To extend this thought process I see a difficulty for teachers in being responsive to unmet need as a SENCo and I can feel direct instruction creating situations in which teachers cannot be curious any more about the way the child is interacting with the learning or environment. I am struggling to bring back to teachers an adaptability or flexibility in thinking as they are becoming dependent on tightly narrated and modelled instructional practices and in observation when the very specific instructional skill is observed we hit the shout out button with no regard for if it was actually an effective moment for the skill or, more importantly whether it was necessary or effective. “We are here to see this, so this we shall see” mentality. I also feel like I learned to teach in an era of both instructional and moderately guided practice but without deliberate practice and thus I honed and refined every single day, because I worked in a school where not to do so were a considerable risk to life and limb! That is where my teaching really developed, not by being completely stifled by routine instructional approaches but by thinking hard about how to deliver well to extremely complex children during challenging interactions. I worry that the repetitive cycles that children experience throughout their school day in the way that all staff deliver using similar narrations can be boring and repetitive and that life satisfaction and enjoyment of school suffer as a result. Has this got anything to do with poor attendance and lack of engagement in our secondary schools? I sometimes hazard that it might. I like the comparator to parenting. In a family of three I have to use multiple methods as I have two sons, one of whom is Neurodivergent and requires repetitive explicit practice with highly scaffolded learning opportunities for independence. My second son requires moderate instruction with room for independence and self-reliance and my daughter prefers to lead from the bottom with complete autonomy and to seek the support she requires, when required, rather than accept explicit guidance. All three approaches are appropriate to the differing needs of my children. One size cannot fit all.
Thanks for sharing your experiences, Fran. I completely understand your worries about the observation culture you describe: when a lesson is judged on whether a particular instructional skill shows up, with no regard for whether it was the right move for that child in that moment.
You learned to teach through thinking hard about how to deliver the best for your students in very challenging situations. We put too many trainee teachers in these situations with too little support – is it any surprise we struggle to recruit and retain teachers? You were able to develop your judgement, but it’s easier to hand teachers a script and say ‘just teach it this way’.
Your family example makes the point more clearly than any study – it isn’t that explicit, scaffolded instruction is best, or autonomy the ideal; it’s that one of your sons needs the first, your daughter the second, and the skill lies in judging which is most appropriate for each. It’s that judgement that we’re in danger of removing from our education system. Even when we allow it, it isn’t clear we’re giving teachers the skills to exercise it effectively.
You ask whether this feeds into attendance and disengagement in secondary. It’s hard to prove any single way of teaching is the cause, but I don’t think we can rule out that it’s part of the issue. I looked at the data (https://www.chris-reid.co.uk/p/why-dont-students-like-school-do) and something is clearly going badly wrong. We owe it to the children in our schools to work out what that is.
Thanks Kris – I’ve read the literature around cognitive load but Martin's instruction framework is new to me, so I appreciate the heads-up. From a very brief read, the idea of calibrating guidance to expertise and fading it towards independence as fluency grows could fit with my argument for ‘moderately guided instruction’ but I’m looking forward to reading about it more thoroughly.
As someone who bridges the worlds for cognitive science and US science standards that demand elements of student-led discovery, I find frameworks that also bridge those worlds extremely helpful. I also appreciate conversations in that space as well. So, I appreciate that work here.
Thanks Kris – the bridge-building is important work, and more space to develop those frameworks and keep those conversations going can only be a good thing. Thanks again for reading, and for putting Martin's framework on my radar.
McKinsey and Company did an analysis of PISA scores that Ollie Levell highlighted in this blog: https://www.ollielovell.com/inquiry_explicit_difference/ that showed that teacher-directed methods in many to all science lessons alongside inquiry-based methods in some to many lessons was the sweet spot for improving scores.
Thanks Pete - that's a strange coincidence because last week I was trying to remember where I'd seen that analysis and couldn't track it down, thanks for that! Ollie's post is also a great take on the discussion - it's always nice to see more nuanced explorations of the topic - particularly appreciated from the perspective of a fellow physics teacher!
Thanks for sharing this Chris, although there is a lot to respond to hear your story does remind me of an interview with a high-performing school in Victoria and I mentioned the phrase "developmental continuum" for learning and I could just feel the body language cringe in the room...
Although we don't like to think of them that way, schools are ideological spaces, and this comes out in these kinds of interactions. The good thing is if you're aware you can get a real sense of what is actually valued and like in your case, it's probably a good thing to experience rejection when the ideological differences between yourself and the school is possibly too wide to negotiate.
Thanks Tom – I think you’re right. Looking back, that interview turned out for the best, for both parties. Exposing where your sympathies lie can be awkward in the moment, but it probably leads to the right outcome.
I went in fairly naively, having spent a few years teaching at a private school. There’s a gulf between the education discussion in the private and state sectors in England – both say they use evidence and want to improve teaching, but, to borrow your phrase, they’re different ideological spaces.
The interview was a lesson for me in the terminology that schools use and the meaning behind it. I was also asked whether I was a ‘guide on the side’ or a ‘sage on the stage’ – and got that one wrong too!
On what you’re saying here, I have a friend who gave me some really interesting advice about interviews: don’t ask questions that polarise but seek out the interviewers position first by asking more open questions and then move from there (e.g. instead of “what football team do you support?” ask “what sports are you into?”).
Kind of feels a bit like manipulation, but I think he raised an important idea for how we tend to try and discern “in” and “out” groups quickly and how these need to be challenged.
As a teacher, you do want somewhere that feels like ‘your sort of place’ - your ideological spaces again - even if it’s hard to get a sense of from a single visit.
I feel schools should think about recruitment more openly than interviewees do, though. If they rely on polarising questions a school can end up with staff who all agree, but who then leads the change when something isn't working? Who challenges the orthodoxy? And if a school doesn't want to be challenged, how is it going to teach its students to think critically?
Anyway, more to take up another day. Thanks Tom - enjoying what's happening on The Interruption too 🙂
I think there's a lot more here to agree about than disagree!, but I'm not always following some of the arguments and suggestions, and suspect that you and I generally have been reading different literature, which would make sense given we are from very different backgrounds, no doubt, and live in different countries.
For example, I'm a little confused about what you are calling "evidence" for the purpose of this essay.
1) You cite Mayer as "evidence," but per the authors own description, it is a brief historical review of the literature plus their expert opinion which is now 21 year old. I got the part where you wanted to include it as a historical counter-point, but it feels like you cite it as more than that. Perhaps I'm just misinterpreting that.
2) you cite the Kirschner et al paper as though it's the only thing any of them ever wrote or had to say on the topic, which I was somewhat confused by? All of those authors have large bodies of work on their own and with other colleagues, and while Sweller is retired, Kirschner is still very active.
