Explicit teaching and teacher training
Do faculties of education take an evidence-informed approach?
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Recently, I have been posting about cognitive load theory. This has been an interesting series of posts and I intend to return to some of the reactions at a later date.
Cognitive load theory supports the process of explicit teaching, where concepts and procedures are fully explained and demonstrated before students are asked to use them, and where, as learning progresses, there is a gradual release of control from teacher to student. Rosenshine’s summary is probably the most pithy and well-known description of this process.
The end result of explicit teaching is intended to be students who can solve open-ended problems, write complex analytical essays, demonstrate creativity and so on. The defining features that make it explicit teaching involve the process by which these outcomes are meant to be achieved.
However, cognitive load theory in not the only source of evidence supporting explicit teaching - far from it. It is possible, should you wish, to reject the entire evidence-base that underpins cognitive load theory and yet still recognise the weight of evidence for explicit teaching. You could refer, as Rosenshine does, to evidence from the process-product studies of the 1950s-1970s. You could extrapolate from studies of early reading instruction. You could, perhaps, infer the value of explicit teaching from Project Follow Through, the largest education experiment ever conducted.
Even those commentators on Twitter who view my advocacy for explicit teaching, cognitive load theory and a knowledge-rich curriculum as divisive, tend to insist that explicit teaching has a role. The problem with people like me, they contend, is that we present a false choice between explicit teaching and inquiry learning, when both have their value and their place.
If this were the case - if we all agreed that explicit teaching had a role - then this would be a rare point of consensus across the education community. As such, and independent of the value of any other teaching methods, the value of explicit teaching would be one of the few things we should expect to be taught to all trainee teachers. Is it, though?
To attempt to answer this question, I conducted a quick-and-dirty Twitter poll.
Respondents could vote as to whether their teacher training portrayed direct instruction / explicit teaching as good, bad or neutral, or they could choose ‘just looking’ if they did not have a view (or never trained as a teacher).
As you can see, a majority of respondents who expressed a view suggested their teacher training portrayed explicit teaching as bad.
Of course, you can criticise this poll as unrepresentative. Sure. But least 778 people claimed to have had a teacher training experience where they perceived that explicit teaching was portrayed as bad. That is hard to dismiss.
When you read through the replies, a number of themes emerge. For a subgroup of teachers, explicit teaching was not explicitly mentioned during their training. Some of those chose not to vote, whereas others inferred from this omission that explicit teaching must be bad because other methods were promoted instead.
Where explicit teaching was mentioned, it was often given a pejorative name such as ‘chalk-and-talk’. Sometimes, trainee teachers were exposed to simplistic slogans such as, ‘Be a guide on the side not a sage on the stage’.
I predict that many of those who are involved in delivering teacher training will protest that many of the respondents to my question were reflecting on teacher training that took place many years ago. That is true. They will insist that teacher training is better today. I’m not sure how we would know that. A common argument in these discussions is that we have no systematic collection of evidence that demonstrates what is taught on education courses and so we cannot draw strong conclusions. Anyone who then tries to peer into the walled garden can be dismissed for their unrepresentative samples or their perceived bias. It’s a neat defense mechanism.
But let’s look at the facts. When I started training in 1997, the results of Project Follow Through had been known for over 20 years. If teacher education courses have historically left their students with the impression that explicit teaching is bad, a view that is at odds with the evidence as it stood then and that we pretty much all agree is false, then why should we have faith that it has suddenly and dramatically changed?
Instead, we need to point to this history of failure as a reason to agree a set of rigorous, evidence-informed standards, alongside an accountability system that actually checks whether these standards are being met. Those courses that have changed tack in recent times have nothing to fear from such a system.
Is this an attack on academic freedom? Hardly. Professors can still go on Twitter and denounce explicit teaching if they want to. They can still exercise their right to suggest everyone they disagree with is literally Hitler, should the mood take them. What they cannot do, is teach incorrect, incomplete or inadequate technical know-how to new teachers.
After all, we would not expect medical students to be taught that vaccines are bad.
It's true that it's basically impossible to know what is being taught in schools of education (just as it's impossible to know what is really being taught in K-12 classrooms, at least in the U.S.), but I recently was permitted to observe several classes in reading instruction methods at a well-regarded American ed school, which will remain nameless.
I didn't hear explicit teaching mentioned at all -- except for the explicit teaching of reading comprehension strategies. I'm not sure that counts, since that approach rests on the premise that if you teach kids, e.g., what a glossary is, that will equip them to read complex nonfiction text, regardless of the amount of academic knowledge and vocabulary they have. That premise obviously conflicts with what cognitive science has uncovered about how reading comprehension works.
Beyond that, I did hear a number of things that conflict with cognitive science principles, although not exactly with the idea of explicit instruction. For example, I heard one instructor say that if you give a quiz, of course you don't want to just ask kids to just regurgitate names and dates and things like that, because that's the kind of stuff they can just look up on their phone. This is an extremely common trope, and of course it overlooks not only the benefits of retrieval practice but also the fact that breaking off from reading to look things up on your phone imposes a heavy burden on working memory--especially if you lack the background knowledge to understand whatever definitions you might find.
Greg - I think you'll find one of my few run-ins with direct instruction in Primary Ed quite amusing (or depressing)... In a balanced literacy unit we were told that in order to incorporate authentic "direct instruction" we should have students use their prior knowledge to give "direct instruction" to each other. You can't make this stuff up.