great article. i have some thoughts, mainly i want to point towards the end of it, when you hit the nail, in my opinion. the practical problem is simply, that classrooms are to big. we definitely need to work out some ideological issues, but that won’t help, if there are not enough teachers to give each child the support they need. thats also the only problem i have with engelmanns quote; it can be misinterpreted as a too huge task for the shoulders of a single teacher. we wont solve this problem through innovation, like AI, but through politics. its a frustrating subject, but i think everybody that has worked in public schools (in almost every country) knows that we simply need more resources. education is inherently political (for this and also a lot of other reasons) and thats the one perspective i missed in your conclusion.
It is definitely a political problem. Putting it all on teachers (who are often barely above the poverty line themselves) to solve is more of a way to avoid dealing with the problem.
I just recently retired as a music teacher from the American DoDEA system where inquiry-based learning is still being pushed (required) and explicit instruction is considered “sage on the stage” lecturing and anti-child centered.
I started my career 46 years ago as a pre-school Montessori teacher, however. Upon reflection I can see that Montessori embraces exploratory child-centered learning AND explicit instruction. Yes, the teacher (often referred to as a director) does function as a “guide on the side”, but only until the moment comes when a didactic materials must be presented. At that point they are as explicit as Siegfried Engelmann.
That might be why DoD schools are outliers in all the test results.
Then again, it might be because the DoD typically provides for the basic needs of families: shelter, food, clothing, a regular paycheck, free or subsidized recreation, etc.
On the whole I agree, and I call myself a constructivist. But I feel there is a bit of a straw man fallacy in the piece.
Constructivism has always meant, to me, heavily guided and purposefully framed exploration. The teacher has to know the destination, and carefully observes and questions to reveal student thinking.
An example is cognitively guided instruction. There is a period of exploration—using a carefully chosen problem type, found in the very sophisticated Common Core Progressions documents—and the teacher then employs a worked example *from a peer* that advances the thinking of the group.
Tomorrow, they will try it again. And the strategy is meaningful because there was purposeful struggle and social confirmation of an appropriate strategy that leads to conceptual understanding.
In this way, all first graders can learn to unitize 10. Directly teaching and then practicing that concept would fly over many of their heads because they are six and it would be boring as hell.
A huge problem with constructivism is not the cognitive science but the lack of understanding of the conceptual underpinning of standards on the part of teachers.
Re: "heavily guided and purposefully framed exploration"
"We don’t need our prompts to be too tight and tidy or our lesson plans to be too crowded and thick. The more space we allow between children’s experiences with layered content, the more they can bring themselves to their learning and share more of their honest processing and expression. We’ll learn more about children this way, too—how they’re connecting and wondering and making sense of things."
I’m from the Lucy Sprague Mitchell school of exploration (literally: Bank Street College of Education), but there has to be a balance.
Young children absolutely need to play, and in their free (and sometimes bounded) play there are opportunities for executive functions to develop. Teachers absolutely need to take an active role before, during and after.
As kids get older, the content gets more structured and the time for less guided play diminishes.
There’s also no nonsense about phonics and phonemic awareness (and I hope Mr. Rogers would agree): it can still be fun but it is teacher directed and sequential.
I don’t think I agree with Mr. Rogers’s successors in all circumstances, but I see a place for their views. The through lines for me are developmental appropriateness and the knowledge of the teacher.
I'm pretty sure literally no one is arguing for a lack of some kind of balance.
The best explanation of play that I've heard of is from Amanda Morgan. She specializes in PreK, but a lot of what she says applies to older students as well.
She says play = agency + joy. And she says play can be a spectrum with increasing adult support and direction, all the way from free play, through guided play, games, playful instruction, and direct instruction. If you're interested, you can check her out at notjustcute.com.
With regard to phonics, Fred Rogers wasn't a reading specialist (nor do I want to put him on too high a pedestal). But from my training, experience with reading interventions, and from reading research on the subject, I can tell you that an overemphasis on phonics is systematically killing the love of reading for many children even before it has much of a chance to start. Kids who need help with phonics definitely should get that help, but giving kids mandatory nonsense-word assessments and lessons in skills they've already demonstrated on real words in real books doesn't help anyone (but the people selling the curriculums and tests).
I think your words are very tempering and welcome. Yes, I agree that everyone seeks some kind of balance, but as always the devil is in the details.