3) you seem to imply that there haven't been any well-designed studies that compared instructional approaches head on, and thus we have to turn to metanalyses to examine this, but there has been. Perhaps it's not known in the UK, but the US ran a study including 200,000 children, lasting 10 years, on which instructional approaches were the most effective. You can read more about it here, among many other places.
4) this isn't on evidence but rather definitions. Based on how you described it, and the results of the 2011 meta-analysis you cite, which has the final line of the abstract as "The findings suggest that unassisted discovery does not benefit learners, whereas feedback, worked examples, scaffolding, and elicited explanations do." (it's paywalled and I don't have the time or energy to track it down right now). Honestly, this sounds like a description of direct, explicit instruction, not guided inquiry, so I'm a little confused as to what their ultimate findings were.
Also, I'm not totally clear on your distinction between guided inquiry and direct instruction (in the literature I'm familiar with direct instruction written with a capital D and a capital I is referring very very specifically to Engelmann's work, not the general idea of direct instruction or Rosenshine's principles, so I couldn't tell if you really meant to only talk about Engelmann-style DI, or just direct instruction generally). My understanding is that the disagreement is not about content, but about timing. Good general lower case direct explicit instruction also includes guided inquiry, it just comes later in the process, whereas your description of guided inquiry sounds like it wants to start with and center student-discovery (with some support) first and foremost, only offering explicit instruction when this approach has failed to allow students to obtain all the needed knowledge? Also, I have to respectfully object to your characterization of explicit instruction as a teaching scenario where "students are not used to having responsibility and are more comfortable being passive.' There is zero room for passivity in direct explicit instruction - it features receiving near constant feedback from the classroom/students/student, it is not just lecturing at a board.
5) you complain that direct instruction is susceptible to lethal mutation, and then go on to talk about how hard it is to get guided inquiry right, so wouldn't you think it's fair to say that the susceptibility to legal mutation argument applies to both approaches, not just one, and thus it doesn't make sense to slander one in favor of the other on these grounds?
Thanks for this Cristine- some great points here. Taking them in turn:
First, you’re right that defining and selecting evidence - whilst sometimes presented as an objective choice – inevitably has a subjective element built in. I looked at very little qualitative evidence here, for example. In 2k-ish words, I tried to be representative but ultimately couldn’t include every important contribution - as you rightly point out.
1. I cited Mayer because KSC also cited the paper, and to show it supports guided over pure discovery rather than saying anything about direct instruction or because it’s the strongest case per se. Agree it doesn’t carry my overall argument (which is that overall, I don’t think we can fairly say that direct instruction is definitely more effective than moderately guided instruction) – the meta-analyses have much more to say there.
2. Again, much of this is limited by space and all authors have much wider contributions - agreed. Point here is about what that specific paper achieved rather than the individual authors (hence citing criticisms and rebuttals too). To a degree, I wanted to show the influence of that paper specifically - the positives (we don’t do much unguided discovery now in schools, which is probably for the best) and the points I wanted to take issue with (eg the grouping of what I argued were different instructional methods under the term minimally or unguided instruction)
3. Really important point, and lots in here. First, I didn’t distinguish clearly enough between Direct Instruction (Engelmann) and (lower case) direct instruction/explicit teaching. I’ve added a footnote to correct this. The former I’ve never seen promoted, in England at least. The latter, I argue is promoted in England as the only valid instructional method, and draws on Rosenshine, cognitive load theory etc, so incorporates more flexibility and a larger evidence base than Engelmann’s DI. As I stated, I think explicit teaching is hugely valuable - I use it and it’s a key instructional tool. My point was a) sometimes we present things that aren’t explicit teaching as if they were and it was as tightly scripted as the original Engelmann DI (the ‘lethal mutations’ and ‘total instruction’ point) and b) it is sometimes presented as the only effective evidence-backed teaching tool. I wanted to dispute that. In terms of Project Follow Through, it’s a hugely valuable trial (again, added to footnote) but takes the heavily scripted Direct Instruction which wasn’t what KSC or I were referring to (again, I could have been clearer here) and none of the comparison models were moderately-guided in the sense I’m defending. There are methodological points you could take up (quite apart from the age of the study, which you rightly criticise in terms of drawing on Mayer and KSC 2006), eg schools opted in, there was as much variation within as between outcomes for different methods. DI was more consistent, but again, it was a more tightly-specified approach and implementation was more consistent etc. Obviously, there’s much more you can say, but I’ll leave that there for now.
4. a) Regarding the Alfieri et al 2011 meta-analysis; the line before the one you cited claims: ‘In contrast, analyses of 360 comparisons revealed that outcomes were favorable for enhanced discovery when compared with other forms of instruction (d = 0.30, 95% CI [.23, .36])’. And then in the discussion: ‘Although the meta-analysis indicated that the type of comparison condition did not moderate the results, note that enhanced discovery was generally better than both direct teaching and explanations provided. Thus, the construction of explanations or participation in guided discovery is better for learners than being provided with an explanation or explicitly taught how to succeed on a task, in support of constructivist claims. Analysis of the dependent measure indicated that although learners’ post-test and acquisition scores benefited from enhanced-discovery tasks, reaction times did not. This suggests that learners may take more time to find problem solutions or to perform target responses when engaged in enhanced-discovery tasks.’ Like any other study, their approach and grouping is open to criticism, but I don’t think to the extent that it invalidates the claim that ‘there is no clear winner’ between direct and moderately guided instruction, as I was arguing here.
b) Here’s my take, bringing together the various papers I’ve read. There is certainly a disagreement about when enquiry can take place, but it’s also about who does the constructing and what problem-solving is for: in explicit teaching, problem-solving follows explanation, to consolidate and transfer; in moderately guided approaches it’s also a means of learning. Direct instruction/explicit teaching also relies on the novice-expert distinction, material explicitly taught via explanation, modelling, practice, with enquiry reserved for the point expertise has been developed and mastery of the material. When enquiry does take place, it’s often relatively tightly bounded. In moderately guided instruction (eg guided discovery, structured enquiry), enquiry can happen at any point. The teacher designs sequences of tasks through which understanding is built up, not just explanations to be received – a point about instructional design, not the stronger claim that knowledge has to be discovered unaided, associated with ‘pure’ discovery learning. Problem solving is a tool for learning. Essentially, it’s concerned with the amount of support given to manage productive struggle, and that might be a way to differentiate unguided from minimally, moderately guided and direct instruction, together with ideas about error minimisation, scaffolds and level and nature of feedback at different stages. Explicit instruction is about control of information, moderately guided instruction with control of tasks. But, most of the accounts of moderately guided instruction accept that direct instruction can and probably should be included within lessons incorporating e.g. structured enquiry, so the distinction isn’t that clear.
