Core's Leadership Summit at the beginning of March offered so much great insight into teaching reading and the ins-and-outs of RtI (Response to Intervention). As promised, I'm going slowly unpack the nuggets of goodness I took away from the conference.
Firstly, I was reminded of the importance of explicit instruction. This idea of making your teaching completely explicit was hammered into me as a grad student at USF. And likewise, Anita Archer's most recent book and conference seminar focused on the importance of explicit instruction.
Here's Anita Archer's Book:
Why use Explicit Instruction:
Many conference attendees gave Dr. Archer some resistance; they believed that self discovery was just as valid of a teaching method as explicit instruction (think Montessori). Dr. Archer said that you only can successfully discover the world independently if you have a lot of schema/background knowledge. Explicit instruction really helps those students with a low schema/background knowledge, or students with a history of failure. Unfortunately, all of my students fall into one of these two categories. But fortunately, explicit teaching can help them to be more successful.
In a nutshell, what does explicit instruction look like?
- Systematic
- Relentless
- Engaging
- Successful
In the other parts of this series, I'll give more details about each of these areas of explicit instruction....ohhh, I have a lot more goodness to share on this topic.
For the teachers out there: What does explicit instruction look like in your classroom? When would you opt to use discovery/implicit instruction rather than explicit teaching?
Read on!
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