‘A mystifying position’: AERO CEO calls out critics of explicit instruction

On the research organisation’s fifth birthday, Dr Jenny Donovan has called out those in academia who remain invested in discredited instructional approaches and that openly criticise practices that align with what we know works best in the classroom.

“It’s kind of a mystifying position to me. I don’t really understand it,” the former high school teacher tells EducationHQ.

“I think it mostly comes from people who feel very comfortable with the way things are, and what they’re currently doing, and they don’t like the suggestion that things could be better, things could be improved, or that people might need to make changes.”

Since its establishment in 2021, AERO has advocated for a system-wide shift to explicit teaching “because that’s what the evidence is most strongly behind”.

“The evidence-base for explicit and systematic approaches is overwhelming and robust,” Donovan adds.

“So right from the very beginning, we’ve been very clear that this is what the evidence points to – and we’ve made it our business to unpack what that means for people in education, whether they are classroom teachers or system leaders or ministers…”

There remains a misguided idea about explicit instruction in academic circles especially, Donovan suggests.

“I think it can be ideological for some people, there is a rhetorical line about explicit teaching being ‘traditional’ or ‘basic’ or that it ‘turns children into automatons’ or de-professionalises teachers…

“But I actually think that is often a view held by people who don’t understand what we mean when we’re talking about explicit teaching – they’ve got an idea that it harks back to the 19th century or something.”

Far from reverting to an archaic practice, the explicit instruction now underway in school systems across the country is “actually very contemporary”, Donovan says.

“It is not familiar practice for most teachers. It’s something that you need to develop the skill and technique around doing well. It is driven largely by what we understand about how learning happens.

“We didn’t have this kind of insight in the last century…”

Claims made about the approach being conservative and traditional speak volumes, Donovan says.

“That really just betrays that they don’t know what they’re talking about, and they need to have a really good look at what is effective explicit instruction and what it looks like in practice.”

Last year a group of academics and teacher educators took aim at the government-funded organisation in articles published on the AARE blog, arguing AERO is fundamentally harming teachers’ autonomy and being used by governments to push a ‘neoliberal’ agenda in classrooms.

Dr Greg Ashman, author and deputy principal at Ballarat Clarendon College in Victoria, said at the time that he was in no way surprised that education academics were so vocally opposed to AERO and the work it undertakes.

The organisation wouldn’t be needed if these commentators were doing their job properly, he contended.

“AERO has kind of eaten their lunch, in the sense that it’s doing what they should be doing, which is providing practical advice to teachers.

“That’s something that they’ve … failed to do over many years.

“That’s not unique to Australia, that’s education academics across the world, really.”

Donovan warns that despite momentum from the science of learning movement, both opposed voices and complacency in schools pose a threat to education’s improvement agenda.

“It takes a long time to get change happening. In health, for example, if you start a process of doing clinical trials on something, it takes 17 years before the outcome of those trials is firmly established in GP practice.

“For the scale of change to be achieved that we’ve seen in the last five years really is pretty exciting. But … we can’t afford to be complacent.

“This is not something that’s happened accidentally. It’s something that we’ve worked really hard with all of the departments to pull off, and you can’t take your foot off the pedal.

”There are things that threaten this and the progress that we’re making…” she says.

Educators who claim to be aligned with the science but are falling short in practice are another cohort to watch, Donovan suggests.

“[These are] the people who think, ‘yep, we are evidence-based. We’re all doing explicit teaching because we did a professional learning day on it two years ago and that’s all we need to do’.

“There is a real risk … they just might not be doing it well enough – they might be sliding back into old habits.

“They might not realise that what they need to do is really keep learning. They need to keep refining their technique. You don’t become an expert explicit practitioner overnight and you don’t do it on the back of just one professional learning session or reading one article or practice guide.”

Donovan says she’s well aware of the hard work it takes to be a very effective teacher.

“We know that teachers have complex, challenging roles and one of the things that we’re trying to do is say, there are ways that you can do this work that maximise the effectiveness.”

Education is also prone to falling for fads, and often the sunk cost fallacy comes into play in schools – but there is strong evidence to show that once we know better, we can do better at scale, the expert suggests.

“When I worked in the New South Wales Department before I went into this role, we did an evaluation of the Reading Recovery program which was the big program that a lot of people were using .... as a reading intervention for children who weren’t learning to read.

“Our evaluation showed that it didn’t work, but not only did it not work, it was worst for the children who were most vulnerable. For children who made any progress, it was very short-lived ... this was devastating to the [Department].”

At the time some $50 million a year was being ploughed into the program, and there were trained Reading Recovery teachers at work all over the country, Donovan says. 

But the evidence was clear and action needed to be taken, she adds. 

“The Department went through a process of ‘okay, the evidence says this is not the way to be addressing the problem of too many children not learning to read, we have to close it down, we’ve got to do the thing that does work’.

“It took them a couple of years but they managed to do that as an entire system...”