c) I wrote: ‘teachers are losing the freedom and desire even to experiment with different methods of instruction. If students are not used to having responsibility and are more comfortable being passive, as a teacher there’s a lot less friction in simply embracing this.’ I could have worded this more clearly, because I certainly didn’t mean that direct instruction is a passive approach – well-conducted direct instruction should lead to strong and consistent cognitive engagement. I wanted to say: if students are only used to direct instruction as a teaching method, they are likely to struggle when given more responsibility for knowledge construction and there is a tendency from them to become passive in response. Even this, though, doesn’t have enough evidence to back it up. I have changed to ‘If teachers are required only to use variants of direct instruction, it is unlikely that teachers and students will be well-equipped to get the most out of moderately guided approaches like structured enquiry, even if these were encouraged. Training, feedback, stronger models and a transition period would be required to embed these in lesson – alongside rather than as a replacement for direct instruction.’ Happy to discuss further though if you still feel this overreaches, as the original did.
5. You’re right that both direct instruction and moderately guided instruction (and any other approach) are susceptible to lethal mutation. In the case of e.g. structured enquiry, over- or under-scaffolding would certainly qualify, and because there’s far less codified guidance on what good structured enquiry looks like, it’s arguably harder to spot when it’s gone wrong. My point wasn’t that direct instruction is inherently more prone to mutation than the alternatives, though, it’s that it’s being mandated in an inflexible, often unevidenced form that strips out the very teacher judgement the original approach needs to work. Direct instruction is hugely useful –which is exactly why I argue we should resist standardised versions that hollow it out. So the worry isn’t ‘DI is fragile, therefore we should follow moderately guided approaches’; it’s around mandating any method in a rigid form when the original method relied to a degree on teacher judgement for its efficacy and that judgement is being undermined. The same risk applies to moderately guided approaches, which is a reason to work out what good practice looks like there too, but not a reason to mandate that either.
I really like this piece and it’s good to see more conversation about the middle ground. I’m currently teaching in the mainstream after many years in Montessori and it’s so interesting to observe the obsession with explicit instruction and quite frankly, depressing to see such a narrow view of learning rather than blending elements of both explicit instruction and less teacher-centric methods. Students definitely need to be explicitly taught some stuff but they also need some room to breathe. A big focus for me is helping students to become a bit more independent & offering some choice. I’ve written a bit about this on my own Substack. Thanks for a good read.
Thanks Kat - really good to hear the Montessori-to-mainstream comparison from someone who’s seen both from the inside. That's at the heart of it for me: not that any particular practice is poor, but the assumption that one method works for every student in every classroom. It sounds like a caricature, yet, as you say, it's the impression more and more teachers are being given. The ‘room to breathe’ you describe is exactly what gets squeezed out. I'd love to hear more about your experience and I'll definitely be reading your pieces. Thanks again, Kat.
Your comparison with parenting detracts from this piece. Where people are paid by the state to parent as in the case of foster parents there is training and licensing. For parents that are interested there is an abundance of information on how to parent- you perhaps have heard of the home schooling movement. JumpMath introduced a whole series of math books for parents looking to supplement the school system. There are plenty of others.
There are child psychologists sharing their years of experience on how to help parents navigate their children’s progress from dependence to independence.
Thanks Stan. You're right that there's plenty of support for parents out there, as your examples show. The distinction I want to draw is between structure, support and guidance – often essential for good teaching and good parenting – and mandating one particular way of doing either. The first I'm all for. The second I'd resist even where the evidence is strong. I don’t think we can have good teaching without a degree of autonomy, and, as I point out, I don’t believe we currently have overwhelming evidence that a particular instructional method ‘works’ over all others.
Consider Shakespearean actors. Many of the best would not dream of ad-libbing in the middle of Hamlet. Yet we can still see they bring their individuality and amazing talent to delivering exactly the same words as everyone else.
The need to invent your own way in all respects maybe overrated when it comes to making a lasting impression about something important.
I think you need more than conjecture to show a problem exists with mostly sticking with a common best practice.
My point is no one thinks Ian McKellen lacks autonomy when he does Shakespeare.
The idea that you must be different, must not copy and this is autonomy is BS. Autonomy would allow you to exactly copy someone else if you know it is a good thing.
My comparison to actors not changing a script was an analogy. The point was there is far more to a delivery of words than the words themselves. It doesn’t even occur to people that great actors are giving up autonomy.
Compare this with education where the idea that people must plan their own lessons is so entrenched. Or compare it to how as a student your writing must be your own. Simply referring to someone else’s and saying this makes the point better than I could is considered insufficient.
Yet when the point is not to practice creating new works but to use the best available this is an incredibly poor use of time.
While my example of an actor using a script is just an analogy why not check what logic drives your response to this?
Is an actor not trying to engage his audience, do they not want to leave a lasting impression and raise awareness of sometimes subtle points?
Robert Frost: “There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can't move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies.” - for the zealots and the lemmings
Thanks Tony, that’s a great quote. And it’s about giving teachers the room to lay the groundwork so they can give students the prod, and avoid mandating the quail shot!
This is good stuff, well articulated. I think it's clear we are in an ideological war with ideologues who don't believe they are ideologues hiding behind the cover of 'research'. Unfortunately, the ideologues are winning the war with their domination of policy, but it's clear that most teachers smell something fishy. I give it 5.2 years until this form of structured teaching is binned.
Thanks for this. I do worry that teachers are being pushed toward something that strips out their autonomy and, in the end, doesn't improve things for them or their students. I’m hoping we can find a way beyond this in which we can genuinely embrace and see the value in all educational research – but also its limitations. We need to be careful about how we interpret findings, and there’s a difference between communicating useful methods and concluding there’s a single right way to do things. Teachers need support and access to the best evidence — but they also need the trust and space to decide what's best for their own classes.
Thank you for the thoughtful piece and sharing your writing. I’ve been learning about the instructional hierarchy - the progression of learning through four stages from acquisition to adaptation. Using this as a framework, there is room for instruction with more guidance or less depending on the learner and what they bring to the task. I agree that supporting teachers to be better able to make these professional judgments to know how to respond is key. Learning happens when thinking is effortful and we support students to connect new information to their prior knowledge. Ascertaining student prior knowledge is one challenge as is knowing your content well enough to determine if a student has enough requisite knowledge to engage productively with the task. In addition, unpacking the complexity of a task as an ‘expert’ is difficult and determining when to add or remove a scaffold seems challenging as well. We have quite a lot of room for supporting teachers to plan and respond effectively to the learners in front of them!
