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Descriptions of effective teaching often depict an idealized form of "perfect" instruction. Yet, pursuing perfection in teaching, which depends on children's behavior, is ultimately futile. To be effective, lessons and educators need to operate with about 75% efficiency. The remaining 25% can be impactful, but expecting it in every lesson, every day, is unrealistic. Perfection in teaching may be unattainable, but progress is not. Whether you are aiming for the 75% effectiveness mark or striving for continuous improvement, this podcast will guide you in that endeavor.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Better Teaching Only Stuff that Works. A podcast for teachers, instructional coaches, administrators, and anyone else who supports teachers in the classroom. This show is a proud member of the BE Podcast Network shows that help you go beyond education. Find all our shows@bepodcastnetwork.com.
I am Jean Taver, the host for this podcast, and my goal for this episode, like all episodes, is that you laugh at least once and that you leave with an actionable idea for better teaching. A quick reminder, no cliches, no buzzwords, only stuff that works.
Speaker 2: Hello, everyone. It's just me again today, and today I am going to talk about something that has been on my mind lately, and I've seen it in, on X and Twitter and, and other places. And it is answering a question about what do new teachers need to know? And like most things in education, I don't know w- exactly what they need to know, all the things they need to know.
But of course, I'm gonna share my opinion on something they need to know, and I don't think it's gonna be, uh, any surprise that it's gonna be explicit instruction. And I just wanna share a couple experiences lately that really reinforce that. And, and one is I had worked in the district probably for more than 10 years as a consultant, and I would come in every year and I would train teachers and, and coach them in explicit instruction, coach, uh, administrators.
And then COVID hit, and schools were closed for a couple years. And, uh, after a couple years of virtual schools and virtual training, I got a call from that district, from the person who was in charge of training new teachers in their, uh, induction program. And in California, uh, new teachers, teachers just being credentialed, uh, need to go through an additional two years of training, uh, called an induction program.
And so I was called, uh, and the person who ran the program asked me to come down because she said that the teachers, uh, have no experience in explicit instruction, and this was kinda doubly true because these people had b- gotten their credential during a virtual... All their classes were virtual. They had never been in a classroom.
And so she wanted to be sure that these folks had an opportunity to be trained and coached in explicit instruction. And as a, as a side note, uh, I had trained and coached the person who was in charge of the program now, so we were familiar with each other, and she knew exactly, she knew exactly what I did.
So that was, that was one experience. You know, they just didn't have training and coaching in explicit instruction. Another experience I had recently is, is we were training, uh, 32 new teachers in a district. Uh, most of the teachers were brand new teachers. And as we went around the room and had people introduce themselves, we discovered that of those 32 new hires, they had come from 20 different credentialing programs.
20 different credentialing programs, different vocabularies, different language, and now they're in this new district, and guess what? They had had no training in explicit instruction. So again, no surprise, I believe that every new teacher needs training and coaching in designing and delivering explicit instruction.
So let me give you some reasons. Um- First of all, I, I, I wanna, I wanna be explicit that this is not-- when I say training and instruction, this is not sitting in a PD. This is not sitting in a classroom learning about it. This is being trained in how to do it, doing it, and receiving feedback. And the idea is this, to be able to get teachers to that level of fluency.
And so thinking of, of, thinking of the learning hierarchy, we need to get teachers past the acquisition stage of explicit instruction and into the fluency stage. And why is, why is this so important? There's research that says that teachers need to make between 800 and 1,500 decisions a day. Now, why is there such a big disparity?
One of the disparities is between the 1,800 and fift- uh, the 800 and 1,500 is the type of research questions were asked, what constituted making the decision, et cetera. Regardless, let's use 800 decisions. That's a lot of decisions you need to make. But if a teacher is fluent in explicit instruction, it decreases the number of decisions that that teacher has to make in the classroom dramatically.
Because what does fluency mean? Fluency means getting to automaticity, being able to draw from long-term memory, being able to draw from knowledge automatically without having to make a decision. So what you're doing becomes a habit. The unexpected becomes expected. Th-think about this. If you're a coffee drinker and someone asks you how you take your coffee, you don't have to think about it.
You don't make a decision every time. You just tell them, "I take it black." And that's what we need to get, that level of fluency in many of the, uh, things that are happening in the classroom with respect to explicit instruction. Become fluent, the unexpected becomes more expected, and then we can move on to generalization when things happen.
