Five arguments against explicit teaching

#5 Explicit teaching is demotivating

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It was the early 2000s and we had assembled on a Friday night in Newcastle, England. As ever with these events, a motley crew had been drawn from the different spheres of the life of the husband-to-be and so there was a little tension in the air. We stayed out late that evening, getting to know each other, and that compounded the affront of having to rise early on Saturday morning to go clay pigeon shooting; an activity the best man had arranged and that we had all paid for in advance.

The shooting instructor set about instigating a macho culture, collecting five pounds from each of us to make a pot of winnings. My first five practice shots went poorly as I hit only two of the targets. I remember the noise and recoil from firing a gun for the first time. My next five shots went even worse as I missed every single one of them. The instructor mixed gentle mockery with a tip about what I was doing wrong; aiming too high or too low or something.

I pointed at a grassy bank—with my hand and not the shotgun—and explained that I was going to sit the rest of it out. The instructor protested briefly, saying something to the effect that I’d paid for the session so I might as well complete it. I was unmoved and the group soon forgot about me, absorbed in their competition, as I reflected on my life choices on the grassy bank.

Clay pigeon shooting was stupid, I decided. It was silly and pointless. It was probably bad for the environment, too, in some way. Look at all those fools losing themselves to the competition. They were so uncool. We’d all be better off still in bed.

Then it dawned on me: this is how some students must feel about mathematics.

Argument Number 5: Explicit teaching is demotivating.

‘Motivation’ must mean something because we have a word for it. However, nobody measures it directly. I’m not even sure what that would look like. Instead, we use proxies; things that stand in for motivation.

Interest is one such proxy and interest can be further divided into two categories: situational and individual. Situational interest is about finding an experience interesting, whereas individual interest is a more enduring interest in a given field. There is nothing wrong with generating situational interest but the assumption it will necessarily lead to individual interest is as common as it is flawed.

For instance, if I give a chemistry lecture full of explosions, colour changes, smells and so on, I can easily generate situational interest amongst even the most surly of teens. However, this will not necessarily induce an ongoing love of chemistry. Imagine, for example, that my shooting instructor had brought bacon sandwiches to the clay pigeon shoot. That would certainly have improved the experience for me but it would have done nothing to increase my interest in firing a shotgun.

Other proxies for motivation are even more revealing. Self-efficacy is about our belief we will be successful in a task. After missing five clay pigeons, my self-efficacy was pretty low. This is clearly not exactly the same as motivation, but motivation and a belief we will be successful are so closely linked it works well as a proxy.

A belief we will be successful could be delusional, but it’s most likely to come from experiencing success in the past and we know achievement and motivation are linked. Often, we assume motivation causes achievement, but the evidence suggests it is a two-way street, with achievement also causing motivation. In some circumstances, this may even be the stronger direction.

If so, an instructional procedure that maximises success will ultimately be more motivational than one that does not, even if the latter generates more situational interest. This is one reason why approaches such as ‘productive struggle’, where teachers deliberately let students flounder, are such folly, especially for relative novices.

In contrast, evidence suggests that for academic subjects, explicit teaching will maximise success.

What’s special about academic subjects?

At one time, it was reasonable to look at a classroom where students are sat in rows learning letter-sound relationships and remark that this is not how we learn to speak: we learn to speak through immersion and discovery so why can’t we learn to read that way? Why do classrooms look so cold and artificial in comparison?

David C. Geary, an evolutionary educational psychologist, has a possible answer for this. We have been learning to speak and listen, figure each other out, navigate our local area and many other such things for hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of years. This means the acquisition of these skills has been shaped by evolution and we can obtain them through immersion. Critically, we have evolved to be motivated to throw ourselves into situations that build these skills.

In contrast, literacy and, by extension, all academic endeavours, are only a few thousand years old, at most. The first Eurasian writing appeared about five thousand years ago and mass literacy is a quite recent invention. This means that evolution cannot possibly have shaped our ability to learn literacy and neither are we naturally motivated to do so.

This is bad news for teachers but it does explain why children won’t generally learn to read, no matter how long we let them play in the presence of books and with knowledgeable adults on hand. Instead, for most children, we need some formal instruction.

The good news is that if that formal instruction is effective, success will likely lead to future motivation: A virtuous circle.

And what will most likely lead to success? Explicit teaching.

Conclusion

There are many arguments offered against explicit teaching and in this series of posts, I have tried to address them. Apologies if you came across them on Facebook or somewhere else and were not familiar with my work. You may have thought from the headlines, as some have told me, that I was opposed to explicit teaching and I did not properly think that through. However, if you have stayed and found them valuable, I am glad and I would ask you to consider becoming a paid subscriber.

I may edit these posts together at some point as a kind of monograph, but I’ll need to set up a website to host that first.

Reminder

Here are the first four posts in this series:

1. Explicit teaching promotes rote memorisation over deeper understanding

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

3. Explicit teaching kills teacher creativity and autonomy

4. Explicit teaching takes no account of student differences