- Title: Exploring the Foundations of Explicit Instruction
- Authors: Anita L. Archer and Charles A. Hughes
- Access the original paper here
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Paper summary
The text explores explicit instruction as a systematic and effective teaching methodology. It details the elements and underlying principles of explicit instruction, emphasizing its structured approach with clear explanations, demonstrations, and supported practice. The text highlights research supporting its effectiveness in both general and special education settings. It addresses common concerns about explicit instruction, such as guided versus unguided approaches and the role of drill and practice. Furthermore, the document stresses the importance of optimizing academic learning time and scaffolding instruction to meet diverse student needs. The provided excerpt champions the idea that explicit instruction, when implemented thoughtfully, can maximize student achievement.
What are the key implications for teachers in the classroom?
Explicit instruction is a structured and systematic teaching methodology that can be a valuable tool for educators to maximize student’s academic growth. Explicit instruction involves a series of supports where students are guided through the learning process. Some key implications for teachers in the classroom include:
- Focusing instruction on critical content by teaching skills, strategies, vocabulary, and concepts that will empower students in the future and match their instructional needs. Teachers can examine their curriculum, select the most critical skills and objectives, and discard or deemphasize the less critical ones.
- Sequencing skills logically by teaching easier skills before harder ones, high-frequency skills before less frequent ones, ensuring mastery of prerequisites, and separating similar skills to avoid confusion.
- Breaking down complex skills and strategies into smaller instructional units and teaching in small steps to address concerns about cognitive overloading and working memory capacity. Once mastered, these units are synthesized and practiced as a whole.
- Designing organized and focused lessons that are on topic, well-sequenced, and without irrelevant digressions to optimize instructional time.
- Beginning lessons with a clear statement of goals and expectations, telling learners what is to be learned and why it is important.
- Reviewing prior skills and knowledge before beginning instruction to verify that students have the prerequisite skills and to link the new skill with related skills.
- Providing step-by-step demonstrations by modeling the skill and clarifying the decision-making processes.
- Using clear and concise language with consistent, unambiguous wording and terminology, adjusting complexity based on students’ receptive vocabulary to reduce confusion.
- Providing a range of examples and non-examples to establish the boundaries of when and when not to apply a skill, strategy, concept, or rule.
- Providing guided and supported practice to promote initial success and build confidence, regulating the difficulty of practice opportunities, and gradually increasing task difficulty as guidance decreases.
- Requiring frequent responses through questioning to help students focus, provide opportunities for elaboration, check understanding, and keep students active.
- Monitoring student performance closely to verify mastery and make timely adjustments, providing feedback on their progress.
- Providing immediate affirmative and corrective feedback to students about the accuracy of their responses to ensure high rates of success and reduce the likelihood of practicing errors.
- Delivering the lesson at a brisk pace to optimize instructional time and on-task behavior, while allowing time for students’ thinking and processing.
- Helping students organize knowledge by using teaching techniques that make connections apparent and facilitate integration with new material.
- Providing distributed and cumulative practice with multiple opportunities to practice a skill over time, addressing retention and automaticity.
Explicit instruction incorporates principles of effective instruction, such as optimizing engaged time, promoting high levels of success, increasing content coverage, having students spend more time in instructional groups, scaffolding instruction, and addressing different forms of knowledge. Teachers can increase academic learning time by increasing allocated time, matching instruction to student needs, starting lessons on time, teaching in groups, being prepared, avoiding digressions, decreasing transition time, and using routines. By implementing explicit instruction elements, teachers can address the principles of learning, resulting in higher levels of student success, increased content coverage, and enhanced student engagement.
Quote
Many students need explicit instruction in order to learn and apply academic skills
