The Case for Explicit Teaching: Why What You Don't Know Won't Help You.

Nothing challenges our professional worth more than the charge that we are failing our students, perhaps even doing them harm. Aviva Freedman offers the sobering hypothesis that at best we do students no good when we try to teach them to write by teaching them explicit features, rules, or principles of specific genres. At stake in her claim, however, is more than our self-worth. Were such a claim true, it would challenge how we structure curricula, write textbooks, train teachers, do research - indeed, whether we do some research at all. It would encourage financiallystrapped provosts to ask what makes generic courses like first year or advanced composition worth their cost. If on the other hand we act on Freedman' s hypotheses and they are wrong, the cost will be borne by our students. The first issue, however, is not whether Freedman' s hypotheses are right or wrong, but whether they are framed productively. As framed, the main part of her Strong Hypothesis (p. 226) is categorical and absolute: "explicit teaching is unnecessary; for the most part, not even possible; and where possible, not useful (except during editing, for a limited number of transparent and highly specific features)/' Such categorical claims are especially vulnerable, since they are disconfirmed by a single uncontested counter-example. In this case, either of two kinds would be fatal: