Love that substack sent you to me. I was at ResearchED NYC in May and serendipitously met Dr. Marcy Stein. We sat together in a session and at one point she leaned in and said, “just because it's scripted doesn't mean it's explicit.” Your piece made me think of that. The slide deck can be perfectly sequenced and the teacher can still never make the learning target visible to students. It’s not all about a script or the time needed to prepare…it’s about depth of knowledge. Scripting controls the teacher's performance. Explicit instruction targets the student's encoding. Those are not the same goal.
Thank you for putting into words what I struggled to explain. This was the first time I have explicitly used explicit teaching. All I have to say is by the second half of the day, I was done. I don’t want to talk, read, show another slide or teach by my lesson plan. I struggled all year with being aware with what and how my students learned. I wanted to so badly return to my 5Es and PBL lesson plans. Ones that when I wrote them, I could easily recall them.
This is a really interesting distinction between structure and scripting, thank you. I agree that explicit teaching has become conflated with over scripted delivery, particularly through slide culture. I wonder though whether the pressure teachers feel to over script is partly a response to accountability systems that reward visible 'preparedness' (like detailed slides) over in the moment professional judgement. Do you think that tension is part of what’s driving what you’re describing? I'd be curious to hear your take on this. Many thanks again for your thinking on this topic
Love that substack sent you to me. I was at ResearchED NYC in May and serendipitously met Dr. Marcy Stein. We sat together in a session and at one point she leaned in and said, “just because it's scripted doesn't mean it's explicit.” Your piece made me think of that. The slide deck can be perfectly sequenced and the teacher can still never make the learning target visible to students. It’s not all about a script or the time needed to prepare…it’s about depth of knowledge. Scripting controls the teacher's performance. Explicit instruction targets the student's encoding. Those are not the same goal.
Thank you for putting into words what I struggled to explain. This was the first time I have explicitly used explicit teaching. All I have to say is by the second half of the day, I was done. I don’t want to talk, read, show another slide or teach by my lesson plan. I struggled all year with being aware with what and how my students learned. I wanted to so badly return to my 5Es and PBL lesson plans. Ones that when I wrote them, I could easily recall them.
Here is a link to one of my ELA lesson plans.
Unit Title: M9 Grow Plants Grow
Structured Literacy: Vowel Teams: ie, igh
HMH Focus: Yum! ¡MmMm! ¡Qué rico!: Americas' Sproutings
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xx3v_ZtU34iAjwCIt8PkVDGeUtxqeHWK5g2VZyGBYF4/edit?usp=drivesdk
This is a really interesting distinction between structure and scripting, thank you. I agree that explicit teaching has become conflated with over scripted delivery, particularly through slide culture. I wonder though whether the pressure teachers feel to over script is partly a response to accountability systems that reward visible 'preparedness' (like detailed slides) over in the moment professional judgement. Do you think that tension is part of what’s driving what you’re describing? I'd be curious to hear your take on this. Many thanks again for your thinking on this topic