January 29, 2025 by Doug McCurry from BooBook Education

The science of learning, and explicit teaching in VCE English

In an AGE article about her school having the top VCE results in 2024, the principal of Ballarat Clarendon College, Jen Bourke, attributed their success to a ‘“highly interactive” model of explicit instruction’ in which ‘every concept is fully explained, every skill is fully demonstrated before we ask the students to apply those concepts or skills.’

This approach she describes as inspired by ‘the science of learning’. The positivist notion of a science of learning is much less relevant to English teaching than the notion of explicit teaching in English.

• What would it mean to explicitly teach the concepts and skills of text study as enacted in VCE English?
• What are the concept and skills that underpin Section A of the English exam?
• How would one explicitly teach the concepts and skills of Section A?

These are the question we tacitly if not explicitly consider in teaching text study and in preparing students for the English exam. These are the questions I had to consider (more or less explicitly) in developing the BBE text study guides.

• How could a study guide (and such a guide is a kind of long-distance teaching) do other than simply tell students what they have to know and write in the exam?

In thinking about writing study guides for Section A, I began from the approach I took in teaching texts that it was all about knowing and absorbing the text. As a teachers I thought it particularly important to absorb the actual language of a text to understand it and to write about it well, through a process like osmosis.

I taught by asking student to turn to a page where I read a sentence of a paragraph and then discussed the substance and significance of the material. I did not approach the task of text study conceptually, other than offering the injunction that a student had to read with a pencil in their hand so they could underline important words, sentences and paragraphs as they read. And I did not try to define what I thought makes parts of the text particularly important. In such an approach everything has to arise directly out of reading and discussing what is written in the text.

The only material I prepared for students was an extract, which was about ten pages of copied words, phrases, sentences and occasionally paragraphs from the text. I wanted students to become very familiar with this material. I did not want them to memorise it and quote it as such, I wanted them to absorb the material so that it shaped the way they thought and wrote about the text.

Since I left teaching many commentators have argued (or simply assumed) the benefits of explicit teaching of concepts and skills, in the manner stated by the principal of Ballarat Clarendon College . Such views were often crude and simplistic when applied to English teaching and learning, and did not at first cause me to question my view that an osmotic process was more effective with high level skills like writing a Section A essay, than explicit instruction and demonstration of concepts and skills.

Over the years my suspicions about explicit instruction have softened partly because of my interest in the idea of thinking routines (as described by Ron Ritchhart in Making Thinking Visible (2011) and assessment for learning (as described by The Assessment Reform Group). These influences have informed my work on the BBE Section A study guides.

My thinking evolved further during the first few of the sixteen guides I have done. My approach always began with the language of the text, and I produced extracts of 20 or so pages of quotation or paraphrase from the text as the basis for and part of the study guide. In the first guide (with the great convenience of an electronic copy of the text and a word processor) I did a 5000 word extract of Pride and Prejudice with 1000 words of marginal questions and commentary on the quotations. The following is the first page of the extract.

The study guides also have a point form synopsis of the text, 25 essay questions, twenty short answer questions and three electronic and automatically scored multiple choice tests on the text. I developed a full list of possible themes and point form character sketches, but also encouraged students to do this task for themselves.

The following are some of the key concepts and vocabulary explained in section 2.

In the study guides I take a less conventional approach that I would not have taken when teaching by recommending a routine of definite steps for writing responses to any essay topic. The following is an overview of that planning process.

I proposed four steps in a routine based on a template of themes and quotes to analyse a question and organise a response to any essay question. Using such a template for any question is an ambitious (or deluded?) plan, but it seemed to offer a process for demonstrating such key concepts as analysing a question, selecting relevant material and selecting appropriate quotes.

The following is my template for Pride and Prejudice. It has the key themes (highlighted) interspersed in a summary of key facts and incidents. These summaries can easily be expanded by someone who knows the book in writing an essay.

This material was accompanied by a small set of key quotes and paraphrases and both sets of material were concise enough to fit on one page.

Choosing the question and planning the response

I proposed using this template of key incidents and paraphrases or quotes as the basis for a response to any essay topic. I showed students how I would analyse the terms of the question by turning it into sub-questions and select appropriate parts of the template to use to discuss a particular question. The following is one example from the study guide, analysing the VCAA examination task of 2020.

The following version of the template shows less relevant facts, incidents and themes crossed out, leaving only material appropriate to the chosen question.

In the left hand column of the next table, a number of sub-questions analyse or unpack the key ideas in the question, and the relevant material from the template is presented for analysis in terms of the question. In the right column, this material is organised into an essay plan.

This plan was used to write the following essay.

This response is not offered as ‘a high’, although some parts of it might meet the criteria for high level response. It is concerned to explicitly show the key concepts of analysing a question, and selecting relevant and appropriate facts, incidents and quotes to answer a particular question. I told students that I did not think they should use such a formal process in writing an exam essay, but I told them the process showed the key ideas and activities for writing a strong Section A essay. The process shows how a small amount of key material could be used as the basis for an essay plan for any question.

The guide also gives essay plans in the template format for the second question of 2020 and twelve of the twenty five essay topics in the guide.

The five sections for each of the study guides are very substantial and rather unwieldy. This prompted me to try to condense the material into a one page overview, and a summary checklist of no more than six pages for the text. The Checklist (which includes the one page overview of themes, facts, incident and quotes) is the condensed material a really diligent student would prepare for themselves and that they would be reading and rereading the night before and the morning of the exam.

The checklist we provide is not a substitute for the student’s own work to condense the material. The more they do this work the better. The aim is for students read, reread and think about the condensed material in the checklist and absorb rather than learn it. (We do not want students learning their own or other people’s essays.) The modelled process shows students how definite content can relevantly inform a response to a set question.

The following are the first and the last pages of the Checklist for Pride and Prejudice.