"clearly outlining learning intentions and success criteria" That's par for the course in universities nowadays, though more for legal arse-covering than as part of actual practice. If 1 in 100 students has ever looked at the learning objectives I'd be surprised. This seems like something AI would do well.
Thank you for living up to the title of "Contrarian," Dr. Ellerton. I enjoyed the read, but I do have a question.
It seems to me that you're not opposing explicit instruction, but trying to highlight the ways in which it's, philosophically, a little short-sighted. Perhaps that it is an effective approach precisely because it pays attention only to what can be "neuro-scientifically proven" and prefers the lifelessness of "evidence-based" to the adventurousness of the experiential, the interpersonal, or discovery-based learning. Is that fair?
If so, my question is about what you would recommend teachers to actually do? Embracing uniqueness sounds great, but it's a little impractically vague. Do we augment, replace, or complement explicit instruction? If so, with what?
Thanks again for a thought-provoking post. I'm genuinely interested in understanding the underlying philosophy to flesh out what will make classrooms less... bland.
Hi David. Good questions all. You've probably had a look at some of my other posts, and they go some way to describing this. Particularly the 2 post segment on Bloom's taxonomy. I also include some links to thinking programs that you might find interesting. And some alternative ways of looking at this. If the posts leave questions I'm happy to chat. I'll also be starting my Critical Thinking Explained segment soon, and including there many ideas and resources.
Substack audience is diverse, and not confined to education specialists. I usually enjoy your posts but couldn't follow this one.
Old-fashioned teachers would say "define your terms". I don't know what "explicit instruction" means, and the post doesn't enlighten me. I could guess that it's the opposite of "the hidden curriculum", but that doesn't make sense.
Thanks, John. Fair point. It’s such a huge issue in education at the moment in the primary and secondary contexts that it can feel like a given. I’ve added a bit of explanation at the beginning with a link, though there was some within the text later, unhelpfully.
I would like a definition also because the term can mean different things to different people.
However, in my humble opinion, the simplest explanation is that it's teacher centered and usually consists of some combination of lecture followed by opportunity for guided practice. It's usually contrasted against discovery learning or what's known as "progressive education," which is often defined as "a student-centered approach that emphasizes hands-on learning, collaboration and real-world problem-solving."
As anyone who has ever said "I told them a thousand times" can tell you, people often have to learn things for themselves. So there are definitely times when direct instruction is not the best approach.
Yes I think they distinguish between explicit instruction and direct instruction, but as far as I'm concerned direct instruction is a clear instruction in what the teacher wants the students to do after the instruction is given. To that end the whole lesson plan needs to be reverse engineered from the learning outcome so that at each step you're thinking how can students potentially fail to follow this and give the instruction many times without sounding like a broken record!
"Direct instruction" and "explicit instruction" are synonymous, though many people take pains to make distinctions between the two terms. Honestly, that was a bit of a typo on my part.
I think many human endeavors resist "reverse engineering." We're not manufacturing machines; we're not landing men on the moon; we're teaching young humans to be literate, empathic, engaged, empowered adults. There has to be better metaphors for this than that of tearing down and building machines.
Have you ever read the (very) short science fiction story "Men are Different?" by Alan Bloch? That's what this discussion reminds me of.
This is an interesting book cover - I have not read it yet but it sounds like they are saying Education backed the wrong horse by not going with Mill's System of Logic and applying it to Education. Instead it backed Dewey and Education hasn't become the Science it could have been. The proponents of Science of Learning and Direct Instruction seem to be picking up the pieces from here..
Dewey and progressive education has been a whipping boy for some powerful ed reformers for ages. Another one is Paulo Freire, and if you haven't read "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" yet, you probably should.
I think many of the people right now who are saying that John Stuart Mill said some things in his day that could (if taken out of context) be used to support the claims of powerful education reformers today also forget the historical milieu he was situated in, and the facts that he was both an outspoken socialist and a eugenicist. To me, the argument seems like a strange exercise in creating a fictional alternate history presented as a nonfiction argument.
