On knowing what you’re dealing with
An argument for hearing the other side of the story
I began my career in education only 11 years ago, so I don’t have the collective memory that other teachers have. I’m researching the effects of explicit teaching on student behaviour and wellbeing, but I wouldn’t be much of a researcher if I didn’t compare explicit teaching to an alternative. So I decided to compare it to inquiry-based learning. I started teaching when inquiry was in full swing, and I’ve been present for the shift to explicit instruction. I didn’t know much about the era before the rise of “21st-century skills,” so I decided to investigate for myself.
There was another reason for doing this. I’m not a lover of Viviane Robinson’s agnosticism about effective practice, but her view that we need to deeply understand what drives teachers is something that has stayed with me. If that were her one enduring legacy, it would be a valuable one. So aside from wanting my research to be more robust, my role (professionally and personally) is to remove barriers to teachers refining practice, and understanding their point of view is a first step.
What triggered my curiosity was that I’ve been reading a lot of journal articles from the turn of this century that almost use “reform” synonymously with “inquiry.” It seemed as though there was a collective effort to move teachers towards teaching less. In the current age of reform, with the focus on explicit teaching, it’s hard to imagine systems actively promoting the opposite approach. But they did. Many still do! The shift didn’t happen overnight but there were a few key catalysts.
Without a deep dive, it was hard to know how explicit (pardon the pun) policymakers were about promoting inquiry, how it gained prominence, or whether as an advocate of explicit teaching I had imagined its ubiquity. I did ask ChatGPT to explain the following:
What is the history of inquiry and its rise?
How do you know?
The initial response went back to very early constructivists – the Piagets, Vygotskys and Bruners of our initial teacher education. By the way, they’re still being taught! But then I asked for more recent evidence of policy shifts. It was a worthwhile rabbit hole and I would love for you to poke holes in this post as my own understanding is emerging. With this in mind, here are some fascinating tidbits about the history of inquiry-based learning.
Inquiry methods can be traced back to Jerome Bruner’s discovery learning (1961) and an emphasis on scientific discovery after Sputnik, where a lack of STEM capability was seen to be a critical weakness of US defences. A much-cited document, the US National Science Education Standards (National Research Council, 1995), both codified and legitimised inquiry in the US1.
The highly influential How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School (National Research Council, 2000) seems to have facilitated the spread of inquiry pedagogies to other subject areas. The report synthesised aspects of the science of learning into a coherent and plausible instructional approach, supported by sound understanding of cognitive science but crucially applying a constructivist lens in its recommendations for teaching.
For example, the report correctly identified that students come with variable levels of prior knowledge, but recommended that teachers be alert to misconceptions and address these in a just-in-time manner, rather than planning for such misconceptions in Tier 1 instruction and front-loading prior knowledge. The authors recognised the novice-to-expert continuum and that for deep learning to occur, students needed knowledge, but it emphasised separating memory from understanding. I think the demonisation of rote learning and other inquiry tropes can be fairly confidently traced back to this document.
We also see metacognition rise in popularity from here, with a recommendation to teach it explicitly, which is positive. However, asking students to work independently to get to grips with “thinking like a scientist” is highly inefficient for a novice, having little knowledge to think with. Additionally, we know that metacognition predicts outcomes; it’s correlated with ability so we can’t say much about causation.
Perhaps the low point of inquiry reforms is its debut in the PISA survey. There’s a cautionary tale here. We know that PISA has a large influence on what international policy-makers pay attention to. Andreas Schleicher and co. have long promoted inquiry and the idea that children are mini adults, and our role is to bring out the inner entrepreneur. In 2015, PISA asked students about the frequency of inquiry methods in science; the scale was closely aligned with the National Science Education Standards mentioned earlier.
The move was an own-goal. Not only did inquiry underperform compared to teacher-directed instruction, disadvantaged students were more likely to find themselves in inquiry-based science classrooms.
