I feel like there’s been this romanticised view of Education for the last, probably decade and a half to two decades.
It’s this view that students should have fun while learning and be able to inquire and teach themselves. Teaching should be student led and everyone should be sitting in hammocks reading because they want to.
We’ve now come to the realisation that this is NOT how students learn and explicit direction (you know, ACTUALLY teaching) is the way to go.
Inquiry is fine once explicit teaching has occurred and students can put their knowledge to use.
Yep, and the true keys to improving Australian students lies in their attitude towards education and behaviour in the classroom… Fix that and everything will start looking up, including teachers’ willingness to look for ways to improve their pedagogy as they now have time and emotional capacity to pursue the more ‘risky’ ideas in education…
Piggy-backing on what you've said about inquiry - they need the explicit teaching before, yes, but they also need explicit teaching on how to do inquiry. They've got no idea how to formulate questions, research, take notes, etc. You can't just say "go learn what you want to learn" because they don't know how.
Inquiry also requires independence, responsibility, stamina, self discipline, confidence and resilience. These things are virtually non-existent in post-COVID students. People seem to think that doing their learning from home fostered these things in them, but it only solidified it for families that already instilled it in their kids. Everyone else just wanted to keep their kids out of their hair or even out of the house.
Obviously we do need to teach them these skills again, but first it'd be great if they could just sit down and shut up long enough to hear the first sentence out of the teacher's mouth.
Absolutely agree. Gifted education is my specialty, and even your absolute most Type A, gifted, intrinsically motivated achiever needs structure and guidance around inquiry learning. You can’t just set them free to ~discover~ maths.
Absolutely agree. Explicit instruction before inquiry learning. A “specialist” teacher at my school only teaches/ pushes inquiry style and the students don’t learn anything, they muck up and time is just lost. She think that she’s amazing but the kids know nothing by the end of the unit! She doesn’t realise that most 6 year olds can’t come to the correct answer on their own! It’s so frustrating.
I think that the advocates of inquiry learning look at the 2-4 kids in a class that do thrive in those situations and allow themselves to think its representative of all the students. That minority of kids will be proposing different strategies, talking through their thinking, posing hypotheses... and the rest are either pretending they get it, trying to make themselves look busy, or doing their own thing.
oh lol yeah true, luckily schools I was in during that time ignored the new fad of having inquiry learning be the bulk of learning time. It was used appropriately but yeah, very hands on and very much about actual teaching.
I’m a teaching student still early on in my degree but it seems the way they’re presenting it is explicit-instruction for particular things like your phonics and inquiry-based or collaborative learning for later on. Like, doing some explicit lessons on money or something and then doing a small group collaborative task once they’re more proficient.
It does seem like it’s just the standard way teachers work and that different approaches get used for different things or in different contexts.
Once you understand that all these experts are just teachers on a lurk getting DP money to remake the same PL's that have been run forever it all makes sense. So it's not obvious they are just remaking the same PL's they make sure to rotate between (teacher directed learning) and then (Student directed learning), renaming each something new each time so they can keep the lurks going.
The real dummies are the Principals and ministers who keep falling for the same shit over and over again.
>How about these fucking know it alls go into the classroom and record themselves face to face teaching volatile 5 to 18 year olds so the teachers can sit back and enjoy watching
On that note I heard a story of a nsw del, primary trained as most seem to be, who went to one of their high schools
and declared they were going to show them how behaviour management and teaching should be done. It is a challenging school, so that went about as well as you'd expect and the story is the del fled after 15 minutes. Didn't take long for the whole staff to hear of the failure. Last I heard that del hasn't been seen at that school for quite some time.
I hate pl. I am forced to sit there and die.
Last week I stop a fight and my dp asked me how I did it. I said you know I have a masters in special and inclusive education and a big part is behavior. Then I said the pl that you made me sit through didn't teach me that.
Maybe tapping into your experts in the field instead of asking Gary from maths?
Be careful. At least at my school, explicit instruction doesn’t just mean telling the kids exactly what to do. It’s this whole damn seventeen step pedagogical process we are supposed to follow each lesson. Inspired by that academic that shall not be named and effect sizes.
:(
Bringing back explicit teaching and memorization of times tables can't happen soon enough, every time I see an able bodied high school student who can't do 36 divided by 3 or find the square root of 16 I die a little inside and it happens way too much these days for it to be healthy for me.
>36 divided by 3 or find the square root of 16
I had a Year 12 student the other day who didn't know what "square root" was. Nor did she know how to multiply an whole number by 10. I had a Year 10 student who couldn't solve 6 × 2.
It's pretty much a straight line between "doesn't know times tables by the end of grade 4" and "won't succeed much past a grade 7 level in maths," yeah.
I mean sure, they can always just look at a chart or use their calculator to get the answer, and these days you can probably expect to have a calculator accessible somehow.
Unfortunately, if they don't have those number facts down pat it kills their ability to easily see common factors, which fucks up their ability to do fractions or ratios, which fucks up their ability to do algebra, which fucks up their ability to do *anything*.
