Explicit instruction needs to take a step back.
The knowledge a child has before the lesson starts is more influential on acquisition than explicit instruction.
Explicit instruction has become the thing. Much of the credit for any improvement in primary maths comes from the evidence behind explicit instruction these days. I am suggesting that now it is worth looking forward to where the next improvement will come from. Explicit instruction is helpful, but it is not fixing the problem.
There is no evidence base for this one yet, but theoretically it is sound and worth exploring with more attention. Think about anything you have ever had to learn. If you know very little about it the new concepts are harsh and removed. As soon as you have insight, experience and knowledge about a topic it becomes something you just build on and add to.
When there are lots of smaller ideas for a new concept to attach to, the new concept just sorts itself out pretty well because you are not asking the child to consider a lot of new and unknown thoughts. Learning is easy in those situations because there was a lot to attach to and not because of how it was taught.
The reason explicit instruction looks as powerful as it does is that we keep asking children to learn concepts without the prior knowledge that would have made them much more understandable. Explicit instruction stops the lesson from collapsing, because it takes on what missing prior knowledge should take on. It does that carrying quite well but at the detriment of skewing the benefits of the instruction. A great deal of what we point to when we talk about what works is really evidence about how to teach precisely into a gap.
If a child already knows this and this and this and this, and the next thing is quite seamless to learn, then that is what we mean when we talk about sequencing. If the sequencing is right then the instruction really doesn’t have the same impact or value anymore.
You can see it in something as ordinary as a child working out eight plus five. If that child already knows that eight sits two away from ten, and that five can be broken into two and three, and that ten and three make thirteen, then eight plus five is a tiny new thing. The child who cannot do it is rarely stuck on eight plus five. They are stuck because the smaller knowledge bundles before were not quite understood, and so the same sum that is practically discovery for one child has to be explicitly taught for another.
The game changer is not explicit instruction. It is the bundles of knowledge the child has built to connect to everything that comes next.
The early years are pivotal to this perspective, because Foundation to Year 2 is where that prior knowledge needs to be built properly. If it isn’t, then every later lesson needs explicit teaching to fill the gap that the prior knowledge didn’t. A child who is struggling in Year 5 is very rarely struggling with the Year 5 idea. They are struggling because something much smaller was not quite understood, and no amount of skill in the delivery of the Year 5 lesson can put that missing piece back properly.
We have put enormous effort into working out how we should teach. We owe the same effort to working out what a child needs to know first, and in what order they need to know it. Prior knowledge is a huge part of cognitive load theory that we are overlooking and it seems we are just talking about explicit teaching instead.
The Y Intercept is building a numeracy sequence that ensures prior knowledge is embedded in the early years and built upon. www.theyintercept.com.au