Here in Australia, our government, and I suspect it's no different
anywhere else has once again, come up with a strategy that they feel
is much better for student outcomes.
Since our student performance is going down the drain, and that
is that all teachers need to be teaching using explicit instruction.
Now, I don't know where these government officials have been.
But explicit instruction has been around for quite some time now.
And in the show notes, I'm going to put links up to two publications,
one from the late 1980s and another from 2018, that clearly demonstrated
the effectiveness of explicit instruction for literacy and numeracy.
And I want to add here.
That there have been several studies done way before this, in the U S for example,
because I remember doing an assignment at uni on this, which is many moons ago now.
And for the life of me, I can't find it
so I can't link it, but in the study, they demonstrated that explicit
instruction was particularly brilliant at improving literacy, especially
reading in low performing schools.
So we know it's an effective teaching strategy.
Now in 2018, there was a paper written by one of my very own university lecturers,
Lorraine Hammond, and she joined together with Wendy Moore and I quote, "In
Australia there is a growing interest in teacher directed approaches that present
new learning material to students in an explicit, direct, and highly scaffolded
manner. Despite evidence of efficacy,"
and then she goes on to cite a whole bunch of people, "these teacher directed
instructional approaches remain either politically or romantically correct,"
another sighting "among some educators.
In contrast enthusiasm for teacher directed approaches has come from
Australian politicians, policymakers, and researchers and it has been
widely reported in the media," and she quotes all a bunch of people
from 2014, "as a tool to address the declining performance of Australian
students in international testing.
Buckingham 2016 attributed Australia's performance in PISA to the privileging
of inquiry based approaches and argued this needs to be revised in the light
of evidence, showing the greater effectiveness of teacher directed
explicit instruction." The authors go on to explain the difference between
direct and explicit instruction.
And I think this is really important.
And I quote, "Unlike direct instruction, which consists of a suite of commercially
available teaching resources and developed from the pioneering work
of Siegfried Engleman in the 1960s, explicit instruction is not scripted
instead teachers must determine what new knowledge, strategy or rule
they will teach and how this will be communicated to students in a fast
paced manner that provides guided practice and regular formative feedback.
Although many of the instructional principles are similar to direct
instruction in explicit instruction the emphasis is on teaching behaviors
that maximize student achievement rather than curriculum design.
Hattie draws the distinction.
The teacher decides the learning intentions and success criteria, makes
them transparent to the students, demonstrates them by modeling, evaluates
if they understand what they have been told by checking for understanding and
retelling them what the have been told by tying it together with closure.
That was all a very big mouthful.
I know, but where am I going with this?
Well, firstly, I'm not going to argue the benefits or the
pitfalls of explicit instruction.
But the paper mentioned, they looked at how coaching teachers in this
strategy helped their practice and improved student outcomes.
And I think many teachers believe that they are teaching explicitly.
But actually the explicit model is very specific and requires a specific set
of procedures, which are fast paced and check for understanding using an I do
we do, you do model, and it's like the gradual release of responsibility model.
And in this paper, Hammond and Moore point out that in their one year experiment
using their specific model, brought about measurable and significant change.
So, if you indeed are a curious educator with a growth mindset, you
will be checking and you'll be looking at your own practice to see where
you can improve and whether or not your explicit teaching is in fact
just that and not direct instruction.
This is significant, because one is just following a script
and practicing, while the other includes modeling, evaluating for
understanding and independent practice.
And so now that we've got explicit out of the way, I want to address part of the
quote from earlier where Buckingham in 2016 attributed Australia's performance
in PISA P I S A to the privileging of inquiry based approaches and argued
this needs to be revised in the light of evidence, showing the
greater effectiveness of teacher directed explicit instruction.
Uh, firstly can we just address the elephant in the room.
We're talking here about results of students' performance.
Okay so that's obvious if you want students to test well, you teach
them explicitly in this model I've talked about so that they are 100%
clear in what they have to do.
So that's one part of the equation.
By extrapolation, that would mean that, despite everything we know about
the efficacy of explicit instruction, obviously, either, we're not teaching
using this strategy or we're not applying the strategy correctly.
Now, I don't know what we're doing, but I think that schools and
individual teachers will have to reevaluate the effectiveness of their
explicit practices for themselves.
And secondly, in that piece cited by Buckingham, where he says the
privilege of inquiry based approaches are responsible for the lack of
performance results in this PISA test, which is an international test.
Really?
Now, I don't know what this PISA
international test actually tests, but inquiry based teaching
is much broader and deeper.
It's not there to do well in a test.
Inquiry is about getting kids to think, to wonder and explore and
eventually getting them to take responsibility for their own learning.
It's how people cope and deal with real life situations.
Any great teacher knows that teaching is about having a suite of strategies.
A tool belt, so to speak with a bunch of different strategies or tools that
each come out for a specific task.
If you want to teach a kid to read and make sure they have
well-established phonemic awareness you use explicit instruction.
You want to teach a kid how to write a report, following some basic steps,
you do it through explicit instruction.
But when you want a kid to analyze a sentence to improve it, you
don't just tell them the answer.
You encourage them to use their God-given gray matter to think
about how they can improve it.
You scaffold, but you encourage them to look critically at their sentence
or their writing and see it for themselves, how they can improve it.
You're not going to be an enabler, and encourage them to just sit
there like a potato and expected to be filled up with your words.
You want them to come up with their own words!
This is our inquiry works.
It's a mindset.
A stance, or as Kath Murdoch says it's a lens through which you teach.
Inquiry isn't a separate subject.
Or something you teach on a Wednesday afternoon.
It's embedded in a culture of learning.
It dovetails with explicit instruction.
It's not an and or approach.
It really makes me crazy when I see comments like that.
That you don't get results with inquiry.
Well my question is what do you want to achieve?
If you want citizens or people who simply follow the rules, don't think
for themselves and wait for someone else like possibly governments or
teachers or whoever to tell them what to do and open up their brains
and then put the stuff inside.
then go with direct explicit instruction and create an army of robots who
are programmed to do and not think.
On the other hand, if you want to create people and citizens of the
future, who question think for themselves, are creative problem
solvers and critical thinkers, then.
It's a no brainer.
We've got to integrate inquiry based learning into our toolkit, so that
we can create a future, where there's innovation where there's accountability.
Where one person's word isn't just accepted, but scrutinized
and tested and verified.
Just like scientists do.
And surely if we say that we educate the whole child.
Then inquiry based strategies must be included in our culture of learning.
We cannot claim to be child centered, or that educating the whole child
is important to us if we're not including inquiry and play into
a repertoire, that of course also includes explicit instruction when
we're teaching new content or skills, which incidentally also includes
the teaching of the inquiry process.
You're going to do that explicitly to.
And to show you just how easy it is to take on an inquiry mindset, I
have a free resource just for you.
You go to resources.
dot Ed lessons.com forward slash how to encourage natural curiosity.
I know that's a mouthful.
But I'll put the link in the show notes for you.
Download it and see how you can get tuned into simple everyday
activities of children, like going for a walk or playing in the yard
and get them wondering and thinking.
And if you're curious, And you want to find the strategies that'll
help your learners become more curious and become independent
thinkers, then get blooming curious.
My weekly newsletter, where I share strategies, tips and
interesting finds with you.
And to sign up, just go to www dot Ed's lessons.com and sign up with a form there.
The link will be in the show notes too.
And listen.
I just want to thank you for listening to this podcast and me and my soap box.
I know that you could have chosen any one of a gazillion out
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And for that, I am really grateful.
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So until next week.
Stay blooming curious.
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What do you think of today's episode?
I hope it got you thinking.
See you around cheers.