The “Just Tell Them” Trap

How direct instruction gets mistranslated as 'teacher talk,' lecturing and all sorts of other dull bobbins

Not so long ago, thanks to Ofsted’s peculiar, disproportionate - and all too often, toxic - effects on the teaching in England, teachers were told to keep their mouths shut. Literally. At one point, inspectors -armed with clipboards, stopwatches and the conviction of old Testament prophets - were timing how long we dared to speak. Anything over 10 minutes of “teacher talk” per lesson was frowned upon, as if students might asphyxiate from overexposure to the knowledge and experience of experts.

I vividly recall a training session in which a particularly pious inspector/consultant announced that the best lessons were those in which the teacher said almost nothing at all.¹ Learning, we were told, was what happened when teachers stopped interfering. The less you said, the more students would somehow ‘discover’ for themselves, as if knowledge were a noble gas that naturally diffused into vacant minds.

The result was farce. I remember a teacher leading a lesson On JB Priestley’s play, An Inspector Calls, in which students were encouraged to read out scense in groups whilst simultaneously hula hooping. The poor man had been told that analysis was too “teacher-led,” so he reimagined it as a kind of lyrical aerobics class. Students spun, twirled, and laughed as they struggled to give the words of the play any attention. It was, apparently, an example of “active learning.” No one learned a thing about the play, but some may have left with improved core strength. I was that teacher.²

It was madness, of course, but it was officially endorsed madness. For a few years, you could have been marked down for speaking too clearly, too long, or - heaven forbid - with enthusiasm. Classrooms filled with low-level chatter masquerading as collaboration; teachers were told to act as facilitators rather than experts. Even when students were hopelessly confused, we were warned not to “spoon-feed.” The result was a generation of children encouraged to discover knowledge that teachers already possessed but were actively prevented from sharing.

In recent years, though, the pendulum has swung back. The profession has begun to rediscover the value of explicit teaching. Teachers have found their voices again. We have a new permission to explain things to the confused young people in our charge. However, this brave new world has not resulted in joyful classrooms in which children nod appreciatively as pearls of hard won wisdom drop from thei teachers’ lips. In fact, the opposite can often be true: lessons in which the only voice that can be heard is the teacher’s drone.

If anything, this unlooked-for monotony has accelerated since Covid. After months of remote lessons delivered to blank screens and muted microphones, followed by diktats that forbade teachers from circulating and being restricted to taped boxes at the front of the room, we’ve understandably become cautious about expecting too much from students. Talking feels safe; it fills the void where human connection used to be but filling the sound waves isn’t the same as filling the mind. What began as a necessary corrective to the performative group work of the past has, in some places, ossified into a new orthodoxy: telling as teaching, explanation as evidence of learning.

And into that mood of caution and wariness comes books like Zach Groshell’s Just Tell Them, a brisk, clear-headed defence of teacher explanation and direct instruction. It’s a welcome reminder that clarity, structure, and expertise still matter, and that the teacher’s voice is not the enemy of learning. But as with every swing of the pendulum, what begins as correction risks curdling into caricature.

The notion that teachers should be empowered to explain stuff to students is an appealing message, and one which, when I wrote The Secret of Literacy, back in 2014, against the backdrop of an orthodoxy of performative group work and vacuous learning styles, felt novel and necessary.

Even then, I was aware of what could go wrong:

There are some definite pitfalls to avoid in explaining things to kids. The biggest criticism of teachers talking is that it’s boring. And, generally speaking, boring pupils is not a good way to get them to learn stuff. But to suggest that teachers should therefore avoid explaining their subjects to pupils is a bizarre leap. Surely it would be vastly more sensible to expend our efforts in improving teachers’ ability to explain?

This then is our aim: how can we make our explanations better?

The starting point in teaching any new concept or idea is to lay the groundwork of the propositional knowledge required. This type of transmission lesson is deeply unfashionable and is something that many teachers are at pains to conceal. We all know that sometimes the most effective way to teach children is to talk to them, although we must always be wary that if they’re not learning, we are just talking.

I was right then and Groshell is right now: students benefit from clarity; novices need guidance; explanations are indispensable. But, as I discussed recently we must guard against implementation traps, particularly what I’ve dubbed the translation trap.

Avoiding implementation traps

Vague injunctions are inevitably interpreted creatively: “retrieval practice” becomes students copying down answers to random trivia questions, “reducing cognitive load” turns into making everything easier, and “explicit instruction” is mistaken for an uninterrupted monologue from the front.

I find this last one particularly galling. Back in 2012, I was a vocal advocate of so-called “teacher talk” and began conducting a proxy war against the many and various absurd attempts to silence teachers. Little did I imagine that my plea for more explanation and modelling would be interpreted as an argument for silencing children instead.

My only real problem with Groschell’s book is its title. The moment teachers are told that it’s fine to “just tell them,” some take it to mean that talking is teaching and that so long as the explanation is sound, understanding will inevitably follow.

This may be feel comforting but it’s a destructive delusion. Talking more doesn’t mean students are learning more. In fact, as teachers talk more, students are likely to participate less. And as participation falls, so does thinking, and with it, meaning-making. For children to make meaning, they must think. Listening to (or being present for) an explanation, however articulate, does not guarantee that thinking is taking place. In fact, it may mitigate against it.

In The Hidden Lives of Learners, Graham Nuthall demonstrated that every student in a classroom learns a different 40–50 per cent of what is taught. Each constructs their own version of events, stitched together from prior knowledge, interest, and attention, and a great deal (Nuthall esitmistes this as 50%) of what they learn is wrong.

David Ausubel argued that learning becomes meaningful only when new information is “anchored” to what a learner already knows. Telling alone cannot produce that anchoring.

What has crept into some classrooms - perhaps as an understandable overreaction to the popularity of ‘student led’ pedagogy - is a new form of passivity. There is a tacit but tense agreement that if teachers talk and students sit passively everyone feels reassured by the apparent order. But when students are expected to answer a question or produce work, they often respond with bewildered hostility.

Explanation without participation is the opposite of effective instruction. It’s not that teachers are talking too much (although I’ve come to believe that this is routinely true) but that students are doing too little with what is said. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve sat in the back of a classroom and asked the student next to me what the teacher just said only for them to respond that they have no idea. To develop a culture of attention there needs to be a clear expectation that teachers ask students to repeat, respond to, discuss and are critical of what is said.

Fully guided instruction is not monologue but dialogue. It’s structured interaction: teachers explain, model, question, check, and adapt in response to what students show they understand. Effective teachers design a high ratio of participation, constantly assessing attention and comprehension, and holding students to account for the quality of their thought.

The trap stem from the all too predictable misconception that instead of being understood as “don’t let students stumble around in the dark trying to figure out stuff for themselves,” just tell them is translated as “don’t do anything except explain stuff.” It’s what happens when we replace performative group work with performative clarity. Both misunderstand how learning actually happens. Discovery learning denies guidance; “just telling” denies thought. In both cases, children are denied the cognitive work that turns information into understanding.

So yes, tell them. Tell them clearly, tell them well, tell them again. But don’t just tell them. Make them think, speak, write, and argue. If the purpose of explanation isn’t to expand students’ thoughts so they can “think the unthinkable and the not yet thought” them it results in an impoverished classroom experience.

1. One of the best things accomplished by Sir Michael Wilshaw in his tenure as CHMI was to ban inspectors from paid consultancy.

2. You can read about my ill-fated hula hooping lesson here.