Explicit Instruction with Anita Archer: Part 1

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!