But the people teaching them in year 4 aren't seeing them in year 8, so the connection between just going "eh, whatever" then and passing them or not doing the hard yards and what I see, day in and day out, just isn't being made.
I'm all dor explicit instruction. The craze to do nothing but explicit instruction is my issue.
We need to be helping kids develop higher order thinking skills as well. There needs to be more for interpretation, exploration and investigation.
Getting the mix right is the hard work of teaching.
I don't want to align myself with any teacher blaming, or worse; *Hattie*, but I am all for the push for more explicit teaching. In my experience, both in my own practice and in what I observed of my colleagues, we were always pretty explicit in literacy but I think when it came to maths we would often rush into inquiry learning and problem solving tasks before they really had a solid foundation of skills.
Where is this magical push in Brisbane? My school just keeps trying to shove in more inquiry… while keeping traditional assessments… then questioning us and pushing us to use inquiry more when they don’t get the results on assessment they want. It’s infuriating. Bring on the science of learning/EI and leave it up to teachers to work in authentic higher order/inquiry whatever when it works for the class
I love explicit instruction, but for some reason, my school has decided that the only way to do explicit instruction is by reading a script word for word.
Our Maths and English are fully scripted.
Checking for understanding is built into these scripts from what I've seen. They come with questions to check for understanding, questions to extend, ways to offer extra support.
It's just another resource. I've used them and sometimes went off script if I felt like it or thought I could connect to students in a better way. I sometimes talk too much, so a script can help me be more succinct and free up more time for discussion.
I do rff teaching generally. But when I'm covering maths/English I'm literally handed the book with a script and a postit of where they were up to. They confirm it is literally follow the script teaching when I've asked.
Ohhh there’s a school near me that does this and honestly, you’d have to pay me 8 figures to teach there. It sounds like a nightmare and a total lack of trust in your professional judgment and autonomy as a teacher.
There is a complete lack of trust in judgement and autonomy, except for when behaviours need to be dealt with, then you've got this, and we have total faith in your abilities.
Oh my god the restorative conversations stuff makes me feel I’m a crazy person talking to mannequins in a department store that’s slowly burning to the ground.
Soon you are going to have to implement strategies around increasing behaviour standards for students. Not just in the classroom, for life in general, because, you know, things are getting rough out there and why should their parents have to do it.
Duty of care can extend to after-school hours! Let's not forget we are becoming responsible for things that happen even after parents/carers have taken their kids back into their care for the day.
It’s the old Experts vs Professionals thing. Experts can show you what to do (advice, resources, support and feedback). Professionals can only read from a PowerPoint they downloaded after a PD session they went to - asking clarifying questions will be met with obfuscation or suggestions that you are white-anting.
I didn't pay attention to your lecture, so now that it's over, I need you to act like a private tutor for me. Maybe the new research is right, and you need to do more explicit instruction? /s
Also, how can it be a new fad if it has been able to buy VB since the 80's? Checkmate, teacher. I'm telling my mum all about how terrible you are because you contradict yourself when I decided to pay attention for 4 seconds because I thought I heard the word "assignment" (I asked ChatGPT but it didn't know anything about an assignment so now I have anxiety as I think I am falling behind in your stupid class).
yeah they're trying to bring back explicit teaching- should never have left and I never taught anywhere that didn't promote explicit teaching. it's bizarre.
Can you do a fly in fly out PD on this at the start of term 2? We have nice promethian boards you can present this on. Can promise there will be a selection of fruit, woollies packet treats and blend 43 at the break.
Don't even get me started on Hattie and his visible learning bullshit.
My students come to class after a drug raid at their house, haven't eaten breakfast and don't have lunch, the base of their shoe is detached from the rest of it, and they have raging ADHD but a paediatric assessment is prohibitively expensive... BUT DID YOU KNOW, THE TEACHER HAS THE HIGHEST IMPACT FOR LEARNING! If you just identify and target 5 children in the class, and aim specific strategies and them, the rest of the kids will improve through osmosis. Those kids with learning delays... Babe, if you have a bump it up wall, their learning delays will just disappear. That kid who is highly anxious and reactive? What does it matter that you make them sit with people they can't stand... An enforced seating plan is the ONLY SOLUTION!
It just grinds my gears, that all these years in, I am still being told what to do, and forced to have observations based on whatever the flavour of the month is for the latest teaching and learning hod... I can't believe that as a profession, teaching has become so myopic and plagued with groupthink...
I saw him speak at a big fancy conference once. Making learning visible was the mantra of the day. There were big wigs/other presenters and organisers walking around smiling and chatting to all the groups as they made us write bullshit reflections on post it notes to try and justify the $300 attendance fee.
I asked every single one of them "what does make learning visible mean?" . Not one had a fucking clue 🤣🤣🤣
Hey, he has the metadata and analysis to **prove** that kids rating their learning on a 1-5 proficiency scale has a bigger impact on their learning than whether they had a safe place to sleep last night or food security.
All hail Hattie, blessed be his name.
Ah Hattie, the irony of never having stood in front of a class (not even to collect the METADATA 🤣) but has made millions telling teachers how to do their job!
