You are correct: teachers will do what they are confident doing AND what has produced the best results for their students previously. Also, teachers who have been around for a few decades often cop it because they are "inflexible" but they are able to articulate to me that "we did this years ago, under the name of ______" and they will/won't embrace that thing based on their (legitimate) past experiences.
I also had a good laugh about those in ivory towers trying to get the best seat possible within their institutions. That said, I've found that those within higher education who GENUINELY CARE about outcomes for students and about developing teacher competencies are APPALLED at this kind of criticism as they have spent decades trying to help teachers move out of their snail shells of knowledge/experience and into the greater garden of learning, and they fear that criticism of academia will send the snails into full blown retreat. Fair enough.
What resonated most with me is the double dipping approach. It's true! I utilise both pedagogical approaches. You can't teach students to be adaptable, collaborative learners without inquiry based learning. They will never excel at problem solving if you are just using direct instruction approaches, and that's not ok. Likewise, I find that most students benefit from a measure of routine and of meaningful explicit teaching. Ironically for the inquiry based learning camp, you need to be able to learn by direct instruction in order to excel in higher education... The two can work in tandem
Very thoughtful and illuminating. I hadn't ever considered the research to practice industry in quite this light because I've always attacked it from the practice side. It makes me more sympathetic to the other POV, even though it tends not to resonate with me. When my book of writing curriculum came out I was advised to try to set up a controlled experiment that could prove the curriculum "works" because being able to point to that evidence would make for a much easier sales pitch at the school/district level, but after much thinking I couldn't even conceive an experiment that I could believe in as meaningful. The student/teacher experience is qualitative, not quantitative and the "success" of the curriculum relies on the teacher/student dynamic, rather than something inherent to the curriculum itself. Don't get me wrong, I think the curriculum is great, but having developed through the work of teaching I knew that really, the curriculum itself was a relatively small part of the equation and to champion it as the solution to whatever problems I was talking about was less than true.
Indeed, it got me exactly nowhere, but I did enjoy the time while I was there. I learned sort of late that it was not a welcoming place to the kind of teaching I wanted to do.
This articulates really nicely a lot of the things I have been feeling for years, since leaving academia and returning to the classroom, about why these debates just aren't very relevant to teacher practice.
One thing I think you miss, though, is the extent to which the demand for all these ideologically-based, "research" based "systems" of instruction comes not from the researchers themselves, but from admin-- school leaders, district people, etc. They are often the ones pushing for simplistic narratives of "what works" because it gives them an objective "research-based" rationale they can use to defend their decision-making.
You write: "Teachers will do what works for them and they won’t do what doesn’t work for them."
What's the phrase that describes "Nominal Compliance?" Do you see/hear that often among teachers?
They say something like:
"XYZ Curriculum or ABC pedagogy doesn't work for me, but I can't straight up openly reject my school district's choice. I show up at the training or department meeting but roll my eyes along with some other teachers. I do some of what works for me, but also some of what doesn't work so well but is required by my boss."
Or as Deborah Meier once said, "Sometimes, you stand in front of the class and lecture for a while."
I'm obviously on #TeamInquiry as an over-arching stance, but that doesn't mean that there aren't moments where you teach kids how to do a thing by showing them how to do it.
This is where Seymour Papert's theory of constructionism becomes so important. This is a matter of stance. There is nothing wrong with instruction, just in overvaluing it. The way one teaches is fundamentally guided by how they believe learning occurs. Constructionists believe that the learner is central to the learning process and instructionists believe that learning is the result of having been taught or due to an external factor like a specific textbook or curriculum.
Deb Meier would agree that every teacher would benefit from standing at the front of the class and lecturing less. I marvel at the teachers who speak breathlessly from bell-to-bell in the apparently heartfelt belief that this produces a uniform affect, if only the kids would just hang on my every word.
Oh, and "inquiry" is a terrible choice for the opposite of direct instruction.
I like the "Inquiry" approach (for want of a better name), I like drawing out what students already know, scaffolding a lesson so they don't need much direct instruction from me, helping only when they're really stuck. But I can tell you how some students perceive this: "This guy isn't very helpful, maybe he doesn't even care if I succeed or fail." And that's a big problem.
Occasionally, a student will tell me about one of my colleagues who they had for an earlier class: "He's wonderful, he showed us EXACTLY how to do the problems!" And my heart sinks a bit, because I know they're going to be mightily disappointed with me.
