Tag: cognitive load

4 Proven Ways to Know When Explicit Teaching Works Best

Pedagogy · Instructional Choices

4 Proven Ways to Know When Explicit Teaching Works Best

Explicit teaching or inquiry? The research says the answer sits with your students, in what they already know.
⏱ 5 min read · By Matt Faulkner · Pedagogy / New Teachers

Few staffroom arguments run hotter than explicit teaching versus inquiry. One camp says tell them first. The other says let them wrestle with the problem. Both camps point to research, and both sound sure of themselves.

The research tells a less tribal story. The same lesson design helps one group of students and holds another back. What decides the outcome is how much your students already know about the content in front of them.

So change the question. Ask which approach fits these students, on this content, today. Below are four ways to make that call.

A teacher guides a small group of primary students as they fold paper fraction strips, an explicit teaching moment before students explore on their own.

Why One Lesson Helps Some Students and Stalls Others

Working memory handles only a few new pieces of information at once. Long-term memory has no such limit. When students already know the building blocks, each block works as a single chunk, which frees space for thinking.

Researchers call the flip side the expertise reversal effect (Kalyuga et al., 2003). Support that helps a novice becomes clutter for a student who knows the content. For example, a worked example rescues a beginner. A confident student has to wade through the same example to reach the bit they need.

As a result, no single approach suits every student or every topic. The variable worth watching is prior knowledge, and you can check it in minutes.

1. Check What They Know Before You Choose

A prior knowledge check is not a pre-test. Two minutes at the start of a lesson tells you plenty. In practice, it works like any other piece of formative assessment: you gather evidence, then you act on it.

🔍 Two-Minute Prior Knowledge Checks
  • One entry question on mini whiteboards. Scan the room in 10 seconds.
  • Show, hide, rebuild. Show a diagram or rule for five seconds, hide it, then ask students to reproduce it.
  • Example or non-example. Hold up four cases and ask students to sort them.
  • Partner explain. Pairs explain the idea to each other while you listen in on three of them.

Expect a spread. Most checks reveal two or three groups rather than one tidy class, and that spread shapes everything that follows.

2. Use Explicit Teaching When the Parts Are New and Connected

Some content has many parts that depend on each other. Researchers call this high element interactivity. A student can’t understand one piece without holding several others in mind at the same time.

Ashman, Kalyuga and Sweller (2020) tested this with Year 5 students learning about light energy efficiency. In the first experiment, with simpler material, explaining first gave better results on practice-style problems. Transfer showed no difference. Then the researchers made the material more complex. This time, explaining first won on both practice and transfer problems.

That fits a longer line of research on novices. Kirschner, Sweller and Clark (2006) argued that beginners learn more from full guidance than from discovery. Discovery overloads their working memory.

Here’s a maths version. Picture Year 3 students meeting equivalent fractions for the first time. A teacher models with fraction strips and talks through one worked example. Students then try a few with support before working alone.

3. Let Students Explore First When the Building Blocks Are Secure

Zhang and Sweller (2024) studied 85 middle school students learning about density. The students who knew less did better when the teacher explained first. The students who knew more did better when they investigated first. Same content, opposite winners.

Supporters of productive failure go further. Kapur (2016) argues that struggling with a problem before instruction helps students notice what they don’t know yet. Productive failure is a specific form of productive struggle, timed before the teaching instead of after it. That said, struggle pays off when students have something to struggle with. Our post on making students struggle productively covers how to set that up.

Back to the fractions lesson. Students who already know halves and quarters don’t need the worked example. Instead, hand them a strip and a challenge. How many fractions equal to one half can they fold? Afterwards, name the pattern explicitly with the whole group.

Your best starting point depends less on your teaching philosophy than on what students walked in knowing.
🧭 Explain First or Explore First?
  • Explain first when the content is new, the parts depend on each other, or early errors would stick.
  • Explain first when your prior knowledge check shows gaps in the building blocks.
  • Explore first when students hold the building blocks and the task asks them to connect known ideas.
  • Explore first only if you plan to consolidate explicitly afterwards. Investigation without a debrief leaves misconceptions in place.

