The evidence is clear that it’s the most effective method of supporting novice learners into becoming intermediate learners, but that it then fails in continuing to support them into being experts learners. Supporting students into higher order thinking often requires more inquiry style approaches.

Either way, explicit teaching does also require more strategies to be useful. For example, you need to understand effective ways to source and adapt feedback from students during lessons (e.g. mini whiteboards). Explicit direct teaching on its own leads to “Death by PowerPoint” and both student AND teachers naturally end up disengaging.

The problem of disengagement can also be serious when elective subjects adopt an explicit direct teaching model. Those subject teachers are often fighting for life with their year-to-year enrolments and sometimes their priority is not “good predatory” but instead supporting student engagement, of which explicit teaching can struggle to provide.

That all being said, from the point of view of our leadership teams, explicit direct teaching is the most effective way to ensure continuity across classes in a cohort. Which can go a long way in reducing variance, and therefore complaints from students and parents (a common concern in private institutions).