Anyway, what I'm working on now is how to be more systematic in signaling "I care" that isn't "Here's how you do the problems." I need to be more intentional about this than the direct-instruction-style teacher, because they're already signaling "I care" in their teaching style. Mostly, what I'm doing is a LOT of follow-up, like "I noticed you weren't in class today, how are you doing?" Because even if you're using the teaching style that you KNOW is best for the students, it doesn't benefit them if they get discouraged and drop out because they think you don't care about them.
I will just point out that in a post ostensibly about how the argument between inquiry and direct instruction is pointless, we have a comment from someone who KNOWs inquiry is better but who also lists a number of the obvious downsides, without any apparent irony.
This is just one reason why the debate is important. It raises awareness that what you KNOW may not be the truth but the result of various biases.
I doubt many of those feigning boredom with this debate are truly disinterested, they are proponents of inquiry — like Dan has been for many years — who know they’ve lost and are trying to take their football home with them so nobody else can play.
What they meant is that even if you are using a teaching style that you are convinced is the "best" for the students, it doesn't benefit them if they get the impression that you don't care about them.
Spot on! Especially the idea that "what works for me" as a teacher is very ill-defined and customized to the individual instructor. Your title aligns well with Rick Defour's motto: "The genius of AND the tyranny of OR." Parents never get caught up in a debate on whether to feed their kids water OR vegetables... they go with AND in that situation... so why do these silly debates exist in education?
Just look at John Hattie's Visible Learning list of effect sizes. At first it appears to settle the debate with Direct Instruction at 0.6 and Inquiry-Based Learning at 0.4... until you pull back and look at a few more strategies on the list:
Cognitive Task Analysis 1.29
Classroom Discussion 0.82
Problem-Solving Teaching 0.68
Metacognitive Strategies 0.60
Direct Instruction 0.60
Inquiry-Based Learning 0.40
If you consider that an effect size of 0.40 represents a year's worth of growth, then Hattie's meta-analysis claims that all of the above strategies work, and that maybe the choice of the proper instructional tool should be based on what is being taught and assessed at the time, and not on an ideological stance.
Yes, there are a lot of contradictory results when u take a deeper look at Hattie. U can add the JIgSaw Method = 1.20 - a cooperative problem solving approach.
Interestingly, there are similar contradictions for the Reading Wars-
Phonics = 0.48 & Whole Language = 0.14 but Reading Recovery = 0.47
But, Hattie's method has been thoroughly pulled apart in the peer review -
I think the simple question of, what are your goals and how can I support is underrated for coaching. Curiosity and connections are things I value in the classroom and I believe both of those can be done in either setting.
The split between the two approaches is somewhat more nuanced than the partisans would like to think. While an inquiry-based approach has the benefits of students having ownership of their learning, teachers must not only design a workable framework for the inquiry—questions, learning target, whatever—they must monitor students progress on that learning process. And while dealing with frustration is a key skill for students to gain, ultimately education spaces are time-constrained, so ultimately direct instruction has a necessary role in, among other things, providing context and in bridging gaps or clearing up misunderstandings as students pursue their learning.
I agree with the folly of arguing these issues with ill-informed zealots. However, there is a rising tide of fundamentalism, masquerading as science, that is going to make teachers' lives a whole lot worse and erode whatever confidence is left in public schools. The "Science of ____" bullshit is coming from the right as a way to ban books, whitewash history, and teach the mechanics of reading absent meaning AND a creepy paternalism from the left seeking to help other people's children win at a game they rigged for their own kids' benefit.
It IS GOING TO GET VERY VERY VERY UGLY VERY QUICKLY and I cannot be the only person fighting these phonatics online and IRL.
I also concur with your critique of education academia. It's typically embarrassing at best.
That said, the bothsidesism and "teachers are gonna do what teachers are gonna do" stuff" is at best problematic. It suggests a moral relativism, intransigence, lack of leadership, and malfeasance.
Imagine what would be possible if teacher education once again focused on the art of teaching.
"Successful instruction starts with student knowledge, with whatever students know now." THIS!
and
"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." YEP
I missed this article originally, but found it after musing if X had a mute button just for references to the debates you cite. I paraphrase this Dylan Wiliam quote in pd frequently:Everything works somewhere, nothing works everywhere. The better question, then is, “ Under what conditions does this work?”
I really enjoyed reading this!
You are correct: teachers will do what they are confident doing AND what has produced the best results for their students previously. Also, teachers who have been around for a few decades often cop it because they are "inflexible" but they are able to articulate to me that "we did this years ago, under the name of ______" and they will/won't embrace that thing based on their (legitimate) past experiences.
