Getting to Know: Zach Groshell

“Wait, so the fact that the kids aren't learning has an explanation from cognitive science?”

A primary purpose of “The Next 30 Years” is to turn up the lights on teachers, researchers, and instructional leaders who deserve a higher profile. Zach Groshell is one of them. He is author of the new book Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching. He also recently joined me for the most-watched webinar I've ever hosted at AEI. Like so many others, Groshell became an accidental apostle for a more explicit, teacher-centered, evidence-informed approach to teaching. He started his career steeped in the progressive education dogmas of student-centered “discovery,” inquiry-based learning, and constructivism, but eventually he realized that these approaches were failing his students–particularly those who most needed clear, consistent, systematic instruction. His journey is one many teachers will recognize as their own, and we delved deep into the arc of that journey in this conversation.

Robert Pondiscio: In Just Tell Them, you describe your early years of teaching as embracing “groovy methods” like discovery and inquiry-based learning. Were there specific events or realizations that led you away from those methods?

Zach Groshell: The first sign I saw was that I started blaming a lot of my failures on the kids' behavior. I just thought the kids needed to persist. They needed to learn how to manage their time, manage a project, manage each other. I was constantly fighting a battle between what I knew about good classroom management and the fact that the methods themselves seemed to produce really bad behavior, and I was just blaming the kids. It took a while for me to realize it actually had very little to do with classroom management; it had to do with the pedagogical method: putting posters on the ground and giving out markers, or having a bunch of yarn and cardboard spilling out of my classroom door and all that other stuff. What this really was doing was creating opportunities for my fastest, highest-flying, most knowledgeable students to show me what they already knew, and the kids that needed more structure and explicit instruction, those kids were expressing the fact that they were constantly being confronted with their own struggles. They were leaving the classroom or pouting or breaking their markers into the carpet and so on as a way of saving face or as a way of demonstrating to me, “It's better to look like you don't care than to look stupid.” I was not supporting them.

Pondiscio: But we’ve all been acculturated to believe the kind of hands-on, project-based lesson you just criticized is what good teaching and learning looks like. Administrators love this stuff!

Groshell: That poster project was sort of for the leader, the evaluator, who was thinking, “This is awesome.” It had an aesthetic to it that was very groovy, and it was very pleasing to see that kind of buzz and that engagement. But I realized when I started asking questions, drilling in on their thinking about the math, that they didn't know the math at all in any sophisticated way. But the lesson looked good!

My fourth graders had to do a science fair and in the first year, we all did a lot of different experiments, and then we went and presented to parents. And I would walk around and realize that none of the kids could explain the science behind their experiment. They could only just do the magic trick for their parent. And so the next year I was like, “I'm going to teach 'em a little bit more before we get hands-on with the materials.” And the third year I just went fully extreme. I was like, “I'm going to do six weeks of teaching them about science and it's all going to be planned so that when they go and do their experiment in front of parents, they will look like absolute geniuses when it comes to viscosity or slope,” or whatever the experiment was about. And that's exactly what happened. The parents of that class walked around and went, “These kids are getting a great education! They know so much about science!” I had them spend only 2 days preparing the magic trick after six weeks of actually teaching them science, and I realized the difference in the two types of teaching.

Pondiscio: I've told the story many times about stumbling upon E.D. Hirsch Jr.'s work and feeling like, “Oh Lord, it's almost as if he's been in my classroom!” His work on reading comprehension described perfectly what I saw every single day. Was there something similar for you where you came across a body of work that said, “This is it!”

Groshell: That would be an article by Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark in 2006, on the failure of constructivist and inquiry-based problem-based learning. I read that in my first PhD methods course. They described cognitive load theory, and I went, “Wait, so the fact that the kids aren't learning has an explanation from cognitive science? That material can be too complex? Not having enough guidance can lead to cognitive overload, and working memory will break down and they won't be able to store all of those thoughts in long-term memory?” That was my moment.

Dr. Zach Groshell. Credit to Education Rickshaw.

Pondiscio: I was very struck by the description a few moments ago of your evaluator. We’ve all had that experience, and frankly I’ve even done it evaluating other teachers’ classrooms: “Oh, there's productive buzz! Oh, look, the kids are engaged! Good learning is happening here.” We give teachers mixed signals about what should and should not be happening in their classrooms.

