Instruction: Ask an Expert - Michael Kamil

Michael: Explicit instruction is one of those things that seems like just an absolute no brainer. What we know about children is that they will learn whatever you teach them, they very often don't learn things, well sometimes they learn those too, we wish they wouldn't but the problem that we have is convincing teachers that there are ways to teach explicitly. And it really comes down to this; for explicit instruction, we give teachers a set of rules and they technosize the teaching so here the five steps to get the main idea or here are the four things that you need to do to generate a question, or here are the six rules you need to write a (inaudible), and because of that they often don't regress to what we call the automatic phase of that, where it becomes not six steps but a process. I mean sometimes you have to do all of those things, sometimes you don't but I think explicit instruction has to be used as a concept along with the goal of what instruction is about and it's not doing a process, but it's becoming a more literate individual, becoming an individual who can learn from reading and take that knowledge to other places outside of school.