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On explicit instruction and equity:
We often discuss explicit instruction as a method, but rarely as a matter of equity. Its purpose is to provide all students, regardless of background, with the kind of knowledge that can genuinely change their lives.
Minimally-guided instruction privileges the already privileged. It assumes students possess the background knowledge, metacognitive strategies, and cultural capital to navigate highly ambiguous learning environments.
A tiny minority of students discover how to read by themselves. While a few children (often with high language exposure at home and strong working memory) can intuit the alphabetic principle, most cannot. To base an education system on that sub-group is ethically reprehensible.
Explicit instruction is about recognising that some children need more systematic, more deliberate, more scaffolded instruction to reach the same destinations as their more advantaged peers.
To deny them this and to insist instead on minimally-guided approaches that assume prior knowledge, cultural familiarity, and cognitive confidence is to perpetuate the very inequalities which education claims to address.
As noted, "The greatest victims of these fads are the very students who are most at risk." When educators choose methods based on philosophical preference rather than empirical evidence, they effectively conduct experiments on other people's children.
The professional responsibility of teachers is not to express their pedagogical personality or to implement the approach that feels most satisfying to them. It is to use methods that maximise learning for all students, particularly those who have been historically underserved.
Explicit instruction has been caricatured as authoritarian, mechanistic, or anti-progressive. But there is nothing "oppressive" about ensuring that all children learn to read fluently, write clearly, and think mathematically.
Ultimately, the most radical act in education may be the relentless care of consistently implementing effective teaching methods, regardless of fashion or philosophy. When schools serve all children well, not just those who arrive with advantages, they fulfil education's democratic promise.