Groshell: And there's even more when you consider how teachers are encouraged to design the classroom environment. I would continuously change my tables and put them facing away from me, facing towards each other, their friends. I would be constantly changing my room because then it looked flexible. It looked like learning was taking place. But each time I really needed to get serious, because there was a test coming up or we'd just fooled around for far too long and I can't accept that only 25 percent of you have figured this out on your own, I would bring all the desks as close as I could to the projector and suddenly switch into direct instruction mode, where I orchestrated each problem and led the learning. And each time I did that, we could get serious and the students would learn. And afterwards I realized the kids, they don't resent me for doing this sort of thing. They feel the way you feel when you run a really long race and at the end you get your drink of water and you're just like, “Yes, I beat my time!” It’s a different way of thinking about kids' motivation. This type of teaching is more fulfilling and nourishing than the superficial, “We're just going through the motions of activities that this guy keeps coming up with for us.”

Pondiscio: That brings us back to your book, which is your effort to save the rest of us a whole lot of time and fumbling around in the dark. Walk us through the genesis of this and led you to put pen to paper.

Groshell: Yeah, I mean the title Just Tell Them doesn’t mean only tell them stuff. It actually refers to an internal narrative I had in my mind, which was that I would give kids a discovery type of experience, some sort of big problem or some sort of materials. And in my mind I'm thinking, “Is it time to stop this? Nobody's learning from this. Should we break this down?” And as an instructional coach later on, I would see teachers saying the same thing. I would want to go right up to them and say, “It's time. You just need to tell them right now how to do it.” But there’s this whole feeling in the field that using explanation and modeling is a last resort as opposed to something that's preventative, something that actually is more equitable in terms of getting the information to everyone, rather than waiting until the same kids fail, and then stopping everybody and correcting them in a really quick and frustrated way because you're mad they didn't figure it out on their own.

Pondiscio: How did we get to this point, where we think it's just a bad idea to use explicit instruction, or that explicit instruction is synonymous with bad teaching?

Groshell: Yeah, it's exactly that. It is viewed as synonymous with bad teaching. But it has to do, I think, with our views of human nature, the romantic view of what childhood should be like, how learning should happen. It is this sort of idealized, romantic perspective that if we just set the conditions, they will bloom like flowers. And the truth doesn't sit well with people: The real truth is they’re more like blocks of marble and we need to form them into the masterpiece that they could be. And the minute you switch to that, you find all the empowerment that you've been looking for. It's when you think, “I'm just going to wait until they develop it on their own. They're not ready for it, or their background somehow is the main factor or variable that is influencing their learning and not me,” I think that's where you start to lose a lot of motivation as a teacher.

Pondiscio: I've heard you talk about this, but I want to give you a chance to kind of expound on a little bit: Explicit teaching is not paint-by-numbers teaching. It’s not handing the teacher a script to idiot-proof them.

Groshell: No, and you can't check your brain at the door regardless of whether you're given really good materials or not. You are the orchestrator of the learning. When I provide training to teachers, I try to explain explicit instruction in a way that is digestible, because there are so many moving pieces. We talk about decomposition of the content and sequencing examples to create opportunities that allow students to generalize. We talk about spaced practice and interleaving, how to create cumulative reviews that draw on past material. To be great at explicit instruction, you’re basically an artist weaving together all these strands from previous units so that the kids don't forget it. It's not easy to do this by any means. I do, however, think it's scalable. I think it is within every teacher's power to communicate to kids what they're meant to learn, show them what it is, how to do it, and get everyone to practice it a lot. I think that that’s a scalable and doable ask of teachers, as opposed to requiring them to be curriculum designers and creating these large discovery schemes the last six weeks, in which the teacher is somehow supposed to facilitate 30 independent passion projects. I think that's just a very difficult ask of teachers, not to mention it’s not very effective.

Dr. Groshell presenting during the webinar “Reviving the Lost Art of Direct and Explicit Instruction,” hosted by AEI and Robert Pondiscio.

Pondiscio: It feels like at least there's some traction for this now. We're having a “science of reading” moment right now, even if it's just because nothing else has worked. Has that softened the ground for explicit teaching? It feels like you're getting a more receptive hearing for these ideas than you would've, say, five or 10 years ago. True?

Groshell: It’s true, and I sometimes wonder how that happened. Think about what happened after Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story. Everybody had a common text. Everybody listened to the same podcast and got the same information, and it was so convincing that people were persuaded. This is where I think the science of learning is so important, for people who just understood “phonics good, not teaching phonics bad.” We need to do some work helping them understand why that is. It's not just an empirical finding. It's the fact that reading is a very complex task. The task can be broken up into its parts and taught in isolation, and you slowly build up to the complex process of reading, including background knowledge, and you need knowledge of syntax and so on and so forth. That complexity is true for every other thing we learn in school, and so it disturbs me a little bit when I go into a classroom in the morning and they're teaching systematically out of a phonics program, and everybody's responding and everybody feels successful. Then after an hour of that, they go have a bathroom break, they come back in and we have tubs of math objects all over the ground that kids are playing with. Why is math somehow the subject that is taught by inquiry and discovery when phonics and early reading are not? To me, having those two opposing instructional methods in the same classroom doesn’t make sense when you apply a science of learning or a cognitive load theory lens.

