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WHAT IS researchED?

researchED is an international, grassroots education-improvement movement that was founded in 2013 by Tom Bennett, a London-based high school teacher and author. researchED is a truly unique, teacher-led phenomenon, bringing people from all areas of education together onto a level playing field. Speakers include teachers, principals, professor, researchers and policy makers.

Since our first sell-out event, researchED has spread all across the UK, into the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Australia, the USA, with events planned in Spain, Japan, South Africa and more. We hold general days as well as themed events, such as researchED Maths & Science, or researchED Tech.

WHO ARE WE?

Since 2013, researchED has grown from a tweet to an international conference movement that so far has spanned six continents and thirteen countries. We have simple aims: to help teaching become more evidence-facing; to raise the research literacy in teaching; to improve education research standards; and to bring research users and research creators closer together. To do this, we hold unique one-day conferences that bring together teachers, researchers, academics and anyone touched by research. We believe in teacher voice, and short-circuiting the top-down approach to education that benefits no one.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

The gathering of mainly teachers, researchers, school leaders, policymakers and edu-bloggers creates a unique dynamic. Teachers and researchers can attend the sessions all day and engage with each other to exchange ideas. The vast majority of speakers stay for the duration of the conference, visit each other’s sessions, work on the expansion of their knowledge and gain a deeper understanding of the work of their peers. Teachers can take note of recent developments in educational research, but are also given the opportunity to provide feedback on the applicability of research or practical obstacles.

FOREWORD:
IT’S THE WAY YOU TELL THEM

Among the most maddening things that new teachers face is a dilemma that is so vast and absurdly obvious that it is hard to even give it a name: ‘What is the best way for me to teach?’ – along with the quandaries ‘How can I get the students to follow my instructions?’ and ‘Do I know enough about this?’ These are the fundamentals that grip us. It will come as a huge surprise to non-teachers (and still some surprise to many teachers) that answering these questions is frequently not a large part of a teacher’s formal induction into the profession.

What they do frequently get is a series of well-meant suggestions of how to build elaborate activities that are designed primarily to engage or excite – such as games or ‘fun’ activities – or tasks designed to satisfy some other, often social or cultural objective – teaching them how to work well in groups, be creative, be tolerant etc.

I say ‘well-meant’ because they are, but this model of professional practice is as far removed from the ideal as homeopathy is from open-heart surgery. The teacher is still left unsure if the knowledge or skills content of the lesson was received, transmitted or understood memorably, unless they are assessed. But even so, what then? Repeat the same pedagogical leap of faith?

But there is an entire study of this process which, in a feat of absurdity extraordinary even for education, is often absent from teacher preparation: explicit instruction, and its cousin, direct instruction. This is the studied craft and the structured scientific investigation into how we impart information and content in ways that are as optimally memorable as possible. This, surely, should be at the heart of the teacher’s project, whatever one’s subject or phase.

Teachers should be rightly suspicious when they’re told what ‘research proves’. In order for that to be the case, it’s necessary for a significant portion of the teaching community to be reasonably research literate – enough to generate a form of herd immunity – both in content and methodology. Then, they can reach out to and engage with research which can assist their decision making. I say ‘assist’ carefully.

That doesn’t mean making their decisions for them; that doesn’t mean it’s a trump card. Teachers need to interact with what the best evidence is saying and translate it through the lens of their experience. If it concurs, then that itself is significant. If it clashes, then that’s an interesting launch platform for a conversation. Teaching is not – and can never be – a research-based or research-led profession. Research can’t tell us what the right questions to ask are, nor can it authoritatively speak for all circumstances and contexts. That’s what human judgement, nous and professional, collective wisdom is for. But it can act as a commentary to what we do. It can expose flaws in our own biases. It can reveal possible prejudices and dogma in our thinking and methods. It can assist bringing together the shared wisdom of the teaching community. It can act as a commentary to what we do. It can and should be nothing less than the attempt to systematically approach what we know about education, and understand it in a structured way.

