A former biochemist, teacher and learning specialist Dr Michael Collett is keen to address the misconception, saying there’s an idea out there that at some point students will know enough foundational knowledge for teachers to do away with the instructional approach.

“But you’re always giving kids foundational knowledge,” the numeracy specialist and instructional leader from Northcote High School in Melbourne says.

“So, if you’re working with a VCE class, when they come to that VCE topic, they are still largely complete novices in the thing you’re trying to teach them.

“And so all the things that we know [about] novice learners still apply – their knowledge is very disorganised, they don’t have many (cognitive) connections, they haven’t learnt any of the procedures they need to know.

“All the problems that we try to address with explicit instruction at the lower years, they are still there.”

Opting to run with any kind of inquiry-based or other non-explicit pedagogy at VCE when tackling new domains or topics is simply not backed up by the research, Collett argues.

“We’re not necessarily dealing with students, that by the time they’ve reached Year 11 or 12 are suddenly universally independent learners in every domain – the material that you’re teaching them is still new to them and they still don’t have places to connect it to,” he adds.

Since joining the teaching ranks via Teach for Australia – a career move motivated by the prospect of helping disadvantaged students to succeed – Collett has dedicated much of his educational career to honing his knowledge and application of explicit instruction in the secondary context.

With the state’s education department’s recent commitment to evidence-based practice and the release of the new Teaching and Learning Model 2.0, secondary schools are “behind the eight ball a little bit on this explicit instruction thing”, he warns.

“I think that kind of grassroots explicit instruction [movement] has come through in primary schools really strongly in lots of places.

“But I think it’s still got a way to go when it comes to high schools.”

It’s for this precise reason that Collett recently presented at a Sharing Best Practice event on ‘explicit instruction in VCE’.

There are certain routines and practices used as part of an explicit instruction approach in the primary classroom that don’t fly so well with VCE students, the teacher explains.

One is using mini-whiteboards to efficiently check for students’ understanding.

“I know that I have got colleagues that have tried to use mini-whiteboards with VCE students and it ‘sort of’ works.

“The hard part, I think, with using a mini-whiteboard for these years, is that often the answers are too complicated – the performance of what you’re trying to get out of students is too hard for them to get onto a whiteboard, and then you don’t get that really quick formative assessment piece, which is the whole purpose.

“So, we have to find another way to do that same job.”

Motivated to switch out of the science lab and into a teaching career, Collett has now spent years honing his use of explict instruction in the secondary classroom. 

Collett likes to gauge his students’ understanding by walking around the room and taking a quick peek at their work.

“I’m just a very nosy, over the shoulder (checker). I’m walking around, inspecting every student’s work and just whip around the class doing that.”

Standardised student worksheets make this an easier and more accurate practice for teachers, he adds.

“I know exactly where on the page to look. I know exactly what I’m looking for. And I’ve got my kids all set up in rows and pairs, so it’s very easy to get around the room.”

Collett suspects he also uses class discussion as a means to check for understanding much more often than the average primary teacher.

“I can inspect the students’ understanding by listening to them explain it to someone else – but there’s lots of other strategies you can use,” he says.

Other effective practices, such as initiating a choral response, don’t always work quite as well with VCE students, Collete points out.

“Not because they think it wouldn’t work as a learning strategy, but because they’re less wanting to do it.

“There’re probably feeling that that’s a little kid thing, and so if you come into a Year 12 class and try to make them do it, they’re not really into coral response.

“I try, and sometimes I get a little bit of a buzz from the room, but it’s not as easy as it would be with little kids.”

When it comes to creating an environment conducive to learning, Colett suggests it’s really not possible to do great explicit instruction if disruptions and distractions dictate your classroom.

Before launching into any core instructional work, Collett advises, it pays to establish expectations and set up learning routines right from day one. Reinforce these consistently, he says.

“But none of that’s rocket science, right?” he reflects.

“But if [explicit instruction is] done properly, in my classes the pace is really fast, because it needs to be – you want the kids to be thinking as much as possible.

“…and so you’re constantly giving them more information, hearing what they’re saying about it or reading what they’re writing about it, and then responding.

“In the quick pace of that lesson, ideally the kids don’t have enough time to be disruptive if you’ve got it going well.”

We should bear in mind that learning is hard for all ages, Colett emphasises, and so explicit instruction should be the go-to when new content is being covered – whether this be at the tertiary, secondary or primary level.

“I think the hard thing at VCE, and for high school teachers, is there’s this idea that ‘we already do it’, because, you know, ‘we speak to kids, and so therefore we’re instructing them’.

“And that’s really quite a hard misconception to deal with,” he shares.

Secondary schools might also unwittingly fall into a common ‘cart before the horse’ knowledge trap, Collett says.

Driven by the desire for their senior students to be independent learners who can drive their own investigative research within a given topic, misguided approaches can often kick in, he flags.

“And so we think, ‘well, if we teach that way, then they’ll be good at that’.

“But in my experience, and from what my understanding of the research is, if they have more knowledge of an area, that’s how you get that – you get kids that can investigate into a topic if they know more about the topic.

“So having them work independently by asking Google or ChatGPT something, they can’t tell if what they’re getting is correct or not.”