Explicit teaching in Victoria

Do Victorian government schools really use explicit teaching as a 'core component' of their teaching and learning model?

The second-largest school system in my state of Victoria, Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic Schools, recently released its Flourishing Learners position statement which advocates the science of learning, particularly its key implication for teaching practice - explicit instruction.

There is a lot of excellent material in the Statement (much of it aligns with my own work) and I encourage you to have a read of it as another example of what a system-led drive towards the science of learning can look like. Those of you familiar with my recent research (What is the Science of Learning? and Implementing the Science of Learning: Teacher experiences) will know that system-led work is key for efficiently and effectively scaling up science of learning-based practices.

But if you listen to the Victorian Department of Education, MACS’ shift towards explicit instruction is nothing new; it’s what the state system is doing. A Department spokesperson is quoted in this piece by Robyn Grace in The Age:

“Explicit teaching is a core component of the Victorian teaching and learning model and this is already being delivered in government schools.”

Is the spokesperson right?

In the most basic sense, yes. In all the ways that really matter, no.

In this post, I will make three points:

1. The definition of explicit teaching that is being used matters.

2. What is being ‘explicitly taught’ matters too.

3. The evidence base for teaching means it should be positioned as a cornerstone pedagogy, not an optional one.

To do this, I look at the following Victorian Department of Education resources, particularly the High Impact Teaching Strategies and the Pedagogical Model. These are part of the Victorian Teaching and Learning model, which is referred to in the comment from the Department spokesperson above.

In addition to my recent research, I draw on a submission I put in last October to the Victorian Upper House Inquiry into the State Education System. The Submission is wide-ranging but the parts relevant to this post are pages 25 through to 32.

Defining ‘explicit teaching’

In my recent report, I use two definitions of explicit teaching: Clark, Kirschner and Sweller (2012) and Archer and Hughes (2010).

Clark, Kirschner and Sweller:

Teachers providing explicit instructional guidance fully explain (emphasis original) the concepts and skills that students are required to learn… In a math class, for example, when teaching students how to solve a new type of problem, the teacher may begin by showing students how to solve the problem and fully explaining the how and why of the mathematics involved. Often, in following problems, step-by-step explanations may gradually be faded or withdrawn until, through practice and feedback, the students can solve the problem themselves. In this way, before trying to solve the problem on their own, students would have already been walked through both the procedure and the concepts behind the procedure (emphasis added).

Archer and Hughes:

Effective and explicit instruction can be viewed as providing a series of instructional supports or scaffolds---first through the logical selection and sequencing of content, and then by breaking down that content into manageable instructional units based on students’ cognitive capabilities (e.g., working memory capacity, attention, and prior knowledge). Instructional delivery is characterized by clear descriptions and demonstrations of a skill, followed by supported practice and timely feedback. Initial practice is carried out with high levels of teacher involvement; however, once student success is evident, the teacher’s support is systematically withdrawn, and the students move toward independent performance.

These explanations are slightly different, but what they have in common is a teacher-led process where initial instruction involves explanation of a concept or procedure and its demonstration, followed by an intentional, gradual release of response towards the student that ends in independent work.

One of the reasons that explicit instruction is so poorly understood is that sometimes only this first part (the teacher-led process of explanation and demonstration) is given the title. If you only use this part as your definition, then of course all teachers will say ‘I use explicit instruction/teaching’. After all, there’s always a place for explaining and demonstrating something - even if the ‘something’ is only a small part of a lesson, or a procedure, or incidental to the lesson objectives.

The Victorian Department of Education uses this definition from Hattie in their High Impact Teaching Strategies (2017, updated 2020¹) document:

When teachers adopt explicit teaching practices they clearly show students what to do and how to do it. Students are not left to construct this information for themselves. The teacher decides on learning intentions and success criteria, makes them transparent to students, and demonstrates them by modelling. In addition, the teacher checks for understanding, and at the end of each lesson revisits what the lesson has covered and ties it all together (Hattie, 2009).