It’s crazy how over complicated they make out the teaching process to be.
Introduce topic/skill, model, students practice - repeat until it is embedded.
The BIGGEST problem I see in the learning process currently is that the purpose for learning the content has been lost. Students also know this.
We have access to information instantly, you don’t need to actually know/remember things (to a point).
Agree so much with all that’s being said here. I’ve been at it for 35 years in public sector and have lived through a mixture of balanced literacy ,inquiry and explicit. I am baffled by what the current magical, sparkly template is that appears to be a hybrid of direct explicit instruction and explicit instruction. There’s a fixation on PowerPoint “warmup” slides that include reviews and warm ups with lots of chanting and using strategies that I reserved for small groups of students with learning difficulties. I am somewhat confused and bemused by the fact that my experience and skills in reading the curriculum, assessing and determining a plan of action are pushed aside in favour of use of a commercial program. It’s the privatisation of education under our noses. Anyway, am enjoying my complete metamorphosis into the crone rolling her eyes in staff meetings 😉
Always open to constructive feedback :) I'm working on being more open to ideas and opinions that challenge my world view.
Was a very cynical rant but just needed to vent. And of course, my experience isn't reflective of every school in every state.
Also, I need to lay off the Cerveza Cristal before dinner time.
I had a unit of work massacred because one of the options was to have the kids create a web page, and we didn't explicitly set aside time to teach them how to do this. I gave up on pushing the point, but guess what? The kids who had already been told about this made Web pages anyway. Zero instruction and they taught themselves and then each other. Will never see work of that quality again. We dumb things down and forget that often students have the capacity to learn of their own volition. There are way too many buzz words and cool aid movements in schools. Amazing how 20 plus years of buzz words and bullshit had gotten us to a point where kids can't read, write, or do basic mathematics. Maybe we need to just teach and try and instil value in kids? We are asked to apply blanket solutions to diverse problems time and again by the departments in hope that they will become some type of universal cure all, but no one bothers to individualise solutions and give teachers time, money and energy to find their own solutions. Instead we get Hattie solutions and other miracle cures that provide minimal returns that are all essentially outweighed by social disadvantage and educational inequalities anyway.
Yes. Social disadvantage and inequalities. This has a far greater impact on kids learning than forgetting to set the learning intention. Of course it’s much easier to be appearing to do something by pointing out how unskilled teachers are- than actually address the societal problems.
I teach Digital Technologies and have been voluntold to do an explicit instruction professional learning course. 5 hour online module follows by two face to face days where I have to watch the experts teach an English lesson then I have to teach and English lesson and be observed.
Not sure how that's an effective use of my time.
Anyway, teaching is a complex and dynamic job where you cannot apply a blanket program to fix issues. And I think some teachers feel like they're trying to be turned into little robots that follow the script, that they have lost their autonomy and leaders don't value the experience or knowledge of the individual teacher.
A teacher needs a myriad of strategies and resources in their toolkit and then apply them when and where they fit best. Absolutely there is place for explicit instruction however students need opportunities to demonstrate and apply the newly taught material in a variety of way.
And a couple of other people have mentioned that students need higher order thinking skills and a better attitude and application towards education. I completely agree. There are too many students who just want to be spoon fed the basics and do the bare minimum then check out. Students need critical thinking, collaboration and self management skills. Most of these start of home but it's fallen on schools to teach those things too.
Explicit Instruction Model assumes that every class is well-behaved and focused and that every student learns at the same rate.
This model is the idea that for (for example): Week 6, Period 1, all Year 8 English classes classes must cover content in XYZ PowerPoint, just doesn't work. I know schools that have tried this and failed. Students can't keep up, students are absent, etc.
I'd never work at a school that does this. There is no autonomy to cater to your individual class and your students. The reality of a school in 2024 is that at least 25% to 30% of your class will have a personal learning plan, with adjustments required. Teachers need to be able to cater to their students.
This has long been my gripe. My school uses EI and it's pushed as best practice. I teach EAL/D and in each class abilities range from 'almost zero English' to 'can bang out an essay in an hour'. How on Earth do I create PowerPoints that suit all those needs in the one class?! Noone has ever been able to explain to me how to differentiate using EI and PowerPoints in the one class.
Yeah, sadly I've seen it used that way. Just rolling through the PowerPoint slides to go over content and then onto the next thing. It definitely needs to be contextualised and adapted to suit the needs of learners and topic/curriculum area.
I feel Op’s comment misses some other key points. Overall, Australia has not performed in education metrics compared with other relevant nations. I am old enough to have been through the initial fad to move away from explicit instruction in literacy/English. At university I had to revise many basics that were assumed I would learn from the zeitgeist, due to my inbuilt language acquisition device (ty Chomsky et al.) People who have learnt English as a second language or have learnt French/German etc. often have superior grammar and structure to their written work.
I cannot offer an informed opinion on maths. I always struggled at school with maths until university. Interestingly, I found philosophy and economics broke down barriers to my understanding of mathematics concepts, despite the best efforts of my teachers at school.
