This season, which is about teaching and about direct teaching in particular, just taps into a lot of questions about fears that certain kinds of teaching or teaching kids in a very direct way is somehow gonna squash their independence or not allow them to be independent.
Sigh. So we're going to try to reopen one of the fauxest debates in education-- the direct instruction vs. discovery debate. Let's hit a couple of points here.
1) I call this a faux debate because I have never encountered, in person or otherwise, a single capable teacher who believed that they needed to use all of one or the other. It's strictly mix and match, depending on the content. I have never so much as heard of, for instance, an elementary teacher who thinks that students should just sort of discover the multiplication table. OTOH, there are people in leadership positions, thought leaders, administrators on local and state levels, and various edupreneurs who adhere to one side or the other, but actual teachers in the field are in general more practical than ideological.
2) Direct instruction covers a wide range of possibilities, from super-strict scripting to handing out a times table and telling students to commit it to memory to explicitly instructing a student after face-to-face analysis of what brick is missing in the student's building.
Look-- both direct and discovery instruction have very definite limits.
Students have a limited ability to discover things about subjects of which they are ignorant. And when the question at hand has a clear, known answer, it's just annoying as hell for someone to demand that you "discover" the answer and wait for them to tell you whether you're right or not (which is, in fact, just a twisty way of delivering delayed direct instruction). Make me go look it up? That's just having me get direct instruction from a book.
And lord knows we need knowledgeable filters. Have we not seen a universe of people who "did their own research" in a flurry of internet-based discovery self-instruction and thereby arrived at utter and complete baloney? Never tell me you "learned more from the kids" than they did from you-- if you, the certified teacher, are not the most knowledgeable expert in your classroom, then why are you there? You're no more useful than one of those "guides" at an AI school.
But direct instruction can't do it all, either. It's not so much that endless direct instruction robs students of agency and autonomy; it's that you, the adult teacher, are not going to enjoy the ways that your supremely bored students find to exercise their agency and autonomy.
Students are not simply buckets into which information is easily poured, and "thinking" is not simply the act of retrieving little data chunks from the bucket. And I am frankly suspicious of folks who think everything is a settled Truth that needs only be collected and repeated (looking at you, classical education folks).
And when we enter the world of interpretation and analysis, direct instruction simply doesn't cut it. There is no reason for students to have to "discover" the dates of major events in The Great European War, but direct instruction is inadequate for learning about the causes of the war. There is no reason for students to "discover" the setting and characters of Hamlet, but direct instruction is inadequate for grappling with just how mad Hamlet may or may not be.
Too much direct instruction in a classroom and students zone out, learning that their only task is to collect and retrieve whatever the teacher wants them to collect and retrieve. Too much discovery in a classroom and students feel aimless and abandoned by an adult who is somewhat useless. To guide students successfully through the learning landscape, you don't make them follow in your exact footsteps, step by step, and you don't just turn them loose with a "Good luck, hope to see you on the other side."
At this point in the debate, some advocates of either school are going to pipe up and object that I have mis-described their preferred mode of teaching, and they will proceed to describe the "true" version of discovery or direct instruction, and they will describe a mode that is, in fact, a blend of both, at which point I will grasp at one of my remaining hairs because that is my frickin' point.
I sometimes look at back at my 39 years in the classroom and try to decide where my teaching lands in this dichotomy, and I land on a third possibility-- exploration and examination.
To explore the learning landscape of whatever content you're dealing with, the student needs both some direct instruction about the fundamentals of the landscape and some freedom to range about it. We can't get to a useful and enriching conversation about the themes of Hamlet without some hard foundation in what the text does and does not say-- but we can't stop there. It's hard to examine what we don't know, but once we have that knowledge, we need some freedom to sift through it, turn it over, see what we can find in it. It's hard to grapple with advanced math if you haven't memorized your times tables, but you can't memorize your way through every math problem you ever encounter.
I don't know what the new season of Hanford's work will bring, though I'm sure that once again a whole world of education amateurs, journalists, thought leaders, policy wonks, politicians, etc etc etc will have many discussions about it. No doubt various teacher examples of one failure or another will be unearthed (because in a group of 4 million, you can find a couple of examples of anything). Meanwhile, I expect that the rest of the actual teachers in actual classrooms will continue to continue working on a balanced blend of what actually works for them.
Guide on the side or sage on the stage? How about a guide who is knowledgeable enough to periodically stop and deliver some sage advice, and who is wise enough to know when to lead and when to get out of the way? It won’t sell many stories, but it will get the job done.
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