Five arguments against explicit teaching

#4 Explicit teaching takes no account of student differences

Oct 21, 2025

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It is important to notice the weird nature of the romantic philosophy that opposes explicit teaching. Stretching right back to its modern origins in the Enlightenment, progressive education has prioritised the child as individual above all else. According to this view, children should be self-governing consumers who choose what activities they wish to participate in. It is a surprisingly neoliberal take for a movement that has come to be associated with the political left and it is at odds with the collectivism of that movement.

Nevertheless, individualism or even hyper-individualism is the instinct behind the next argument against explicit teaching that we shall address.

Argument Number 4: Explicit teaching takes no account of student differences.

How do students differ? A recent report found that nearly half of students born in Wales in 2002/3 were, at some point in their school career, identified as having ‘additional learning needs’ or what used to be called ‘special educational needs’. We can see why there was an impetus to change that label. When it affects almost half of students, a need is hardly special. What are these additional needs? Do we need to vary what we do in order to address them?

When we look at the science behind how children learn, it doesn’t seem to vary that much. As Dan Willingham writes:

“…there are many examples from the cognitive and education literature of near-universal principles around which a good teacher may build his or her practice…
Because many of these principles are supported by significant consensus in the scientific literature and are also reflected in craft knowledge, we can be fairly confident in committing ourselves to creatively exploring and deploying them.”

In 2021, Gena Nelson and colleagues completed a systematic review of different strategies used for teaching students with disabilities. They found that explicit and systematic instruction had a large amount of research to support it.

So, the teacher who is teaching explicitly and who asks themselves what they need to do to support students with additional learning needs should probably answer: more of the same.

Perhaps, then, we are looking at this the wrong way around and it is the most advanced students whose needs are not met by explicit teaching. Cognitive load theory’s expertise reversal effect supports the idea that as students become more expert, they need less guidance and more experience at problem solving. However, that is something that explicit teaching programs build into the approach—a gradual release from teacher to student.

Differentiation as a panacea

Perhaps the issue is that whole-class, interactive explicit teaching cannot release students at different rates. This is a genuine issue. With one teacher and 25-30 students, compromises need to be made. Or do they?

One teaching practice that bordered on an obsession when I used to teach in England was ‘differentiation’—fearsome ‘Ofsted’ inspectors would descend on schools and demand hard-pressed teachers provide evidence of how they were differentiating. This is the idea of adapting a lesson in some way so that different students can take a slightly different route through it, depending on their needs. To some extent, all teachers do this. They may, for example, go and offer additional help to a student or give a student some extension questions to do. Placing students in different classes according to their ability is also sometimes considered a form of differentiation.

In a sense, differentiation is one of those vague abstract nouns that are so popular in education because they mean whatever you want them to mean.

However, when we break it down, the model of differentiation most frequently promoted in practice is one where different groups of students are given different tasks to complete. The problem is that there is still only one teacher and that teacher now has to divide themselves between different groups doing different tasks. It’s not clear that the benefits of more targeted work outweigh the costs of dividing the teacher’s time and attention in this way.

A 2020 scoping review of the available research on differentiation conducted by Australian academics found that the benefits of differentiation have been neither proved nor disproved. That’s weak evidence for a practice that is so widely encouraged and contrasts sharply with the evidence base for explicit teaching.

On what basis?

If we do choose to differentiate, the next question that arises is: on what basis? How do I know that Jack should be given the yellow worksheet and Aisha should be given the pink one? What am I basing this on?

Alarmingly, advocates of differentiation often suggest using the widely debunked theory of learning styles to select tasks. Although students often express a preference to learn, say, visually or auditorily, there is no evidence that matching instruction to these preferred styles is effective.

Setting the spurious aside, how does a teacher know, in advance, what a student can handle? It would involve making judgements largely on the kinds of ad hoc assessments teachers make in class. We know these are likely to reflect bias. What’s more, they often reflect teachers’ implicit theories of learning. For example, I have heard a teacher explain that students who have not mastered fractions cannot cope with decimals. There is no good reason to assume this to be the case. Testing it would require a well-designed experiment, and I’m not aware of such an experiment being conducted. Such theories place advance limits on students by limiting what they are exposed to.

In interactive explicit teaching, concepts are fully explained and procedures fully modelled to all students and the teacher modulates their teaching based on the feedback they then receive on students’ success. This does not require the teacher to be able to see into the future.

The difference

Students have more in common with each other than we tend to think. They all have working memories and long-term memories. There is some variation in the capacity of working memory but the same principles apply. Of course, students have different tastes and aspirations, but they don’t learn fundamentally differently from each other. Why is there a need to stress and, in the case of learning styles, even invent differences between students? That comes directly from the ideology of progressive education.

The optimal form of teaching is probably one-to-one, but that is resource intensive and the reality is that most students will continue to be taught by one teacher leading a large class. Differentiation sounds like a panacea but it involves trade-offs that often don’t, on balance, pay off. Instead, whole-class explicit teaching works for all students and particularly those with the most need.