How to Not Waste Your Only Life Debating Direct Instruction and Inquiry-Based Learning

You can start not wasting your only life today!

In 2006, three researchers published a critique of a fairly large basket of pedagogies that, for the sake of shorthand, and because it is the name that has stuck, I’ll call “inquiry-based learning.” That critique precipitated a response from advocates of inquiry-based learning and then a response to their response from the original researchers. Smash cut to several months ago and the same groups of researchers, along with their academic children, are critiquing and counter-critiquing one another again¹.

The winners in all of this are certainly the researchers—both groups. They have burrowed deeper into their scholarly mouseholes and established themselves more securely as sentries. I did not spend a long time in academia but this quickly struck me as one of a dwindling number of paths to career success.

Other winners? Academic publishers who likely never see more clicks than when they host these kinds of scholarly food fights. Another winner: the online commentariat, the partisans of both inquiry-based learning and direct instruction who are happily caught up in the backwash of this academic debate and refresh its energy on Twitter, their podcasts, newsletters, and elsewhere on the internet.

Notable groups who are not winners: teachers and students. But neither are they losers. The vast majority of teachers and students do not consume, use, or experience research in the ways these scholars hope.

I would have counted myself as part of the online commentariat in this debate as recently as a few years ago, but I have found a way through and out. I have turned my sword into a plowshare. If you are, right now, spending your only life debating direct instruction and inquiry-based learning, here are several realizations I have had that might help you redirect your passions as well.

Teachers will do what works for them and they won’t do what doesn’t work for them.

It is true that “what works” in a very well-defined context is an empirical question. You can study it. You can referee two different teaching approaches using assessment scores, survey results, classroom observations, meta-analyses—all the usual tools.

“What works for these specific teachers,” however, is not an empirical question. It is decided by those teachers based on their individual capacities, their available resources, their school and district policies, their collaborators, whether their students just returned to school from a worldwide pandemic, etc.

These scholars imagine their research functions like legislation, that if they would only produce an airtight case, control all of the variables except one, and produce a scholarly QED, that teachers and their practices would fall into line. Of course that isn’t how any of this works.

Teachers will only do work they can imagine themselves doing and only with support doing it.

You can consider this idea an invitation. It is an invitation to log out of the debate and log into a program of supporting teacher imagination and teacher practice instead. It is an invitation to take your best ideas and make them fault tolerant, to make generous assumptions about teachers, to assume good faith especially, but to assume as little extra capacity as possible.

If a teacher notes that, for them, direct instruction seems to produce disengaged students learning small ideas that don’t seem to transfer particularly well across contexts, you can point to a meta-analysis and say, “Well the research says,” but this will not be responsive to the teacher’s needs.

If a teacher notes that, for them, inquiry-based learning seems to produce activities that interfere with rather than produce learning, that their students seem to retain the experience of learning rather than the learning itself, it does not benefit the teacher to point to a different meta-analysis or to make an abstract appeal to the needs of the modern workforce.

Teachers are inviting you to take them at their word and on their own terms and work from that place together.

“Direct Instruction” and “Inquiry-Based Learning” are overloaded concepts. 

Those terms don’t describe the ways teachers actually teach and debating them is consequently an exercise in pretending unreality is reality. I think this is obvious to most onlookers even though we’re all supposed to pretend otherwise.

Who would win in a fight between Boba Fett and Kylo Ren? I don’t know! Similarly, I do not know whether Direct Instruction™ or Inquiry Based Learning™ is best for classroom teaching.

Every one of these critiques and counter-critiques includes a paragraph where one group tries to define their preferred instructional model and then the opposing model. Invariably, they’ll use a fine brush and a full palette to render their own model and then a gigantic paint roller to render the opposition. The opposition will respond, “No no, we aren’t like that, we are much more nuanced than that actually,” and then do the exact same in reply.

Success as an educational researcher requires you to stake out, name, and defend particular claims, and the correspondence of those claims to observable reality is often optional. The median teacher feels no such obligation and selects from a basket of pedagogies that lack any of the coherence or dogmatism that motivates these groups of researchers.

This realization is liberating. You can reject these monolithic ideas and choose instead to take classroom teachers on their own terms—What are your goals for your teaching? What has worked for you? Do I have any ideas that can help? Is there any research that can help?—and work together.

You can take good ideas wherever you find them.

Occasionally both sets of partisans will stumble into some common ground. You’ll see them both occasionally quote Alfred North Whitehead approvingly. David Ausubel too. Both sets of researchers seem to agree on one thing, though it isn’t always easy to find in their critiques and counter-critiques:

Successful instruction starts with student knowledge, with whatever students know now.

This is a very helpful first principle. At its essence, teaching is the work of inviting and developing existing student knowledge. When I start from that kind of premise, rather than from partisan obligation, I can take good ideas wherever I find them.

From partisans of Inquiry-Based Learning™, I can take ideas for inviting student knowledge. I can take activity designs that draw out of students what they already know, activity designs that activate inert knowledge and yield mental resources a teacher can use in their direct instruction.

From proponents of Direct Instruction™, I an take ideas for developing student knowledge. I can take designs for teacher instruction that respect the cognitive architecture of the brain, principles for using multimedia in learning, and the ways all of the above can help students productively re-organize their existing ideas.

See? That was easy! You can change your life right now by starting with broad, sturdy premises about learning that cut across these branded, self-limiting ideas. 

The partisans of those branded ideas do not always appreciate this intellectual promiscuity, I have found. “You can’t do that,” they say. “If our ideas are good for one aspect of your work, then they are good for all aspects of your work.”

To this you can reply, “Ha ha oh no. That is your business, not mine.” 

They would like you to choose which is the greatest fictional villain of all time—Joker or Magneto—to which you can reply, “Ha ha oh no. I find them both quite compelling.”

I realize I am maybe that guy right now, declaring that the thing you care a lot about is maybe not worth all that care. I am. I am saying that the intellectual ground many of you are spending your life naming, studying, and protecting is actually not all that arable, and that if you’re willing to look, it’s actually adjacent to some beautiful vistas, fertile soil, and interesting neighbors. No one is making you self-limit and thought-terminate in this way. Especially if you are not on the tenure track, if you are not right now seeking an endowed chair in the building closest to the center of campus, there is very little incentive for you to do this to yourself. You can stop at any moment and spend your only life doing something else—something better for teachers and students—instead.

1. If you really want a summary, read Jill Barshay’s, but this post is not for you if you do.