Explicit resistance

Hey 👋

Hope your week is treating you well. Following a brief documentary intermission, we’re jumping back into our Snack series on teacher biases…

Big idea 🍉

Expert-induced blindness (aka ‘curse of knowledge’) is a cognitive bias that makes it difficult for experts in a domain to empathise with novices, especially when that knowledge gap is large. This is why, as teachers, we can often find ourselves overestimating what our students know or how easy it is for them to learn new things.

This bias rears its head in a variety of classroom situations. For example, unless we’re intentional about it, we can easily give our students insufficient thinking time during questioning.

But perhaps the biggest implication of expert-induced blindness is an attraction towards less guided teaching approaches such as ‘inquiry’ or ‘discovery’, despite their poor track record for novice learners. This is because the ideas and strategies we hope students will develop come so easily to us—it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t reach the same conclusions on their own. Consequently, we can find ourselves intuitively resisting more explicit approaches to teaching, despite the wealth of evidence in their support, particularly for our most vulnerable students.

(popular quotes such as the above are an example of the popularity of this unhelpful disposition, as Greg Ashman explains in The Power of Explicit Teaching)

One of the reasons explicit teaching works so well is because it is rooted in assumptions that actively help to counteract expert-induced blindness. Specifically, explicit teaching assumes that (A) we need clarity on what students must know, (B) learners do best when new material is introduced in manageable steps, and (C) deep understanding and fluency require extended rehearsal and elaboration.

By countering expert-induced blindness at this ‘root’ level, we better align our teaching with how novices learn, and in doing so: increase our chances of securing success and equity for all.

(we’ll talk more next week about what exactly explicit teaching is and why it works)

🎓 For more, check out this classic paper on the weaknesses of minimally guided instruction.

Summary

• One of the biggest implications of expert-induced blindness is a natural resistance to explicit teaching approaches.

• This is unhelpful because explicit approaches have a strong base of support, particularly for our most vulnerable students.

• One of the reasons that explicit teaching is so effective is that is actively counteracts wonky assumptions arising from expert-induced blindness.

Little updates 🥕

• Meta-analysis of literacy interventions in the home → finds they tend to help with comprehension but not so well for decoding.

• Study on teacher beliefs about learning → suggests growth mindsets boost positivity, motivation, and help-seeking, while fixed mindsets increase stress and avoidance, especially for girls in science.

• Meta-analysis of peer tutoring in STEM → shows it has potential to improve academic performance (and also slightly boost motivation).

• Review of school attendance → finds (depressing) declines since 2016 and highlights a range of promising interventions.

Get access to 100-word summaries, a comprehensive research library, and downloadable PDFs → Learn about Snacks PRO