Teaching Strategies Part 2: What teachers know, but researchers fail to acknowledge

This will be a series of posts on teaching strategies and the importance of the recognition that the process of teaching, learning, assessment, feedback and appraisal is cyclical and that a one-size-fits-all model does not take into account the intricacies of most classroom environments. These posts are a long time in the making and follow on from my first post on this blog: Constructivism, social constructivism and what teachers think they know about learning, but takes the other side of the argument; if there is an argument to be had – and I think there is. Teaching and learning strategies are foundational in most of my teaching at university, which makes sense since the majority of my teaching is in initial teacher education programs and pre-service teachers need to learn how to teach and how kids learn; therefore, they need to know about teaching strategies. I teach about inquiry-based learning, direct instruction, or as it’s sometimes called, explicit teaching and several other strategies, most of which fall under one of those two concepts. Those two concepts in a nutshell, and without nuance are: Explicit teaching is teacher-led instruction where the teacher leads most aspects of the class and specifically teaches the students what they need to learn.  One might call these more traditional teaching methods – sage on the stage. Inquiry-based learning, on the other hand, is more student-led – teachers become facilitators of learning, designing and planning experiences for students, but allowing the students to explore and learn without specifically teaching or instructing them (guide-on -the-side).  Which is better…. That is the million-dollar question!

I think this recent article in The Conversation, covers the debate quite well, but I’d like to go a few steps further because this debate is at the heart of a foundational shift in education away from ‘traditional’ methods to more progressive education, which I will cover in. the next post in this series.  If one were to read Pearson and Sweller or other big hitters in Australian research, such as Dinham and even Hattie they would see that the advocacy for direct instruction/explicit teaching is far-reaching and vehement. One might also conclude that there is a large swath of teachers who reject direct instruction in favour of inquiry-based learning (IBL) and don’t care about content and instead focus on skills. As the article in the Conversation suggests, this is not an either/or issue, it is a both/and.

In this blog, I won’t focus on the above authors, I’ll save that for the third post in the series; however, what I will say is that broadly, these authors contend that direct instruction is better than IBL for improving student achievement.  At the heart of the argument is that explicit instruction can be empirically shown to improve student achievement while IBL, depending on the form it takes, either has little to no effect or according to Sweller, can have a detrimental effect. So, who is right?

The answer to that question is easy – in my opinion both arguments are right. The notion that direct instruction improves student achievement to a greater extent than IBL can be shown empirically, that is a fact, but it is not the end of the story. A more nuanced way to approach this, is to ask, how improves achievement and why? Various researchers have shown that on standardised tests, NAPLAN, TIMMS, PEARLS, PISA etc, direct instruction can improve achievement to a greater extent than IBL, but let’s think about this more deeply. Is the goal of classroom learning to do well on a standardised test, or any test for that matter? I would have thought that the goal was learning and engagement, not achievement, but maybe, to some, that is a semantic argument, it’s not for me. There is a difference between learning and engagement, and achievement. Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences, while achievement is the success with which something is done; these are not the same, but are often conflated in educational discourse. I think there is a fundamental difference here: what teachers do in the classroom is focus on learning, while researchers and bureaucracies and governments focus on the output of that learning in the form of achievement. While teachers want their students to achieve, that is not the focus of their work, or at least, in my opinion shouldn’t be. When teachers start to focus on achievement instead of learning, especially when encouraged to do so in a top-down way, can have adverse outcomes.

Anyone who is a current teacher or who has been in recent years, or who has a child in years 3, 5, 7 or 9 in Australia would understand that what has happened as a result of this research is that schools, around a particular time of year, pause their normal teaching and start focussing on teaching NAPLAN-specific lessons in the hope that they can improve student performance on the test, although these standardised tests are meant to be a snap-shot in time about where students are at, I digress. I don’t want to go down the rabbit-hole of standardised tests, but suffice it to say, that teachers revert to direct instruction when the results of tests matter, or more correctly, they perceive them to matter because of top-down pressure. In other words, they change their focus from learning to achievement and the result have not been positive, as seen in steadily declining scores on standardised tests. This is not to say that the opposite holds true, that if teachers were to solely focus on IBL that test scores would improve, actually quite the opposite would likely be true.

When one looks at achievement, be it NAPLAN, PISA, TIMMS or any other empirically derived assessment, we have to ask what is being assessed? If we know what we want students to learn and we tell them, then we explain it, instruct them how to do it and then test them on what we taught, we would likely get a good result, but that is a simplified view of classroom teaching and learning. Any teacher would understand that the nuance involved in the teaching and learning process is more complex than this and that while this process can work for fact-based process-driven learning, it would not work, or is not the best choice for all school-based learning.  While a simple example, and one that can easily be dismissed, let’s look at a spelling test. On Monday I give the students a list of ten words. I explain to them the phonics involved in spelling the words and any exceptions to rules in the words on the list. The students study the words and then have a spelling test on Friday. They all do well, and voila, direct instruction works. Tell the student what you want them to learn, teach them what you want them to learn and they learn it – everyone wins! But this is flawed on so many levels unless those ten words are all you ever want the students to learn. Let’s take another example, one my students would be all too familiar with – the quadratic equation – FOIL anyone? So, for the non-math inclined, the quadratic equation is used for multiplying two binomials. I can remember this vividly from algebra, but I also couldn’t tell you, even if my life depended on it, what use multiplying binomials has.  Again, I learned FOIL (firsts, outsides, insides, lasts), which is the method by which to multiply the binomials and I can still multiply them to this day, but I haven’t had to and wouldn’t know what I could use that learning for – but I did well on the test. Empirically, on the test, my achievement was high, similar to being able to spell handkerchief.

Here, what we see is that empirically driven learning is probably best taught through direct instruction, rote learning and repetition. I’m not saying these aren’t valuable strategies, they are, for certain kinds of learning. But what about understanding the experience of soldiers in the trenches in WWI – is this best taught through direct instruction? Should the teacher stand at the front and explain the conditions in the trenches and how the soldiers felt? Or is some inquiry-based learning more appropriate here? What if we asked the students what they thought life was like on the Western Front and let their curiosity lead them to understand the experiences of soldiers and what was happening – is this a more powerful technique? I think so, but I’m. not sure it would translate to a multiple-choice test where we could empirically measure students’ learning in a way that would satisfy the critics of IBL.

All this is to say that teaching and learning is about more than test-taking, assessment and empirically measuring success. Teachers need a toolbox of strategies, not only to teach the material but to engage students and to teach them to think critically and draw conclusions based on evidence. Teaching and learning are not synonymous with achievement nor are they related. Teaching and learning are about engaging students, igniting curiosity, appealing to student interest and yes, even including them in the decisions about what and how they go about their educational journey so they become agents of their own learning. While the benefits and features of direct instruction are invaluable to a teacher’s toolbox, it is just one strategy they employ to facilitate learning in the classroom and any perception that doesn’t recognise the complexities of the school classroom and the nuances involved in the learning and teaching process is fundamentally flawed.

I look forward to exploring these ideas further in the next posts in the series:

Teaching Strategies Part 3: The traditionalists v the progressives

Teaching Strategies Part 4: What the research does and does not tell us

Teaching Strategies Part 5: The challenges of interpreting research to practice in educational discourse