On why teacher expertise is still an essential ingredient
Or how explicit direct instruction can hit a wall
When I discovered explicit direct instruction (EDI), also known as ‘the purple book,’ I was so enamoured that I thought it would even make a cup of tea for me when I got home from work. The sequences promoted by Hollingsworth and Ybarra alleviated my workload, and I experienced a high success rate in my classroom that I could finally see. I think, for a while, I intuitively adopted, adapted, and took what I needed from it without giving the ‘experienced teacher’ decision-making process a lot of thought.
It wasn’t until I started sharing the EDI ‘hammer’ with others that I became conscious that not everything is a ‘nail’. In my own practice, I started noticing limits but addressed these without too much conscious effort. For one thing, using EDI means that students can learn a new skill or concept incredibly quickly. For example, I taught a demo lesson on nominalisation recently. My observer was just a few minutes late and when they arrived, I had almost finished the sequence! When I first started using EDI, I would plan for a sequence to consume a full lesson, but with such efficiency and such a high success rate, I would be forced to ‘wing’ the remaining 40 minutes!
Another limit is that it doesn’t account for highly conceptual and complex relationships. At some point, students need to apply their learning by taking risks with their thinking — making assertions and supporting them, responding to provocative questions, and practising the skill of interpretation. I am loth to say there are no ‘right’ answers in the Humanities, but we do regularly ask students to make informed and subjective interpretations of language, events, and characters. It’s hard to see how simple examples and non-examples, or gradual release, will help with this.
There are some features of the EDI lesson that work every time. Learning intentions are a great habit to get into, followed by addressing why the learning is important. There is some flexibility around where the ‘importance’ factor might happen, but stating why we are learning something is highly autonomy-supportive. Even if a student is none too keen on John Steinbeck, we can explain the importance of developing empathy and understanding the big events that have shaped the Western world. Sometimes just appealing to identified motivation by saying ‘It’s in the test!’ can work for some groups.
Bulletproof definitions always belong in a lesson. But this may be another limitation of the EDI sequence. I’ve been talking with an expert colleague about Ausubel’s meaningful learning, and I now think that some concepts, as opposed to just the vocabulary that denotes them, are just too big for EDI. The big subsuming ideas take a lot longer than a definition and a multiple-choice check-for-understanding can facilitate. Of course, we can use EDI for the smaller ideas as we go along, but the best way to learn how paradox manifests in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird may be to use a highly dialogic Questioning the Author approach to deep dive into the Maycomb Ladies’ afternoon tea.
Where I have landed is that the science of learning is bigger than EDI, and even bigger than explicit instruction. EDI and its variants account for checks for understanding and gradual release, but not a lot of transfer and critical thinking. When it comes to skills, the idea that we can reduce cognitive load by using a whole-part approach doesn’t fit neatly with an EDI sequence, although we can embed TAPPLE moments throughout.
Having said that, once you try EDI, it becomes a useful mindset or organising principle. For example, now, if I ask students to transform and organise their learning into a knowledge organiser, I will show a fully worked model or pre-populate some sections. Gradual release can come in this form. If I want students to interpret sections of text, I might do a couple of think-alouds, followed by some targeted discussion or questioning, so they can hear how an expert thinks about text — including some of the uncertainty and the multiplicity of plausible interpretations.
The most difficult part of sharing explicit instruction with others is that I don’t have hard-and-fast advice about when and even whether to use it. It’s a bit of a paradox — without experience of fairly high-fidelity EDI, it’s hard to know when to adapt. One way to develop expertise is to try several models, perhaps incorporating Rosenshine with some EDI essentials and a sprinkling of Anita Archer. If you’re teaching things, providing models, and checking for understanding frequently, you’ve probably got it right.
Reject dogma, make mistakes, figure out what works for you. That way, you’re a critical consumer of solid professional advice. But only you can apply it in the way that works for your content and your students.
Would you love to nerd-out about cognitive load theory for three days? Then come to the CLT Conference at the University of Sydney. Book your tickets below. See you there, where I will talk about the links between self-regulated learning, load-reduction instruction and student wellbeing.