Thanks Lara, the instructional hierarchy is a great illustration of why this discussion really matters. An appropriate method at the acquisition stage, with clear modelling and tight prompting, isn't the right one when it comes to generalising or adapting, when students apply their knowledge to a situation they haven't been walked through first. If we tell teachers ‘maximum guidance is always the right move’ we may hamper students when they come to the later stages of the hierarchy.
And as you say, that's the hard part – ascertaining prior knowledge, knowing your content well enough to judge whether a student can engage productively, unpacking a task you've long since automated, knowing when to withdraw the scaffold. If we standardise too far, we lose the responsiveness to the students’ needs. It's because it's this complex that it needs judgement, built through lots of practice and strong feedback.
That’s the power but also the danger of a tool like the instructional hierarchy. In the right hands it's a diagnostic aid; mandated as a checklist (fluency? tick, move on…), it becomes another thing teachers are expected to use rather than something that develops their thinking. Give teachers the framework, the resources, then the space to apply it and feedback on how they got on. As you say, there's a lot of room to support that - and teachers deserve all the support they can get.
Glad to catch up with your work this evening Chris. Found myself nodding, thinking, nodding again and rethinking with this one. Really thought provoking, interesting and comprehensive article. And fascinating to hear about your interview experience; discovery learning certainly seems to be growing a rather contaminated stigma!
Taking an inverse approach to Ashman's argument that modern explicit instruction may be tending towards a more 'total instruction' is a very unique angle to take, and I very much enjoyed working my way through your thinking. Ashman's article is indeed very relevant to this discussion, who you mention makes the realistic point about what happens when viewing the unguided-direct instruction divide as a continuum; if going from the left to the middle is on the right track, why not go all the way? Your convergence on guided discovery in response reminds me a lot of a related term I've encountered in this research called 'explicit enquiry', which seems to satisfy both sides of the continuum in a similar way.
As you've very elaborately outlined, perhaps a middle ground or a hybrid combination of direct instruction and guided enquiry may be best for children's learning. But as you explained, which side of the continuum the teacher leans into more seems to highly depend on so many different factors. While notorious for their obsession with knowledge and explicit instruction, this hybrid is something I didn't get to see much in my visit to Michaela a few months ago, but have read about. The teachers value the importance of children's inquisitivity and research enquiry, but only after building a secure enough knowledge base as a foundation. So perhaps the order of teaching methods matters a lot, similar to what the KSC paper explores around novice and expert learners.
Apologies for the long comment, just had a lot to share and very much enjoyed reading, Chris!
Thanks Sam - it's great to get your take on this, especially as you've seen a far wider range of schools and practices than I have. I wrote about a Michaela imitator; you've visited the real thing, and what you describe - enquiry valued, but only once a secure knowledge base is in place - is exactly the sequencing point I think gets lost in the polarised version of this debate. That said, I think there is a push in a lot of schools towards a particular ‘correct’ way of teaching that distorts even the evidence around what works well with explicit teaching.
You're right that order matters. Part of the value of KSC is that there genuinely was poorly conducted discovery learning around at the time - I ran some of it myself early in my career, with little guidance on how to do it well. Children won't spontaneously teach themselves the literacy and numeracy they need; they need structured guidance. The real question is when we can start removing some of that scaffolding, and ultimately I think only the classroom teacher can make that call - they know their class and they know the material. The job is to make sure they're making it with balanced evidence in front of them.
The terminology is a minefield - PBL (problem- or project-based, depending who you ask), enquiry, minimally guided instruction - and lumping it all together, as KSC did, doesn't help. That said, ‘explicit enquiry’ sounds very close to the position I'm arguing we should take seriously. Thanks for the heads-up, Sam, I'll go and find some resources on it!
I would definitely agree with calling the terminology landscape a minefield - there are so many different terms that seem to orbit around a similar 'student led' angle. I think this does a disservice to teachers by further separating the research base from the teaching profession. Perhaps this school wide funnelling towards the ‘correct’ way of teaching that you mention is a consequence of schools and senior leaders trying their best to navigate the weeds of an overgrowing polarised conversation.
Definitely lots more to investigate with this topic! I'm reading Robert Pondiscio's latest piece on the limitations of the knowledge rich curriculum at the moment, which I think parallels your article quite nicely but takes a broader scope, looking at the ideological and political obstacles facing 'knowledge' advocates. Think you might enjoy: https://thenext30years.substack.com/p/why-knowledge-rich-curriculum-never
I have a lot of sympathy for senior leaders who are trying to navigate their way through the various pressures schools are under: it’s something I’m going to try and get at in my next post (where does the push towards ‘Total Instruction’ come from?).
Thanks too for the link to Robert Pondiscio’s latest. I’ve just read it – an interesting read and, as you say, certainly a different perspective than I’ve taken. Leave that one with me…
On a broader note, it’s really helped my thinking to see you describing the sheer variety of approaches there are out there, the challenges, and the contexts they take place in. It’s easy to get caught up in your own practices and assume everyone’s doing something similar. Looking forward to your next one!
I imagine there is lot of interesting history behind the idea of 'total instruction', given the quite archaic 'draconian' connotations it would naturally conjure. Looking forward to reading your ideas on this.
And I'm very grateful to hear I've been able to support your thinking on some of these topics. I think my mindset with this project is similar to yours in some respects. I'm trying my best not to take any assumptions for granted, mostly because I don't think you could find a more messy and divided professional landscape than education! So who am I to know better at this early stage?
Great to catch up with your latest Chris. Managed to book a place at BERA now so look forward to catching up in person soon
Since beginning the Substack, I’ve realised how many assumptions I hold that others don’t. One of the valuable things has been coming across so many people who have also thought deeply about these issues yet hold different views, and I think it’s made me a more careful writer (and thinker) as a result.
Places like Substack are essential for challenging the idea you need to subscribe to a particular camp or that your views on education need to divide neatly down party-political lines.
That’s great news about BERA, Sam. It’ll be fun to catch up in person and set education to rights over a coffee!
Thanks Toby – that's exactly it. A lot of what looks like deep disagreement is really about terminology and the assumptions we bring, not aims. Get past that and there's far more shared ground than the two-camps picture suggests.