4. Shift Your Approach as Their Knowledge Grows

Today’s explain-first lesson becomes next week’s explore-first lesson. In other words, the content stays the same while your students change. That’s gradual release working across a sequence, and it’s the same thinking behind fading support across lessons.

Watch for the moment to hand over. Our post on the signs it’s time to fade the scaffold lists what to look for. Even so, the path isn’t one-way. If errors creep back in, bring the explicit support back for a lesson.

One honest caveat. The research debate isn’t settled, and most of these studies ran over a session or two. Productive failure researchers also point out a weakness. Many studies favouring explicit teaching compare it against unguided struggle, a weak opponent. At the same time, the pattern across studies is consistent enough to act on. Novices need guidance first, and students with secure knowledge benefit from more room.

Next week we start a three-part series on cognitive load theory, the thinking that sits underneath all of this.

Over to you

What’s your default when you introduce something new: explain first or explore first? Think of a lesson where the other approach would have served your students better. Tell us about it in the comments.

References

Ashman, G., Kalyuga, S., & Sweller, J. (2020). Problem-solving or explicit instruction: Which should go first when element interactivity is high? Educational Psychology Review, 32(1), 229–247. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-019-09500-5

Kalyuga, S., Ayres, P., Chandler, P., & Sweller, J. (2003). The expertise reversal effect. Educational Psychologist, 38(1), 23–31. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15326985EP3801_4

Kapur, M. (2016). Examining productive failure, productive success, unproductive failure, and unproductive success in learning. Educational Psychologist, 51(2), 289–299. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2016.1155457

Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 75–86. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep4102_1

Zhang, L., & Sweller, J. (2024). Instructional sequences in science teaching: Considering element interactivity when sequencing inquiry-based investigation activities and explicit instruction. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 39(4), 3791–3801. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-024-00799-5

5 Powerful Moves That Will Actually Make Students Struggle

Week 15 · Pedagogy · Task Design

5 Task Design Moves That Actually Stretch Every Student

Productive struggle isn’t what happens when a task is too hard. It’s what happens when you’ve designed it just right.
⏱ 6 min read · By Matt Faulkner · Pedagogy / New Teachers

There is a particular kind of classroom frustration that has nothing to do with behaviour. It is the lesson where students race through the task, and you realise about twelve minutes in that it asked nothing of them. Or the opposite: where you pitched it harder and now three hands are up, six students are staring at the ceiling, and two have quietly written their name and stopped.

Both of those outcomes have the same root cause. The task was not designed with stretch in mind. It was designed with content in mind — and there is a difference.

Last week, we looked at how backward design changes what you plan for. This post takes the next step. Once you know where students need to get to, the question becomes: how do you design the task that gets them there — one that genuinely challenges without tipping into frustration? The answer has a name in the research literature: productive struggle. And it can be deliberately built in.

What “Just Beyond Comfortable” Actually Means

Lev Vygotsky described the zone of proximal development (ZPD) as the space between what a learner can do independently and what they can do with support. Tasks that sit below the ZPD require no new thinking. Tasks that sit too far above it produce confusion and disengagement. Tasks that sit right at the edge of the ZPD — just beyond what a student can currently do alone — are where genuine learning occurs.

John Sweller’s cognitive load theory adds important precision here. Working memory is limited. When a task overloads it — too many new elements at once, too much unfamiliar vocabulary, too many simultaneous steps — students cannot process the content, let alone learn from it. In other words, difficulty alone is not the goal. Productive difficulty is. The task needs to be complex enough to require real thinking, but structured enough that thinking is actually possible.

For teachers, that distinction is everything. A task is not automatically rigorous because it is hard. It is rigorous when it demands higher-order thinking within a structure students can manage. As a result, designing for productive struggle is less about making tasks harder and more about making them smarter.