Pondiscio: I wonder if we don’t worship to excess at the altar of student engagement. It gets back to productive buzz: “Oh, there's learning happening here because the kids are engaged and they're talking!”

Groshell: Yes, the notion that the schools are too academic. We don't need to have them learn all these facts and things. If we could just create classrooms with a playful learning environment--this is what's natural, this is what's good for kids: just play with objects, play with tools, play with each other. “It's wonderful to be a child and look at all these ideas they came up with? Let's share the learning!” And yeah, it's a way of teaching, which maybe brings us back to choice in schools eventually, which is that there might be a lot of parents that just, that's what they want. They want this for their kids, and I don't want that for my kids, so how do we come up with a compromise that doesn't ruin both of our visions for what a good school entails?

Pondiscio: One thing that you and I have in common is a background teaching at-risk, low-SES learners. Explicit instruction is particularly powerful and important for disadvantaged kids, correct?

Groshell: Yes, for two main reasons. One is that, when we talk about disadvantage, background knowledge is really the driver of critical thinking and comprehension, and we don't live in a society where we can assume the same amount of background knowledge between families. So that's the first piece: Kids that come from disadvantaged backgrounds are often not given the sufficient mental tools in their long-term memory, like facts, dates, and people, the general heuristics that other people just take for granted. So when they are in a Socratic seminar or a discussion in the class, they're not able to contribute a lot. And so teaching them that background knowledge explicitly levels the playing field: It gets to them more efficiently, and it helps to narrow that sort of “Matthew Effect.” The other reason explicit instruction is particularly impactful for disadvantaged kids is working memory. Working memory is where all thinking takes place. And, for a lot of kids that I worked with as an interventionist for math, it comes down to something we can't unfortunately change, which is that they process information slowly. They need things to be broken down more carefully. They need things to be sequenced systematically. They can't just absorb it, have one exposure to it or encounter it incidentally and then be able to learn it. So, by using explicit instruction, we are delivering the material in a way that levels the playing field. Maybe for some kids we can throw a lot at them and something will stick, but for the kids who need a little more time, the only way it's going to stick is if we design the instruction in a very carefully considered way.

Pondiscio: Give us your best advice for the teacher who is persuaded by all this, but is working in a setting where they are surrounded by people who are not persuaded.

Groshell: A lot of people that read this may come away thinking that I'm talking about old-fashioned lecturing, so the first thing to remember is how interactive and how engaging a very well-designed explicit instruction lesson is. It's saying just a few words and refraining from saying all the extraneous things that kids don't need to think about. It's asking kids to respond, to write, getting everybody to do the same thing at the same time. And as you go back and forth with the kids, like a tennis match, you're creating this really joyful learning experience. You're moving people forward like a coach, training them to get better at a skill, and you are assessing it and you're developing them, so that by the end of that sequence, the learning is going to look a lot like what the inquiry-based learning people think is good teaching; the inquiry people just do it at the beginning and for the whole time. But with explicit instruction, you are building these kids' capacities up so they can apply what they’re taught through an interactive and scaffolded process. We're not going back to old-fashioned teaching. We're going to what works, and what works is based on how the mind processes and retains information.

Pondsicio: How has the reception been to the book and what are your hopes for it?

Groshell: The number one comment people have is “Finally, someone speaking my language.” And I think that's important. There’s an element of social proof, that while practitioners of direct instruction may not be the dominant voices in education, that there are many of us out there that are using it to get results. I want people to feel like they're part of a community, that there are other people that think this way. I try to temper my enthusiasm for cognitive science with the fact that I have done this with real kids. I've done this with teachers and it’s transformed their first year of teaching by getting everyone back into rows and having the teacher stand at the front, and maybe that’ll transform their careers in some ways. So that's one part. I also want people to be able to use this book as a resource when it comes to figuring out the sort of filters or constraints or important considerations when teaching. I don't want their explanations to be without visuals, without examples, without storytelling, as dry as an instruction manual. I want people to have a set of tools that they can use to recognize what high-quality, research-based explanations and explicit instruction look like.

Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching by Zach Groshell, PhD. Credit to Education Rickshaw.