Explicit Instruction Works. Education Schools Just Won’t Admit It. | American Enterprise Institute - AEI

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Explicit Instruction Works. Education Schools Just Won’t Admit It.

Explicit Instruction Works. Education Schools Just Won’t Admit It.

Zach Groshell

by Zach Groshell

July 27, 2026

Report | American Enterprise Institute

Education

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Key Points

Despite the popularity of inquiry-based, discovery-based, and project-based learning, effective teaching should not involve withholding information from students.

Effective teachers present new content in small steps, model concepts, ask a high volume of questions and check the responses of all students, provide immediate corrective feedback, guide practice closely, and build in extensive cumulative review.

Contrary to its common caricatures, explicit instruction is not a teacher monologue, a hindrance to student creativity or problem-solving skills, or a risk to children’s self-esteem.

Introduction

When I was training to be a teacher, my professors loved to stand at a lectern and lecture—at length—on how teaching was about so much more than lecturing.

“He who does the talking does the learning,” they explained to us from behind their podiums.

“Be a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage,” they explained to us from a literal stage.

And then there were the appeals to “the 21st century”—a century we are now well into—and the insistence, with every passing innovation, that knowledge itself had become obsolete. “The teacher is no longer the source of knowledge. Students can just look up the answers to their questions.”

There was something ironic about how directly my education professors were teaching me to avoid direct teaching, but at the time, I had neither the arguments nor the evidence to see through their claims. Like any new teacher, I took the advice I was handed at face value: Teacher-led learning was the problem, and something called “inquiry learning” was the answer.

Besides, I had my own memories of sitting through boring lessons as a student, and the idea that good teaching meant getting kids to construct and discover felt intuitive and morally correct. It didn’t occur to me that there could be a third approach.

“If teachers got out of the way,” I reasoned, “students would be more engaged and take ownership of their learning.”

So I did what my professors told me to do. I spent the first years of my career working hard to be the guide on the side. I rolled out butcher paper on the floor so students could “investigate their thinking” with markers. I designed sprawling, open-ended projects. I arranged the desks so students faced each other rather than me. There was always something to be built out of cardboard, always a hum of activity, and school leadership held me up as an example for the rest of the faculty to follow.

After several years of implementing these student-led practices—inquiry based, discovery based, and project based (all ending in based, for some reason)—I had to confront an uncomfortable truth: No matter how much effort I put into these methods and how many books and blogs I consumed affirming their value, my students weren’t learning all that much.

The signs were everywhere—like the fact that I taught the safety instructions before a science lab directly and explicitly, but I never taught the science itself. Apparently, it was fine if my students bombed the test as long as they didn’t blow up the lab.

But what ultimately tipped me into skepticism was the evidence right in front of me. I could get my students to make their trifold boards look good in time for the science fair, but as I walked the room and listened, what I overheard didn’t have much science in it. I would hover nearby during a math or history inquiry lesson, eavesdropping like a detective on student discussions, and the same picture kept emerging: The ones who were getting it—my “highs”—tended to already know about the topic going in. The ones who weren’t—my “lows”—were struggling and finding unproductive ways to save face.

I wasn’t closing the gap. I was widening it.

The instructional choices we make have consequences, and those consequences fall on specific children. One moment I still can’t shake came in the middle of an extended block of “passion projects”—weeks set aside for students to explore whatever they wanted. One of my students, a girl who couldn’t read, write, or calculate at her grade level, spent the entire stretch producing a single friendship bracelet. That was all she had to show by the end of the passion project, and it was our choice to allow it. The time could...