A select group of “model schools” will set the standard for new teaching practices in Victoria as educators work to meet a government deadline to make the switch to explicit instruction methods.
Explicit instruction, a key component of the new Victorian Teaching and Learning Model 2.0, promotes breaking down new concepts and modelling each step before progressing, checking for student understanding and re-teaching concepts and ideas if needed.
The government’s shift is a significant move away from Victoria's historically autonomous system, which allowed principals to choose their own approach to teaching.
Explicit instruction practices have already been adopted by numerous Victorian schools, which have formed grassroots clusters to share knowledge, but until now there has been no guidance from government on which instruction is preferred.
Victoria’s public schools have been given three years to move to structured phonics and explicit instruction from prep to grade 2 after the state’s Education Minister Ben Carroll announced a system-wide shift in June.
La Trobe University, which has led the way for evidence-based teaching practice in Australia, launched its Science of Language and Reading (SOLAR) Lab in 2020 – an initiative that has since trained more than 12,000 educators and other professionals.
Building on this work, the University’s new ‘Momentum Schools’ research project will investigate how best to support this change, linking schools that have successfully adopted explicit instruction with others just starting the transition.
Over the project’s three-year lifetime, researchers hope to track the rollout of explicit instruction practices and expand its adoption across the school years, including secondary.
Understanding explicit instruction
Momentum Schools researcher Associate Professor Melissa Barnes said many schools are keen to adopt to practices but are uncertain where to begin. However, in observing schools which have made the transition, Associate Professor Barnes said there are several strategies that they have used.
“Firstly, they have clearly communicated the purpose of explicit instruction,” Associate Professor Barnes told The Educator.
“For successful implementation, school leaders and teachers need to clearly understand what explicit instruction is, what it looks like in practice and why incorporating it will improve student learning.”
Another strategy that works alongside this, she noted, is supporting the understanding and practice of explicit instruction through ongoing professional learning, which directly informs their day-to-day teaching practices.
“Rather than one-off workshops or sessions, schools that have provided ongoing professional learning have found a lot of success,” she said.
“Finally, another key strategy used is implementing explicit instruction incrementally. For example, many primary schools started with the P-2 classes, focus on explicit instruction within their literacy learning and then incrementally rolled this out to other year levels and learning areas [e.g. maths etc].”
Tackling misconceptions
In the push towards explicit teaching in NSW, some experts have voiced concerns that it overemphasises a single method and undermines teachers' professional expertise.
When asked what she would say to school leaders who share these concerns, Associate Professor Barnes said assumptions about what explicit teaching is have
“We have developed a helpful video to explain what explicit instruction is, which we provide as a resource to our Momentum Schools,” she said.
“In addition, we do not advocate that explicit instruction should replace other teaching methods but rather it should ground the learning approach and be used to enhance what teachers are already teaching.”
Associate Professor Barnes noted that explicit instruction and inquiry-based learning are often positioned at polar ends of the teaching approach continuum, with many arguing that teachers should belong to one camp or the other.
“However, explicit instruction can be applied to inquiry-based learning, where teachers model the inquiry process through an ‘I do, we do, and you do’ approach.”
New approaches improving workload, wellbeing and scores
Cranbourne Primary School principal Lachlan Yeates has seen first-hand the value of explicit instruction in his classrooms. He said supporting staff was critical to the school’s transition to the new approaches.
“By providing time, resources and quality professional development, we were able to give staff the space to adopt the new approaches,” Yeates told The Educator.
“After making the transition, our staff [according to our staff opinion survey] are incredibly positive about the impact the move has had on their workload, wellbeing and student learning outcomes.”
Yeates said the structured approach is now reaping benefits in reduced staff planning and increased support for graduate teachers.
“We are particularly excited that one of our graduate teachers has been nominated for Early Career Teacher of the Year and she has thrived with our new framework.”
Yeates said while some argue that explicit approaches could disempower or disengage children, his staff have experienced “the exact opposite.”
“While we have been very pleased at the improvement in our literacy and numeracy outcomes [as measured by assessments such as NAPLAN and PAT], we have been particularly surprised and impressed at the improvements in our wellbeing outcomes,” he said.
Despite being in a low socioeconomic area of Melbourne, attendance at the school is higher than similar schools and state averages, Yeates noted.
“We have also experienced a 90 per cent reduction in violent yard incidents and our Student Opinion Survey results are equal or higher than the state on all measures.”