With as many as 20% of Americans having dyslexia, the nonsense word screening is a brilliant use of a very small amount of time. If my daughter (who was reading fluently until 4th grade, when her ability to mask her lack of phonemic awareness and decoding knowledge finally ran out in the face of more complex texts and multi-syllabic words) had it, she would have gotten the help she needed years earlier.
I was in “gifted” classes all through my schooling, but I remember phonics workbooks as part of my early grades in school. Far from boring, it was fine with me. I found agency and joy in school for sure, and phonics was just one more arena where I could be successful.
To me, the research is clear, and young kids need to play in school, AND need phonemic awareness instruction and assessment, followed by sequential phonics, to get out of the mess we are in.
(We also need a whole hell of a lot of other changes to our [lack of a coherent] approach, it’s not just phonics. I would start with identity, like Dr. Gholdy Muhammad!)
The research is only "clear" when you avoid reading about 3/4 of what's out there. When you only stick to Shaywitz (who started getting famous as a shill for the Pritzkers) and studies in experimental psychology endorsed by the IDA (formerly the Orton Society), you get the false idea that there's an overwhelming body of research supporting what some people using an fMRI machine to study the reading of up to a whole small sentence say.
Why not start by reading up on EMMA (eye-movement miscue analysis) research? or the growing body of evidence from the UK that two decades of overteaching phonics hasn't done what people were told it would do?
Maybe you should have taken the time to really listen to your daughter read aloud, and then ask her to retell what she read. Maybe teachers should have time and autonomy to do that, too.
I'm not going to get into your opinions about how students' identities don't matter. Your "gifted" label obviously seems to matter to you, though.
This is such a wonderful article, thank you! I saw this when I was teaching English as a second/foreign language, moving from my CELTA (teaching adults) to the TYLEC (teaching children) where the Discovery and Exploration of language was the biggest distinction. In my adult teaching, I was able to use metalinguistic terms, break down the grammar etc but with kids, it needed to be the treasure hunt you described.
What you describe is exactly what I witnessed teaching English literature at a government school in Sri Lanka to Middle Schoolers. I had one girl in the class reading Jeffery Archer and another who was a high beginner at best according to the CEFR - and I had to teach both these students poetry and literature and grade them in a standardised way...there was nothing standard about it.
This really hits home for me as someone who's worked in education policy. The mystery meat navigation analogy is brillant for explaining how discovery learning basically asks students to find what they already know. I saw this exact dynamic play out in schools where well-meaning teachers used inquiry-based methods that totally benifited kids from educated families while leaving others confused. The Engelmann quote about teachers taking responsibility for learning rather than blaming students is powerful stuff.
Phenomena centered approaches like those from NGSS I think solve a lot of these problems while still making inquiry and discovery a vital step in the learning process… but it’s a guided process, not a fully independent one. It’s still starts with discovery and inquiry, but the parameters conditions and contexts are all well presented and controlled for.
It’s how I handled my science classroom - we’d start with a demo or some other kind of phenomena, use that to generate questions and have discussions centered on the student’s inquiry, and then we’d get into the meat of it. I always found kids far more engaged when we taught it that way rather than teaching the content first and THEN jumping into the phenomena.
Anyone who has watched a baby crawl around a room for five minutes or pour water from one container to another in the bathtub knows that "The capacity for autonomous inquiry is not a starting condition; it is an achievement, built through the systematic acquisition of knowledge and skills that make independence possible" is false.
“Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children, play is serious learning. At various times, play is a way to cope with life and to prepare for adulthood. Playing is a way to solve problems and to express feelings. In fact, play is the real work of childhood.” - Fred Rogers
In this hotly contested arena thank you for doing that rare thing, hitting all relevant nails squarely on the head. The pithy ‘category mistake’ observation is for me particularly powerful, in directly pinning down that significant aspect of the problem.
"In education, by contrast, we routinely implement approaches based on intuition, ideology, or romantic appeal, testing them only after widespread adoption, if at all." This is the subject of my latest post: Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego: M.I.C.E. Can Undermine Literacy Instruction (https://harriettjanetos.substack.com/p/money-ideology-compromise-ego-mice?r=5spuf).
Here’s a more academic version with that idea integrated smoothly and clearly:
Although not widely supported, there is some pedagogical merit in traditional tracking models, particularly those that employed progressively smaller class sizes based on students’ prior knowledge and skill levels. It’s my belief that these models succeeded in addressing the instructional needs of students in higher tracks, but likely fell short or ignored providing the explicit, systematic instruction and supports required for students placed in lower tracks.