To extend this thought process I see a difficulty for teachers in being responsive to unmet need as a SENCo and I can feel direct instruction creating situations in which teachers cannot be curious any more about the way the child is interacting with the learning or environment. I am struggling to bring back to teachers an adaptability or flexibility in thinking as they are becoming dependent on tightly narrated and modelled instructional practices and in observation when the very specific instructional skill is observed we hit the shout out button with no regard for if it was actually an effective moment for the skill or, more importantly whether it was necessary or effective. “We are here to see this, so this we shall see” mentality. I also feel like I learned to teach in an era of both instructional and moderately guided practice but without deliberate practice and thus I honed and refined every single day, because I worked in a school where not to do so were a considerable risk to life and limb! That is where my teaching really developed, not by being completely stifled by routine instructional approaches but by thinking hard about how to deliver well to extremely complex children during challenging interactions. I worry that the repetitive cycles that children experience throughout their school day in the way that all staff deliver using similar narrations can be boring and repetitive and that life satisfaction and enjoyment of school suffer as a result. Has this got anything to do with poor attendance and lack of engagement in our secondary schools? I sometimes hazard that it might. I like the comparator to parenting. In a family of three I have to use multiple methods as I have two sons, one of whom is Neurodivergent and requires repetitive explicit practice with highly scaffolded learning opportunities for independence. My second son requires moderate instruction with room for independence and self-reliance and my daughter prefers to lead from the bottom with complete autonomy and to seek the support she requires, when required, rather than accept explicit guidance. All three approaches are appropriate to the differing needs of my children. One size cannot fit all.
Thanks for sharing your experiences, Fran. I completely understand your worries about the observation culture you describe: when a lesson is judged on whether a particular instructional skill shows up, with no regard for whether it was the right move for that child in that moment.
You learned to teach through thinking hard about how to deliver the best for your students in very challenging situations. We put too many trainee teachers in these situations with too little support – is it any surprise we struggle to recruit and retain teachers? You were able to develop your judgement, but it’s easier to hand teachers a script and say ‘just teach it this way’.
Your family example makes the point more clearly than any study – it isn’t that explicit, scaffolded instruction is best, or autonomy the ideal; it’s that one of your sons needs the first, your daughter the second, and the skill lies in judging which is most appropriate for each. It’s that judgement that we’re in danger of removing from our education system. Even when we allow it, it isn’t clear we’re giving teachers the skills to exercise it effectively.
You ask whether this feeds into attendance and disengagement in secondary. It’s hard to prove any single way of teaching is the cause, but I don’t think we can rule out that it’s part of the issue. I looked at the data (https://www.chris-reid.co.uk/p/why-dont-students-like-school-do) and something is clearly going badly wrong. We owe it to the children in our schools to work out what that is.
Have you looked at Martin's load reduction instruction framework?
Thanks Kris – I’ve read the literature around cognitive load but Martin's instruction framework is new to me, so I appreciate the heads-up. From a very brief read, the idea of calibrating guidance to expertise and fading it towards independence as fluency grows could fit with my argument for ‘moderately guided instruction’ but I’m looking forward to reading about it more thoroughly.
As someone who bridges the worlds for cognitive science and US science standards that demand elements of student-led discovery, I find frameworks that also bridge those worlds extremely helpful. I also appreciate conversations in that space as well. So, I appreciate that work here.
Thanks Kris – the bridge-building is important work, and more space to develop those frameworks and keep those conversations going can only be a good thing. Thanks again for reading, and for putting Martin's framework on my radar.
McKinsey and Company did an analysis of PISA scores that Ollie Levell highlighted in this blog: https://www.ollielovell.com/inquiry_explicit_difference/ that showed that teacher-directed methods in many to all science lessons alongside inquiry-based methods in some to many lessons was the sweet spot for improving scores.
Thanks Pete - that's a strange coincidence because last week I was trying to remember where I'd seen that analysis and couldn't track it down, thanks for that! Ollie's post is also a great take on the discussion - it's always nice to see more nuanced explorations of the topic - particularly appreciated from the perspective of a fellow physics teacher!
Thanks for sharing this Chris, although there is a lot to respond to hear your story does remind me of an interview with a high-performing school in Victoria and I mentioned the phrase "developmental continuum" for learning and I could just feel the body language cringe in the room...
Although we don't like to think of them that way, schools are ideological spaces, and this comes out in these kinds of interactions. The good thing is if you're aware you can get a real sense of what is actually valued and like in your case, it's probably a good thing to experience rejection when the ideological differences between yourself and the school is possibly too wide to negotiate.
Thanks Tom – I think you’re right. Looking back, that interview turned out for the best, for both parties. Exposing where your sympathies lie can be awkward in the moment, but it probably leads to the right outcome.
I went in fairly naively, having spent a few years teaching at a private school. There’s a gulf between the education discussion in the private and state sectors in England – both say they use evidence and want to improve teaching, but, to borrow your phrase, they’re different ideological spaces.
The interview was a lesson for me in the terminology that schools use and the meaning behind it. I was also asked whether I was a ‘guide on the side’ or a ‘sage on the stage’ – and got that one wrong too!
How could you get that one wrong! 😂
On what you’re saying here, I have a friend who gave me some really interesting advice about interviews: don’t ask questions that polarise but seek out the interviewers position first by asking more open questions and then move from there (e.g. instead of “what football team do you support?” ask “what sports are you into?”).
Kind of feels a bit like manipulation, but I think he raised an important idea for how we tend to try and discern “in” and “out” groups quickly and how these need to be challenged.
Keep up the writing!
It's a good tactic - I'll keep it in mind!
As a teacher, you do want somewhere that feels like ‘your sort of place’ - your ideological spaces again - even if it’s hard to get a sense of from a single visit.
I feel schools should think about recruitment more openly than interviewees do, though. If they rely on polarising questions a school can end up with staff who all agree, but who then leads the change when something isn't working? Who challenges the orthodoxy? And if a school doesn't want to be challenged, how is it going to teach its students to think critically?
Anyway, more to take up another day. Thanks Tom - enjoying what's happening on The Interruption too 🙂
I think there's a lot more here to agree about than disagree!, but I'm not always following some of the arguments and suggestions, and suspect that you and I generally have been reading different literature, which would make sense given we are from very different backgrounds, no doubt, and live in different countries.
For example, I'm a little confused about what you are calling "evidence" for the purpose of this essay.
1) You cite Mayer as "evidence," but per the authors own description, it is a brief historical review of the literature plus their expert opinion which is now 21 year old. I got the part where you wanted to include it as a historical counter-point, but it feels like you cite it as more than that. Perhaps I'm just misinterpreting that.
2) you cite the Kirschner et al paper as though it's the only thing any of them ever wrote or had to say on the topic, which I was somewhat confused by? All of those authors have large bodies of work on their own and with other colleagues, and while Sweller is retired, Kirschner is still very active.
