On invisible pedagogy

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?

Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash

Debates about the meaning of explicit instruction have ramped up recently, with several Dioceses and the NSW Department of Education mandating its use. Just as many universities have simultaneously responded with “Don’t tell me what to do,” and “We already do this,” many teachers would likely recognise elements of explicit practice that they already regularly use in the classroom. They might justifiably claim that their autonomy was being eroded.

Ironically, the missing piece of the picture is the learner-centred aspect of explicit teaching — the frequent checks for understanding, the high participation, the actual learning. Often, teaching is conducted with a person at the front of the room speaking, models are provided, even time for practice and mastery can be seen. But students can neither be seen nor heard learning. Far from being chalk and talk, explicit classrooms are briskly-paced places with lots of visible and audible learning. Explicit teaching is highly student-centred, so those kinds of arguments against it simply don’t fly.

I was sent a paper (Power et al. 2018) recently which aimed to evaluate a progressive, play-based early learning program in Wales. The authors invest considerable time explaining why this is such a difficult task. The first reason speaks a little to the position of teachers in Australia facing directives about explicit practice. A lot of teachers who think they’re teaching in a progressive, student-led way are actually teaching reasonably explicitly. The convenient aspect of this phenomenon is that when a program does not show positive effects of learning, the developers can claim a lack of fidelity — the teachers were not student-centred enough for it to truly work as intended.

Indeed, the opposite can happen. Schools can claim success from their student-centred inquiry programs where some other secret sauce may be at play. There are plenty of successful schools that promote inquiry practices. Wealthy schools benefiting from peer effects, compounded by highly motivated teachers and students, can overcome inquiry pedagogies. Motivated teachers may spend a lot of time marking and replicating the 2 sigma tutoring effect, to compensate for inquiry. In my experience, teachers want the best for students and work hard, teaching reasonably explicitly behind the closed door of their classroom to overcome the poor whole-school approaches imposed on them.

Even at the individual teacher level, we often attribute success to our ideology rather than our methods. Often the loudest opponents to explicit instruction are the ones who have had many years’ experience of being highly charismatic, entrenched in their settings and well respected by the school community. We all know this teacher. The phenomenon falls under the category of comments like, “They behave for me.” It’s the curse of knowledge in a different form. Students would sweat blood for these people and it’s often mutual. Waiting for charisma and respect to kick in is not going to help most mere mortals or vulnerable early-career teachers. They need strategies that are shown to work for most of us.

The second issue that the paper (Power et al. 2018) raises is the difficulty of measuring what they term “invisible pedagogy.” It might be fruitful to provide contrasting explanations of explicit and inquiry pedagogies at this point. Evans and Martin (2023) make this distinction by explaining:

The term “explicit” … conveys the nature of the instructional strategy as transparently presenting the structure and content of what is intended to be learned. In contrast, other approaches to instruction may not directly present content to students, or they may even actively withhold content from students, and encourage them to “discover” and construct the content and its structure themselves.

The idea of withholding is an important one. For Power et al. (2018), invisibility doesn’t necessarily mean that there is no teacher direction or control, it just means that we can’t see that control. This concession might be a distinction without a difference. If I think about the majority of the lessons where I have been the ‘guide on the side’ in inquiry lessons, many of which consist of endless student hours on laptops, I may have been giving some weak direction. There might be some token teacher talk at the start of the lesson; perhaps one in five might be what’s recognisable as a lesson. I may have had control over whether laptops were open, but very little over what was being done with them.

With students inquiring at different paces, on different projects, the best I could muster would be about two minutes of instruction per student per lesson. Inquiry is about trial and error, so I would have no idea as a teacher what was being learned until the end of the project where some weak PowerPoint (or worse, flavoured tea, guitar rendition, interpretive dance) was presented. The paper lists other invisible features of progressive education which make it dificult to ascertain whether learning has happened as a result of the pedagogy:

• The pace is up to the student where there is a stage-not-age philosophy

• Success criteria are implicit, not explicit or visible

• Middle class (and wealthier) homes compensate, making the attribution of the success of these pedagogies difficult — similarly the need for the ‘shadow’ education industry, namely tutors

• Subject boundaries are blurred making it difficult to assess learning in a specific domain.

I recently listened to Paul Kirschner talk about the problems with program-based research. It’s win-win for proponents — when it doesn’t work, researchers can claim lack of fidelity; when it does work, we have no idea what the active ingredient was. Some might say that the observable and measurable aspects of explicit teaching are just another form of teacher surveillance, evidence of the presence of the “phallic teacher,” symptomatic of the “neoliberal imaginary.” Alternatively, we could put our faith in credible research and concede that if we have no visible or audible evidence of learning, it probably didn’t happen.

---

Postscript: When I first started this newsletter, I would fire off little missives about whatever was on my mind, or quickly whip up a post about the news of the day. It started with a new year’s resolution to write once a day, which I kept up for about a month. A couple of years and a Masters later (my graduation is on Tuesday!), these posts have become the triangulation of commentary, research and many conversations with very smart people. As a result, they take a lot longer to coalesce and to write than they used to, and I think they’re better. Several very clever edu-women will see our chats in this piece. You know who you are —thank you! You’ve slowed my thinking down in a good way.