It's Not the Explanations

Zach Groshell wrote a book called Just Tell Them, with the subtitle, "The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching." It's a good book! I'm going to say something critical about it, but I do mean that. The sections on attention, teaching with inputs and outputs, visuals, and examples are especially good. It’s short and full of nice illustrations. Teachers should read the book.

But the book falls into a trap that I find unhelpful. Groshell advocates for a type of teaching that is often called explicit teaching or direct instruction or some other permutation of those words. The book isn’t just about explanations. It's about everything that goes into explicit teaching. But both the title and the subtitle suggest that explanations are at the center of Groshell’s conception of effective teaching.

I want to look at three different models of explicit teaching, and think about the role that explanations play in each.

Direct Instruction

Here is a page from a Direct Instruction teacher’s guide:

Focus on the blue sections at the bottom. The blue text is what the teacher says. (Signal.) is a signal for students to respond chorally. This is what a lot of Direct Instruction looks like. A lot of practice, a lot of choral response. There are explanations mixed in, but probably they’re not very long and they’re interspersed with students answering lots of questions.

You can feel however you like about Direct Instruction. There’s a lot to have opinions about — the scripting, the procedural focus, the whole-group choral response, the fast-paced whole-group instruction. But explanations are not the central component of this style of teaching.¹

Rosenshine's Principles

Barak Rosenshine was a researcher who observed a ton of classrooms, looked at the classrooms where students were most successful, and picked out some common characteristics of those classrooms. Here are the principles he found in those successful classrooms:

• Begin a lesson with a short review of previous learning

• Present new material in small steps with student practice after each step

• Ask a large number of questions and check the responses of all students

• Provide models

• Guide student practice

• Check for student understanding

• Obtain a high success rate

• Provide scaffolds for difficult tasks

• Require and monitor independent practice

• Engage students in weekly and monthly review

Rosenshine's principles are often held up as a model for explicit teaching. But here's the thing. Explanation doesn't play a very large role. The only principle where explanation is clearly present is "Provide models." Yes, teachers will give explanations when they provide models. But they will also provide worked examples, exemplars, demonstrations, and more. Rosenshine’s principles are mostly about student practice, and giving feedback on that practice. Again, explanations play a role, but they are one very small component in a larger system.

JUMP

JUMP is a math curriculum created by John Mighton. It’s often spoken of favorably by people who advocate for explicit instruction. For instance, here’s Anna Stokke giving John Mighton a friendly interview on her podcast.

Below is a page from the JUMP program on writing mixed numbers as improper fractions.

And here’s a quote from the front matter of the JUMP workbooks:

Allow students to discover the concepts by themselves as much as possible. Mathematical discoveries can be made in small, incremental steps. The discovery of a new step is like untangling the parts of a puzzle. It is exciting and rewarding.

The JUMP program incorporates many of Rosenshine’s principles. It breaks concepts down into small steps and provides practice after each step. It provides scaffolds for difficult tasks. It provides models, mostly in the form of worked examples. And it specifically downplays the value of explanations.

JUMP is a curriculum that teachers can use in lots of different ways. I use it for some topics, and I do use explanations. But I think there’s something important about breaking concepts down into small steps: if you do that well, and you try to explain every possible question from every single small step, you end up spending all of your time explaining. If you’re willing to step back, focus on communicating big ideas, and let students apply those ideas with lots of guidance, feedback, and checks for understanding, students can often do more than you think.

Explanations

I'm not arguing that explanations are bad, or that explanations aren't part of explicit teaching. They are. Teachers should explain things. I explain things to my students all the time.

I'm arguing that explanations are not the central component of explicit teaching. They play a role. But that's obvious to teachers. I've heard teachers use the phrase "direct instruction" as a synonym for "the part of the lesson where I explain things to students." Teachers know that explanations exist. Teachers use explanations.

If you want to help teachers understand explicit instruction, explanation isn't what you should focus on. Instead, focus on all the other stuff — because some of it is much less obvious, and much less widely used.

To me, the center of teaching is all the questions and tasks we give students. We want students to do stuff — in my case, to solve math problems — in order to learn. In all three examples above, students are constantly doing things. Answering questions, responding, thinking. That's what good teaching looks like. When I do a better job with all the other pieces of instruction — connecting prior knowledge to current learning, breaking content into small steps, guiding practice, checking for understanding — I find that I don't need to explain as much. I explain less; students do math more. Again, I'm not saying I don't explain things. I do. But explanations are not the center of effective teaching.

Let's imagine you want to convince more people that an explicit instruction model like DI or Rosenshine’s principles or JUMP is effective. If you run around saying "just tell them" a lot of teachers will say to you "I've tried explaining things to students and they never seem to remember, that didn't work for me."

There's a lot of good stuff in Groshell’s book. Lots of great advice that goes beyond explanations. I get that "Just Tell Them" is an edgy and clever name for a book about education. But that framing is unhelpful. And it’s not just that book — lots of people talk about explicit instruction as if it’s mostly explanations.

And I think Groshell knows this. Explanations play a role in his book. There’s good advice about making explanations more effective. There’s also a lot of advice about other parts of teaching besides explanation, and how they all fit together. Teaching well involves doings lots of things well, and fitting all those things into a coherent system. It will always be tempting to reduce teaching down to that one little thing. But that’s not how it works.

1. I have never taught a Direct Instruction program. I read the book Direct Instruction: A Practitioner’s Guide and reviewed it last year. I’m basing my impressions off of the teacher’s guides I have and what I have read about the programs. I don’t want to get into (another) argument about DI here, so I’ll just briefly say: I personally wouldn’t want to teach in that way, and you can read my review to see where I find DI lacking. But I have learned a lot from the DI programs, I think they’re thoughtfully designed, and I’ve incorporated some elements of DI into my teaching.