Explicit Instruction in an Implicit World: Learning to Teach, Teaching to Learn

Scarecrow gets an honorary doctorate bestowed by the Wizard of Oz during Dorothy’s dream, a ThD he gets for braving the dangers along the yellow brick road, a self-made straw man.

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Soon after, Dorothy clicks her ruby red technicolor heels, leaves her newfound friends with newfound courage, a resurrected heart, and a functioning brain, and wakes up in her bedroom amidst a loving family on a farm in Kansas. In Baum’s Oz Scarecrow becomes the new ruler.

The storyline in the Land of Oz where fake wizards are exposed, witches are melted, and flying monkeys that terrorize the little people of Munchkin County are neutralized, mirrors a core white American narrative. Let us have our country in peace under benevolent rule. Let the machinery work and leave me alone. A slight plot twist here or there, an empty bucket of water, a wrong turn on a turret, and what turns out to be an idyllic end for Dorothy on a homestead in the heartland could have been an apocalyptic nightmare. Nightmares didn’t sell movies in 1939.

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Scarecrow’s anthropomorphisization from a bag of rags stuffed with straw hanging on a pole to a candidate for a ThD happens with no accounting for academic preparation, no SAT, no personal essay, no prior learning or interest, but he is loyal, courageous, selfless, innocently noble. His personal qualities and his common sense qualify him for a doctorate and a position of power. Surviving the yellow brick road to the Emerald City, the hard lessons, the lessons you can’t learn from books, his fantasy is his dissertation, his diploma his proof. As others have quipped, Scarecrow is the poster child for the grand old American diploma mill.

“Why are others smart and I’m not?” Scarecrow asks the Wizard:

“They have one thing you haven't got: A diploma. Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Universitartus Committiartum E Pluribus Unum, I hereby confer upon you the honorary degree of ThD – Doctor of Thinkology.¹”

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Straw men have one thing in common: They look enough like a real person to fool the unobservant or the gullible. If you weren’t sure, you might mistake one for a logical argument. Anybody can make up a straw man. Remember the “ban plastic bags” political argument that raged across the country a few years ago? If you favored a ban, you were an affluent democrat who didn’t care about food insecurity. If you opposed a ban, you were an affluent republican who didn’t care about the planet.

Straw men turn up the distortion level and make rational decision-making more difficult to achieve. Any child who accuses his parents of hating them because they won’t let them stay out past curfew is distorting the parents’ view, creating a straw man.

The best way to eliminate straw men from your own consciousness is to watch for them, usually thriving within an either-or context. Often they raise a red herring: food insecurity is an issue, just not germane to a plastic bag ban. Identify them. Don’t make them up. Call them out for what they are: Distortions.

A longtime debate between mainstream traditional and self-identified progressive educators has simmered since late 19th century America, giving birth to generations of straw men. Baum wrote the Oz book during this period and, as a tale of moral enlightenment, a parable delivered in the dream of a young woman, took the side of the common folk against the progressives. Everyone knows children should learn the three Rs. But those hi falutin’ uppity merchants with their plans for a town library, they don’t care about the common man. All of the pomp and circumstance of advanced education is spit and polish, not substance.

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Once again, the debate has reached a low boil. With the advent of the Science of Reading (SoR) coalition and the atomistic nature of Common Core national standards, the adjectives direct, systematic, and explicit have formed a trinity that shoot a fire hose of meaning at the noun instruction, as if to douse the flames on a burning schoolhouse where teaching has been hijacked by bleeding heart liberals who care more about self-esteem than phonics.

In some discourse settings the debate has been framed around the dichotomy of explicit vs implicit instruction. In my view, there is no dichotomy: All teaching is explicit in varying degrees. A narrow, specialized view of explicit pedagogy is showing up in state and federal documents called “direct instruction,” which more aptly refers to published materials available from commercial textbook companies than to a theory-driven pedagogical philosophy. Aside: Science is not a pedagogical philosophy. I will argue that this narrow view (DI) has always been out of touch with mainstream explicit instructional history, theory, and practice.

The opposing model of instruction, the straw man, I will call “Implicit Instruction,” using the term advocates for explicit instruction have applied in this context. The DI view in ascendancy has created a straw man so weak in the classroom that they must be given scripts to read to improve their outcomes. Instead of describing what implicit instruction is, they describe what it is not. Straw Man has nothing to recommend him at all; essentially, implicit instruction is bad DI. Witness:

It’s a stretch to call what is described here “teaching.” This decontextualized information dump seems closer to an isolated reading assignment, an encyclopedia article—here’s the information, good luck, make of it what you will. Something implicit is going on here, but it’s hard to classify it as instruction. What is explicit, even obvious in context, is the intent to create a straw man. Explicit does not mean obvious. People routinely miss the obvious even if it is explicit—many people might miss the obvious straw man floundering above. Explicit describes a subjective state of semiotic communion. What is explicit in a sign or symbol or text or act in context depends in part on the receiver’s awareness and receptivity.

