Explicit Teaching

Good teaching is clear and direct, with specific goals and outcomes

Explicit instruction is a high-impact teaching methodology. It involves a teacher introducing a new concept or skill by breaking down what students need to learn into small steps and providing precise explanations and directions throughout the lesson to support student success.

For example, a writing lesson on sentence structure might see the teacher introduce a new concept of ‘adverbial clauses’ by explaining its formula:

subordinating conjunction + subject  + verb.

The teacher would then give a step-by-step demonstration on how to write an adverbial clause, teaching students how to combine it with a principal clause to write a sentence:

This demonstration would be followed by guided practice where, supervised by the teacher, students follow the formula to write their own sentences. The teacher would then provide the students with opportunities for independent practice, while monitoring their progress and providing immediate feedback to ensure understanding and mastery of the addition technique.

A key component to explicit teaching is to make the lesson short and sharp to minimise cognitive overload for the students. Cognitive overload occurs if the student is presented with information that is too detailed and complicated for the working memory to process and move to the long-term memory.

Explicit teaching should therefore be differentiated to accommodate the range of abilities and pre-existing knowledge that are typically present within a classroom. For example, the teacher might take a small group for explicit teaching, while the rest of the class works independently on a range of activities.

Explicit teaching is also a technique, that removes ambiguity from the learning process. It involves the teacher drawing the student’s attention throughout a lesson to things that could be overlooked, taken for granted, misinterpreted, misunderstood, or not understood at all.

Think of a teacher pointing at a word and explicitly identifying it as a hyperlink. The teacher explains the purpose of a hyperlink as connecting two webpages within a website and asks the students questions about why the word was chosen to be hyperlinked, and what information the word leads to on the connecting webpage.

As part of the explicit teaching process, it is important for a teacher to be aware that even when a student is working at an advanced and independent level, there could be gaps or misunderstandings that need to be remediated. It is always important that the teacher uses ongoing assessment including observation and questioning, to identify and address errors.

Explicit teaching is used at Ashfield Public School with ongoing professional learning supporting teachers to understand how it significantly impacts the success of a student to learn and apply new skills and concepts.