Good teaching and learning means employing a blend of approaches including direct teaching

Changes to the curriculum are often associated with moves to encourage particular approaches to teaching and learning. On the one hand, they can be seen as a reassertion of ‘traditional’ methods, sometimes described as ‘direct teaching’, while on the other hand they may be seen as favouring discovery learning or constructivism. Such polarisation fails to reflect the complexity of decisions about appropriate teaching and learning approaches. This Review, therefore, should not be regarded as falling into a particular ‘camp’; rather, it implies the need for a broad repertoire of teaching and learning experiences that reflect the curriculum purposes.

A particular risk lies in direct teaching being caricatured as didactic, whole-class instruction. However, Hattie powerfully defines direct teaching as follows: ‘The teacher decides the learning intentions and success criteria, makes them transparent to the students, demonstrates them by modelling, evaluates if they (the students) understand what they have been told by checking for understanding, and re-telling them what they have been told by tying it all together with closure’. Its essence lies in clear purposes and success criteria, modelling and practice, and regular and insightful feedback. In this way, direct teaching involves the active engagement of the teacher in ‘scaffolding’ learning. Creating contexts within which learners can demonstrate the ability to apply learning independently in unfamiliar settings is an important part of that scaffolding.