I’d advocate bringing back a revised tracking model rather than relying on mixed-skill classrooms that depend heavily on teacher or LLM driven differentiation. Like the Montessori approach, we could group students across mixed age ranges (e.g., 2-3 year spans) while maintaining relatively comparable skill levels. Such a structure may better align instruction with students’ developmental readiness and learning needs, while providing proximal scaffolding for peer to peer support.
Your article hits. An IB education does well at balancing. We are encouraged to use both sides of the pendulum, all the way from discovery to direct instruction through lecture.
Humans all have different needs. To prescribe one approach means most will not fit.
I’m not a teacher, but I am now observing a third generation of children (siblings, children, grandchildren), and they are all different in prior knowledge, aptitude, interests, and curiousity.
These differences are magnified in American public schools now that there is no tracking, no willingness to allow children to repeat grades, no discipline, and too many cell phones.
How can explicit instruction work in a post-elementary math class in which some students cannot multiply numbers in their heads, some can follow a geometric proof, and some are ready for calculus?
Most experienced teachers do a blend of both. It seems to me a false dichotomy that started the article: "The capacity for autonomous inquiry is not a starting condition; it is an achievement, built through the systematic acquisition of knowledge and skills that make independence possible."
"Autonomous inquiry" is an inherent trait to this thing humans do: thinking. And so is the "systematic acquisition of knowledge". They work together but are (even if subtly) different. If one trains for problem solving but then is tested on memory, it is no surprise the tests results might disappoint.
Also in the mid nineties there was an uproar in Europe. German parents were saying how come our grown children, who grew up with every privilege and access to computers from a young age, are squeezed out of the job market by young programmers who grew up in India, playing with sticks and stones? I bet the German students tested better in acquired and retained knowledge and the Indian students tested better in problem solving. As educators we must address the whole.
While you've focused on who is most disadvantaged, I assume you agree that well-prepared learners are also disadvantaged (relative to their learning potential) by a discovery approach?
great article. i have some thoughts, mainly i want to point towards the end of it, when you hit the nail, in my opinion. the practical problem is simply, that classrooms are to big. we definitely need to work out some ideological issues, but that won’t help, if there are not enough teachers to give each child the support they need. thats also the only problem i have with engelmanns quote; it can be misinterpreted as a too huge task for the shoulders of a single teacher. we wont solve this problem through innovation, like AI, but through politics. its a frustrating subject, but i think everybody that has worked in public schools (in almost every country) knows that we simply need more resources. education is inherently political (for this and also a lot of other reasons) and thats the one perspective i missed in your conclusion.
It is definitely a political problem. Putting it all on teachers (who are often barely above the poverty line themselves) to solve is more of a way to avoid dealing with the problem.
https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/larrabee_Public_goods.pdf
I just recently retired as a music teacher from the American DoDEA system where inquiry-based learning is still being pushed (required) and explicit instruction is considered “sage on the stage” lecturing and anti-child centered.
I started my career 46 years ago as a pre-school Montessori teacher, however. Upon reflection I can see that Montessori embraces exploratory child-centered learning AND explicit instruction. Yes, the teacher (often referred to as a director) does function as a “guide on the side”, but only until the moment comes when a didactic materials must be presented. At that point they are as explicit as Siegfried Engelmann.
That might be why DoD schools are outliers in all the test results.
Then again, it might be because the DoD typically provides for the basic needs of families: shelter, food, clothing, a regular paycheck, free or subsidized recreation, etc.
On the whole I agree, and I call myself a constructivist. But I feel there is a bit of a straw man fallacy in the piece.
Constructivism has always meant, to me, heavily guided and purposefully framed exploration. The teacher has to know the destination, and carefully observes and questions to reveal student thinking.
An example is cognitively guided instruction. There is a period of exploration—using a carefully chosen problem type, found in the very sophisticated Common Core Progressions documents—and the teacher then employs a worked example *from a peer* that advances the thinking of the group.
Tomorrow, they will try it again. And the strategy is meaningful because there was purposeful struggle and social confirmation of an appropriate strategy that leads to conceptual understanding.
In this way, all first graders can learn to unitize 10. Directly teaching and then practicing that concept would fly over many of their heads because they are six and it would be boring as hell.
A huge problem with constructivism is not the cognitive science but the lack of understanding of the conceptual underpinning of standards on the part of teachers.