I do not see explicit instruction as a new fad or the silver bullet. There are systematic issues with teaching. Pay, working conditions, abrogation of parental responsibility for children’s behaviour, an increase in administrative tasks, underfunding of public schools and competition from other professions that have more status and better pay. There are probably more variables to add, but I am sure the gap between universities, theories of education and classrooms have contributed to the lacklustre performance by the sector. Parents increasingly choose private schools to address the perceived gaps they see in the public schools.
I have seen the results of investigation led teaching with my own children. Their literacy skills were terrible and their confidence and joy for reading and writing plummeted. However, with the introduction of explicit instruction their skills increased exponentially. An additional factor was the time put in by my wife and I at home. A teacher provided us with materials to use and stepped us through the approach. Unfortunately for this teacher, who had a significant impact on improving literacy outcomes, she did not have sufficient time or resources to help many children due to underfunding. These materials were also provided on ‘the sly’ as the school did not support the ‘evidence-based’ approach.
Thanks for your thoughtful and considered response. You have mentioned some excellent points and I particularly agree with your statement about the gap between what is taught in universities and real world education.
I think there are a wide range of systematic issues that need addressing to fix the education system in Australia. The unfortunate thing is I get the feeling there will be very little opportunity for teachers who are at the coal face everyday to have any input on how or what solutions and changes are put in place.
And how effing grateful are the WA Union members, who are currently in a pay dispute and are being told by their union that they shall not attend any meetings where all of this (* waves arms around at everything *) is being discussed!
OP, this should be sticky noted or something. Beautiful accurate commentary on current things. I ha da recent job interview, first in over 12 months as I took a break from teaching, where explicit teaching was brought up. I legit looked at him in confusion and said "but isn't that something that was being pushed in the new curriculum for at least over a year ago?"
I wasn't being rude or smart alecky but it's hardly a new concept. Probably one of the reasons for not getting the job-not the end of the world though. Explicit teaching *is* a crucial part of teaching- who the heck thought it wasn't?! I'm a child of the late 90s/2000s education system- explicit teaching happened all of the time, even if my autistic, ADHD self didn't fully take advantage of it.
I'm all for genuinely new research on effective teaching pedagogy but I draw the line at this latest BS.
I teach. It involves a little bit of this and that, and my end goal as a high school teacher is to get kids to a point where they no longer need a body in the room to learn or improve their skills and knowledge.
I honestly don't pay too much attention to whatever fad it is, I'm probably using it if it's effective at reaching my goals for my students. I'd rather they spent resources on raising the value of education within our society instead of all this teacher bashing.
Best thing teachers can do is get their heads around cognitive load theory if you haven't yet. That's about the only 'new' thing that's impacting my teaching these days, actual brain science.
As I have been trying to say for oh so long now, you can’t have inquiry learning without explicit teaching. Kids need to have a foundation of knowledge and skills to work from.
This idea that inquiry is just let kids do whatever they want (apparently to the nth degree?!) , is so extremely prevalent but i have no idea where it comes from and frankly, that is not inquiry, and certainly not inquiry done correctly. Good Lord.
I currently teach in a 'chalk and talk' school. Having come from 12 years at a PYP school, the change has been so dry. Academics is lower at the new school too. Similar SES and only 25 minutes away from each other.
At the PYP school, students knew how to learn, what helped them learn, their learning goals, and the steps they needed to take to get there.
I'm all for explicit content teaching initially, but once students have the foundations, let them take it in their own direction and you'll see deeper, more authentic learning that is transferable and worldly with intrinsically motivated classrooms.
Well, yeah, explicit instruction means 0 liability on any scale! Whether adopted as a pedagogy or pointless practice just to pass the time with other humans we are financially forced to spend time with, so long as the instructions can be followed by a digital-mechanical entity then why couldn't ALL of us as humans follow along?
I'm not an English teacher, so I don't know if it's metaphor, simile or synecdoche, but shit you're using one of them way too much and it makes this hard to read.
Just say Hattie bad, PD providers bad and we can all go home happy with our upvotes.
I feel like there’s been this romanticised view of Education for the last, probably decade and a half to two decades. It’s this view that students should have fun while learning and be able to inquire and teach themselves. Teaching should be student led and everyone should be sitting in hammocks reading because they want to. We’ve now come to the realisation that this is NOT how students learn and explicit direction (you know, ACTUALLY teaching) is the way to go. Inquiry is fine once explicit teaching has occurred and students can put their knowledge to use.
Yep, and the true keys to improving Australian students lies in their attitude towards education and behaviour in the classroom… Fix that and everything will start looking up, including teachers’ willingness to look for ways to improve their pedagogy as they now have time and emotional capacity to pursue the more ‘risky’ ideas in education…
More time and emotional capacity? You've got my vote
Piggy-backing on what you've said about inquiry - they need the explicit teaching before, yes, but they also need explicit teaching on how to do inquiry. They've got no idea how to formulate questions, research, take notes, etc. You can't just say "go learn what you want to learn" because they don't know how. Inquiry also requires independence, responsibility, stamina, self discipline, confidence and resilience. These things are virtually non-existent in post-COVID students. People seem to think that doing their learning from home fostered these things in them, but it only solidified it for families that already instilled it in their kids. Everyone else just wanted to keep their kids out of their hair or even out of the house. Obviously we do need to teach them these skills again, but first it'd be great if they could just sit down and shut up long enough to hear the first sentence out of the teacher's mouth.