Teaching can – and needs to be – research informed, possibly research augmented. The craft, the art of it, is at the heart of it. Working out what works also means working out what we mean by ‘works’, and where science, heart and wisdom overlap – and where they don’t.

Here, Adam Boxer has assembled a superb collection of some of the education sector’s pre-eminent voices in this field, both in the academic arenas and in the field of practice. At researchED we have always championed this duality, because we believe that only through the interaction of science and craft can we arrive at the most probable strategies for teachers to use in the only place they matter – in rooms full of children.

One day it will seem strange that any educator did not know this topic intimately, or were not able to quote these commentators critically at the beginnings of their careers. One day. That day hasn’t come yet. Until then, I believe that this book is an invaluable overview of some of the most interesting and practical voices engaged in this field’s great conversation. I hope you find it useful, interesting, and thought-provoking.

Tom Bennett
Founder, researchED
Series editor

INTRODUCTION

When I first qualified to teach, I considered myself a ‘social constructivist’ in my approach to teaching and to learning. In this regard, I was quite unremarkable, and completely in line with the educational orthodoxy. I believed that there was a specially privileged place for knowledge which students had generated themselves and that somehow information which was directly provided for students by teachers was less well embedded in their consciousness. In this vein, I felt comfortable in having met the teaching standards, and had no self-doubt at all when it came to ticking off the sub-clause in teachers’ standard 2 stating that teachers must ‘demonstrate knowledge and understanding of how pupils learn and how this impacts on teaching’ (Department for Education, 2011). As such, my students completed many open inquiries, research tasks and discovery-based activities. They wrote definitions for themselves, gleaned vital information from posters stuck around the room and spent lots of time teaching each other. I don’t think I was particularly remarkable in this regard: my practices were never challenged and feedback was always about surface details of the lessons, not about the philosophy that underpinned them.

A few years into my career, I came across the Sutton Trust’s What Makes Great Teaching? document (Coe et al., 2014). Within the report, the authors summarised foundational and robust research findings that would best support teacher quality. One section was headed as ‘ineffective practices’, and true to its title, went on to list a number of teacher activities that were either unlikely to lead to improved learning or would actually harm its progress. Some of these I knew about already: I knew that learning styles were bunk, that lavish praise could be counterproductive and that grouping students by ability was precarious at best. What I was not prepared for was the simple statement that an example of an ineffective practice was to ‘allow learners to discover key ideas for themselves’, with the authors arguing that:

Enthusiasm for ‘discovery learning’ is not supported by research evidence, which broadly favours direct instruction (Kirschner et al., 2006). Although learners do need to build new understanding on what they already know, if teachers want them to learn new ideas, knowledge or methods they need to teach them directly.

In less than 50 words, a foundational plank of my educational philosophy had been removed. I had made claims to being an ‘evidence-informed’ teacher, and thought that my practices were well supported by the literature. This was the first serious challenge to my teaching I had received.

I followed the report’s citation to Kirschner et al.’s 2006 article, which reviewed the evidence from the cognitive sciences regarding how minimal guidance during instruction was significantly less effective than fully guided, teacher-led instruction. From there, I was slowly introduced to the arena of the cognitive sciences and stronger models of human thought and condition than I had previously used to satisfy the second teachers’ standard.

It is inevitable that some research findings will be better known than others. Some ideas spread and gain traction; others struggle to find their feet. In recent years, well-established findings like cognitive load theory and retrieval practice appear to be making ground, hopefully to the betterment of thousands of students across the world. The aim for policy makers, leaders and teacher trainers should be to push the highest impact strategies further into the public consciousness, to occupy a ‘Goldilocks zone’ of being both effective and well known. The topic of this book, Engelmann’s programme of Direct Instruction, unfortunately sits in the exact opposite of this: an anti-Goldilocks zone of being the least known strategy with a frustratingly large impact. How can it be that a teaching style with such an incredibly high impact can be known to so few? Kris Boulton’s opening chapter brings this dilemma into sharp relief. Tracing the fascinating history of Project Follow Through – the study that would pit Engelmann’s programmes against other teaching styles, – he shows convincingly how there are both methodological and ideological structures in place which have prevented widespread acknowledgement of Direct Instruction’s strength. He cites Engelmann describing how those opposing his programmes brought their objections to the corridors of power, utilising political routes to halt rolling them out. Though history will judge those involved, Direct Instruction lives on, and its lessons can and should be learnt by teachers across the world.