Re: "heavily guided and purposefully framed exploration"
"We don’t need our prompts to be too tight and tidy or our lesson plans to be too crowded and thick. The more space we allow between children’s experiences with layered content, the more they can bring themselves to their learning and share more of their honest processing and expression. We’ll learn more about children this way, too—how they’re connecting and wondering and making sense of things."
https://www.fredrogersinstitute.org/resources/play-as-truth
I’m from the Lucy Sprague Mitchell school of exploration (literally: Bank Street College of Education), but there has to be a balance.
Young children absolutely need to play, and in their free (and sometimes bounded) play there are opportunities for executive functions to develop. Teachers absolutely need to take an active role before, during and after.
As kids get older, the content gets more structured and the time for less guided play diminishes.
There’s also no nonsense about phonics and phonemic awareness (and I hope Mr. Rogers would agree): it can still be fun but it is teacher directed and sequential.
I don’t think I agree with Mr. Rogers’s successors in all circumstances, but I see a place for their views. The through lines for me are developmental appropriateness and the knowledge of the teacher.
I'm pretty sure literally no one is arguing for a lack of some kind of balance.
The best explanation of play that I've heard of is from Amanda Morgan. She specializes in PreK, but a lot of what she says applies to older students as well.
She says play = agency + joy. And she says play can be a spectrum with increasing adult support and direction, all the way from free play, through guided play, games, playful instruction, and direct instruction. If you're interested, you can check her out at notjustcute.com.
With regard to phonics, Fred Rogers wasn't a reading specialist (nor do I want to put him on too high a pedestal). But from my training, experience with reading interventions, and from reading research on the subject, I can tell you that an overemphasis on phonics is systematically killing the love of reading for many children even before it has much of a chance to start. Kids who need help with phonics definitely should get that help, but giving kids mandatory nonsense-word assessments and lessons in skills they've already demonstrated on real words in real books doesn't help anyone (but the people selling the curriculums and tests).
I think your words are very tempering and welcome. Yes, I agree that everyone seeks some kind of balance, but as always the devil is in the details.
With as many as 20% of Americans having dyslexia, the nonsense word screening is a brilliant use of a very small amount of time. If my daughter (who was reading fluently until 4th grade, when her ability to mask her lack of phonemic awareness and decoding knowledge finally ran out in the face of more complex texts and multi-syllabic words) had it, she would have gotten the help she needed years earlier.
I was in “gifted” classes all through my schooling, but I remember phonics workbooks as part of my early grades in school. Far from boring, it was fine with me. I found agency and joy in school for sure, and phonics was just one more arena where I could be successful.
To me, the research is clear, and young kids need to play in school, AND need phonemic awareness instruction and assessment, followed by sequential phonics, to get out of the mess we are in.
(We also need a whole hell of a lot of other changes to our [lack of a coherent] approach, it’s not just phonics. I would start with identity, like Dr. Gholdy Muhammad!)
The research is only "clear" when you avoid reading about 3/4 of what's out there. When you only stick to Shaywitz (who started getting famous as a shill for the Pritzkers) and studies in experimental psychology endorsed by the IDA (formerly the Orton Society), you get the false idea that there's an overwhelming body of research supporting what some people using an fMRI machine to study the reading of up to a whole small sentence say.
Why not start by reading up on EMMA (eye-movement miscue analysis) research? or the growing body of evidence from the UK that two decades of overteaching phonics hasn't done what people were told it would do?
Maybe you should have taken the time to really listen to your daughter read aloud, and then ask her to retell what she read. Maybe teachers should have time and autonomy to do that, too.
I'm not going to get into your opinions about how students' identities don't matter. Your "gifted" label obviously seems to matter to you, though.
Good talk.
This is such a wonderful article, thank you! I saw this when I was teaching English as a second/foreign language, moving from my CELTA (teaching adults) to the TYLEC (teaching children) where the Discovery and Exploration of language was the biggest distinction. In my adult teaching, I was able to use metalinguistic terms, break down the grammar etc but with kids, it needed to be the treasure hunt you described.
What you describe is exactly what I witnessed teaching English literature at a government school in Sri Lanka to Middle Schoolers. I had one girl in the class reading Jeffery Archer and another who was a high beginner at best according to the CEFR - and I had to teach both these students poetry and literature and grade them in a standardised way...there was nothing standard about it.
