Train teachers to teach -- not to be guides on the side

For 30 years, teachers were trained to be "guides on the side," helping students "construct understanding," writes Chris O'Brien on Never Stop Learning. They weren't trained to teach. Now teachers fear being replaced by robots who will explain, model and assess. Humans may be allowed to stick around as counselors.

When O'Brien was in ed school in the late '90s, he writes, he was taught about Bloom’s taxonomy. Maslow’s hierarchy and (already debunked) learning styles. He didn't learn how to explain, check for understanding, anticipate misconceptions, model skills or give useful feedback.

The "craft of instruction" was ignored, he writes. Explicit instruction was considered "a power dynamic to be dismantled rather than a skill to be developed."

Unwilling to question ideology, progressives ignored the very clear evidence on "actually works in rooms with actual students," he writes.

"Effective teachers present new material in small steps, model procedures, check for understanding frequently, and provide systematic practice with feedback," O'Brien writes. "Students learn new material by connecting it to things they already know — which requires a teacher who knows what students know and can build the bridge deliberately."

The research is not ambiguous, he writes. Yet, ed schools kept on training teachers "to facilitate rather than instruct."

You cannot connect the dots if you have no dots. Exploration is powerful — but only after the foundational knowledge exists that makes the exploration productive. Inquiry works — but only when students have enough background knowledge to actually inquire with.

Overwhelmed with too many demands on their working memory, "novice learners . . . don’t construct understanding," O'Brien writes. "They construct confusion." The path to "students who can think, question, connect, and create" runs through explicit instruction.

Thirty years of evidence shows that inquiry-based, discovery-oriented classrooms work best for "the students who were going to learn anyway," he writes. "Whose background knowledge was rich enough to make the exploration productive. Whose families filled the gap at home." Students who need to be taught well do poorly.

Instead of building robots who teach, perhaps with a human facilitator on the side, we need human teachers who know the content, understand how students learn and have "been trained to deliver instruction with the precision and responsiveness that actually produces learning," writes O'Brien, who's worked as a teacher, principal and network leader. "We know how to build that teacher. The science has been clear for decades. We just decided not to."

British teachers have embraced cognitive science, including explicit instruction, writes Greg Toppo in an interview with Zach Groshell, the author of Just Tell Them. Achievement is rising steadily in English schools on international tests, while U.S. students are doing worse.