Explicit Instruction Is Having a Moment

My new piece for the American Enterprise Institute and researchED is out, and it’s blown up. Read it here: https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/explicit-instruction-works-education-schools-just-wont-admit-it/

The essay is the argument I’ve been making for years, in one place. How I was trained to avoid explicit instruction. What convinced me I was wrong. And what the last half-century of classroom research actually shows.

Some of the ground will be familiar to regular readers of this blog. The friendship bracelet story is in there. So is Project Follow Through. So is the case against the caricatures of explicit teaching that keep getting repeated in teacher prep programs and staff lounges — that it’s just the teacher talking, that it kills problem-solving and creativity, that it damages children’s self-esteem. None of it holds up.

A few of the things I take on directly:

“Explicit instruction is just the teacher talking.” It isn’t. A well-run explicit lesson is one of the most interactive things you’ll see in a classroom.

“Explicit teaching kills problem-solving and creativity.” The research says the opposite. Direct Instruction was the only Project Follow Through model to produce positive gains in higher-order thinking. Studies of critical thinking and divergent thinking find the same pattern.

“Explicit instruction is hard on children’s self-esteem.” Children feel good about themselves when they can actually do things. Success drives motivation, not the other way around.

The piece ends where I keep ending up: with the kids who have the least margin for instructional malpractice. The children we call “struggling,” “low,” or “at-risk” are the children most consistently harmed by the romantic forms of teaching I was trained to practice. Explicit instruction shouldn’t be written into their intervention plans after we’ve wasted years of their schooling. It should have been the plan all along.

Read the whole thing here. And share it — with a colleague, a leadership team, a preservice teacher, anyone still being told that getting out of the way is the job.

— Zach