I also had a good laugh about those in ivory towers trying to get the best seat possible within their institutions. That said, I've found that those within higher education who GENUINELY CARE about outcomes for students and about developing teacher competencies are APPALLED at this kind of criticism as they have spent decades trying to help teachers move out of their snail shells of knowledge/experience and into the greater garden of learning, and they fear that criticism of academia will send the snails into full blown retreat. Fair enough.
What resonated most with me is the double dipping approach. It's true! I utilise both pedagogical approaches. You can't teach students to be adaptable, collaborative learners without inquiry based learning. They will never excel at problem solving if you are just using direct instruction approaches, and that's not ok. Likewise, I find that most students benefit from a measure of routine and of meaningful explicit teaching. Ironically for the inquiry based learning camp, you need to be able to learn by direct instruction in order to excel in higher education... The two can work in tandem
Very thoughtful and illuminating. I hadn't ever considered the research to practice industry in quite this light because I've always attacked it from the practice side. It makes me more sympathetic to the other POV, even though it tends not to resonate with me. When my book of writing curriculum came out I was advised to try to set up a controlled experiment that could prove the curriculum "works" because being able to point to that evidence would make for a much easier sales pitch at the school/district level, but after much thinking I couldn't even conceive an experiment that I could believe in as meaningful. The student/teacher experience is qualitative, not quantitative and the "success" of the curriculum relies on the teacher/student dynamic, rather than something inherent to the curriculum itself. Don't get me wrong, I think the curriculum is great, but having developed through the work of teaching I knew that really, the curriculum itself was a relatively small part of the equation and to champion it as the solution to whatever problems I was talking about was less than true.
That kind of modesty would get you nowhere in the academy!
Indeed, it got me exactly nowhere, but I did enjoy the time while I was there. I learned sort of late that it was not a welcoming place to the kind of teaching I wanted to do.
This articulates really nicely a lot of the things I have been feeling for years, since leaving academia and returning to the classroom, about why these debates just aren't very relevant to teacher practice.
One thing I think you miss, though, is the extent to which the demand for all these ideologically-based, "research" based "systems" of instruction comes not from the researchers themselves, but from admin-- school leaders, district people, etc. They are often the ones pushing for simplistic narratives of "what works" because it gives them an objective "research-based" rationale they can use to defend their decision-making.
Helpful addition here. Commenting for extra visibility.
Good stuff Dan.
Question:
You write: "Teachers will do what works for them and they won’t do what doesn’t work for them."
What's the phrase that describes "Nominal Compliance?" Do you see/hear that often among teachers?
They say something like:
"XYZ Curriculum or ABC pedagogy doesn't work for me, but I can't straight up openly reject my school district's choice. I show up at the training or department meeting but roll my eyes along with some other teachers. I do some of what works for me, but also some of what doesn't work so well but is required by my boss."
Or as Deborah Meier once said, "Sometimes, you stand in front of the class and lecture for a while."
I'm obviously on #TeamInquiry as an over-arching stance, but that doesn't mean that there aren't moments where you teach kids how to do a thing by showing them how to do it.
This is where Seymour Papert's theory of constructionism becomes so important. This is a matter of stance. There is nothing wrong with instruction, just in overvaluing it. The way one teaches is fundamentally guided by how they believe learning occurs. Constructionists believe that the learner is central to the learning process and instructionists believe that learning is the result of having been taught or due to an external factor like a specific textbook or curriculum.
Deb Meier would agree that every teacher would benefit from standing at the front of the class and lecturing less. I marvel at the teachers who speak breathlessly from bell-to-bell in the apparently heartfelt belief that this produces a uniform affect, if only the kids would just hang on my every word.
Oh, and "inquiry" is a terrible choice for the opposite of direct instruction.
I like the "Inquiry" approach (for want of a better name), I like drawing out what students already know, scaffolding a lesson so they don't need much direct instruction from me, helping only when they're really stuck. But I can tell you how some students perceive this: "This guy isn't very helpful, maybe he doesn't even care if I succeed or fail." And that's a big problem.
Occasionally, a student will tell me about one of my colleagues who they had for an earlier class: "He's wonderful, he showed us EXACTLY how to do the problems!" And my heart sinks a bit, because I know they're going to be mightily disappointed with me.
Anyway, what I'm working on now is how to be more systematic in signaling "I care" that isn't "Here's how you do the problems." I need to be more intentional about this than the direct-instruction-style teacher, because they're already signaling "I care" in their teaching style. Mostly, what I'm doing is a LOT of follow-up, like "I noticed you weren't in class today, how are you doing?" Because even if you're using the teaching style that you KNOW is best for the students, it doesn't benefit them if they get discouraged and drop out because they think you don't care about them.