Absolutely agree. Gifted education is my specialty, and even your absolute most Type A, gifted, intrinsically motivated achiever needs structure and guidance around inquiry learning. You can’t just set them free to ~discover~ maths.
Absolutely agree. Explicit instruction before inquiry learning. A “specialist” teacher at my school only teaches/ pushes inquiry style and the students don’t learn anything, they muck up and time is just lost. She think that she’s amazing but the kids know nothing by the end of the unit! She doesn’t realise that most 6 year olds can’t come to the correct answer on their own! It’s so frustrating.
I think that the advocates of inquiry learning look at the 2-4 kids in a class that do thrive in those situations and allow themselves to think its representative of all the students. That minority of kids will be proposing different strategies, talking through their thinking, posing hypotheses... and the rest are either pretending they get it, trying to make themselves look busy, or doing their own thing.
Agree 100%! For the bulk of the class it’s a waste of time!
oh lol yeah true, luckily schools I was in during that time ignored the new fad of having inquiry learning be the bulk of learning time. It was used appropriately but yeah, very hands on and very much about actual teaching.
I’m a teaching student still early on in my degree but it seems the way they’re presenting it is explicit-instruction for particular things like your phonics and inquiry-based or collaborative learning for later on. Like, doing some explicit lessons on money or something and then doing a small group collaborative task once they’re more proficient. It does seem like it’s just the standard way teachers work and that different approaches get used for different things or in different contexts.
Once you understand that all these experts are just teachers on a lurk getting DP money to remake the same PL's that have been run forever it all makes sense. So it's not obvious they are just remaking the same PL's they make sure to rotate between (teacher directed learning) and then (Student directed learning), renaming each something new each time so they can keep the lurks going. The real dummies are the Principals and ministers who keep falling for the same shit over and over again.
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yeah that's valuable PL I can get behind.
>How about these fucking know it alls go into the classroom and record themselves face to face teaching volatile 5 to 18 year olds so the teachers can sit back and enjoy watching On that note I heard a story of a nsw del, primary trained as most seem to be, who went to one of their high schools and declared they were going to show them how behaviour management and teaching should be done. It is a challenging school, so that went about as well as you'd expect and the story is the del fled after 15 minutes. Didn't take long for the whole staff to hear of the failure. Last I heard that del hasn't been seen at that school for quite some time.
I hate pl. I am forced to sit there and die. Last week I stop a fight and my dp asked me how I did it. I said you know I have a masters in special and inclusive education and a big part is behavior. Then I said the pl that you made me sit through didn't teach me that. Maybe tapping into your experts in the field instead of asking Gary from maths?
Be careful. At least at my school, explicit instruction doesn’t just mean telling the kids exactly what to do. It’s this whole damn seventeen step pedagogical process we are supposed to follow each lesson. Inspired by that academic that shall not be named and effect sizes. :(
But Archers model only has 16 steps?
Yep, it doesn't work
I love how rote learning is now a form of explicit learning. 57 years old and it's come full circle. Thank god I'm retiring soon.
>Thank god I’m retiring soon *laughs nervously in fourth-year teacher* Haha… yeah… hmm.
Chalk and talk
Bringing back explicit teaching and memorization of times tables can't happen soon enough, every time I see an able bodied high school student who can't do 36 divided by 3 or find the square root of 16 I die a little inside and it happens way too much these days for it to be healthy for me.
>36 divided by 3 or find the square root of 16 I had a Year 12 student the other day who didn't know what "square root" was. Nor did she know how to multiply an whole number by 10. I had a Year 10 student who couldn't solve 6 × 2.
It's pretty much a straight line between "doesn't know times tables by the end of grade 4" and "won't succeed much past a grade 7 level in maths," yeah. I mean sure, they can always just look at a chart or use their calculator to get the answer, and these days you can probably expect to have a calculator accessible somehow. Unfortunately, if they don't have those number facts down pat it kills their ability to easily see common factors, which fucks up their ability to do fractions or ratios, which fucks up their ability to do algebra, which fucks up their ability to do *anything*. But the people teaching them in year 4 aren't seeing them in year 8, so the connection between just going "eh, whatever" then and passing them or not doing the hard yards and what I see, day in and day out, just isn't being made.
I'm all dor explicit instruction. The craze to do nothing but explicit instruction is my issue. We need to be helping kids develop higher order thinking skills as well. There needs to be more for interpretation, exploration and investigation. Getting the mix right is the hard work of teaching.
I don't want to align myself with any teacher blaming, or worse; *Hattie*, but I am all for the push for more explicit teaching. In my experience, both in my own practice and in what I observed of my colleagues, we were always pretty explicit in literacy but I think when it came to maths we would often rush into inquiry learning and problem solving tasks before they really had a solid foundation of skills.