3) you seem to imply that there haven't been any well-designed studies that compared instructional approaches head on, and thus we have to turn to metanalyses to examine this, but there has been. Perhaps it's not known in the UK, but the US ran a study including 200,000 children, lasting 10 years, on which instructional approaches were the most effective. You can read more about it here, among many other places.
https://www.nifdi.org/what-is-di/project-follow-through.html
There's also a nice discussion of exactly how this experimental study was set up by one of the original researchers involved in the study here:
https://chalkandtalkpodcast.podbean.com/e/project-follow-through-direct-instructions-overlooked-success-with-marcy-stein/
4) this isn't on evidence but rather definitions. Based on how you described it, and the results of the 2011 meta-analysis you cite, which has the final line of the abstract as "The findings suggest that unassisted discovery does not benefit learners, whereas feedback, worked examples, scaffolding, and elicited explanations do." (it's paywalled and I don't have the time or energy to track it down right now). Honestly, this sounds like a description of direct, explicit instruction, not guided inquiry, so I'm a little confused as to what their ultimate findings were.
Also, I'm not totally clear on your distinction between guided inquiry and direct instruction (in the literature I'm familiar with direct instruction written with a capital D and a capital I is referring very very specifically to Engelmann's work, not the general idea of direct instruction or Rosenshine's principles, so I couldn't tell if you really meant to only talk about Engelmann-style DI, or just direct instruction generally). My understanding is that the disagreement is not about content, but about timing. Good general lower case direct explicit instruction also includes guided inquiry, it just comes later in the process, whereas your description of guided inquiry sounds like it wants to start with and center student-discovery (with some support) first and foremost, only offering explicit instruction when this approach has failed to allow students to obtain all the needed knowledge? Also, I have to respectfully object to your characterization of explicit instruction as a teaching scenario where "students are not used to having responsibility and are more comfortable being passive.' There is zero room for passivity in direct explicit instruction - it features receiving near constant feedback from the classroom/students/student, it is not just lecturing at a board.
5) you complain that direct instruction is susceptible to lethal mutation, and then go on to talk about how hard it is to get guided inquiry right, so wouldn't you think it's fair to say that the susceptibility to legal mutation argument applies to both approaches, not just one, and thus it doesn't make sense to slander one in favor of the other on these grounds?
Thanks for the interesting read.
Thanks for this Cristine- some great points here. Taking them in turn:
First, you’re right that defining and selecting evidence - whilst sometimes presented as an objective choice – inevitably has a subjective element built in. I looked at very little qualitative evidence here, for example. In 2k-ish words, I tried to be representative but ultimately couldn’t include every important contribution - as you rightly point out.
1. I cited Mayer because KSC also cited the paper, and to show it supports guided over pure discovery rather than saying anything about direct instruction or because it’s the strongest case per se. Agree it doesn’t carry my overall argument (which is that overall, I don’t think we can fairly say that direct instruction is definitely more effective than moderately guided instruction) – the meta-analyses have much more to say there.
2. Again, much of this is limited by space and all authors have much wider contributions - agreed. Point here is about what that specific paper achieved rather than the individual authors (hence citing criticisms and rebuttals too). To a degree, I wanted to show the influence of that paper specifically - the positives (we don’t do much unguided discovery now in schools, which is probably for the best) and the points I wanted to take issue with (eg the grouping of what I argued were different instructional methods under the term minimally or unguided instruction)
3. Really important point, and lots in here. First, I didn’t distinguish clearly enough between Direct Instruction (Engelmann) and (lower case) direct instruction/explicit teaching. I’ve added a footnote to correct this. The former I’ve never seen promoted, in England at least. The latter, I argue is promoted in England as the only valid instructional method, and draws on Rosenshine, cognitive load theory etc, so incorporates more flexibility and a larger evidence base than Engelmann’s DI. As I stated, I think explicit teaching is hugely valuable - I use it and it’s a key instructional tool. My point was a) sometimes we present things that aren’t explicit teaching as if they were and it was as tightly scripted as the original Engelmann DI (the ‘lethal mutations’ and ‘total instruction’ point) and b) it is sometimes presented as the only effective evidence-backed teaching tool. I wanted to dispute that. In terms of Project Follow Through, it’s a hugely valuable trial (again, added to footnote) but takes the heavily scripted Direct Instruction which wasn’t what KSC or I were referring to (again, I could have been clearer here) and none of the comparison models were moderately-guided in the sense I’m defending. There are methodological points you could take up (quite apart from the age of the study, which you rightly criticise in terms of drawing on Mayer and KSC 2006), eg schools opted in, there was as much variation within as between outcomes for different methods. DI was more consistent, but again, it was a more tightly-specified approach and implementation was more consistent etc. Obviously, there’s much more you can say, but I’ll leave that there for now.
4. a) Regarding the Alfieri et al 2011 meta-analysis; the line before the one you cited claims: ‘In contrast, analyses of 360 comparisons revealed that outcomes were favorable for enhanced discovery when compared with other forms of instruction (d = 0.30, 95% CI [.23, .36])’. And then in the discussion: ‘Although the meta-analysis indicated that the type of comparison condition did not moderate the results, note that enhanced discovery was generally better than both direct teaching and explanations provided. Thus, the construction of explanations or participation in guided discovery is better for learners than being provided with an explanation or explicitly taught how to succeed on a task, in support of constructivist claims. Analysis of the dependent measure indicated that although learners’ post-test and acquisition scores benefited from enhanced-discovery tasks, reaction times did not. This suggests that learners may take more time to find problem solutions or to perform target responses when engaged in enhanced-discovery tasks.’ Like any other study, their approach and grouping is open to criticism, but I don’t think to the extent that it invalidates the claim that ‘there is no clear winner’ between direct and moderately guided instruction, as I was arguing here.
b) Here’s my take, bringing together the various papers I’ve read. There is certainly a disagreement about when enquiry can take place, but it’s also about who does the constructing and what problem-solving is for: in explicit teaching, problem-solving follows explanation, to consolidate and transfer; in moderately guided approaches it’s also a means of learning. Direct instruction/explicit teaching also relies on the novice-expert distinction, material explicitly taught via explanation, modelling, practice, with enquiry reserved for the point expertise has been developed and mastery of the material. When enquiry does take place, it’s often relatively tightly bounded. In moderately guided instruction (eg guided discovery, structured enquiry), enquiry can happen at any point. The teacher designs sequences of tasks through which understanding is built up, not just explanations to be received – a point about instructional design, not the stronger claim that knowledge has to be discovered unaided, associated with ‘pure’ discovery learning. Problem solving is a tool for learning. Essentially, it’s concerned with the amount of support given to manage productive struggle, and that might be a way to differentiate unguided from minimally, moderately guided and direct instruction, together with ideas about error minimisation, scaffolds and level and nature of feedback at different stages. Explicit instruction is about control of information, moderately guided instruction with control of tasks. But, most of the accounts of moderately guided instruction accept that direct instruction can and probably should be included within lessons incorporating e.g. structured enquiry, so the distinction isn’t that clear.