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Explicit instruction as I’ve come to see it working with my colleagues in a Reading Specialist credential program is an umbrella concept with a core sense of “clear, unmistakable, designed to stimulate learning.” Seen in this light, pedagogy of all sorts is a deliberate, coherent public act undertaken on behalf of a child designed to foster more complex competence and understanding. If not, it isn’t teaching. If it’s really good teaching, it is well-planned, targeted, systematic, coherent, engaging, cumulative, scaffolded.

Explicit instruction as it has been construed for the past fifty years in regular education involves stating a clear objective, creating interest, explaining, modeling, checking for understanding, monitoring guided practice, assigning independent practice, and completing assessments. This working model is particularly useful in teaching technical micro skills, complex and intricate algorithms, factual narratives, and content-area knowledge ranging from vocabulary to conceptual development, which some view as closely related. Lessons designed to teach mastery of phonics, especially to children for whom phonemes are not obvious, are often heavily teacher-centered, systematic, informed by technical research and assessment with careful attention to what is or isn’t obvious to a particular child. Being explicit can not mean saying the same thing to every child.

Explicit instruction becomes increasingly productive as learners become more capable of executing complex tasks either collaboratively or individually. As learners develop world knowledge, academic literacy, and mathematical thinking, together with an understanding of science as an epistemological collection of tools, teachers are wise to gradually release responsibility for goal setting, monitoring, and learning to open pathways from the periphery to the center of expertise. Teachers should be required to demonstrate a high level of competence in designing explicit instructional lessons, critiquing them, modifying them, and adapting them.

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Implicit instruction, that is, instructional moves that intentionally slow down the presentation of new information and place inferential demands on learners, is central to teaching critical and mathematical thinking; to internalizing complex protocols with interacting variables like physical health and fitness; to developing strategies for managing in medias res processes with slots to fill like assessing quality of water; to inferencing and imagining and empathizing from historical artifacts; to collecting a toolkit of strategies and resources for vital literacy skills like comprehension and composition, which require self-regulation, tools and signs, principled interpretation, and argumentation.

Problem solving, calculating, regulating learning tools and technologies, mastering nuanced and automatic processes like word recognition in print—all children need good implicit instruction designed explicitly. Some children need gold standard implicit instruction, that is to say, sustained one-on-one attention with a medical-model-quality intervention designed, implemented, and monitored regularly by a highly educated professional with access to a collection of qualitative and quantitative observations of progress, subjective and objective (see the Vanderbilt website in a footnote below).

In my experience implicit instruction is the more difficult part in planning and executing explicit instruction in regular classrooms. Guided practice in particular requires a skillful teacher with highly developed levels of relational thinking and alertness to social moves. The key in my mind is this: the teacher must establish firm joint attention with learners, focus activity, motivate it, and let the learners take the lead, having previously been directly taught collaborative behaviors and cognitive moves. The teacher must follow close behind or above the learners to the point of resolution without giving away the answer. Learners must convince themselves through logic that the answer they have concluded is right or at least reasonable. If they subsequently learn that they arrived at an inappropriate answer, they should have the opportunity to examine the extent of the difference, where thinking went awry, and how to patch it up next time.

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Explicit instruction is the dominant tradition in American public schools. In many ways it provided the engine that made the factory we still have today academically productive, such as it has been. At the center of the classroom is a knowledgeable, credentialed teacher, explaining, modeling, assigning, giving feedback, clear, step-by-step, dedicated, educated in behavioral objectives and content. In fact, the guided and independent practice elements in explicit instruction require implicit instruction.

Around the periphery are learners, following along, absorbing, practicing, working, discussing, talking, writing. The resistors and the troubled sit among the periphery as well. One dark note: This teaching posture seems to morph in rigidity as you cross socioeconomic levels, flexible and gentle in affluent schools, authoritarian and stiff in high-poverty schools.