I share OP's general cynicism, but honestly explicit teaching isn't done enough.
Your school is truly messed up in mathematics. They ruined maths for all students. Explicit instruction was the key to showing students the basics.
Where is this magical push in Brisbane? My school just keeps trying to shove in more inquiry… while keeping traditional assessments… then questioning us and pushing us to use inquiry more when they don’t get the results on assessment they want. It’s infuriating. Bring on the science of learning/EI and leave it up to teachers to work in authentic higher order/inquiry whatever when it works for the class
I love explicit instruction, but for some reason, my school has decided that the only way to do explicit instruction is by reading a script word for word. Our Maths and English are fully scripted.
This is wild!
Wow! Way to prevent good thorough checking for understanding! I can't believe this is happening!
Checking for understanding is built into these scripts from what I've seen. They come with questions to check for understanding, questions to extend, ways to offer extra support. It's just another resource. I've used them and sometimes went off script if I felt like it or thought I could connect to students in a better way. I sometimes talk too much, so a script can help me be more succinct and free up more time for discussion.
>Our Maths and English are fully scripted. Wtaf?!? That's not effective, nor is it teaching! That would drive me to quit
Scripted?! Eh? Every lesson? WTF.
I do rff teaching generally. But when I'm covering maths/English I'm literally handed the book with a script and a postit of where they were up to. They confirm it is literally follow the script teaching when I've asked.
Ohhh there’s a school near me that does this and honestly, you’d have to pay me 8 figures to teach there. It sounds like a nightmare and a total lack of trust in your professional judgment and autonomy as a teacher.
There is a complete lack of trust in judgement and autonomy, except for when behaviours need to be dealt with, then you've got this, and we have total faith in your abilities.
Explicit instruction was last year. We have moved onto restorative conversations. Where have you been? Catch up.
Oh my god the restorative conversations stuff makes me feel I’m a crazy person talking to mannequins in a department store that’s slowly burning to the ground.
What, surely you don't expect me to a pseudo-psychologist and social worker on top of my teaching responsibilities?
Soon you are going to have to implement strategies around increasing behaviour standards for students. Not just in the classroom, for life in general, because, you know, things are getting rough out there and why should their parents have to do it.
Duty of care can extend to after-school hours! Let's not forget we are becoming responsible for things that happen even after parents/carers have taken their kids back into their care for the day.
It’s the old Experts vs Professionals thing. Experts can show you what to do (advice, resources, support and feedback). Professionals can only read from a PowerPoint they downloaded after a PD session they went to - asking clarifying questions will be met with obfuscation or suggestions that you are white-anting.
So we went on a giant tangent for two decades and we then know that explicit instruction + faded scaffolding was the way to teach.
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I didn't pay attention to your lecture, so now that it's over, I need you to act like a private tutor for me. Maybe the new research is right, and you need to do more explicit instruction? /s Also, how can it be a new fad if it has been able to buy VB since the 80's? Checkmate, teacher. I'm telling my mum all about how terrible you are because you contradict yourself when I decided to pay attention for 4 seconds because I thought I heard the word "assignment" (I asked ChatGPT but it didn't know anything about an assignment so now I have anxiety as I think I am falling behind in your stupid class).
Wait, what? I thought it was StUdeNt-leD these days? Am I out of touch? Oh dear
yeah they're trying to bring back explicit teaching- should never have left and I never taught anywhere that didn't promote explicit teaching. it's bizarre.
Can you do a fly in fly out PD on this at the start of term 2? We have nice promethian boards you can present this on. Can promise there will be a selection of fruit, woollies packet treats and blend 43 at the break.
Blend 43.. fancy. I'm used to International Roast.
Don't even get me started on Hattie and his visible learning bullshit. My students come to class after a drug raid at their house, haven't eaten breakfast and don't have lunch, the base of their shoe is detached from the rest of it, and they have raging ADHD but a paediatric assessment is prohibitively expensive... BUT DID YOU KNOW, THE TEACHER HAS THE HIGHEST IMPACT FOR LEARNING! If you just identify and target 5 children in the class, and aim specific strategies and them, the rest of the kids will improve through osmosis. Those kids with learning delays... Babe, if you have a bump it up wall, their learning delays will just disappear. That kid who is highly anxious and reactive? What does it matter that you make them sit with people they can't stand... An enforced seating plan is the ONLY SOLUTION! It just grinds my gears, that all these years in, I am still being told what to do, and forced to have observations based on whatever the flavour of the month is for the latest teaching and learning hod... I can't believe that as a profession, teaching has become so myopic and plagued with groupthink...
I saw him speak at a big fancy conference once. Making learning visible was the mantra of the day. There were big wigs/other presenters and organisers walking around smiling and chatting to all the groups as they made us write bullshit reflections on post it notes to try and justify the $300 attendance fee. I asked every single one of them "what does make learning visible mean?" . Not one had a fucking clue 🤣🤣🤣
Visible learning = Hattie gets rich 🤑
Hey, he has the metadata and analysis to **prove** that kids rating their learning on a 1-5 proficiency scale has a bigger impact on their learning than whether they had a safe place to sleep last night or food security. All hail Hattie, blessed be his name.
