Curios of the week #125

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

The back of Clarendon has been a building site for a while and just over the road, on Ajax Street, there has been a strip of wasteland, surrounded by temporary fencing, which has variously served as host to a site office and a car park for builders. Now that the work is finished, we are reclaiming that land and this week saw the laying of new turf. It is exciting to think our kids will be running around on that soon.

I have been back in the classroom teaching Year 8 mathematics. We are doing a unit on 3D shape and measurement and, as ever, it has made me contemplate the purposes that such a unit serves. It has also made me focus on vocabulary—vertex versus vertices, the ambiguity of the word ‘side’ and why we replace it with edges and faces. There’s a lot to reflect on in terms of Engelmann and Carnine’s Theory of Instruction.

This week’s Curios include funny teachers, more AERO attacks, open-plan classrooms and much more.

Conjuring trick of the week

Did you know that direct instruction and explicit teaching are completely different things? Neither did I. I understood ‘direct instruction’ to be a problematic term because it is so elastic. Barak Rosenshine even wrote a paper on the five meanings of direct instruction and I am pretty sure we could venture more. That’s why I have adopted ‘explicit teaching’ as the term I use.

Apparently, Rosenshine and I are wrong. According to a position paper from the Australian Science Teachers Association (ASTA), direct instruction means only one of the five things Rosenshine thinks it means: the scripted programs developed by Zig Engelmann and colleagues. The rest of us are labouring under a misconception.

This is unscholarly nonsense and so should make us sceptical, at best, about the rest of the position paper.

The intent of the authors is clear: to somehow mangle the meaning of explicit teaching so that it fits their constructivist philosophy—a philosophy neatly summarised when they write, “science teachers use a broad range of strategies so that students are actively engaged in constructing their learning.” This is Richard Mayer’s ‘Constructivist Teaching Fallacy’ that takes a largely accurate view of the mind—that learning involves building schemas in long-term memory—and draws from it the implication that students must be behaviourally active. In other words, we ‘construct’ meaning by doing things and this implies inquiry learning strategies.

The authors are for explicit teaching while railing against ‘a return to transmissive, teacher-centred learning,’ which is just a pejorative way of describing… explicit teaching. This leads to a confused paper where at one point, we read that in explicit teaching:

“Teachers use questioning to ensure students are thinking deeply about concepts rather than memorising them.”

In explicit teaching, students don’t remember the concepts they’re thinking deeply about?

Then, at another point, we read lists of questionable assertions like this:

“Transmissive teaching ends up being rote learning – students learn facts about science and do not develop conceptual understanding, and do not learn to think scientifically. Although students do need to memorise some things, this misunderstanding may lead to all learning being didactic. They can’t learn scientific skills this way.”

So, do students need to remember (some) things or not? And why can students not learn scientific skills by having them explained and demonstrated to them, or ‘transmitted’ if you must? The evidence suggests the opposite.

The paper is a classic example of education academics attempting to deny there is anything to debate while asserting their own highly debatable views as fact.

Thread of the week

I posted on Twitter/X about a classic study that went wrong:

If you don’t have Twitter/X then you can read the thread here.

Trope of the week

Some educational tropes are hardy perennials.