Direct Instruction is a specific programme with scripts, focused resources and teaching sequences planned to the most minute of details. Triangulating evidence from Project Follow Through, the cognitive sciences and other large-scale research projects, Greg Ashman describes the major features of Direct Instruction and compares it to more expansive teaching styles like ‘explicit instruction’ or ‘direct instruction’ (with no capitals). Ashman convincingly shows that the overwhelming weight of evidence supports fully guided instruction – where the teacher is in complete control of the learning process. It is clear as time goes on and the evidence base becomes better disseminated that more and more teachers are turning to an explicit instruction model of teaching – a model that relies heavily on themes from Direct Instruction and other evidence-based programmes.

This book is therefore not just about Direct Instruction as a specific programme designed by Engelmann. This is a book about how teachers in the UK can, and are, being inspired by Direct Instruction in their own practice. In our context it is vital that we borrow key elements from Direct Instruction in thinking about how we can best tailor instruction to the needs of our students. A teacher who employs explicit instruction in their teaching will most likely be borrowing from research in the cognitive sciences, process-product studies and Project Follow Through. And whilst an entire library could be written on the influence of each of those evidence bases on explicit instruction, this volume aims principally to expose the thread that leads from Engelmann to explicit instruction.

As such, one crucial feature of Direct Instruction is its use of examples and non-examples. In complementary chapters, Tom Needham and Gethyn Jones show the power of examples in revealing meaning to students. Sometimes, a technical definition, though correct, can ‘darken’ understanding and prevent students from latching onto a concept. Using examples to explain concepts allows students to actively make inferences about the commonalities between the examples and, through inference and extrapolation, move towards nuanced and rich appreciations. Non-examples are shown to be incredibly powerful in promoting hard thought and showing the boundary conditions within which a concept holds true. Using examples is powerful for students, and it also forces teachers to appreciate the nature of the concepts they are due to be teaching and how they are best encapsulated and defined.

Naveen Rizvi continues the theme by deploying another technique from Direct Instruction called covertization. She shows how not only the careful sequencing of examples but also the teacher’s active use of cues, step-by-step algorithms and deliberate guidance can slowly build students up to becoming competent solvers of open problems. In this way she makes clear a thread that runs throughout this book – a thread that points to the end goal of explicit instruction: building students whose teaching has been so thoughtful and well sequenced that they are able to rapidly progress to a point at which they no longer have need of the teacher who at first guided them so supportively.

Sarah Cullen’s chapter puts the above into practice through her invocation of fading. We must always begin teaching with as much support and guidance as possible but with time, practice and feedback, we begin to rely on that support less and less, eventually reaching the culmination of all that work, where students, in her words, ‘take their first flight … a thrilling moment in teaching’. Cullen’s essay serves as a rallying call to teachers to help their students achieve the joy and satisfaction of mastering, internalising and applying a complex body of knowledge.

Cullen’s consideration of fading across years, terms and lessons is our first real taste of how insights from Direct Instruction can inform curricular planning at all levels. In a wide-ranging chapter, Amy Coombe and Lia Martin apply lessons from Direct Instruction to all levels of an ongoing attempt to teach writing. They show how deep thought from a wide perspective allows us to ensure that we are properly covering and imparting the fundamentals of the writer’s craft to our students, without tacitly leaving holes or incomplete understandings in their knowledge. Bursting with practical examples, they perceptively include findings from Doug Lemov’s seminal Teach Like a Champion, findings which serve to buttress a Direct Instruction-inspired theory of teaching.

