A Useful Book That Should Have Been Needless

I had two, recurring thoughts as I read the book that the faculty of our school was invited to read over the summer.  One was that this should be required reading in every teacher-training program.  The second was more of a question.  Why on earth did this need to be published?

Why This Book Was Written

Zach Groshell tells us up front that he wrote Just Tell Them:  The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching because of all the nonsense he had experienced while training to be a teacher.  If you think my calling what transpires in many undergraduate courses in education nonsense is a bit harsh, believe me that Groshell is far more direct, referring to "edu-babble" and what he calls a "virtue-signaling, cringe-inducing, absolute nothingburger of a statement," but you will need to read his book to see which nothingburger he meant.

As in any activity or profession, foolishness has grown in the field of education like so many weeds.   This certainly does not set education apart from any other endeavor.  What I can tell you from more than thirty-five years in this profession is that the foolishness does not stem from an intent to do harm, although its origins are frequently less laudable than its advocates would claim, yet harm it does do, and it is the reason why so many American children seem less educated than those who came before them.

Aeneas Defeats Turnus, Luca Giordano (1634-1705)

Many people have the nagging sense that our children do not know all they should, that they are less capable than we imagine they should be, and that they, in a variety of ways, do not measure up either with children of yesteryear or with those in other countries.  Yes, we have been saying that sort of thing for centuries, and Vergil wrote in his Aeneid of a stone that twice-six of the kind of men the earth currently produced could not lift, but this is not that.  Track the scores on various assessments or look at the assessments themselves, and you will see that quite often our children are not experiencing as robust an education as they once were, and part of the reason is by design.

Some will find fault with this statement, but there is far less that changes in pedagogy than in content.  There was a time when Pluto was considered a planet and an atom was, by definition, the smallest particle of matter.  Content changes as we make new discoveries, correct wrong information, and in the case of history classes, simply live from one year to the next.  Pedagogy, on the other hand, does not change as significantly or as often.  It is true that discoveries in everything from nutrition to social science to neuroscience can and should bring about changes in how we teach, but there are some fundamentals to the particular form of communication we call teaching that have remained the same across cultures and millennia, and one of those is the need to tell people things.

A Shock to Non-Teachers

When I told friends who were not in education that I was reading a book that advocated for teachers directly telling pieces of information to students, a bewildered look crossed their faces.  Wasn't this what teachers already did?  Little did my friends realize, as I suspect is the case with most adults, not only has direct instruction taken a back seat to other methods, it has been for decades mocked, lampooned, and denigrated in university classes preparing people to teach, in professional development sessions and conferences, and in faculty meetings in nearly every kind of school.  Replacing the bogeyman of deadly boring and stern lecturers who speak to hear themselves talk has been the teacher who asks questions and guides students to figure things out for themselves, helping them develop critical thinking skills on their way to becoming lifelong learners.

A popular form of direct instruction

This, of course, sounds good, but Groshell takes issue with these replacement philosophies that have been boiled down to bumperstickers.  "He who does the talking, does the learning."  "Your job is to be a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage."  His classroom observations give evidence to what common sense already knew.  Never directly giving information and always opting for an inquiry-based model with its inherent "productive struggle" leads to three outcomes.  Students who already know something about the material do just fine.  Those who do not either copy from the students who know what they are doing or simply check out.

A Very Useful Book

It is regrettable that such a book needed to be written, but fortunately it has been, hopefully to counteract ideas that too often were generated and promulgated by people whose livelihoods depended on generating and promulgating new and shiny things.  Where this book has its place is in university schools of education.  He carefully lays out what direct instruction is, how and when to implement it appropriately, and how and when to pull back from it as students indeed take charge of their own learning and begin asking the questions that will help them become the critically thinking, lifelong learners we all want them to be.  With that in mind, I would offer some words of advice about this book to three groups of people.

A Reading from Homer, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1885)

To new teachers:  If you are within your first five years of teaching, read this book, highlight it, and take copious notes in the margins.  It will help to set you on a path of well-rounded instruction that will serve your students for years to come.

To veteran teachers:  If you have always had a nagging sense that something was off about some of the pedagogical approaches pitched to you, this book will validate what you have likely known all along.  If you are someone who thought that only a question-based, project-based style of teaching was legitimate and yet struggled with the lack of engagement or success in some of your students, this book will show you how you can incorporate direct instruction alongside other methods, thus giving your students a better opportunity to learn deeply.

To administrators:  Groshell writes on p. 75, "When I started my career, 'engagement' was the be-all and end-all of teaching, and to some tunnel-visioned principals, it remains the only lens they use to observe teaching."  Remember that the quiet student may be learning far more richly than the one doing and saying all the things we have come to think are the sole indicators of learning.  Remember that your teachers are experts in their field (and they should be, or you should not have hired them) and let them teach using whatever methods are, in their professional and considered opinion, appropriate in any given moment.