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The devil is in the details when it comes to what your friendly interlocutor means by explicit instruction. Available online for free is the following diagram summarizing commonly understood elements of explicit instruction that I can square² with what I know to be the model widely followed in California. Importantly, the role of the teacher is to “create well-crafted lessons.” Lesson design is a teaching expectation. The non-negotiables trace back to Madeline Hunter, an education professor at UCLA, who in the late 1970s, developed the framework that became the basis for generations of teacher preparation and professional development programs.

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A staple of regular teacher preparation programs is lesson design. As a longtime professor in California state universities teaching in credential programs, I’ve come across a range of lesson design templates, but I don’t recall any templates that varied from the criterion of “explicit.” Explicit does not mean obvious. Teachers are expected to know explicitly what they expect students to learn, what activities students will experience giving them opportunities to learn, and how they will assess the learning. They must never leave students to flounder, making whatever sense they can. How they make such learning explicit or, better yet, help their students see their learning explicitly and clearly—that’s part of the practice and profession.

In recent years, heightened explicit attention to academic language and ELD has been cemented into the design template in terms of expectations, learning experiences, and assessment in California. Importantly, designs include a fourth section: A plan for reflecting on the teaching event for revision and professional goal-setting. The cycle of teaching calls for knowing the learners as cultural and historical agents, planning specifically for this group of learners with their funds of knowledge, language, backgrounds, and experiences, implementing the plan with built in checkpoints to monitor and adjust as well as assess, analyze and reflect on evidence of student learning and build teaching competence.

Years back I picked up the acronym ABCD somewhere to package the non-negotiables of explicit design: Audience (who is in the class?), Behavior (what is the objective?), Content (what is the lesson about?), and Delivery (what will the teacher and learners do?). I can’t say it is a cure all or particular deep, but it has served me well during on the spot, unexpected observations of student teachers in CSU credential programs.

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Note: A teacher can explicitly choose to begin a lesson by keeping students in the dark and gradually helping learners achieve clarity (explicitness). This, I suppose, is a technical violation of design principles, but by no means a design flaw. Suppose I wanted to teach the concept of the paragraph.

In a traditional explicit mode, the plan might go like this (2.5 class hours): OBJECTIVE—Write an expository paragraph; the AUDIENCE: a class of fourth graders; BEHAVIOR: Compose a paragraph about favorite foods; CONTENT: topic sentence, supporting details, closing sentence; DELIVERY: explain the concept of paragraph, model the writing of one, guide the group through the writing of one, and then assign one for homework. Collect the independent practice and repeat the lesson with refinements and improvements.

So how might it go in an “implicit” mode? (1.5 hours) OBJECTIVE: Analyze the function of paragraphs in a passage from the Social Studies textbook; AUDIENCE: fourth graders; BEHAVIOR: Read a multi-paragraph passage in buddy fashion (review the strategy), using a paired-reading strategy; get a good overall understanding of the content (assess on the fly); identify each paragraph; write a caption for each paragraph; explain you why you think the writer organized the paragraphs and what would happen if they were rearranged; CONTENT and DELIVERY: Lead a whole class discussion using a floating thematic linguistic net to capture and put academic language to student ideas about the functions of a paragraph; emphasize the words “organization of information”; introduce the term “packet of information”; model the use of an outline using captions generated by the students; ask for ideas about how paragraphs help readers; write them down and post on an emerging bulletin board.

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In special education teacher preparation and practice, explicit instruction is crucial. Professional credentialing standards in many states embrace the term explicit as a watchword for systematic monitoring, assessment, and the instruction of an individual with identified learning challenges³ .

The following screenshot is excerpted from a website hosted at Vanderbilt University ⁴and explains the connection between levels of explicitness and intensifying instruction. Witness:

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Anyone who has taught the required content-area reading course to secondary credential candidates over time can attest to the increasing potency of research-based explicit instructional frameworks for teaching comprehension strategies, some generic, some discipline specific, in teacher preparation. I taught these strategies to high school teachers, but all of it can be refitted for younger children.

The Vacca and Vacca methods book through all of their editions and refinements, only one of many, pulled together a coherent vision of high school reading instruction in cross-curricular information uptake learning strategies. Although it was an uphill battle to convince future high school band directors and calculus teachers they needed this course in reading, I think I reached rapprochement with my students, and every once in a while I came across a music or math teacher who became convinced of their power to influence literacy improvement in their work. I plan to write more on this topic later.

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Somewhere buried in the reading wars lay the seeds of a contradiction about the importance of competence in instructional design in the preparation and practice of professional classroom educators. Lesson design is a foundational competence in teacher credentialing frameworks in almost every state. It must be because lessons are inherently prepared for specific children under specific circumstances. Since the days of the Open Court police in California when teachers were literally surveilled to assure compliance with the instructional script, educators have been firmly against deskilling and deprofessionalizing teaching.