The Mindset Piece: Designing for Effort, Not Just Difficulty

Carol Dweck’s research on growth mindset is relevant here — but not in the way it is usually applied. It is not enough to tell students that struggle is good for them. If the task design sends the opposite message — if there is only one right answer, if being wrong feels like failure, if speed is implicitly rewarded — then the growth mindset poster on the wall is just decoration.

Dweck’s central finding is that students who believe intelligence is fixed avoid challenge to protect their self-image. By contrast, students who believe ability grows through effort seek out challenge. The task itself can reinforce either belief. A task with one quick answer rewards speed and confidence. A task that requires iteration, justification, and revision sends the message that effort is the point.

That said, this is not about lowering the stakes or removing rigour. It is about designing tasks where being stuck is a legitimate part of the process — and where the structure supports students to push through, rather than wait for the teacher to rescue them.

There is a timely corollary here for AI use in classrooms. Cognitive scientist Paul Kirschner draws a useful distinction between cognitive offloading and cognitive outsourcing. Offloading — writing notes, drawing a diagram, working through steps on paper — frees up working memory while keeping the student as the thinker. Outsourcing — asking AI to explain, summarise, or produce — transfers the thinking itself to an external agent. The student receives a finished product. Nothing is encoded in long-term memory. For teachers designing tasks with productive struggle in mind, the question is worth asking: does the way students are using AI protect generation, or remove it entirely?

5 Design Moves That Build Productive Struggle In

These moves can be applied individually or in combination. They work across year levels and learning areas. Even one move applied consistently will shift what students experience in your classroom.

🎯 5 Task Design Moves for Productive Struggle
  • Move 1 — Open the entry point. Design tasks with a low floor and a high ceiling. Every student can begin; not every student will reach the same endpoint. This removes the paralysis of “I don’t know where to start” while keeping stretch available for those who are ready for it. Jo Boaler’s work on low-floor/high-ceiling tasks in mathematics is the clearest articulation of this principle in practice — and her YouCubed site has free task banks worth bookmarking.
  • Move 2 — Withhold the scaffold before the answer. Give students the problem before you give them the method. Even five minutes of initial thinking — before any explicit teaching — activates prior knowledge, surfaces misconceptions, and means the instruction that follows has somewhere to land. This is not about leaving students stranded. It is about priming the brain to receive new learning. There is a memory research term for what happens here: the Generation Effect. When students generate an answer — retrieve a word, attempt a problem, construct an explanation — they remember it significantly better than when the same information is simply presented to them. The act of production is itself the act of learning. Jamie Clark’s DistillED newsletter on the Generation Effect is worth reading alongside this post — it is one of the clearest explanations of the research and its classroom implications available right now.
  • Move 3 — Limit the information given upfront. Real-world problems rarely arrive with all the relevant information pre-sorted. Give students a question and some — not all — of the information they need. Require them to identify what’s missing or what they’d need to know. That act of identifying gaps is itself higher-order thinking.
  • Move 4 — Require justification, not just answers. “What is the answer?” asks for recall. “How do you know?” asks for thinking. Build justification into the task structure — not as an add-on, but as the core requirement. A student who can get the right answer but cannot explain it has not yet learned what you think they’ve learned.
  • Move 5 — Build in a “stuck” protocol. Before students begin, name what to do when they get stuck. Three specific options: re-read the task, try a different starting point, or discuss with a partner using a sentence starter (“I think the problem is asking me to…”). This removes the habit of raising a hand the moment something feels difficult — and it signals that being stuck is expected, not a sign of failure.

What This Looks Like in HASS: Year 5 Source Analysis

A standard source analysis task gives students a primary source and asks them to identify the author, date, and one key message. That is a recall task. It sits well below the ZPD for most Year 5 students who have been doing this since Year 3.