But micromanaging teachers (who after about 1850 were mostly women) pseudo-scientifically has been a thing for much longer than 40 years. Here are some historical accounts that I find compelling:
Education and the Cult of Efficiency (1962) cites sources from the 1800s.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts here. I found them very insightful and timely, especially as almost all teachers I’m interacting with across Australia are focussed on explicit instruction, typically without question and because of a mandate from above (one level, two levels, or many levels above!).
Yes it does feel like scientific management where teachers (knowledge workers) Process by breaking down the tasks into simple but repetitive pieces that the students can do (their learning outcome is the Product). The hope is that by making simple things easy to do it will make complex possible (wherein the students join the knowledge workforce in this new age of knowledge economy we're passing through). I say hope because the negative outcome of Taylorism can be that the workers become automatons, an unhappy cog in the machine, and fail to see beyond the simple and the obvious.
Re: "wherein the students join the knowledge workforce in this new age of knowledge economy we're passing through"
I wish someone would tell me, which job am I supposed to be training these new meat widgets for? Is it supposed to be social media influencer? gig worker tied to abusive bossware? chatbot prompt engineer?
Then again, maybe it's time to start treating people like people who should have their own hopes and dreams, and stop treating people like machines meant to serve the oligarchs.
If you have time or the inclination, you might check out Frank Smith's essay, "How Education Backed the Wrong Horse":
Thanks for the post, dr. Ellerton. You say "Explicit instruction is successful within certain limits, just like any pedagogical approach." I am not too sure about the latter part. From your posts, I gather you might be operating in an environment where the (E)DI people are the majority, or have the momentum. In my world it mostly and frustratingly feels the other way around, and - if you do not mind me borrowing the food metaphor from your LinkedIn post "... For those who find explicit teaching a bit like a meal that needs salt…" - there has been no shortage of inquiry-based 'innovators' having served nothing but hot air.
Hi Rob. No argument there. The term 'inquiry' is on of the most vaguely defined and poorly used words in education. You inspire me to address exactly that point in my next essay!
Thank you for writing this. I will include it in my file of "am I losing the plot?" articles to reassure myself I'm not. I very much agree with the idea this is also about teacher compliance and student behaviour management.
I'm baffled by colleagues arguing that cognitive load is such that we should all have the same routines in the classroom. PowerPoint slides need to have a graphic identifying the I do, you do, we do phase.
I remember a time when we valued the fact that students would experience teachers doing things differently and that their ability to adapt was an important developmental skill.
Teaching is complicated and I will resist it being broken down to a colour by number skill until the day I finally retire.
It is clear you do not understand the instructional hierarchy. Explicit instruction is the best way to teach new and novel information. However once that foundational knowledge is mastered, it can be used to think critically and solve problems. These things are not mutually exclusive and it is irresponsible to communicate a message that could lead to this interpretation. Yes, we want students to think critically and color problems. However, these areas outcomes of mastering content. You cannot think critically about a topic you know nothing about. Unfortunately, many schools and educational programs emphasize problem solving and critical thinking but do not build the foundational knowledge required to do so. This is leading to students with major gaps in knowledge which will prevent them from doing the very thing employers want.
Thanks for that - I liked how the meta-research showed different effect sizes for different age groups. I agree with the hierarchy in that learning, for most of K-12 students, is the most effective when you first show what someone is doing, get them to copy it, then practise it a lot to make it their own and then apply it to new situations and problem solve etc. I think Dr Ellerton would agree with this - it's just that he's doing it for thinking skills so that we teachers can model it explicitly and help them practise the skill instead of leaving it out after all the domain-specific facts have been learnt.
An analogy would be learning as an actor on how to use gestures and body movements to convey your intention to the audience - I believe it's called Stanislavsky Method and it's highly cognitive as well as emotional (embodied cognition). Shouldn't actors be taught explicitly through the hierarchy aforementioned? Yes, they would need a lot of deliberate practice. So is it explicit teaching because it's intentional? Yes, they are thinking about the purpose of what they are doing. Then why shouldn't students be taught to be better students, learners, thinkers right from the get go? Put more cognitive load on them through their student-ing and let teachers be directors analysing and giving feedback on their thinking by going through the cycle of hierarchy over and over again so they come out of schooling as strong learners?
“They are thinking about the purpose of what they are doing” is essential in this fast paced world of pivoting quickly to stay abreast of rapid change. Thank you for expressing that need.
