The Question Is Whether They Learned

When I first learned of the “no excuses” charter school movement, often associated with the techniques of Teach Like a Champion, my gut said no.

Snap snap. Give her some shine. Waiting on one. Waiting on none. Tracking me. 3, 2, 1, go.

On the vintage YouTube videos of the time, it came across as too fast, too regimented, and too prescriptivist for my creative soul. Even today, I am very careful about how I contextualize and preview videos when I use them in my presentations, knowing that they can equally turn on and turn off teachers to adopting effective practices.

But once I understood the underlying logic of ambitious, rigorous explicit teaching: cognitive load theory, retrieval practice, the relentless focus on maximizing academic learning time — the aesthetics became less important. In fact, my eyes began to see something altogether different than what they previously were able to see. And when I actually tried some of these techniques, even the dreaded Cold Call and SLANT, the kids took to it without a single complaint. The result was a classroom that hummed with productivity, and my results indicated they were learning at a pace that previous cohorts of my students never experienced.

So I updated my views.

My relationship with scripted instruction followed a similar arc. A teacher reading from a manual seemed to put something artificial between them and their students: a wall between the human being doing the teaching and the human beings being taught. I tipped my hat to scripted Direct Instruction programs and their fifty years of research, but I hesitated to adopt them wholesale, worried they might “de-professionalize” teachers by turning them into delivery machines.

Then one day, I found some DI programs sitting on the shelves of my school collecting dust. With some intensive training from NIFDI, I ran Direct Instruction as a daily intervention for the hardest students. Their confidence transformed overnight, and their expected math growth tripled on external tests. The evidence in front of my face was difficult to dismiss.

The people who hold firm opinions about these methods without having used them to move real numbers occupy a peculiar position. Whether or not these methods actually work is almost beside the point — there is simply something “off” about it to them, and that feeling alone is treated as sufficient grounds for dismissal.

I get it — I was once in the same boat — but seeing huge impacts on the very kids the system deems unteachable has a way of dismantling the assumptions you’ve built your identity around.

What I’ve arrived at is this: the evidence-based perspective has no aesthetic preferences. Rows or bean bags, scripts or booklets, apps or textbooks or chalk on a blackboard. The question that matters is whether the children learned. The evidence-based perspective has no sacred cows — if new evidence emerges showing another method is more effective, the ethical choice is to adopt it, regardless of how it “looks” or the popularity it currently holds.

Which brings me to Mr. Q.

To be fair to Mr. Q, I will fabricate some elements of his story, but let’s just say he was one of the weakest math teachers I’ve observed in all my time observing math teachers. His lessons were boring, meandering, and hard to follow. His students were disengaged, often miserable, and they hated his guts. He was not a good teacher, and administrators would spend most of their time dealing with the fallout — suspensions, parent calls, kids bouncing in and out of the hallway — that his lessons reliably produced.

He soon came to know this himself. In order to preserve some dignity — but also because he was a bit of a data nerd — he started experimenting with different approaches. He came to hypothesize that technology could teach his students better than he could, so he put his kids on math apps and monitored that system obsessively: tracking progress, manually assigning interventions, adjusting the program based on patterns he noticed. He ran internal A/B comparisons between students on the app and students in his teacher-led instruction. Nothing rigorous and peer-reviewed, but systematic enough to take seriously. His contention was that the kids learned more when he wasn’t teaching them.

I looked at the data — somewhat tasked, it should be said, with disproving it and getting him back in front of the class. He was right: the data showed double, triple, sometimes quadruple the progress on the app versus in his lessons. Behavior problems largely disappeared as well. The time students had previously spent shouting and throwing snacks across the room was now spent heads-down, headphones on, doing focused computer-based instruction. The normal chaos of his classroom had been replaced with something that sort of functioned.

Still, I took it upon myself to work with him intensively, certain that the explicit teaching practices I’d found so effective were transferable. I was a pretty good instructional coach, and I expected to make quick gains. But man, did I fail. Despite all my efforts, I couldn’t get him to explain things clearly, check for understanding frequently, or project any confidence in the room. If anything, he was a little afraid of the kids. Meanwhile his app system, which we kept running as a pseudo-control group, continued to outperform our teacher-led instruction group, as well as — and I am telling the god-honest truth — all the other math teachers in that sad little building.

Mr. Q, perhaps the weakest teacher in that school, had students who were learning more than students in stronger teachers’ classrooms. There are simple explanations: the apps allowed students to learn at level and respond more frequently, while giving Mr. Q the tools to monitor progress, adjust in real time, and tie performance directly to grades. But the point is this: he built something that worked around his own limitations for the benefit of kids.

The standard response to a case like this is to wave it away: he should’ve been fired, technology sucks, the real lesson here is better teacher prep, higher quality materials, stronger leadership, yada yada. And of course better teachers with better training and better support produce better outcomes. That observation is not wrong, but it sure does ignore the reality of the situation.

In the education system in my state, Mr. Q cannot be fired. He’s not going anywhere. Children are going to be assigned to the Mr. Q’s classrooms of the world regardless of what anyone thinks should ideally happen. The question is what we do for real, living children — the ones who exist right now, in that and similar rooms, who aren’t learning diddly squat, and who are held hostage to persistent disruption and chronically low expectations.

Answering that question honestly requires accepting some uncomfortable things. That teacher variance is real, and not always correctable through the means realistically available to most schools. That in some circumstances, children would learn more from a high schooler with a script or a well-designed technology platform than from a credentialed adult standing in front of a whiteboard. That we care far more about the comfort of adults and the preservation of the system as it exists than whether students actually learn.

I don’t hold up Mr. Q’s classroom as a model. But children walked into that room, sat down in front of a screen, and left having learned more than they would have otherwise. The ideological hand-wave — fire him, hire better, strengthen the profession — doesn’t help a single person. The pragmatist in me says we should be honest about the scale and severity of the problem and do something about it, even when the solution doesn’t look the way we’d like.