“Learners can logically misinterpret your presentation. So it has to be extremely clear. Otherwise, they will either get the wrong answer or they won’t understand what it is that you’re trying to teach them.”
The above seems quite obvious, but the implications can be immense for anyone interested in helping others learn. This year’s Sold a Story podcast examines the history of an approach to teaching called direct instruction developed by Zig Engelman. Direct instruction is a heavily scripted approach to teaching that isolates and repeats specific learning tasks for students until they have achieved mastery of that task. Research has shown direct instructions to be an effective way to speed up children’s path to learning to read, and Engelman suspected the same approach could be applied to all kinds of learning.
For fans of exploratory learning methodologies like myself, direct instruction sounds life an awful experience for students and perhaps an even worse experience for teachers. Despite piles of research showing that it is effective, most schools have never adopted it and many that have adopted it have later stopped using it.
As I reflect back on my own experiences as a learner, I see elements of both discovery and direct instruction. When working in a field with clear, right answers, i.e. the grammatical aspects of language and many aspects of math, whether it was with a teacher or on my own I used something like direct instruction to get the fundamentals down. Then, at some point, when I had internalized the fundamentals, I moved beyond modeling and repetition to a more creative, generative form of learning, which in many cases felt more like the creation of something new.
The key point was that for any given field (from reading, writing and math to tennis, basketball and singing to philosophy, history and organizational/leadership development), I could not practice anything that felt like discovery learning in a creative way until I had internalized the mechanics of that field.
I suspect that rather than placing directed instruction and discovery learning in opposition to each other, we probably always need to picture out how to combine them. Before we can learn to do something well, we have to learn how to do it. At the same time, I doubt that it makes sense to rely exclusively on directed instruction for all kinds of learning. Once we have reached a certain level of proficiency in the fundamentals of a field of learning, our brains naturally start to extrapolate, combine, isolate, re-combine and change the elements in ways that cannot be directed. Then, as we add on new elements to that field, we sometimes have to go back to a more directed approach to master those new elements so that we can integrate them into our repertoire of tools.
This is very much the way one learns to be great in any field. We repeat learning tasks in an isolated environment (e.g. a lesson on how to hit a topspin forehand) until we have internalized these tasks as skills, then we experiment with using those skills in the real world in which things are unpredictable (e.g. a tennis match) and multiple skills must come together to magically create a result (e.g. a down-the-line winner).
As with many things, the answer is NEITHER either/or NOR both/and, but rather what kind of learning task will be most useful right now to move the learner toward the long-term goal of efficacy in ____ in the real world.
The learning task we ask learners (including ourselves) to focus on should take into account what we are trying to learn how to do. Learning to read or write the word “dog” is totally different from learning to play with a dog, write a story about a dog or act like a dog, so the learning design for each learning task will also be different.
—
Explore・Define・Iterate・Transform
Context ・ Intention ・ Action ・ Outcome
—
Agency (主体性) + Purpose (志) + Growth (成長) + Connection (繋がり) + Contribution (貢献) = Meaning (意義)
—
In the space between you and me awaits all that will ever be.
人と人の間に全てのもと
—
For more on directed instruction, find the Sold a Story podcast series on your podcast app.