c) I wrote: ‘teachers are losing the freedom and desire even to experiment with different methods of instruction. If students are not used to having responsibility and are more comfortable being passive, as a teacher there’s a lot less friction in simply embracing this.’ I could have worded this more clearly, because I certainly didn’t mean that direct instruction is a passive approach – well-conducted direct instruction should lead to strong and consistent cognitive engagement. I wanted to say: if students are only used to direct instruction as a teaching method, they are likely to struggle when given more responsibility for knowledge construction and there is a tendency from them to become passive in response. Even this, though, doesn’t have enough evidence to back it up. I have changed to ‘If teachers are required only to use variants of direct instruction, it is unlikely that teachers and students will be well-equipped to get the most out of moderately guided approaches like structured enquiry, even if these were encouraged. Training, feedback, stronger models and a transition period would be required to embed these in lesson – alongside rather than as a replacement for direct instruction.’ Happy to discuss further though if you still feel this overreaches, as the original did.
5. You’re right that both direct instruction and moderately guided instruction (and any other approach) are susceptible to lethal mutation. In the case of e.g. structured enquiry, over- or under-scaffolding would certainly qualify, and because there’s far less codified guidance on what good structured enquiry looks like, it’s arguably harder to spot when it’s gone wrong. My point wasn’t that direct instruction is inherently more prone to mutation than the alternatives, though, it’s that it’s being mandated in an inflexible, often unevidenced form that strips out the very teacher judgement the original approach needs to work. Direct instruction is hugely useful –which is exactly why I argue we should resist standardised versions that hollow it out. So the worry isn’t ‘DI is fragile, therefore we should follow moderately guided approaches’; it’s around mandating any method in a rigid form when the original method relied to a degree on teacher judgement for its efficacy and that judgement is being undermined. The same risk applies to moderately guided approaches, which is a reason to work out what good practice looks like there too, but not a reason to mandate that either.
Thanks again for your comments Cristine.
I really like this piece and it’s good to see more conversation about the middle ground. I’m currently teaching in the mainstream after many years in Montessori and it’s so interesting to observe the obsession with explicit instruction and quite frankly, depressing to see such a narrow view of learning rather than blending elements of both explicit instruction and less teacher-centric methods. Students definitely need to be explicitly taught some stuff but they also need some room to breathe. A big focus for me is helping students to become a bit more independent & offering some choice. I’ve written a bit about this on my own Substack. Thanks for a good read.
Thanks Kat - really good to hear the Montessori-to-mainstream comparison from someone who’s seen both from the inside. That's at the heart of it for me: not that any particular practice is poor, but the assumption that one method works for every student in every classroom. It sounds like a caricature, yet, as you say, it's the impression more and more teachers are being given. The ‘room to breathe’ you describe is exactly what gets squeezed out. I'd love to hear more about your experience and I'll definitely be reading your pieces. Thanks again, Kat.
Your comparison with parenting detracts from this piece. Where people are paid by the state to parent as in the case of foster parents there is training and licensing. For parents that are interested there is an abundance of information on how to parent- you perhaps have heard of the home schooling movement. JumpMath introduced a whole series of math books for parents looking to supplement the school system. There are plenty of others.
There are child psychologists sharing their years of experience on how to help parents navigate their children’s progress from dependence to independence.
Thanks Stan. You're right that there's plenty of support for parents out there, as your examples show. The distinction I want to draw is between structure, support and guidance – often essential for good teaching and good parenting – and mandating one particular way of doing either. The first I'm all for. The second I'd resist even where the evidence is strong. I don’t think we can have good teaching without a degree of autonomy, and, as I point out, I don’t believe we currently have overwhelming evidence that a particular instructional method ‘works’ over all others.
Consider Shakespearean actors. Many of the best would not dream of ad-libbing in the middle of Hamlet. Yet we can still see they bring their individuality and amazing talent to delivering exactly the same words as everyone else.
The need to invent your own way in all respects maybe overrated when it comes to making a lasting impression about something important.
I think you need more than conjecture to show a problem exists with mostly sticking with a common best practice.
A script in the theatre? Great idea. In the classroom? Less so. More on this in the next post though so happy to pick it up again then!
You completely missed my point.
No where did I mention a script in the classroom.
My point is no one thinks Ian McKellen lacks autonomy when he does Shakespeare.
The idea that you must be different, must not copy and this is autonomy is BS. Autonomy would allow you to exactly copy someone else if you know it is a good thing.
My comparison to actors not changing a script was an analogy. The point was there is far more to a delivery of words than the words themselves. It doesn’t even occur to people that great actors are giving up autonomy.
Compare this with education where the idea that people must plan their own lessons is so entrenched. Or compare it to how as a student your writing must be your own. Simply referring to someone else’s and saying this makes the point better than I could is considered insufficient.
Yet when the point is not to practice creating new works but to use the best available this is an incredibly poor use of time.
While my example of an actor using a script is just an analogy why not check what logic drives your response to this?
Is an actor not trying to engage his audience, do they not want to leave a lasting impression and raise awareness of sometimes subtle points?
The same point applies to musicians.
Robert Frost: “There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can't move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies.” - for the zealots and the lemmings
Thanks Tony, that’s a great quote. And it’s about giving teachers the room to lay the groundwork so they can give students the prod, and avoid mandating the quail shot!
This is good stuff, well articulated. I think it's clear we are in an ideological war with ideologues who don't believe they are ideologues hiding behind the cover of 'research'. Unfortunately, the ideologues are winning the war with their domination of policy, but it's clear that most teachers smell something fishy. I give it 5.2 years until this form of structured teaching is binned.
Thanks for this. I do worry that teachers are being pushed toward something that strips out their autonomy and, in the end, doesn't improve things for them or their students. I’m hoping we can find a way beyond this in which we can genuinely embrace and see the value in all educational research – but also its limitations. We need to be careful about how we interpret findings, and there’s a difference between communicating useful methods and concluding there’s a single right way to do things. Teachers need support and access to the best evidence — but they also need the trust and space to decide what's best for their own classes.
