Explicit Values
More Earnestness on Explicitness
Here is a partial list of some reasons for leaning toward explicit instruction that you may (or may not) agree with even if you don't like how 'explicit instruction' manifests in curricula or the zeitgeist at the moment:
Because explicit instruction does a ton of the world's communicative work every day—speaking it and listening to it. We don't call it 'instruction' but that's what a lot of it, at bottom, is. The need to know how to sit and get—and stand and give (or maybe something more complex)—in person and with print hasn't gone away, could be more 'valuable' than ever, and whole rhetoric courses could be taught about the skills required. But, the prime directive of explicit instruction should be planned obsolescence, at all scales. Explicit instruction programs need to show that their 'explicitizing-ness' knows principled bounds (kudos AlphaSchool), but they should know that the reason for doing this is so that easy-button-explicitness doesn't take over instruction, as it will without the constraints (which is not AlphaSchool's thing).
Because students see and hear an adult elder who is empowered by the community to speak about its shared meanings. And since teacher-elders are not remote from students' everyday lives, students can learn to see all adults (who are as respectable as my teacher) as potential elders—full members of their community who can speak for it—which allows them to see themselves in that role. We need more diverse faces in our classrooms, and those faces need to speak.
Because when students are centered on the teaching, that forms the starter community, that forms initial belonging. You have to belong to something. You don't just have 'belonging.' The teaching and the teacher(s) are the hearth(s) of learning. Community forms, in the beginning, when everyone sees that they're all basking in the same light and heat. It is important for students to see themselves as equally participating in seeing the teaching—that they all have, more or less, the same access and that they are all accessing it. There's one webpage in this classroom—right up here; I have links. This classroom has one channel, and you're on it. That's the central structure, audible and visible, and you have to have a central structure.
Because it has been found to work better as a base than inquiry. That matter is practically settled in the research (lab, classroom, wide array of subjects, interdisciplinary convergence).
Because if you want to teach students what a pineapple is, a common-sensical way to think about starting would be to say, "this is a pineapple" and you show them a pineapple. A very strange way to think about it would be to wonder how you could make students productively struggle to discover what a pineapple is. That 'extraordinary' way of thinking requires extraordinary justification. It can't be the default lens on every instructional question and decision: how do I not say this explicitly and make it an interrogative activity instead? Repeat that over and over and you're in a race with your neighbors to see who can remove the most nodes, and have the highest expectations in the whole wide world. And then practice goes away, the open middle becomes uncrossable, but you keep competitively widening it. That's not philosophy, science, or teaching. It's just runaway coveting.
Because explicitness is valued in people. We don't typically like people who seem to 'play games' with information, especially unnecessarily. But perhaps online is different (where those games are differently punished). Still, if we have to live in mother-in-law land, where it is equally probable that a person going on about the full moon is talking about Earth's satellite and about the size of my butt, and it's up to me to figure out which, then the pendulum has swung too far in the culture toward erasing the speaker, and overburdening the listener.
Because you can do some really cool and creative things with it—and even more cool and creative things with now-inclusive explorations. If the people responsible for it are sticks-in-the-mud and they want Example 1, Example 2, Bring It Together, Exit Ticket, too bad. That's not mentioned as a criterion in any paper I've read.
Because we are ritualistic creatures, still.