There are three problems with this. Firstly, it overstates the significance of learning intentions and success criteria - the latter is difficult to meaningfully distinguish from the former and it can result in a lot of teacher time going around in circles wondering if this LI and SC is better than that LI and SC. Secondly, the language is procedural, focusing on ‘what to do and how to do it’, and this is not even framed in terms of procedural knowledge. Declarative knowledge is completely absent - more on that later. Thirdly, this definition limits explicit instruction to a couple of key procedures in a lesson and reducible to checklists, rather than an overall instructional framework where instructional support is gradually reduced and where independent practice and fluency are the goal.

The Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) is in the process of releasing more modules and guides aligned to its How Students Learn series. This clarification of explicit teaching is helpful. Unlike the HITS entry, it focuses on mastery, scaffolding and regular opportunities for practice, and clarifies that independent practice is a key ingredient of an explicit instruction framework:

Similarly, the definition used by Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic Schools in its Vision for Instruction is clearer than the HITS entry, particularly its acknowledgement that explicit instruction is a sequence, the importance of formative assessment, and regular review:

Both the AERO and MACS work benefit from positioning explicit teaching as a logical application of cognitive science and educational psychology insights, rather than reverse-engineering it from a list of things with a high effect size.

What is being ‘explicitly taught’

As noted earlier, the HITS definition of explicit teaching lends itself to a procedural interpretation, which all teachers would (correctly) say they use. Here are the example illustrations that accompany the HITS entry.

This one is for primary English (teaching writing). This is the example that most closely reflects an explicit instruction framework for a core competency in the subject:

This second one is different. Firstly, it’s not clear whether this ‘research project’ is meant to be a cornerstone activity (i.e. their main way of gaining knowledge about the topic) or a capstone activity (a way of demonstrating their learning about the topic but expanding on it through research). Nevertheless, the explicit teaching of bibliography writing is hardly what people would consider key domain knowledge to whichever strand of Humanities this refers to (my guess is History):

Let’s now move on to how explicit teaching is positioned in another part of the VTLM - the Pedagogical Model. Instead, how does explicit teaching fit within the illustrations of practice in this document?

It can be used for teaching Year 7 Science students about collaboration, after the teachers have minimised ‘chalk and talk’ and ‘focused on student investigation’. (There’s a mention at the end about explicit teaching the ‘subject content’ but that is clearly not the focus of the case study).

It can be used (appropriately!) for secondary school students at a special developmental school to teach them how to establish a cafe:

To be clear, I am not saying these Illustrations of explicit teaching in the HITS and PM are inherently wrong, or inappropriate to the learning area. Undoubtedly students who were taught in the manner described above would experience more success than students whose teachers just expected them to figure it (whatever the objective is) out on their own. That is a good thing.

But what I am saying is that what is being communicated by the Victorian Department of Education about explicit teaching is not domain knowledge-focused. If it’s not knowledge-focused, it cannot be based on “the logical selection and sequencing of content” (Archer and Hughes) which characterises explicit instruction.

In fairness to teachers and schools, they haven’t been given a lot to work with. The Victorian Curriculum - an adaptation of the Australian Curriculum - contains less breadth and depth than the national version in Science.² Learning First benchmarked the Science curriculum in a number of countries, and their work for Australia included the AC, VC and NSW Syllabus. Of the three, the VC fared the worst:

If the Victorian Department of Education tells its teachers that explicit teaching is only really used for skills and procedures, and its curriculum lacks enough of a knowledge focus for the specific outside-the-classroom work required for explicit instruction, it simultaneously explains why the majority of teachers think they tick the explicit teaching box and why explicit instruction is inconsistently used across schools.

Explicit instruction: you can find it, if you squint

If you go back to the reproduction of the VTLM at the top of the post, you’ll see there’s nine Practice Principles³, a five-part Pedagogical Model and 10 High-Impact Teaching Strategies. That’s a lot of complexity. When you dig into the detail, you can see contradictions, most obviously in the way the PP and PM prioritise constructivist and ‘student-centred’ teaching methods where the HITS shows the weight of evidence for explicit instruction methods.