Again, all educators should agree that problem solving and critical thinking are the desired outcomes of quality education. However, we cannot focus on these “skills” at the expense of teaching the foundational knowledge that allows them to be accessed productively.
This is a rebuttals I hear often, however as far as I am aware there is no concrete research to back up these claims. What is the cognitive architecture that this is based on? If I have a deep knowledge in a particular domain I can problem solve and think critically within that domain at a high level. If I do not have knowledge then I cannot. Sure, there are general strategies for critical thinking and problem solving, however if I do not have deep content knowledge the my problem solving will be at best limited, and at worst lead to wildly inaccurate “solutions”.
I don’t know if you saw the Steve Jobs application posted where he hand wrote answers to the questions:
Phone: no
Transportation: unreliable, (or something like that)
This shows you never know where the next inventive mind will arise. It is not always the most proficient but the most creatively applied thinking that advances us.
Fetishisation of supposedly maverick individuals like Steve Jobs is part of the problem with this discourse - in education and society at large. Even granted that the iphone (first iteration) WAS, in fact, a great piece of critical and creative 'invention', surely we have to accept that the true creative genius it embodies was born of the sustained, iterative, problem-solving efforts of anonymous designers and engineers - all of whom were extremely knowledgeable experts in their fields. Why should schools be focusing on producing the next 'Steve Jobs', as opposed to less celebrated but much more expert 'inventive minds'?
For those who are interested, I have written a response to this piece here:
https://fillingthepail.substack.com/p/dr-peter-ellerton-faulty-reasoning
For those interested. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7381035630413262848/
Dr Ron Ritchhart
Director Worldwide Cultures of Thinking Project at Harvard University
Thank you. I have added a link.
"clearly outlining learning intentions and success criteria" That's par for the course in universities nowadays, though more for legal arse-covering than as part of actual practice. If 1 in 100 students has ever looked at the learning objectives I'd be surprised. This seems like something AI would do well.
Thank you for living up to the title of "Contrarian," Dr. Ellerton. I enjoyed the read, but I do have a question.
It seems to me that you're not opposing explicit instruction, but trying to highlight the ways in which it's, philosophically, a little short-sighted. Perhaps that it is an effective approach precisely because it pays attention only to what can be "neuro-scientifically proven" and prefers the lifelessness of "evidence-based" to the adventurousness of the experiential, the interpersonal, or discovery-based learning. Is that fair?
If so, my question is about what you would recommend teachers to actually do? Embracing uniqueness sounds great, but it's a little impractically vague. Do we augment, replace, or complement explicit instruction? If so, with what?
Thanks again for a thought-provoking post. I'm genuinely interested in understanding the underlying philosophy to flesh out what will make classrooms less... bland.
Hi David. Good questions all. You've probably had a look at some of my other posts, and they go some way to describing this. Particularly the 2 post segment on Bloom's taxonomy. I also include some links to thinking programs that you might find interesting. And some alternative ways of looking at this. If the posts leave questions I'm happy to chat. I'll also be starting my Critical Thinking Explained segment soon, and including there many ideas and resources.
Substack audience is diverse, and not confined to education specialists. I usually enjoy your posts but couldn't follow this one.
Old-fashioned teachers would say "define your terms". I don't know what "explicit instruction" means, and the post doesn't enlighten me. I could guess that it's the opposite of "the hidden curriculum", but that doesn't make sense.
Thanks, John. Fair point. It’s such a huge issue in education at the moment in the primary and secondary contexts that it can feel like a given. I’ve added a bit of explanation at the beginning with a link, though there was some within the text later, unhelpfully.
I would like a definition also because the term can mean different things to different people.
However, in my humble opinion, the simplest explanation is that it's teacher centered and usually consists of some combination of lecture followed by opportunity for guided practice. It's usually contrasted against discovery learning or what's known as "progressive education," which is often defined as "a student-centered approach that emphasizes hands-on learning, collaboration and real-world problem-solving."
As anyone who has ever said "I told them a thousand times" can tell you, people often have to learn things for themselves. So there are definitely times when direct instruction is not the best approach.
