Explicit Teaching: A Podcast and a Webinar

Training opportunity approaching!!! I am hosting a free instructional coaching webinar on November 25, 2024. Sign up here and join me and special guests to learn about Steplab’s platform and approach to responsive coaching.

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Several people have asked me recently if explicit teaching and structured learning is making a comeback. I cannot be sure, because the people who invite me to things are typically the same people who already have a pretty good idea of the research and arguments in support of explicit teaching and structured learning.

I don’t often get a chance to meet with schools that have no interest in this stuff, not since I made the decision to avoid working in schools that are fully entrenched in romantic ideology. And even many of them were not teachers, but administrators in central district buildings, far away from where the action is. All it takes, as my school district demonstrated during the subbing shortage after COVID-19, is to force these folks to sub a few classes with actual children present. The transformation from guide-on-the-side to sage-on-the-stage, in these cases, was practically immediate.

I have a few media appearances to share with you today. The first is a webinar I did for the Reading League around cognitive load theory and explicit instruction as it relates to literacy. The argument I make at the beginning is that if we don’t understand how the mind processes and retains information, we will continue to design instruction blindly. The proof that this is currently happening is in how classrooms are teaching phonics explicitly and systematically, but other elements of literacy (as well as math, social studies, and science, etc.) implicitly and unsystematically. Without the science of learning, there are no guiding principles to filter for nonsense.

The second is a podcast that I recorded almost immediately after I presented at The Festival of Education USA at St. Andrew’s in Potomac, Maryland. It’s only 13 minutes, but it covers a lot of ground. A lot of mutual admiration between the interviewer (Glenn Whitman; a stand-up lad) and myself shows through – have a listen!

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