Teachers use explicit instruction to help students acquire information and skills. Using explicit instruction, teachers make the different steps needed for a given task as overt and explicit as possible. Explicit instruction is used to teach the Solve It! approach.
Although there are different definitions of explicit instruction, most include the following instructional procedures:
- Introduce the lesson (e.g., set a context for the lesson, including making meaningful connections to real life, activating prior knowledge, and presenting goals and outcomes for the lesson).
- Present content and demonstrate (e.g., present the target skills in a step-by-step manner, model the skill using a range of examples, etc.).
- Provide guided practice with feedback (e.g., provide guided group and independent practice with corrective feedback, fade teacher-directed activities gradually as students become proficient, monitor mastery at each step).
- Provide closure (e.g., review what students have learned, teach for generalization and transfer, etc.).
Students with disabilities and other learning difficulties may not be able to distinguish important information from nonessential facts. They may have difficulty seeing the relationships between concepts and processes, and can become lost when information is not presented sequentially. Teachers may find that students with learning difficulties can engage in complex cognitive activities that require complex discriminations and reasoning when they are first taught the essential factual information—concepts and skills—using explicit instruction.
Strategy instruction—which is at the core of Solve It!—when combined with explicit instruction provides a strong instructional intervention for students with learning difficulties.
Learn more about how Solve It! embeds explicit instruction and strategy instruction in lessons in the different Solve it! titles. https://www.exinn.net/solve-it/