I was asked for my key takeaways from this read earlier in the summer. There is plenty more in the book which I throughly recommend to anyone interested in exploring ideas around explicit or direct instruction, but a very brief summary:
Learning is very difficult to define, and even with established definitions from the literature, we can see problems or drawbacks if we rely to heavily on them. Nonetheless, we can see learning as being ‘a change in long-term memory’ (Kirchner, Sweller and Clark, 2006) and a process that requires that students ‘actively make sense of the material [… and] transfer what they have learned to new problems’ (Fiorella and Mayer, 2015).
Leaning on Fiorella and Mayer (2015), Needham presents a three-part process of learning: selecting material, organising material and integrating material with prior knowledge. Each step is necessary and must be done well if we want students to learn.
Long-term memory can be thought of as a huge storage cupboard where we keep our memories, but unlike objects in a cupboard which are not affected by being stored, our memories are modified when they are retrieved. Working memory, on the other hand, has a much limited capacity of just a handful of items at any one time and so, if we consider cognitive load theory, we see that there are important classroom implications with how we design our materials and how we give instructions. Retrieval practice activities, like low-stakes regular testing, promotes longer-term retention and has ready application to the English language classroom.
Worked examples and completion problems (like a gap-fill, but more challenging) are valuable strategies for helping students learn and retain information.
Practice, practice and more practice; but this should be carefully planned and spaced so as to increase retention and accuracy. Retention and natural use of varied sentence types and sentence structures, for example, can be improved through explicit practice.
Chris Richards ELT 