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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

Assessment · Record-Keeping

5 Easy Ways to Match Assessment and Record-Keeping

A brilliant assessment strategy means nothing if your record-keeping can’t hold onto what it found.

⏱ 6 min read · By Matt Faulkner · Assessment / Record-Keeping

Last week we mapped the chain that good assessment planning follows: content descriptor, learning intention, success criteria, assessment strategy. That is where most professional learning stops. In practice, one link is still missing — the record-keeping device that actually holds what you found.

Here is the scenario. You run a genuinely good practical assessment. Students are engaged, you are watching closely, and you form clear impressions about who has got it and who hasn’t. Three weeks later, at report-writing time, those impressions are gone. What is left is a gut feeling and a grade you can no longer fully justify.

That is not a memory problem. It is a mismatch between your assessment strategy and how you recorded it. This post works through five record-keeping devices, when each one earns its place, and two worked examples — English and Science — to show the pairing in action.

Why the Record-Keeping Device Isn’t an Afterthought

Susan Brookhart’s research on rubrics makes a useful starting point. She argues effective rubrics need two things: criteria tied to the actual learning, not the task, and performance levels described clearly enough that two teachers would score the same work the same way. A rubric that fails either test isn’t really a record — it’s a rough impression with a score attached.

The same logic applies to every device, not just rubrics. James Popham’s classroom assessment framework treats each record-keeping tool as matched to a specific assessment purpose. A checklist works well for binary, observable skills. In contrast, a rubric works better for quality that sits on a continuum. Use the wrong device and even excellent assessment data becomes unusable later.

Put simply, the assessment strategy and its record-keeping device are answering two different questions. The strategy asks, “what will I see or collect?” The device asks, “how will I hold onto it accurately enough to use later?” Skip the second question and the first one’s answer evaporates.

📋 Five Record-Keeping Devices at a Glance

Checklist. A yes/no list of observable behaviours or skills. Fast to use, easy to update. Best for binary, procedural skills — did the student do this or not.
Rating scale. Like a checklist, but with a range (e.g. rarely–sometimes–consistently). Adds nuance without the full weight of a rubric.
Analytic rubric. Separate criteria, each scored against clear performance-level descriptors. Best for complex, multi-part tasks like extended writing.
Anecdotal record. Short, dated observational notes. Best for capturing context a checklist can’t — the “why,” not just the “what.”
Portfolio or work sample collection. A curated set of student work over time. Best when the strategy itself allows varied formats or products.

Worked Example: Year 4 English — Persuasive Writing

Take a persuasive writing unit built around AC9E4LY06 — planning, creating, editing and publishing a persuasive text using visual features, linked ideas, complex sentences and correct punctuation. The assessment strategy is an extended piece of writing with several moving parts. Consequently, the record-keeping device needs to hold multiple criteria at once, not just a single quality judgement.

✏️ Matching the Method — Year 4 Persuasive Writing

Assessment strategy: Students plan, draft and publish a persuasive text on a self-chosen issue.
Record-keeping device: An analytic rubric with four criteria — argument structure, use of persuasive language, sentence complexity, and mechanics.
Why this device: A single overall grade would hide which criterion needs re-teaching. Reporting “structure: developing, mechanics: consistent” tells the next lesson’s story far better than one number.
Practical tip: Score the rubric during drafting, not just at publication. That gives you formative evidence you can act on before the final piece is due, not just a summative record afterwards.

Worked Example: Year 5 Science — Working Scientifically

Now compare that with a practical investigation built around AC9S5I02 and AC9S5I03 — planning a fair test and using equipment to observe and measure with reasonable precision. Here the assessment strategy is observational: you are watching students work in real time, not marking a finished product. That changes which record-keeping device fits.

🔬 Matching the Method — Year 5 Working Scientifically

Assessment strategy: Teacher observation during a small-group fair test investigation.
Record-keeping device: A checklist for the procedural skills (identifies variables, uses equipment safely, records data), backed by short anecdotal notes for anything unexpected.
Why this device: A rubric is overkill for genuinely binary skills — a student either identified the controlled variable or didn’t. The anecdotal layer catches the student who reasoned brilliantly but fumbled the equipment, which a checklist alone would miss.
Practical tip: Clip the checklist to a board and move between groups. Anything worth a note goes in the margin, dated, in under five words.

Choosing the assessment strategy is the easy half of the job. Choosing a record-keeping device that survives contact with report-writing time is the half most planning skips.

Where Digital Tools Fit — and Where They Don’t

Most Australian schools now run assessment records through a platform like Sentral or Compass, and both can genuinely help. Digital gradebooks hold rubric scores and checklist data centrally, track them across the year, and generate the longitudinal view a single lesson’s notes never could.

That said, the platform should follow the pedagogy, not the other way around. Beyond that, this connects to Miriam Plotinsky’s point about relying on a single, first impression of a student — one data point, however confidently recorded, can still mislead. A digital system makes it tempting to enter one tidy score and move on. Resist that. If your assessment strategy genuinely needs a rubric plus an anecdotal note, enter both — even if the system’s default view only surfaces the score.

For this reason, before you commit a strategy to any platform, ask one question: does this device capture what I actually need to know, or just what’s easiest to type in? If it’s the second, the record-keeping has quietly started driving the assessment instead of serving it.

Closing the Loop

Put the whole chain together and it reads: content descriptor, learning intention, success criteria, assessment strategy, record-keeping device. Each link only holds if the one before it does. A well-matched device isn’t extra admin — it’s what lets the assessment for, as and of learning you’re already doing actually inform what happens next, from tomorrow’s formative check to the report you write in Term 4.

That leaves one honest question still open: even with the right device, every one of these tools carries some bias, some time cost, and some risk of telling an incomplete story. That’s exactly where backward-designed planning earns its keep — and it’s also where Part 3 of this series picks up next.

💬 Your Turn! Which record-keeping device do you reach for most — and has it ever let you down at report-writing time? Tell us what you’ve learned in the comments below.

References

Brookhart, S. M. (2013). How to create and use rubrics for formative assessment and grading. ASCD.

Jorgensen, E. (2026, July 10). Giving students a choice in how they will demonstrate their learning. Edutopia. edutopia.org

Plotinsky, M. (2026, July 10). Working to see the full picture. Edutopia. edutopia.org

Popham, W. J. (2020). Classroom assessment: What teachers need to know (9th ed.). Pearson.