Five arguments against explicit teaching

#2 Creativity and other higher order skills

For less than the cost of one cup of coffee per month, you can be a full subscriber to Filling the Pail with complete access to all of the extensive archive on a range of topics, as well as access to the unabridged version of my weekly Curios posts.

We continue our survey of the arguments you are most likely to meet from sceptics of explicit teaching. This began in the first post in this series where I looked at the claim that explicit teaching promotes rote memorisation over deeper understanding. This time, we will examine a related but subtly different point.

Argument Number 2: Explicit teaching kills student creativity and other higher order skills.

The mischief begins with the cognitive domain of Bloom’s taxonomy. In the 1950s, Benjamin Bloom chaired a series of meetings aimed at improving communication between educators, curriculum designers and the writers of assessments. These meetings led to the development of a way of categorising different educational objectives in three domains of human experience: cognitive, affective and psychomotor. The cognitive domain is the one that has been the most influential.

Whether the committee fully intended it or not, there are three key implications of this approach that are potentially damaging. The first is the implication that there is one thing we can call, for example, ‘analysis’, that involves the same mental pathways no matter what we are analysing. In other words, analysing a poem is somehow the same as analysing a graph. Take the idea further and we end up with generic ‘thinking skills’ that take the names ‘analysis,’ ‘evaluation,’ and so on.

The second implication is that these are different processes: When we are evaluating, our mind is doing something quite distinct from when it is analysing and so on.

Finally, the taxonomy implies a hierarchy—an implication that Bloom’s committee acknowledged. When educators reference the taxonomy today, knowledge or remembering tend to be described as ‘lower order,’ whereas evaluating, creating and analysing are described as ‘higher order.’ Although perhaps not Bloom’s intention, this quickly reduces to a value judgement: higher order thinking is valued more than lower order thinking. Higher order thinking is better. Teachers gain the impression they should focus more on the higher levels and that lower order ‘knowledge’ is not worthy of attention. For example, as a young teacher, I sat in professional learning sessions in which we were exhorted to ask ‘higher level’ questions in class.

This is all wrong.

One way to understand what is going on is through the lens of the ‘nominal fallacy’ where we assume that naming is explaining. Just because we can name something we recognise, like analysis, it does not mean it is a distinct concept, an explanation or even that different forms of reasoning we recognise as analysis have much in common with each other. Momentum in physics and momentum in politics have essentially no overlapping parts. What starts as a useful analogy rapidly becomes a cognitive trap.

Domain specificity

This cognitive trap is evident in many educational policies and curriculum documents. A good example is the Australian Curriculum that lists ‘Critical and Creative Thinking’ as a ‘general capability’. It is an Australian idiosyncrasy to bundle creativity and critical thinking together, but the idea that these are generic skills or capabilities is common. They are not.

In his review for the government of New South Wales, Dan Willingham explains how critical thinking is ‘domain-specific’. This means that very little transfers from one subject area to another. Our ability to think critically in science, for example, is independent of our ability to think critically in English. This is even true of different areas within subjects and implies that what we think of as critical thinking needs to be specifically addressed within each subject area. I would add that the most effective way to do that is likely to be explicitly.

Attempts to teach general critical thinking strategies often involve teaching rules-of-thumb or common patterns. For example, asking who wrote a source and what their motivation might be could be considered a critical thinking strategy. However, to answer these questions requires subject knowledge and, arguably, if we possess that subject knowledge, we might not need to be prompted to ask the question.

To give a slightly absurd example, if I claimed that humans can live on light, water and prayer alone, you would probably be sceptical, regardless of my reasons for making this claim. Why? Because you know differently. Some heuristics do seem to have more general application, such as the ability to identify logical fallacies. Even then, however, a person’s argument could be fallacious, but the point they are making is still essentially true, indicating the limits of these rules-of-thumb.

The consensus of creativity researchers is, again, that it is not one thing but instead, is highly domain-specific. I have on my shelf a book by John Baer titled, Domain Specificity of Creativity that summarises recent thinking among academics. Although not an advocate of Sir Ken Robinson’s views on education, I do like his definition of creativity as, “the process of having original ideas that have value.” Anyone can have original ideas, even if there are dispositions and circumstances that can cause individuals to hold back. However, in order to have value, we need at least some relevant subject knowledge. This is most evident with technical creativity, but even a creative solution to an interpersonal conflict requires some insight into the details of the conflict.

Explicit teaching is an effective and efficient way of gaining subject knowledge and so is not at odds with the goal of developing critical thinking or creativity.

A valuable grain of truth

Damaging as belief in nonexistent generic skills may be, there is some value we can take from this argument.

The form of evidence-informed explicit teaching that is the subject of Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction is a process that gradually releases control from the teacher to the student. It includes independent practice, weekly and monthly reviews, and scaffolds for difficult tasks. Ultimately, the goal is for students to do all the things advocates of inquiry learning value, such as producing extended pieces of writing or solving complex problems. It’s just that these are the culmination of a process that starts with concepts being fully explained and procedures fully demonstrated.

However, it is common to think of explicit teaching as only that phase of teaching where concepts are explained and procedures demonstrated. This is perhaps behind the tendency for some teachers to never sufficiently hand over control to the students. The efficiency with which knowledge can be explicitly taught can push us to overload our units with knowledge without proper time for review and application. Revision lessons can become an exercise in reteaching all the concepts, just more quickly.

Complex activities such as interpreting graphs or writing paragraphs don’t just emerge from having relevant content knowledge, they also need to be modelled and the strategies involved need to be explained. This is why Rosenshine emphasises scaffolds. Knowledge of the First World War is necessary to being able to analyse a source on the topic, but not sufficient. There are history-specific rituals around source analysis that are also essential subject knowledge. The supposedly ‘higher order’ objectives of Bloom’s taxonomy still need to be explicitly taught, just in a subject-specific context.

However, I don’t think Bloom’s taxonomy is the solution. Instead, we need to continue to emphasise the whole process of explicit teaching.

Still to come

In my next three posts on this topic, I will examine the arguments that:

3. Explicit teaching kills teacher creativity and autonomy

4. Explicit teaching takes no account of student differences

5. Explicit teaching is demotivating

Here is the first post:

1. Explicit teaching promotes rote memorisation over deeper understanding