Teaching practice: Explanations and modelling

Editor's Note: This article is part of a series of 10 best practice pieces to have published in 2017. Access them here:

It was Albert Einstein who once said: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

And so it is with teaching and learning.

Amid a focus on active learning approaches whereby students take the lead in the classroom and teachers act as mere facilitators, the art of quality teacher explanations – sometimes called “direct instruction” – has been, if not exactly lost, then denigrated and devalued.

But here’s the unfashionable truth, the elephant in the room, the secret hidden in plain sight: the most effective, expedient way for students to learn is for the teacher – that educated, experienced, expert at the front of the room – to tell them, then show them, what they need to know.