ABSTRACT
Learning as a teacher, with all the inherent challenges of the classroom, staffroom and working with young people, is even harder. In the development of teaching, teachers need to stay focused on the most relevant sensations and information to avoid confusion and distraction. In teacher development there are situations where teachers' working memory is overloaded. Experienced teachers sometimes must interrupt their automatic process of making sense of what they are seeing or else they end up encoding the familiar and filtering out the unfamiliar. The way that retrieval works is a challenge when a teacher is trying to change the way they think about something. An expert teacher can demonstrate how a piece of equipment works at the front of the class while focusing much of their attention on the reactions and mood of the class. A classroom is too demanding a place to be a novice in any more than a small number of aspects.
