Experiential Learning Advocates Have Had It Wrong For Decades
...A modern-day case in point is the widespread belief among North American educators that children learn better when they receive minimal guidance from their teachers. This belief has had a powerful impact on schools and the education our children are receiving, and not in a good way. There is considerable evidence that minimal guidance techniques are failing students -- plunging test scores, millions of functionally illiterate and functionally innumerate high school graduates, and loud complaints from unhappy parents, employers and postsecondary institutions.
The concept of providing students with minimal guidance has been around for at least 50 years, but most people are not aware of its longevity because it keeps changing its name every 10 years or so when its poor results can no longer be ignored. At first, back in the '60s, the minimal-guidance approach was called "discovery learning," but that name soon gave way to "experiential learning," which in turn became "problem-based learning" and then "inquiry learning." Now it's "constructivist learning." Remarkably, every time the wheel turns the newly fired up passionate advocates of the latest iteration appear to be unaware of its long history of failure...
I advocate explicit instruction. Explicit instruction takes the traditional or default approach to teaching and modifies it to make it even more explicit and highly interactive.
This method has its origins in research from the 1960s and 1970s into the behaviours of the most effective teachers and it has been verified since then across a range of different study designs and subjects. You can read more here.
Yet you won’t hear much about explicit teaching if you wander into a education school seminar or a professional development workshop. You won’t read much about it on popular websites for teachers. Instead, you are likely to be encouraged to adopt an implicit or ‘child-centered’ approach. These come in many guises but the common ingredient is that the teacher takes a step back and the students are expected to make some key decisions or figure out some of the concepts for themselves.
Proponents of ‘child-centered’ education are evangelical. They don’t ask us to modify our practice, they ask us to ditch traditional methods entirely in favour of something quite different.
Unlike explicit instruction, implicit teaching is largely unsupported by large-scale correlational or experimental evidence. So what are the reasons people use to try to persuade us to adopt implicit approaches? I’ve collected a few...