A common criticism of both Direct Instruction and explicit instruction is that they are boring and disengaging. Nothing could be further from the truth, with Project Follow Through showing that Direct Instruction was the most effective teaching strategy not only for students’ knowledge and understanding, but also for their ‘affective’ scores – how much they enjoyed the subject. Sarah Barker traces the underlying psychology behind the feelings of satisfaction and mastery that accompany expert teaching and instruction and urges us to think about motivation as a feeling that develops over time in tandem with feelings of competence, mastery and self-assurance. We cannot control the emotions and feelings our students bring to class. But we can control how well they are taught, and we can hope that through expert teaching they grow as active appliers of the knowledge imparted and take strong steps on the path to long-term motivation and enjoyment.

Though this book mostly deals with Direct Instruction’s influence on explicit instruction, this of course isn’t to say that Engelmann’s programmes themselves aren’t highly valuable, and Hannah Stoten describes a viable approach for school leaders to actually go about implementing a full Direct Instruction programme. In such contexts it’s vital that leaders are aware of the potential obstacles that will need to be overcome. Sometimes those obstacles are prosaic – people naturally being resistant to going against the way things have always been done – but sometimes they are more culturally weighty, revolving around issues of standards and expectations. She argues that accepting the potential of Direct Instruction programmes also involves accepting and promoting higher standards of behaviour, engagement and focus than the ones we may have grown used to.

Summer Turner builds on all that has come so far by describing how Engelmann’s work relates to an increasingly popular curricular discourse. Elegantly weaving together philosophical ideas from prominent curriculum theorists with the more functional tools of Direct Instruction, Turner shows how the steady build up of knowledge throughout a course of studies enables students, and especially the most disadvantaged, to flourish. In order to achieve this, not only must the instruction be flawlessly sequenced at a micro level, but the technical set-up of the curriculum must be flawless in its macro sequencing and opportunities for regular revisiting of past content. Summer’s chapter should serve as a springboard for thought when planning a curriculum. However, it is obviously not a complete guide to how to build a Direct Instruction curriculum and should not be used as such. We hope that, in conjunction with this book series’ sister volume The researchED Guide to the Curriculum, educators will gain crucial knowledge and conceptual tools by which to frame their curricular discussions.

Engelmann was not just an expert educator; he was a socially minded ideologue. He believed that all students could learn and that the historic use of ineffective teaching methods walked hand in hand with a gradual erosion in society’s beliefs of what young people from the hardest backgrounds could achieve. John Blake’s chapter explores why it is that such young people tend to fall behind and what systemic, societal and pedagogical causes lie beneath this widespread phenomenon. He argues convincingly that the route to a more socially mobile student body must come via a curriculum centred on powerful knowledge and implemented by teachers inspired by Engelmann’s techniques.

I noted at the outset that Direct Instruction sits in an anti-Goldilocks zone. In an education system obsessed with impact, intervention and improvement, its omission from teacher training courses, CPD events and the general professional discourse is striking. researchED is proud to be at the forefront of teaching teachers the most powerful techniques that decades of educational discourse and training have failed to convey. Learning lessons from Direct Instruction, the greatest educational intervention ever designed, is a vital part of that process.

References

Coe, R., Aloisi, C., Higgins, S. and Major, L. E. (2014) What makes great teaching? Review of the underpinning research. London: The Sutton Trust. Retrieved from: www.bit.ly/3182O2d

Department for Education (2011) Teachers’ standards: guidance for school leaders, school staff and governing bodies. London: The Stationery Office. Retrieved from: www.bit.ly/2YrExSY

Kirschner, P., Sweller, J. and Mayer, R. (2006) ‘Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: an analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching’, Educational Psychologist 41 (2) pp. 75–86.

Author bio-sketch:

Adam Boxer teaches chemistry at a school in North London. He writes about science education, cognitive science and evidence-based practice and is an active member of #CogSciSci, a grassroots collective of more than 600 science teachers looking to support each other in implementing science teaching based on the cognitive sciences.