Thank you for the thoughtful piece and sharing your writing. I’ve been learning about the instructional hierarchy - the progression of learning through four stages from acquisition to adaptation. Using this as a framework, there is room for instruction with more guidance or less depending on the learner and what they bring to the task. I agree that supporting teachers to be better able to make these professional judgments to know how to respond is key. Learning happens when thinking is effortful and we support students to connect new information to their prior knowledge. Ascertaining student prior knowledge is one challenge as is knowing your content well enough to determine if a student has enough requisite knowledge to engage productively with the task. In addition, unpacking the complexity of a task as an ‘expert’ is difficult and determining when to add or remove a scaffold seems challenging as well. We have quite a lot of room for supporting teachers to plan and respond effectively to the learners in front of them!
Thanks Lara, the instructional hierarchy is a great illustration of why this discussion really matters. An appropriate method at the acquisition stage, with clear modelling and tight prompting, isn't the right one when it comes to generalising or adapting, when students apply their knowledge to a situation they haven't been walked through first. If we tell teachers ‘maximum guidance is always the right move’ we may hamper students when they come to the later stages of the hierarchy.
And as you say, that's the hard part – ascertaining prior knowledge, knowing your content well enough to judge whether a student can engage productively, unpacking a task you've long since automated, knowing when to withdraw the scaffold. If we standardise too far, we lose the responsiveness to the students’ needs. It's because it's this complex that it needs judgement, built through lots of practice and strong feedback.
That’s the power but also the danger of a tool like the instructional hierarchy. In the right hands it's a diagnostic aid; mandated as a checklist (fluency? tick, move on…), it becomes another thing teachers are expected to use rather than something that develops their thinking. Give teachers the framework, the resources, then the space to apply it and feedback on how they got on. As you say, there's a lot of room to support that - and teachers deserve all the support they can get.
Glad to catch up with your work this evening Chris. Found myself nodding, thinking, nodding again and rethinking with this one. Really thought provoking, interesting and comprehensive article. And fascinating to hear about your interview experience; discovery learning certainly seems to be growing a rather contaminated stigma!
Taking an inverse approach to Ashman's argument that modern explicit instruction may be tending towards a more 'total instruction' is a very unique angle to take, and I very much enjoyed working my way through your thinking. Ashman's article is indeed very relevant to this discussion, who you mention makes the realistic point about what happens when viewing the unguided-direct instruction divide as a continuum; if going from the left to the middle is on the right track, why not go all the way? Your convergence on guided discovery in response reminds me a lot of a related term I've encountered in this research called 'explicit enquiry', which seems to satisfy both sides of the continuum in a similar way.
As you've very elaborately outlined, perhaps a middle ground or a hybrid combination of direct instruction and guided enquiry may be best for children's learning. But as you explained, which side of the continuum the teacher leans into more seems to highly depend on so many different factors. While notorious for their obsession with knowledge and explicit instruction, this hybrid is something I didn't get to see much in my visit to Michaela a few months ago, but have read about. The teachers value the importance of children's inquisitivity and research enquiry, but only after building a secure enough knowledge base as a foundation. So perhaps the order of teaching methods matters a lot, similar to what the KSC paper explores around novice and expert learners.
Apologies for the long comment, just had a lot to share and very much enjoyed reading, Chris!
Thanks Sam - it's great to get your take on this, especially as you've seen a far wider range of schools and practices than I have. I wrote about a Michaela imitator; you've visited the real thing, and what you describe - enquiry valued, but only once a secure knowledge base is in place - is exactly the sequencing point I think gets lost in the polarised version of this debate. That said, I think there is a push in a lot of schools towards a particular ‘correct’ way of teaching that distorts even the evidence around what works well with explicit teaching.
You're right that order matters. Part of the value of KSC is that there genuinely was poorly conducted discovery learning around at the time - I ran some of it myself early in my career, with little guidance on how to do it well. Children won't spontaneously teach themselves the literacy and numeracy they need; they need structured guidance. The real question is when we can start removing some of that scaffolding, and ultimately I think only the classroom teacher can make that call - they know their class and they know the material. The job is to make sure they're making it with balanced evidence in front of them.
The terminology is a minefield - PBL (problem- or project-based, depending who you ask), enquiry, minimally guided instruction - and lumping it all together, as KSC did, doesn't help. That said, ‘explicit enquiry’ sounds very close to the position I'm arguing we should take seriously. Thanks for the heads-up, Sam, I'll go and find some resources on it!
I would definitely agree with calling the terminology landscape a minefield - there are so many different terms that seem to orbit around a similar 'student led' angle. I think this does a disservice to teachers by further separating the research base from the teaching profession. Perhaps this school wide funnelling towards the ‘correct’ way of teaching that you mention is a consequence of schools and senior leaders trying their best to navigate the weeds of an overgrowing polarised conversation.
Definitely lots more to investigate with this topic! I'm reading Robert Pondiscio's latest piece on the limitations of the knowledge rich curriculum at the moment, which I think parallels your article quite nicely but takes a broader scope, looking at the ideological and political obstacles facing 'knowledge' advocates. Think you might enjoy: https://thenext30years.substack.com/p/why-knowledge-rich-curriculum-never
I have a lot of sympathy for senior leaders who are trying to navigate their way through the various pressures schools are under: it’s something I’m going to try and get at in my next post (where does the push towards ‘Total Instruction’ come from?).
Thanks too for the link to Robert Pondiscio’s latest. I’ve just read it – an interesting read and, as you say, certainly a different perspective than I’ve taken. Leave that one with me…
On a broader note, it’s really helped my thinking to see you describing the sheer variety of approaches there are out there, the challenges, and the contexts they take place in. It’s easy to get caught up in your own practices and assume everyone’s doing something similar. Looking forward to your next one!
I imagine there is lot of interesting history behind the idea of 'total instruction', given the quite archaic 'draconian' connotations it would naturally conjure. Looking forward to reading your ideas on this.
And I'm very grateful to hear I've been able to support your thinking on some of these topics. I think my mindset with this project is similar to yours in some respects. I'm trying my best not to take any assumptions for granted, mostly because I don't think you could find a more messy and divided professional landscape than education! So who am I to know better at this early stage?
Great to catch up with your latest Chris. Managed to book a place at BERA now so look forward to catching up in person soon
Since beginning the Substack, I’ve realised how many assumptions I hold that others don’t. One of the valuable things has been coming across so many people who have also thought deeply about these issues yet hold different views, and I think it’s made me a more careful writer (and thinker) as a result.
Places like Substack are essential for challenging the idea you need to subscribe to a particular camp or that your views on education need to divide neatly down party-political lines.
That’s great news about BERA, Sam. It’ll be fun to catch up in person and set education to rights over a coffee!
Thanks Toby – that's exactly it. A lot of what looks like deep disagreement is really about terminology and the assumptions we bring, not aims. Get past that and there's far more shared ground than the two-camps picture suggests.