Is Explicit Teaching a Con?

Make no mistake, institutionalized education is, at its core, conservative beyond belief. And nowhere is this better exemplified than in the push for “Explicit Teaching”. A push that in my opinion is undermining real progress in education, not just when we need it most, but at a time when we have the technology to support real change.

Do a Google Search on Explicit Teaching and you will see page after page of sites recommending it as the prime pedagogy we should be following. The situation is depressing to say the least.

On its website, the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) says this in its introductory statement about Explicit Instruction:

Explicit instruction breaks down what students need to learn into smaller learning outcomes and models each step. It allows students to process new information more effectively.”

Time and time again, on websites and in articles about Explicit Teaching, the same terms keep popping up: long-term memory; effective recall; building connections to new information; working memory, cognitive overload. When used "correctly" the website says that:

[Students are] … more likely to be able to move the information from working memory to their long-term memory, where it can be easily used to build on existing long-term memories and retrieved in the future.

But here’s the thing, the process of Explicit Teaching is “Teacher Centric”. Proponents of ET recoil in horror at the accusation that it’s no more than a re-branding of “Chalk and Talk”, but in practice, I would argue, that’s exactly what explicit teaching, in practice, becomes.

On the NSW Government education website it says:

Evidence continues to support explicit teaching as a powerful practice. It works for students of all ages, and all backgrounds. It aligns with how students process, store and retrieve information.

I suspect that if you combine explicit teaching with explicit testing on the stuff you’ve explicitly taught then you’re going to get fantastic results showing incredible information retrieval – at least in the short term – thus providing the "evidence" that explicit teaching is a bona-fide pedagogy. Which is great but it doesn’t produce lifelong learners.

I would argue that schooling should be about a whole lot more than “retrieving information”. I would argue that it should be about guiding our students to become learners which would entail knowing how to access information when needed, rather than just retrieving it from a “memory bank”. It would also mean that as teachers we would advocate for curiosity and creativity as learning tools. There is a lot of truth in the old adage about giving a man a fish which might feed him for a day, as opposed to showing him how to fish which would provide him with food for a lifetime.

On the other hand a Guided Inquiry Based Learner (GIBL) approach is child centered and is involved in teaching kids how to learn and how to use creativity and curiosity to develop true conceptual understanding. The GIBL approach also challenges the nature of assessment. How do we differentiate between the different types of knowledge and skills that a child might need in their lifetime? Why should we test knowledge that will in many cases become irrelevant or at best outdated? An article in Edutopia entitled, “ Bringing Inquiry-Based Learning Into Your Class” by Trevor MacKenzie says in part that GIBL provides, “…a scaffolded approach to inquiry in the classroom, one that gradually increases student agency over learning while providing learners with the necessary skills, knowledge, and understanding to be successful in their inquiry”.

I’ve used guided inquiry-based learning in practice and I know it works, especially in a tech supported environment. I’ve seen children become responsible for and thinking about their own learning. That’s why I wrote "Become a Learning Activist"...

So - is the Explicit Teaching agenda an orchestrated "pushback" against any kind of inquiry based learning, playing the “we don’t want some laissez-faire student-led free for all” card that promises more control for teachers who feel uncertain about their role in 21st century learning? I believe it is.