Like the word ‘learning’, the word ‘teaching’ can be defined in different ways, and the various definitions can reveal the differing views people have about how teachers should teach. In the book, ‘The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers’, the teachers at Michaela School see the essence of teaching as effective knowledge transmission – Olivia Dyer’s call to teachers everywhere to ”Just tell ’em!” is a kind of battle cry to teach knowledge explicitly. In ‘Embedded Formative Assessment’, Dylan Wiliam defines teaching as ‘the engineering of effective learning environments’ – this definition describes teaching in terms of its impact on learning. And then there are those who advocate ‘discovery’ learning, for whom teaching is about staying out of the way a lot, so that learners construct some or all of the learning for themselves. Advocates of discovery learning may sit at one end of the spectrum of views of what teaching should be, whilst at the other end we have the E.D. Hirsch view, espoused by the many educationalists for whom ‘Knowledge is Power’, that teaching is really about the imparting of powerful knowledge. If those are two opposite ends of the teaching spectrum, perhaps most teachers would place themselves somewhere in between.
I am very much in the powerful knowledge camp. I do think that teaching is about creating situations in which people learn effectively, but I feel strongly that the best way to do that is to be absolutely clear about what students should be learning, and then to teach that knowledge explicitly – some people refer to this as direct instruction; I prefer the term explicit instruction.
I think the most concise and convincing case for explicit instruction is made by Clark, Kirschner and Sweller in their 2012 article, ‘Putting students on the path to learning. The case for fully guided instruction’, in which they say, ‘while experts often thrive without much guidance, nearly everyone else thrives when provided with full, explicit instructional guidance (and should not be asked to discover any essential content for themselves).’ In other words, ‘Just tell ’em!’ Almost everyone in schools, if not everyone, is a novice and benefits most, therefore, from explicit instruction.
Explicit instruction includes:
- Telling them: presenting, explaining, instructing, asking questions of everyone, thinking aloud, using worked examples, checking for understanding; making sure to teach small amounts at a time, in order to manage cognitive load
- Getting them to do lots of practice; using scaffolds and models to help; checking for understanding, providing feedback; re-teaching where necessary
- When the vast majority, at least, have understood, getting them to practise independently – ideally individually – whilst providing support and feedback and extension work
- Providing multiple opportunities for later retrieval practice – for example the next lesson, the following week, a month later and periodically thereafter – to help the learning to stick. This last step, frequent retrieval practice, can often be missed as teachers have to plough through vast swathes of content, for example, in a KS4 GCSE specification, but it is essential for effective learning – if students can’t retrieve it later when they need it, they haven’t learned it.
This is essentially an I do-we do-you do model of teaching and learning, that places teacher-led instruction and the active participation of the learners at the heart of the teaching process.
Teaching and learning techniques should, of course, be matched to content. In DT, for example, there is plenty of theory to learn, but students also practise by making things; and teachers teaching football in P.E. are bound to include work with a ball. But there are features of good teaching that are common across subjects, such as those outlined in the bullet-point list above, and teachers who typically use these features in their teaching give their students the best chance to make their learning stick. The common features of teaching, taken together, define the school’s teaching approach; this is why we have the Hinchingbrooke Approach to Teaching.