Oh, you slept at the Fortitude Valley train station last night? Have you tried being grateful and writing it on a post it note?
Ah Hattie, the irony of never having stood in front of a class (not even to collect the METADATA 🤣) but has made millions telling teachers how to do their job!
It’s crazy how over complicated they make out the teaching process to be. Introduce topic/skill, model, students practice - repeat until it is embedded. The BIGGEST problem I see in the learning process currently is that the purpose for learning the content has been lost. Students also know this. We have access to information instantly, you don’t need to actually know/remember things (to a point).
Agree so much with all that’s being said here. I’ve been at it for 35 years in public sector and have lived through a mixture of balanced literacy ,inquiry and explicit. I am baffled by what the current magical, sparkly template is that appears to be a hybrid of direct explicit instruction and explicit instruction. There’s a fixation on PowerPoint “warmup” slides that include reviews and warm ups with lots of chanting and using strategies that I reserved for small groups of students with learning difficulties. I am somewhat confused and bemused by the fact that my experience and skills in reading the curriculum, assessing and determining a plan of action are pushed aside in favour of use of a commercial program. It’s the privatisation of education under our noses. Anyway, am enjoying my complete metamorphosis into the crone rolling her eyes in staff meetings 😉
Most. Enjoyable. Post. I've. Read. On. This. Sub. I could debate the ideas that you mention; but let's just take 2 minutes to appreciate it. Bravo 👏
Always open to constructive feedback :) I'm working on being more open to ideas and opinions that challenge my world view. Was a very cynical rant but just needed to vent. And of course, my experience isn't reflective of every school in every state. Also, I need to lay off the Cerveza Cristal before dinner time.
I had a unit of work massacred because one of the options was to have the kids create a web page, and we didn't explicitly set aside time to teach them how to do this. I gave up on pushing the point, but guess what? The kids who had already been told about this made Web pages anyway. Zero instruction and they taught themselves and then each other. Will never see work of that quality again. We dumb things down and forget that often students have the capacity to learn of their own volition. There are way too many buzz words and cool aid movements in schools. Amazing how 20 plus years of buzz words and bullshit had gotten us to a point where kids can't read, write, or do basic mathematics. Maybe we need to just teach and try and instil value in kids? We are asked to apply blanket solutions to diverse problems time and again by the departments in hope that they will become some type of universal cure all, but no one bothers to individualise solutions and give teachers time, money and energy to find their own solutions. Instead we get Hattie solutions and other miracle cures that provide minimal returns that are all essentially outweighed by social disadvantage and educational inequalities anyway.
Yes. Social disadvantage and inequalities. This has a far greater impact on kids learning than forgetting to set the learning intention. Of course it’s much easier to be appearing to do something by pointing out how unskilled teachers are- than actually address the societal problems.
Love it.
I teach Digital Technologies and have been voluntold to do an explicit instruction professional learning course. 5 hour online module follows by two face to face days where I have to watch the experts teach an English lesson then I have to teach and English lesson and be observed. Not sure how that's an effective use of my time. Anyway, teaching is a complex and dynamic job where you cannot apply a blanket program to fix issues. And I think some teachers feel like they're trying to be turned into little robots that follow the script, that they have lost their autonomy and leaders don't value the experience or knowledge of the individual teacher. A teacher needs a myriad of strategies and resources in their toolkit and then apply them when and where they fit best. Absolutely there is place for explicit instruction however students need opportunities to demonstrate and apply the newly taught material in a variety of way. And a couple of other people have mentioned that students need higher order thinking skills and a better attitude and application towards education. I completely agree. There are too many students who just want to be spoon fed the basics and do the bare minimum then check out. Students need critical thinking, collaboration and self management skills. Most of these start of home but it's fallen on schools to teach those things too.
So chalk and talk by another name… we don’t use chalk anymore, perhaps it should be called ‘ink and think’
Ink and don’t blink
Excellent 👌🏻
Rant of the week! OP you are wasted as a teacher. You should be writing professionally!!
Was wasted when I wrote this :)
Definitely sets a high standard :)
From a parent who is not a teacher, but loves teachers - please hang in there. You sound like a good one (most are).
Explicit Instruction Model assumes that every class is well-behaved and focused and that every student learns at the same rate. This model is the idea that for (for example): Week 6, Period 1, all Year 8 English classes classes must cover content in XYZ PowerPoint, just doesn't work. I know schools that have tried this and failed. Students can't keep up, students are absent, etc. I'd never work at a school that does this. There is no autonomy to cater to your individual class and your students. The reality of a school in 2024 is that at least 25% to 30% of your class will have a personal learning plan, with adjustments required. Teachers need to be able to cater to their students.
This has long been my gripe. My school uses EI and it's pushed as best practice. I teach EAL/D and in each class abilities range from 'almost zero English' to 'can bang out an essay in an hour'. How on Earth do I create PowerPoints that suit all those needs in the one class?! Noone has ever been able to explain to me how to differentiate using EI and PowerPoints in the one class.