Yes I think they distinguish between explicit instruction and direct instruction, but as far as I'm concerned direct instruction is a clear instruction in what the teacher wants the students to do after the instruction is given. To that end the whole lesson plan needs to be reverse engineered from the learning outcome so that at each step you're thinking how can students potentially fail to follow this and give the instruction many times without sounding like a broken record!
"Direct instruction" and "explicit instruction" are synonymous, though many people take pains to make distinctions between the two terms. Honestly, that was a bit of a typo on my part.
I think many human endeavors resist "reverse engineering." We're not manufacturing machines; we're not landing men on the moon; we're teaching young humans to be literate, empathic, engaged, empowered adults. There has to be better metaphors for this than that of tearing down and building machines.
Have you ever read the (very) short science fiction story "Men are Different?" by Alan Bloch? That's what this discussion reminds me of.
https://www.amazon.com.au/Could-John-Stuart-Saved-Schools/dp/1578617456
This is an interesting book cover - I have not read it yet but it sounds like they are saying Education backed the wrong horse by not going with Mill's System of Logic and applying it to Education. Instead it backed Dewey and Education hasn't become the Science it could have been. The proponents of Science of Learning and Direct Instruction seem to be picking up the pieces from here..
Dewey and progressive education has been a whipping boy for some powerful ed reformers for ages. Another one is Paulo Freire, and if you haven't read "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" yet, you probably should.
I think many of the people right now who are saying that John Stuart Mill said some things in his day that could (if taken out of context) be used to support the claims of powerful education reformers today also forget the historical milieu he was situated in, and the facts that he was both an outspoken socialist and a eugenicist. To me, the argument seems like a strange exercise in creating a fictional alternate history presented as a nonfiction argument.
But micromanaging teachers (who after about 1850 were mostly women) pseudo-scientifically has been a thing for much longer than 40 years. Here are some historical accounts that I find compelling:
Education and the Cult of Efficiency (1962) cites sources from the 1800s.
https://archive.org/details/educationcultofe0000unse/1up
Woman's "true" profession : voices from the history of teaching
(1981) by Hoffman, Nancy
https://archive.org/details/womanstrueprofes0000hoff
I think some of the best criticisms I've seen about Dewey are the ones that say he was also backed by wealthy interests in his day.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts here. I found them very insightful and timely, especially as almost all teachers I’m interacting with across Australia are focussed on explicit instruction, typically without question and because of a mandate from above (one level, two levels, or many levels above!).
I think it could be old-fashioned Taylorism resurrected for a new age: neo-Taylorism?
Yes it does feel like scientific management where teachers (knowledge workers) Process by breaking down the tasks into simple but repetitive pieces that the students can do (their learning outcome is the Product). The hope is that by making simple things easy to do it will make complex possible (wherein the students join the knowledge workforce in this new age of knowledge economy we're passing through). I say hope because the negative outcome of Taylorism can be that the workers become automatons, an unhappy cog in the machine, and fail to see beyond the simple and the obvious.
Re: "wherein the students join the knowledge workforce in this new age of knowledge economy we're passing through"
I wish someone would tell me, which job am I supposed to be training these new meat widgets for? Is it supposed to be social media influencer? gig worker tied to abusive bossware? chatbot prompt engineer?
Then again, maybe it's time to start treating people like people who should have their own hopes and dreams, and stop treating people like machines meant to serve the oligarchs.
If you have time or the inclination, you might check out Frank Smith's essay, "How Education Backed the Wrong Horse":
https://archive.org/details/joiningliteracyc0000smit/page/109/mode/1up
Thanks for that essay, very much agree and fascinating to see the points raised almost 40 years ago!
Thanks for the post, dr. Ellerton. You say "Explicit instruction is successful within certain limits, just like any pedagogical approach." I am not too sure about the latter part. From your posts, I gather you might be operating in an environment where the (E)DI people are the majority, or have the momentum. In my world it mostly and frustratingly feels the other way around, and - if you do not mind me borrowing the food metaphor from your LinkedIn post "... For those who find explicit teaching a bit like a meal that needs salt…" - there has been no shortage of inquiry-based 'innovators' having served nothing but hot air.
Hi Rob. No argument there. The term 'inquiry' is on of the most vaguely defined and poorly used words in education. You inspire me to address exactly that point in my next essay!
I look forward to reading it!