A productive struggle version applies Moves 1, 3, and 4. Students receive two short sources on colonial settlement — a settler’s diary entry and an account from an Aboriginal perspective — with no guiding questions. The task is simply: what story are these two sources telling, and where do they disagree? From there, students must write one claim supported by evidence from both sources.

The open entry point (Move 1) means every student can begin with an observation. Limiting the guiding questions (Move 3) means students must decide what matters. Requiring a supported claim (Move 4) means the answer is not retrievable without genuine analysis. The teacher’s role shifts from answer-giver to question-asker — circulating and probing with higher-order questions that push thinking further rather than narrowing it toward a predetermined response.

For more on structuring formative checks around this kind of task, the post on formative assessment strategies covers exit ticket design in detail.

What This Looks Like in Maths: Year 3 Multiplication

A standard multiplication task: Solve 3 × 4. Solve 5 × 6. Solve 7 × 8. Students either know these or they don’t. There is no thinking available beyond retrieval — and no entry point for students who aren’t yet fluent.

A productive struggle version uses Move 1 and Move 2. The teacher displays 24 counters on the interactive whiteboard and asks: how many different ways can you arrange these into equal rows? No method has been taught yet. Students work with their own counters, recording each arrangement. From there, the class shares findings — and the teacher introduces the array and the number sentence as the language for what students already discovered.

The low floor means students working at different points of readiness can all begin. The high ceiling means a student who finds three arrangements quickly is asked: how do you know you’ve found them all? That follow-up question — requiring justification and systematic thinking — is where the stretch lives. In practice, it produces more mathematical reasoning than a worksheet of 20 isolated facts ever will.

Beyond that, notice what the task design does to the explicit teaching that follows. Because students have already struggled with the concept, the instruction has a problem to solve. It lands differently than instruction delivered cold.

Where the Gradual Release Fits

Fisher and Frey’s Gradual Release of Responsibility model — I do, We do, You do — is one of the most widely used frameworks in Australian primary schools. It is also frequently misapplied in ways that accidentally prevent productive struggle.

The problem arises when the “I do” phase is so thorough that the “You do” phase requires nothing beyond imitation. Students are not struggling — they are copying. The GRR is designed to scaffold students into independence, not to eliminate the experience of not-yet-knowing.

Used well, the GRR creates the conditions for productive struggle at the “You do” stage by deliberately withdrawing support at the right moment. The key is that the “We do” phase builds enough shared understanding that students can tolerate uncertainty — not so much that the independent task becomes a rehearsal of what they’ve already watched you do.

That calibration — knowing when to hold the scaffold and when to pull it back — is one of the most important professional judgements in teaching. Even so, it is a judgement that gets easier with practice. And it starts with task design that has stretch built in from the beginning.

Design the task for the thinking you want, not just the answer you need. Students rise to what the task demands of them — and rarely higher.

💬 Over to You — Which of the five moves are you already using, and which one are you going to try first? Or if you’ve got a task that created genuinely productive struggle in your classroom, share it below. The best ideas on this site always come from teachers who’ve already done the hard yards.

References

Bertsch, S., Pesta, B. J., Wiscott, R., & McDaniel, M. A. (2007). The generation effect: A meta-analytic review. Memory & Cognition, 35(2), 201–210. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193441

Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. In M. A. Gernsbacher, R. W. Pew, L. M. Hough, & J. R. Pomerantz (Eds.), Psychology and the real world: Essays illustrating fundamental contributions to society (pp. 56–64). Worth Publishers.

Boaler, J. (2016). Mathematical mindsets: Unleashing students’ potential through creative math, inspiring messages and innovative teaching. Jossey-Bass.

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.

Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2014). Better learning through structured teaching: A framework for the gradual release of responsibility (2nd ed.). ASCD.

Kirschner, P. A. (2026). Offloading? No outsourcing! Retrieved from https://paulkirschner.com

Slamecka, N. J., & Graf, P. (1978). The generation effect: Delineation of a phenomenon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4(6), 592–604. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.4.6.592

Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257–285. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1202_4

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.