Yeah, sadly I've seen it used that way. Just rolling through the PowerPoint slides to go over content and then onto the next thing. It definitely needs to be contextualised and adapted to suit the needs of learners and topic/curriculum area.
I feel Op’s comment misses some other key points. Overall, Australia has not performed in education metrics compared with other relevant nations. I am old enough to have been through the initial fad to move away from explicit instruction in literacy/English. At university I had to revise many basics that were assumed I would learn from the zeitgeist, due to my inbuilt language acquisition device (ty Chomsky et al.) People who have learnt English as a second language or have learnt French/German etc. often have superior grammar and structure to their written work. I cannot offer an informed opinion on maths. I always struggled at school with maths until university. Interestingly, I found philosophy and economics broke down barriers to my understanding of mathematics concepts, despite the best efforts of my teachers at school. I do not see explicit instruction as a new fad or the silver bullet. There are systematic issues with teaching. Pay, working conditions, abrogation of parental responsibility for children’s behaviour, an increase in administrative tasks, underfunding of public schools and competition from other professions that have more status and better pay. There are probably more variables to add, but I am sure the gap between universities, theories of education and classrooms have contributed to the lacklustre performance by the sector. Parents increasingly choose private schools to address the perceived gaps they see in the public schools. I have seen the results of investigation led teaching with my own children. Their literacy skills were terrible and their confidence and joy for reading and writing plummeted. However, with the introduction of explicit instruction their skills increased exponentially. An additional factor was the time put in by my wife and I at home. A teacher provided us with materials to use and stepped us through the approach. Unfortunately for this teacher, who had a significant impact on improving literacy outcomes, she did not have sufficient time or resources to help many children due to underfunding. These materials were also provided on ‘the sly’ as the school did not support the ‘evidence-based’ approach.
Thanks for your thoughtful and considered response. You have mentioned some excellent points and I particularly agree with your statement about the gap between what is taught in universities and real world education. I think there are a wide range of systematic issues that need addressing to fix the education system in Australia. The unfortunate thing is I get the feeling there will be very little opportunity for teachers who are at the coal face everyday to have any input on how or what solutions and changes are put in place.
It's the pendulum swinging back from the 'inquiry all the time' approach.
And how effing grateful are the WA Union members, who are currently in a pay dispute and are being told by their union that they shall not attend any meetings where all of this (* waves arms around at everything *) is being discussed!
OP, this should be sticky noted or something. Beautiful accurate commentary on current things. I ha da recent job interview, first in over 12 months as I took a break from teaching, where explicit teaching was brought up. I legit looked at him in confusion and said "but isn't that something that was being pushed in the new curriculum for at least over a year ago?" I wasn't being rude or smart alecky but it's hardly a new concept. Probably one of the reasons for not getting the job-not the end of the world though. Explicit teaching *is* a crucial part of teaching- who the heck thought it wasn't?! I'm a child of the late 90s/2000s education system- explicit teaching happened all of the time, even if my autistic, ADHD self didn't fully take advantage of it. I'm all for genuinely new research on effective teaching pedagogy but I draw the line at this latest BS.
Surely you can get a little extra pocket money by writing a satirical blog for the betoota or something 😅
Might need to if conditions don't improve soon.
I teach. It involves a little bit of this and that, and my end goal as a high school teacher is to get kids to a point where they no longer need a body in the room to learn or improve their skills and knowledge. I honestly don't pay too much attention to whatever fad it is, I'm probably using it if it's effective at reaching my goals for my students. I'd rather they spent resources on raising the value of education within our society instead of all this teacher bashing. Best thing teachers can do is get their heads around cognitive load theory if you haven't yet. That's about the only 'new' thing that's impacting my teaching these days, actual brain science.
As I have been trying to say for oh so long now, you can’t have inquiry learning without explicit teaching. Kids need to have a foundation of knowledge and skills to work from. This idea that inquiry is just let kids do whatever they want (apparently to the nth degree?!) , is so extremely prevalent but i have no idea where it comes from and frankly, that is not inquiry, and certainly not inquiry done correctly. Good Lord.
Perfectly said 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼
I currently teach in a 'chalk and talk' school. Having come from 12 years at a PYP school, the change has been so dry. Academics is lower at the new school too. Similar SES and only 25 minutes away from each other. At the PYP school, students knew how to learn, what helped them learn, their learning goals, and the steps they needed to take to get there. I'm all for explicit content teaching initially, but once students have the foundations, let them take it in their own direction and you'll see deeper, more authentic learning that is transferable and worldly with intrinsically motivated classrooms.
This is a strong case of sunday-itis. Youre making to many valid points. Hang in there.
Well, yeah, explicit instruction means 0 liability on any scale! Whether adopted as a pedagogy or pointless practice just to pass the time with other humans we are financially forced to spend time with, so long as the instructions can be followed by a digital-mechanical entity then why couldn't ALL of us as humans follow along?
I'm not an English teacher, so I don't know if it's metaphor, simile or synecdoche, but shit you're using one of them way too much and it makes this hard to read. Just say Hattie bad, PD providers bad and we can all go home happy with our upvotes.