The failure was ascribed to a lack of resources – so we need money or fancy labs for inquiry to work? It was also blamed on classroom disorder – or does laissez-faire instruction lead to disruptive behaviour? On the other hand, teacher-directed instruction was indifferent to these factors. Inquiry was associated with non-cognitive benefits like enjoyment of learning, career aspirations in STEM, and self-efficacy – ironic in the face of lower academic performance (read Jerrim et al., 2019; Mostafa et al., 2018 for more).
Despite this, the OECD continued to promote inquiry. Students in teacher-directed classrooms were characterised as “passive learners,” relying on “memorisation,” while students in inquiry classrooms relied on “more elaborate” strategies like higher-order analysis and interpretation (Mostafa et al., 2018). It seems, though, that these more elaborate strategies do not lead to stronger outcomes or a flood of capable scientists.
The OECD has plans to assess AI literacy in 2029. It will be interesting to see what narratives are woven when those results come in.
Returning to the subtitle, learning about inquiry has been surprisingly enriching. I understand the underlying values and the history in a way that I never could if I had focused solely on explicit teaching. I empathise with the goals of inquiry, and this understanding has given me a kind of superpower. Presenting the evidence for explicit teaching is not enough. We need to deeply understand the values that drive the teachers that we want to bring along. We need to be able to demonstrate that explicit teaching achieves the goals of schooling, not just learning.
If you like a rabbit hole, those same Cold War fears were a catalyst for cross-sectoral federal funding for Australia’s private schools, starting with science labs for all.
I'm a history nerd and have had a lot of fun researching the roots of our current battles in the education world. Maybe this will help a bit to identify the beginnings of discovery learning. If not, that's okay, I just like sharing what I know for what it's worth!
Louis Agassiz, considered the father of modern science and a household name in the mid-1800's, was likely the originator of the discovery method in the 1800's.
Students of his at Harvard, upon being accepted to the graduate program in natural history, were required to sit with an object (such as a type of fish) and study it through observation for up to a week. Every day. all day. He would question them periodically and only when they had taken in everything he thought was important about the object were they allowed to start attending class.
His students would later go on to say this was a life changing experience for them, forcing them to "see" through observation more than they had ever learned from books. In those days most learning was memorization of facts, so this was revolutionary.
Agassiz and the scientists he trained (including psychologist William James) had a huge effect on education in elementary and high schools. The famous Agassiz himself, who could fill an auditorium of 5,000 for an evening lecture in Boston, was a favorite speaker at teacher "Institutes" and was said to have passed around a jar of grasshoppers during one session in the 1860's so that every teacher could hold one while he gave his lecture.
Agassiz had a huge positive effect on science education in public schools. and the idea that high schools should have science labs and younger students should be exposed to hands on experiences. However, he berated the study of language, especially grammar, and was very much against phonics instruction. He believed that language was actually getting in the way of thought. He encouraged his many followers to "do something about the education problem". He supported the new anti-phonics reading systems introduced in the 1840s which morphed over the next 80 years into Dick and Jane readers.
Like others over the years whose systems started with college students (Donald Graves and process writing, for example) Agassiz assumed that what works for experts is also the best way to teach beginners.
I've started following a number of Substacks on explicit teaching to learn more in this direction. Almost every post describes something similar to what you write here: "Presenting the evidence for explicit teaching is not enough." Unfortunately, a source is then almost never given. Next to Rosenshine's Principles, could you point me toward some foundational literature, literature reviews, or surveys that offer a good way in?
As for your question, I think Gardner also contributed his part with books like "The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach" (1991). There he describes, for instance, the phenomenon of "scholastic learning," where children can answer questions in class and seemingly display good knowledge, yet haven't actually understood the content and can no longer apply it in slightly altered contexts or outside of school. A popular example is the misconceptions about basic laws and concepts in Newtonian mechanics that even first-semester university physics students still exhibit.