Thank you for writing this. I will include it in my file of "am I losing the plot?" articles to reassure myself I'm not. I very much agree with the idea this is also about teacher compliance and student behaviour management.
I'm baffled by colleagues arguing that cognitive load is such that we should all have the same routines in the classroom. PowerPoint slides need to have a graphic identifying the I do, you do, we do phase.
I remember a time when we valued the fact that students would experience teachers doing things differently and that their ability to adapt was an important developmental skill.
Teaching is complicated and I will resist it being broken down to a colour by number skill until the day I finally retire.
It is clear you do not understand the instructional hierarchy. Explicit instruction is the best way to teach new and novel information. However once that foundational knowledge is mastered, it can be used to think critically and solve problems. These things are not mutually exclusive and it is irresponsible to communicate a message that could lead to this interpretation. Yes, we want students to think critically and color problems. However, these areas outcomes of mastering content. You cannot think critically about a topic you know nothing about. Unfortunately, many schools and educational programs emphasize problem solving and critical thinking but do not build the foundational knowledge required to do so. This is leading to students with major gaps in knowledge which will prevent them from doing the very thing employers want.
Thanks, Kevin. I call that the ‘facts first fallacy’ https://open.substack.com/pub/peterellerton/p/the-best-way-to-dumb-down-a-curriculum?r=2azx1r&utm_medium=ios
https://youtu.be/44pPwSBo7jg
Thanks for that - I liked how the meta-research showed different effect sizes for different age groups. I agree with the hierarchy in that learning, for most of K-12 students, is the most effective when you first show what someone is doing, get them to copy it, then practise it a lot to make it their own and then apply it to new situations and problem solve etc. I think Dr Ellerton would agree with this - it's just that he's doing it for thinking skills so that we teachers can model it explicitly and help them practise the skill instead of leaving it out after all the domain-specific facts have been learnt.
An analogy would be learning as an actor on how to use gestures and body movements to convey your intention to the audience - I believe it's called Stanislavsky Method and it's highly cognitive as well as emotional (embodied cognition). Shouldn't actors be taught explicitly through the hierarchy aforementioned? Yes, they would need a lot of deliberate practice. So is it explicit teaching because it's intentional? Yes, they are thinking about the purpose of what they are doing. Then why shouldn't students be taught to be better students, learners, thinkers right from the get go? Put more cognitive load on them through their student-ing and let teachers be directors analysing and giving feedback on their thinking by going through the cycle of hierarchy over and over again so they come out of schooling as strong learners?
“They are thinking about the purpose of what they are doing” is essential in this fast paced world of pivoting quickly to stay abreast of rapid change. Thank you for expressing that need.
This is a great breakdown from Matt Burns, in which he discusses in part the instructional hierarchy.
Again, all educators should agree that problem solving and critical thinking are the desired outcomes of quality education. However, we cannot focus on these “skills” at the expense of teaching the foundational knowledge that allows them to be accessed productively.
This is a rebuttals I hear often, however as far as I am aware there is no concrete research to back up these claims. What is the cognitive architecture that this is based on? If I have a deep knowledge in a particular domain I can problem solve and think critically within that domain at a high level. If I do not have knowledge then I cannot. Sure, there are general strategies for critical thinking and problem solving, however if I do not have deep content knowledge the my problem solving will be at best limited, and at worst lead to wildly inaccurate “solutions”.
I don’t know if you saw the Steve Jobs application posted where he hand wrote answers to the questions:
Phone: no
Transportation: unreliable, (or something like that)
This shows you never know where the next inventive mind will arise. It is not always the most proficient but the most creatively applied thinking that advances us.
Fetishisation of supposedly maverick individuals like Steve Jobs is part of the problem with this discourse - in education and society at large. Even granted that the iphone (first iteration) WAS, in fact, a great piece of critical and creative 'invention', surely we have to accept that the true creative genius it embodies was born of the sustained, iterative, problem-solving efforts of anonymous designers and engineers - all of whom were extremely knowledgeable experts in their fields. Why should schools be focusing on producing the next 'Steve Jobs', as opposed to less celebrated but much more expert 'inventive minds'?
And you make a good point that we never know from where that next creative mind will come forward to apply themselves.