Knowledge-rich curriculum and direct instruction go hand in hand

I woke up today to a wonderful surprise. Daniel Buck of the Fordham Institute has written a favorable review of Just Tell Them, which has now gone out to the thousands of people who receive these e-mails in their inboxes. Something I never thought I’d see in my career was Buck’s suggestion that my book complements the work of E.D. Hirsch (I’m a superfan) in that a knowledge-rich curriculum and direct instruction depend upon each other.

Buck is right to describe how powerful content and speedy delivery go hand in hand. If you use efficient and effective instructional methods—like those described in my book—but choose to impart a knowledge-poor curriculum, you’re simply teaching kids worthless things in very little time. I’ve seen this in schools that spent inordinate amounts of time hammering test-taking strategies and ‘Find the Main Idea’ for random snippets of texts (i.e., this podcast). This ultimately fails because you can’t comprehension-strategy or test-prep your way out of a knowledge problem. It also leads to a rather shallow education, devoid of what makes the world beautiful and interesting.

If you have a knowledge-rich curriculum but a poor delivery system, such as through inquiry projects, you end up merely exposing kids to interesting ideas or experiences. Incidental and unsystematic encounters with the content tend to result in ‘busy’ classrooms, but scratch the surface, and there are few kids who can tell you anything new or sophisticated about the topic. No matter how ‘engaged’ these students appear, it takes modeling, practice, and feedback to embed facts and skills into long-term memory—the building blocks for future learning. You can choose to waste a lot of time delaying the model—asking lots of cheeky probing questions and generating unnecessary ambiguity—or you can just tell them so you can get to the cool part where they are recruited to think critically about what you just said.

Unfortunately, I was trained to eschew both knowledge and direct instruction in favor of developing the child’s inner talents and motivations. I spent the first several years of my teaching career in the worst of both worlds: asking students what they wanted to learn about and allowing them to determine how, when, and with whom they wanted to learn it. What a toxic combination.

Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching is available on Amazon. I encourage you to pick it up and drop me an e-mail so that I can bring the message of this book to your school.