I will just point out that in a post ostensibly about how the argument between inquiry and direct instruction is pointless, we have a comment from someone who KNOWs inquiry is better but who also lists a number of the obvious downsides, without any apparent irony.
This is just one reason why the debate is important. It raises awareness that what you KNOW may not be the truth but the result of various biases.
I doubt many of those feigning boredom with this debate are truly disinterested, they are proponents of inquiry — like Dan has been for many years — who know they’ve lost and are trying to take their football home with them so nobody else can play.
What they meant is that even if you are using a teaching style that you are convinced is the "best" for the students, it doesn't benefit them if they get the impression that you don't care about them.
Seriously? That's such a strange misreading of what I wrote.
Spot on! Especially the idea that "what works for me" as a teacher is very ill-defined and customized to the individual instructor. Your title aligns well with Rick Defour's motto: "The genius of AND the tyranny of OR." Parents never get caught up in a debate on whether to feed their kids water OR vegetables... they go with AND in that situation... so why do these silly debates exist in education?
Just look at John Hattie's Visible Learning list of effect sizes. At first it appears to settle the debate with Direct Instruction at 0.6 and Inquiry-Based Learning at 0.4... until you pull back and look at a few more strategies on the list:
Cognitive Task Analysis 1.29
Classroom Discussion 0.82
Problem-Solving Teaching 0.68
Metacognitive Strategies 0.60
Direct Instruction 0.60
Inquiry-Based Learning 0.40
If you consider that an effect size of 0.40 represents a year's worth of growth, then Hattie's meta-analysis claims that all of the above strategies work, and that maybe the choice of the proper instructional tool should be based on what is being taught and assessed at the time, and not on an ideological stance.
Yes, there are a lot of contradictory results when u take a deeper look at Hattie. U can add the JIgSaw Method = 1.20 - a cooperative problem solving approach.
Interestingly, there are similar contradictions for the Reading Wars-
Phonics = 0.48 & Whole Language = 0.14 but Reading Recovery = 0.47
But, Hattie's method has been thoroughly pulled apart in the peer review -
summaries here - https://visablelearning.blogspot.com/
A brilliant, luminous read, thank you so much.
I think the simple question of, what are your goals and how can I support is underrated for coaching. Curiosity and connections are things I value in the classroom and I believe both of those can be done in either setting.
The split between the two approaches is somewhat more nuanced than the partisans would like to think. While an inquiry-based approach has the benefits of students having ownership of their learning, teachers must not only design a workable framework for the inquiry—questions, learning target, whatever—they must monitor students progress on that learning process. And while dealing with frustration is a key skill for students to gain, ultimately education spaces are time-constrained, so ultimately direct instruction has a necessary role in, among other things, providing context and in bridging gaps or clearing up misunderstandings as students pursue their learning.
"education spaces are time-constrained"
Every time I fall into direct-instruction-mode it's because I've got one eye on the clock.
Brilliant and timely post. Thanks for writing and sharing. I'm writing a series of responses here:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/navilan_how-to-not-waste-your-only-life-debating-activity-7160999635392548864-JoiB?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
I agree with the folly of arguing these issues with ill-informed zealots. However, there is a rising tide of fundamentalism, masquerading as science, that is going to make teachers' lives a whole lot worse and erode whatever confidence is left in public schools. The "Science of ____" bullshit is coming from the right as a way to ban books, whitewash history, and teach the mechanics of reading absent meaning AND a creepy paternalism from the left seeking to help other people's children win at a game they rigged for their own kids' benefit.
It IS GOING TO GET VERY VERY VERY UGLY VERY QUICKLY and I cannot be the only person fighting these phonatics online and IRL.
I also concur with your critique of education academia. It's typically embarrassing at best.
That said, the bothsidesism and "teachers are gonna do what teachers are gonna do" stuff" is at best problematic. It suggests a moral relativism, intransigence, lack of leadership, and malfeasance.
Imagine what would be possible if teacher education once again focused on the art of teaching.
That which you malign as a right wing conspiracy is pushed in my state by people who are very much to the left of the average citizen.
“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.” LOL
"Successful instruction starts with student knowledge, with whatever students know now." THIS!
and
"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." YEP
I missed this article originally, but found it after musing if X had a mute button just for references to the debates you cite. I paraphrase this Dylan Wiliam quote in pd frequently:Everything works somewhere, nothing works everywhere. The better question, then is, “ Under what conditions does this work?”
Acknowledgement of excellent photo reference 🤌