This really hits home for me as someone who's worked in education policy. The mystery meat navigation analogy is brillant for explaining how discovery learning basically asks students to find what they already know. I saw this exact dynamic play out in schools where well-meaning teachers used inquiry-based methods that totally benifited kids from educated families while leaving others confused. The Engelmann quote about teachers taking responsibility for learning rather than blaming students is powerful stuff.
Phenomena centered approaches like those from NGSS I think solve a lot of these problems while still making inquiry and discovery a vital step in the learning process… but it’s a guided process, not a fully independent one. It’s still starts with discovery and inquiry, but the parameters conditions and contexts are all well presented and controlled for.
It’s how I handled my science classroom - we’d start with a demo or some other kind of phenomena, use that to generate questions and have discussions centered on the student’s inquiry, and then we’d get into the meat of it. I always found kids far more engaged when we taught it that way rather than teaching the content first and THEN jumping into the phenomena.
Anyone who has watched a baby crawl around a room for five minutes or pour water from one container to another in the bathtub knows that "The capacity for autonomous inquiry is not a starting condition; it is an achievement, built through the systematic acquisition of knowledge and skills that make independence possible" is false.
“Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children, play is serious learning. At various times, play is a way to cope with life and to prepare for adulthood. Playing is a way to solve problems and to express feelings. In fact, play is the real work of childhood.” - Fred Rogers
https://www.fredrogersinstitute.org/resources
https://allianceforchildhood.org/publications-and-reports
In this hotly contested arena thank you for doing that rare thing, hitting all relevant nails squarely on the head. The pithy ‘category mistake’ observation is for me particularly powerful, in directly pinning down that significant aspect of the problem.
Did we all (as educators) just collectively forget about scaffolding?
"In education, by contrast, we routinely implement approaches based on intuition, ideology, or romantic appeal, testing them only after widespread adoption, if at all." This is the subject of my latest post: Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego: M.I.C.E. Can Undermine Literacy Instruction (https://harriettjanetos.substack.com/p/money-ideology-compromise-ego-mice?r=5spuf).
Here’s a more academic version with that idea integrated smoothly and clearly:
Although not widely supported, there is some pedagogical merit in traditional tracking models, particularly those that employed progressively smaller class sizes based on students’ prior knowledge and skill levels. It’s my belief that these models succeeded in addressing the instructional needs of students in higher tracks, but likely fell short or ignored providing the explicit, systematic instruction and supports required for students placed in lower tracks.
I’d advocate bringing back a revised tracking model rather than relying on mixed-skill classrooms that depend heavily on teacher or LLM driven differentiation. Like the Montessori approach, we could group students across mixed age ranges (e.g., 2-3 year spans) while maintaining relatively comparable skill levels. Such a structure may better align instruction with students’ developmental readiness and learning needs, while providing proximal scaffolding for peer to peer support.
Your article hits. An IB education does well at balancing. We are encouraged to use both sides of the pendulum, all the way from discovery to direct instruction through lecture.
Humans all have different needs. To prescribe one approach means most will not fit.
Thanks for the read!
I’m a relic of the explicit-instruction age.
I’m not a teacher, but I am now observing a third generation of children (siblings, children, grandchildren), and they are all different in prior knowledge, aptitude, interests, and curiousity.
These differences are magnified in American public schools now that there is no tracking, no willingness to allow children to repeat grades, no discipline, and too many cell phones.
How can explicit instruction work in a post-elementary math class in which some students cannot multiply numbers in their heads, some can follow a geometric proof, and some are ready for calculus?
Most experienced teachers do a blend of both. It seems to me a false dichotomy that started the article: "The capacity for autonomous inquiry is not a starting condition; it is an achievement, built through the systematic acquisition of knowledge and skills that make independence possible."
"Autonomous inquiry" is an inherent trait to this thing humans do: thinking. And so is the "systematic acquisition of knowledge". They work together but are (even if subtly) different. If one trains for problem solving but then is tested on memory, it is no surprise the tests results might disappoint.
Also in the mid nineties there was an uproar in Europe. German parents were saying how come our grown children, who grew up with every privilege and access to computers from a young age, are squeezed out of the job market by young programmers who grew up in India, playing with sticks and stones? I bet the German students tested better in acquired and retained knowledge and the Indian students tested better in problem solving. As educators we must address the whole.
While you've focused on who is most disadvantaged, I assume you agree that well-prepared learners are also disadvantaged (relative to their learning potential) by a discovery approach?
Having read this piece, a