They practiced a procedure, but they didn’t build durable knowledge, and it appeared that very little of the text or content moved into long-term memory.

The difference wasn’t teacher effort or student ability. It was the lesson’s demand on cognitive load.

Brackets constrain our choices, and those limits force clarity. The workings of cognitive science do the same. In March, we love shocker Cinderella stories, but in the brain, things are more predictable.

If working memory is limited, instruction must be selective. And in literacy, the text deserves the top seed.

In bright light, a pupil shrinks. Under overload, understanding can too.

1. PDF evidence. I’m a fan of Tim Daly’s latest on teen gambling, so I won’t let my son go to Vegas yet.

2. If you’ve followed this recent SRI study on implementation, this contrast may sound familiar. Surface-level task completion is not the same as robust comprehension. I’m fortunate to know this report well as I get to work closely on literacy improvement efforts with the districts in the study.