Why questions are just as important as answers
While there is no doubt that literacy and numeracy are foundational for communication and day-to-day functionality, the recent necessary shift to online learning has revived pedagogical discourse on the value of explicit teaching and traditional models of education.
Learning to read, write and use numeracy effectively is essential for our students, but these skills serve a loftier purpose - they are the ‘enabling’ skills that provide access to the immeasurable amassed knowledge about our history and our world, and open doors to rich scientific and literary discovery. They allow critical and creative thinking to be explored and shared.
But explicitly teaching these building blocks alone is not sufficient to prepare our students for active engagement and success in a technology and information-led 21st Century. It disregards the very reason that we want our students to learn these skills - to become independent thinkers, investigators, and even innovators. For this, leveraging pedagogical strategies that give learners agency and nurture motivational capacity are vital - engaging learners with journeys, as much as the destinations.
As teachers, these pedagogical strategies should be selected based on their evidence, and with an understanding of the contexts in which they are effective. This means we need to understand our goals and select strategies to suit. Our learning goals should dictate our curriculum design and teaching practice, and there are so many different goals that no single strategy will ever suffice. Educators should be wary of any pedagogical advocate who positions themselves in the ‘all or nothing’ camp when advocating for a particular approach.
Without explicit teaching, students have no starting point; without inquiry, students have nowhere to go.
The teaching and learning of skills such as reading and writing, counting, learning a musical instrument, etc. require repetition. Students need opportunities to practise and master these ‘building-block skills’ in narrow contexts before they can apply them in real-world contexts. For example, phonics enables students to learn to encode and decode language. This skill is taught in order for text to be read and comprehended. When students reach proficiency in decoding, they need to be able to apply these skills to read and comprehend a text. Without the complimentary teaching of comprehension skills, students who can flawlessly decode each word will often have little understanding of what they are reading or why. The same goes for inquiry; students need the building blocks of literacy and numeracy and the foundational content knowledge of a particular discipline before embarking on an inquiry.
There is room for explicit teaching, and repetition, and there is room for inquiry. More than room, there is a need for both approaches - they are two sides of the same coin. Without explicit teaching, students have no starting point, and without inquiry, students have nowhere to go.
There is no better case to be made for teaching inquiry, other than following evidence-based research, than considering social media bubbles and the circulation of misinformation. Students need, now more than ever, the ability to question or be sceptical about the authorship, timing, and veracity of the information they are consuming. They need, when they leave the classroom, to be able to effectively question claims, identify trustworthy sources, and manage social interactions with those who have differing opinions (or ‘facts’).
The impact of the pandemic has been substantial, and arguments for an increased focus on the building blocks are valid. But without the opportunity to apply these skills in broader contexts, without inquiry, students will have no understanding about why they are learning these skills and no space in which to apply them.
We should be mindful of placing an unduly heavy reliance on standardised test results such as NAPLAN as the best way to determine whether or not our students can navigate their world. Yes, they need to read and write and understand all things numerical, but they also need to spend time on developing investigative skills stimulated by hypotheses, inquisition, comparison, evaluation and conclusion.
Some believe that inquiry is asking students to jump through unnecessary hoops and that we should simply be teaching students what they need to advance them faster - but the ability to teach ourselves, using an inquiring mind and identifying our own ways to find answers, is what we really need to find our way in this world.
—Mark Ritterman and Karen Green
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