This blog is Part 2 of 3.
In Part 1, I introduced the idea of facilitation and instruction being competing approaches to how teachers teach.
I stressed that my preference is for a mixed model, that draws on the benefits of both.
We looked at some of those benefits in the context of facilitation, along with some drawbacks.
Now, we can turn our attention to instruction.
The Benefits and Drawbacks of Instruction
Instruction is teacher-led.
Here, the teacher is the focus.
They present learners with information and ideas.
Learning is the result.
But this learning takes place through learners paying attention to the teacher, the things they say and the things they ask learners to do and think about because of their instruction.
Excellent instruction requires a high level of teacher expertise.
This expertise covers two categories.
First is knowledge and understanding.
To instruct learners effectively, the teacher must be confident and secure in the topics about which they are teaching.
If not, they risk communicating ambiguously or passing on information that is partial, incomplete or inaccurate.
Second is knowledge and understanding of how to engage an audience.
Ineffective instruction sees learners bored and disengaged.
In such situations, the benefit of being given access to the teacher’s knowledge is lost because learners are not attending to what is being conveyed.
Techniques like storytelling, using examples, giving opportunities to discuss and reflect on what you’ve heard, and making use of different media formats to supplement speech all come into play here.
The three greatest benefits of instruction are as follows.
First, the teacher knows and understands more than their learners.
Through instruction they can give learners direct access to this, helping them to learn more quickly than might otherwise be the case.
Of particular note are the ways in which teachers can demonstrate meaning, connections, uses, evaluation points and other such aspects that it would take learners a long time to grasp if they were doing all the work themselves.
Second, through instruction the teacher can show learners the correct way to do things.
So too can they demonstrate different ways to think about a topic (here I am acknowledging that in many cases there is more than one ‘correct’ way of thinking about something).
This is modelling – one of the most powerful teaching techniques.
Modelling encompasses physical demonstrations, verbal exemplification, the use of exemplar work and the teaching of thinking (i.e. the modelling of thinking processes).
Third, the teacher can explicitly address, explain and correct misconceptions connected to the topic of study.
This helps learners avoid such misconceptions as well as to appreciate their origins.
The teacher can direct learners’ thinking and help them understand why they may be inclined to think in a certain way, even though this may not be correct.
For example, the Year 4 teacher who helps learners to understand that not all metals are magnetic, even though many learners automatically think this to be true.
On the flipside, we have the three greatest drawbacks of instruction.
First, learners may become and then remain passive.
By passive I mean that are not actively engaged with the learning.
Rather than attending directly to the instruction the teacher provides, they let it wash over them.
This usually happens for one of two reasons:
- The teacher falls into the trap of assuming the mind is a bucket. They pour forth information, expecting that this will fall into learners’ minds and, as a result, be known and understood.
- The teacher may fail to appreciate that intellectual activity needs to be stimulated and encouraged. Such a failure sees instruction of the lecture type. Extended prose gushes from the teacher’s mouth without any thought given to how this could be broken up or studded with opportunities for learners to think actively about what is being said.
Second, instruction is not allied with the opportunity for practice.
Practice allows for the development of understanding and the refinement of skill.
Without it, learning is unlikely to become embedded.
Mastery comes from practice.
Some learners only require limited practice; some require extensive practice.
But all need the opportunity.
A lesson in which the teacher only instructs is a lesson in which learners are unable to do much with the information to which they are being given access.
It is in the doing that we can come to terms, process and assess.
Through this, new information is unpicked, analysed and compared to what we already know.
Instruction without practice is simply telling – and telling alone is not the most effective method of teaching.
Third, instruction is seen as a get out clause for the teacher and the learners.
When this situation arises it is usually because a tacit understanding has developed between the teacher and the learners that runs something like this: if I am standing at the front of the class instructing, and you are sitting down listening, we won’t have any problems and we can all assume that learning is going on.
Such an understanding makes life easy.
No one must put in too much effort, yet everyone can say that they have done their job.
It evokes a degree of mediocrity and complacency akin to the facilitative teacher who sets up an activity and leaves learners to get on with things, happy in the belief that learning will just happen organically, without any further input from them.
These drawbacks illustrate the point that instruction is rarely effective on its own.
It always needs to be allied to some element of practice, or the teacher needs to give thought to when and how learners will be able to actively engage with what the instruction encompasses.
The key is to avoid the enticing yet false proposition that the simple act of instructing is enough.
It is not.
This is true in all realms of teaching, not just the classroom.
Take the driving instructor, for example.
They instruct the learner on how to drive, showing and telling them what is necessary, but, at the same time, the learner has ample opportunity to actively engage with this information by trying to drive the car.
Similarly, the football manager who instructs their players on how they want them to defend does not then leave it at that.
Instead, they provide opportunities for the players to put the instructions into practice, prior to the next match.
Or the piano teacher who instructs their learners on how to interpret Chopin.
They do not tell them what to do and then expect immediate understanding. Rather, they instruct and then give space for practice.
Using Progress as a Yardstick
You will see from the two previous sections that I have sought to present a balanced view of instruction and facilitation, outlining the positive and negative aspects of each.
This has been done in part to give you a neutral overview of both approaches and in part to further the argument I made at the start of Part 1that a mix of both methods is preferable.
But how do we come to decide on the make-up of that mix?
Is there a means through which we can try to make good judgements about how much facilitation and how much instruction we include in our lessons?
Well, perhaps there is.
If we accept that the purpose of our teaching is to create progress, and that progress means the maximisation of learning, then maybe we can use this as the yardstick by which to judge how much facilitation and how much instruction we include in any particular lesson.
The question then becomes:
- What mixture will help ensure the most progress possible?
Granted, you will not be able to answer this question with complete accuracy right away.
The more experience you get, during your training and beyond, the better placed you will be to answer it.
However, even at the very start of your training, you will be able to develop a reasoned response, based on a consideration of what your lesson is about and where you want learners to be by the end of it.
Let us look at an example to show how this might work.
We are planning a lesson on human rights for a Year 10 Citizenship class.
By the end of the lesson, we want learners to be able to explain what human rights are, give their opinion on whether everyone should be entitled to them, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of protecting them through the law.
From here, we can begin to think about how we will mix facilitation and instruction.
First, we note that learners may not be completely familiar with the concept and history of human rights.
This, therefore, may lend itself to instruction.
Next, we note that to form an opinion learners will need to engage with the material from their own perspective and, ideally, will also need to be exposed to other perspectives.
This tends towards facilitation.
Finally, we can see that to assess the strengths and weaknesses, learners will probably need some initial guidance (for example, the modelling of a thinking process) before engaging with the work on their own or in groups.
In this case, by quickly analysing where we want learners to be at the end of our lesson, we find ourselves in a position to say that we will aim for roughly 60% facilitation and 40% instruction.
(Roughly is the key word here. It’s about getting a rough idea in your mind of the balance you’re aiming for.)
This example illustrates how using progress as a yardstick can be contextualised in individual lessons.
To do so, we identify what we expect progress to look like – what we want learners to know or be able to do by the end of the lesson – and work backwards from there, identifying whether facilitation or instruction is a better option at any given point.
Most of the time, we’ll end up with a mixture. And in Part 3, we’ll look at some examples of how this might play out in practical terms.