Proponents of a narrow explicit instruction approach trademarked “direct instruction” (DI), however, differ on this point. They publish and promote scripted literacy instructional materials. The aim as near as I can see is to relieve teachers from the burden of designing instruction, to provide lessons that are inherently better (e.g., more systematic), or to lessen the cognitive load on teachers and place it in the hands of commercial publishers. In its most extreme forms, DI appropriates the teacher’s voice and mind at the time they need it most—during acts of learning. The following screenshot comes from a website established by the National Institute for Direct Instruction, which anoints itself the “gold standard for direct instruction.”

NIDI publishes curriculum materials with explicit instruction spelled out in scripts across daily lesson plans. Using the plans with fidelity has a range of benefits, including relieving teachers of the worry of teaching complex things like critical skills. Witness:

This language is troubling. What are teacher experiences like during the first few months? The implication is that teachers feel constrained, unable to accommodate the needs of all students. Is there a plan for supporting teachers emotionally and for recapturing lost learning? Then one day—voila!—teachers “see” the flexibility. So teachers are taught implicitly over a few months of mouthing the scripts and then usually have an epiphany?

The language about teachers’ being creative within the confines of a script is degrading. The assumption that teachers have low expectations for students (you hadn’t thought this level of learning possible) suggests that teachers need to be remotely controlled to see just how high they can fly. How many teachers enter the profession to become actors reading a script? I decided to teach fourth grade in order to discover how to teach, not to pretend to be a teacher.

What happens to reflective analysis, relational thinking, establishing and reinforcing joint attention? What happens to implicit instruction? The last sentence is indefensible: “DI is effective with all students,” asserts the voice of authority—unless it isn’t. In that case, it’s the teacher’s fault.

Importantly, NIDI has dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s when it comes to the Common Cores standards. Witness:

Any public school system in the market for teacher-proof reading instructional materials packaged in user friendly units gets the added benefit of complete alignment with 427 Common Core learning outcomes. Math instructional materials are even better—100% alignment.

August, 2008, was not good for DI. Note that this screenshot presents findings from an examination of research submitted as evidence of the efficacy of the instructional materials. Note that this rejection was made on behalf of Education Science.

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I’ve done my best to fairly represent current notions of explicit instruction and direct instruction using documents prepared by proponents available in the public domain. I reject the explicit vs implicit dichotomy. I reject scripted lessons as dangerously distorted instruction. Madeline Hunter’s model of clinical teaching from the late-1970s and 1980s codified and gave language to teacher-centered instruction key to what success public schools have had given the factory model and became a staple of teacher preparation; some school superintendents and principals required teachers to use the lesson template, including it in annual evaluations, and districts expended scarce resources for teacher professional development⁵.

As I’ve stated, explicit instruction and its non-negotiable parts work on a practical and empirical level in my experience. My understanding of classrooms as cultural historical activity settings with distributed cognition, tools and signs for intellectual mediation, shared objects and resources, etc., points to limitations in the traditional model, particularly with regard to teaching academic motivation as an outcome, particularly when it masquerades as high quality education in under resourced and economically disadvantaged communities. I begin to part company when scripts, preplanned rewards, and forced reduction in teacher thinking come into view.

The term “implicit learning” has a fairly long research history in the field of psychology. It has been called “unintentional” or “incidental” or “unconscious” or “unaware” learning because the learner was not formally “taught” and did not set out to learn. I’m not well versed in the psychological research, but as near as I can tell, schools would likely not do well to count on it for higher-order intellectual growth. The concept is still theoretically fluid as a developmental process.⁶

Michael Fullan strikes a resonant chord with his call for an education center or core at the national level with coherence, the rebellious angel, the watchword, the primary failing of the Common Core. The documented emergence (Prenger et al., 2021) ⁷ of within-school professional learning communities blossoming into cross-schools professional learning networks is exciting. Could you imagine a professional learning network around scripted lessons? This could be the best of times or the worst of times.

1. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2008/jul/20/scarecrow-and-the-diploma-mills/

2. https://sk.sagepub.com/books/explicit-direct-instruction/n11.xml

3. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED531907.pdf

4. https://my.vanderbilt.edu/spedteacherresources/what-is-explicit-instruction/

5. https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2019/10/08/whatever-happened-to-madeline-hunter-lesson-plans/

6. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8721.01213

7. Journal of Educational Change (2021) 22:13–52 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-020-09383-2