The PP’s nine Principles each have between three and four related Actions intended to guide teacher practice. Where some of the Actions are specific and clear — such as 4.2 and 4.3, which relate to implementing scope and sequence and updating learning programs respectively — others are less clear and not as well supported by evidence; such as 1.2, 3.2 and 3.3, which all refer to teachers ‘co-designing’ with students. Some principles — for example #5, which speaks of “deep learning” as that which goes beyond “surface learning” — rely on concepts that are not clearly defined. What distinguishes ‘deep’ from ‘surface’ learning anyway? Others — such as #8: “Global citizenship is fostered through real world contexts for learning” — are not substantiated by evidence.

These are supported by the e5/5e Pedagogical Model (included again to save you the scroll):

This is clearly a pedagogical model based on inquiry learning, and the most obvious indication of that is the ‘explore’ phase is positioned before the ‘explain’ phase. This decision alone, in my view, shows pretty clearly in my view that the Victorian Department of Education doesn’t actually think explicit instruction (properly construed) is a ‘core’ element of its VTLM. But more interesting is the origin story of this model.

The PM document was published during 2020, when I was taking a break from teaching, so I didn’t see it at the time. But when I saw it last year, it triggered a memory from my time teaching when an older, experienced colleague said ‘they’re bringing back e5 again’, as an example of how everything old is new again. I felt I had come across it before, and I had - it was in my ITE textbook (published 2013) as the Victorian pedagogical model, and the textbook’s reference was 2009. I dug a little deeper - where did this thing come from? There’s no citations or research embedded in these documents, so I turned to Google. Best as I can tell, e5/5e comes from Rodger Bybee, who wrote articles in 1990 (co-authored) and 1997 about this model, which was designed for elementary school science. I don’t know how a model intended for one subject at one level of schooling has become a model for all subjects at all stages of schooling, but your guess is as good as mine.

The HITS document does a lot more to give explicit instruction its due. The explicit teaching entry contains a list of related effect sizes, including goals (covered in HIT #1), modelling (worked examples, HIT #4), and checking for understanding aligns with questioning (HIT #7) and feedback (HIT #8). Implied in the description of explicit teaching is a clear lesson structure (HIT #2). Therefore, half the HITS relate to explicit teaching - but that’s one half of one document that pales in size to newer entrants to the VTLM, which contradict it.

Less menu, more food pyramid

To conclude, let’s go back to our Departmental spokesperson:

“Explicit teaching is a core component of the Victorian teaching and learning model and this is already being delivered in government schools.”

At best, you could say that explicit teaching is a core component of the HITS. Even then, the pick-what-you-like menu approach of the HITS suggests that explicit teaching is no more effective than the other strategies and that pairing, say, ‘setting goals’ (HIT #1) with inquiry learning will be just as effective as pairing it with explicit instruction.

But explicit instruction is certainly not a core component of the rest of the Model (notably the Practice Principles and Pedagogical Model) which instead embrace tired and contradictory language around engagement, student-centred teaching and inquiry learning.

Where explicit instruction is illustrated in these documents, the focus is on procedures or processes rather than domain-specific knowledge. The Victorian Curriculum, which I only briefly mentioned, is also not designed to support explicit instruction of a well-sequenced, knowledge-focused curriculum.

If explicit instruction were to really represent a ‘core component’ of the Victorian Teaching and Learning model, explicit teaching ought to be positioned as cornerstone pedagogy, containing multiple high-impact strategies which, applied together, drive superior learning outcomes. I suspect it would also require a thorough overhaul of the Victorian Curriculum.

What is the alternative? The science of learning, upon which the work of AERO, MACS and the Strong Beginnings review all rest, puts human cognition - how students learn - at the cornerstone of how teachers should teach. If HITS is like a menu, then instead we should have a food pyramid approach, where the science of learning and its associated practices are at its base: not the whole diet, but the fundamentals.

1. I happen to have a hard copy of the 2017 version (which I was given in my first year of teaching and kept), whereas the 2020 update is the only one you can now find online. I did spend a little while combing through the two to see what had changed. I could only find one change: the original included the effect size for Reading Recovery, quietly removed for the revised version. Yet another way the Victorian Department of Education has tried to memory-hole its previous advocacy for balanced literacy.

2. Maybe one day if I have lots of time on my hands, I can do a comparison of the AC and VC in History, ahem, Humanities.

3. These seem to basically act as Victorian-specific Professional Standards for Teaching, but are simultaneously more detailed and worse than the Australian version.