Greg Ashman spends a lot of his time, at his Substack and on Twitter, battling the inquiry clowns. I can’t be bothered. I’m content to just make fun of them. For me, the superiority of explicit teaching or direction instruction or traditional teaching, whatever you want to call it, is so obvious that it is tedious and pointless to try to debate it or to prove it. It is like trying to prove that grass is green. But for Greg, I guess from his being part of the educational psychology world, the nuance matters and the evidence matters.
A few days ago, Greg posted Unpacking explicit teaching. The post lays down very precisely the definition of “explicit teaching” for him and his colleagues, and then outlines the forms of evidence for the efficacy of this type of teaching. Greg’s post is, as usual, very clear and well-written. The following was the stand-out paragraph for me:
Critically, as a system, explicit teaching is highly interactive. Rosenshine states that teachers should, “Ask a large number of questions and check the responses of all students.” He also suggests these questions should have a high success rate. This means they must be pitched where the students are right now and is completely at odds with calls to ask students to engage in so-called productive struggle.
Again, this is all of only passing interest to me. But, for those who want to know what it means for grass to be green and would like to know where to find evidence that grass is green, Greg’s post is well worth a read.
Ironically, I was explicitly told by my government-sponsored High Achieving Teacher Program mentor that, if I continued to teach the way I was teaching (i.e., explicitly, which was pejoratively referred to as “chalk and talk”), my academic mentor would fail me from the course. Nice. But how else do you teach VCE Further Maths (rebranded as General) and VCE Physics non-explicitly? Damned if I know, so I was damned (actually, I explicitly told them to shove it; no inquiry necessary). “Okay boys and girls, let’s sit around and play with Lego so that you can try and figure-out how compound interest works before the exams, is that alright with you?”. Um, no.
It is pretty much axiomatic that anyone DoE arranges to “mentor” teachers will have zero clue, about anything.
hey … not seeing this as very clear>>
“… explicit teaching is highly interactive. …. “Ask a large number of questions and check the responses of all students……pitched where the students are right now.”
I think you need a broader view for learning and teaching.
Thanks Anonymous, and I will look, but I hate “Anonymous”. You can use a fake name, but not no name.