The reality is, the more fluent you are, the less things become unexpected and the less adaptations and generalizations you need to make because you've seen it before. So that's the first reason. The first reason, again, to get to automaticity. Second reason I think that teachers need to become
fluent and expert in explicit instruction is you need to provide accommodations and modifications at times for students. So if you have-- if you're thinking that you have to modify a lesson plan, what are you modifying it from? What's your baseline? If you understand and are an expert, or at least understand and can identify good explicit instruction lesson design, that's what you are gonna modify from.
You can't modify something that doesn't exist. You can't make accommodations from something that doesn't exist. So understanding, being able to design explicit instructions gives you a starting point, gives you a baseline. I have some students, thinking of my students, I can do this, I can do that, but I'm making my adjustments from, I'm making my adjustments from the original lesson design Number three reason that teachers should be expert in explicit instruction, it eliminates variables.
Now, interventions result when students aren't successful with tier one or tier two instruction. When that happens, we need to do something differently, as mentioned before, maybe some sort of modification in how the instruction is presented, modification in the content. But, but, but, but we need to make sure before we start moving kids into intervention programs, we need to be sure that that tier one instruction was solid.
A child's initial classroom experience, the initial classroom experience needs to be constant. It can't be variable. It can't be different from classroom to classroom. If not, how are we able to design intervention programs? We need to be sure that effective explicit instruction is across the board Fourth reason, evaluating materials.
All of us use externally created lessons, whether it's from a textbook, whether it's AI-generated, wherever. We do not have the ability to evaluate lessons, to evaluate what we see in front of us unless we are expert in explicit instruction. We do not need to be expert in design, but we need to be able to be expert in evaluating the design so that we can say, "This is good, this is bad."
I know that there are, uh, you know, I have seen many districts, in fact, probably every district in which I have ever worked as a consultant, are going to have some process for evaluating curriculum, new curriculum that they're gonna purchase If you are doing explicit instruction at your school, then you can evaluate that program because this is what you're looking for.
This is what's gonna make it good. And on the other hand, you're gonna see-- you're gonna be able to know what is not desirable in that program. But without having that expertise in explicit instruction, design and delivery, you're not gonna be able to evaluate that curriculum, whether it's, whether it's a new complete text series or just individual lessons that you're getting from AI.
And then last, and certainly not least, is if all the teachers have developed an expertise in explicit lesson design and delivery, they will have developed a common language, a common understanding of terms being used. Why is that important? Every school has some sort of, uh, professional learning community, PLC, or a professional learning team, or grade levels, uh, meetings, or content area collaboration.
It's very difficult to collaborate unless everybody's on the same page with respect to terminology, and there's no variable with respect to, uh, when somebody's talking about lesson design. They understand what it means. Now, final thought That does not mean that 100% of the lessons being taught by a teacher or 100% of the lessons being taught in that school are gonna be taught using explicit instruction.
There are things that there are gonna be activities, there are going to be, uh, projects, there are gonna be things that, uh, students are gonna be doing once they move out of that, uh, novice stage and move into a more expert stage that we're gonna be asking them to do. But they can't do it w- without first having that explicit and
without having that explicit understanding of lesson delivery and design. So just to recap, what are some reasons why all teachers should be expert in designing and delivering lessons? One, getting to fluency in explicit instruction helps the teacher become automatic. It becomes, there are so fewer decisions that need to be made that the decisions that do need to be made can be made more easily.
Number two, if you need to modify lessons, where are you modifying them from? You need to have a baseline lesson to which I can move this, I can move that, I can make these adjustments. Number three, it eliminates variables when we're looking at student work. We can always count on the fact that instruction was good, instruction was solid.
That's not something that we have to look at. Number four, to evaluate materials Because we have an eye on design, and we have an eye on delivery, and we can ask ourselves, "Do, does this curriculum, do these lessons support what we do? Am I gonna have to change them drastically, or are they good the way they are?"
And then finally, being able to collaborate with colleagues, having developed a common language. Now, I began this asking with the question: What do teachers need to know? There's a lot of things they need to know, uh, and they certainly haven't been listed here, but I am gonna argue till I quit that one of the most important things that they need to know is explicit instruction, understanding lesson design and delivery.
I hope this finds you well. I hope your new school year is going well, and look forward to talking to you soon.
Speaker: If you are enjoying these podcasts, tell a friend. Also, please leave a five star rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. You can follow me on Blue Sky at G Taver Netti on Twitter x at g Taver, Netti, and you can learn more about me and the work I do at my website. Tess cg.com. That's T-E-S-S-C g.com, where you'll also find information about ordering my books teach Fast focus, adaptable structured teaching, and maximizing the impact of coaching cycles.