Beyond the Learning Binary

I've been sitting with this for a while.

If you work in education in Australia right now, you can't escape it. The debate about how we should teach our children (specifically, the clash between what's called explicit instruction and everything that gets bundled under the umbrella of inquiry, holistic or progressive learning) is everywhere. In policy papers, in the media, in staff rooms and on social media, it has a way of turning into an argument that feels urgent and important, but that rarely seems to get us anywhere useful.

I want to be honest about something: I find it frustrating. Not because the questions at the heart of it aren't genuinely important. They are. How children learn, what teachers need to know, what education is actually for: these are worth arguing about carefully and seriously. But the way the debate tends to play out, as a binary choice between two camps, each convinced the other is getting it badly wrong, doesn't match what I see in our classrooms every day. And it doesn't match what the research actually tells us either.

So, I want to try to think through it here. Honestly and openly. As a member of this community, as someone who has spent a life time working with young children and the educators who teach them, and as someone who believes deeply in what we are trying to do at Woodleigh.

What are we actually talking about?
Part of why this debate is so persistent is that the terms get muddled. Explicit instruction, direct instruction, structured teaching: people use these interchangeably but they're not the same thing and the distinctions matter.

Explicit instruction, as it's defined in the research literature by Archer and Hughes (2011), involves clear, purposeful, scaffolded teaching. The teacher explains and models; students practise with support; and the goal is to gradually move students toward independent mastery. It is deliberate. It doesn't assume children will just figure things out on their own. It tells them what they need to know and shows them how to do it.

Direct instruction is related but more tightly scripted. It has roots in behaviourist psychology and typically involves highly systematised, often scripted lessons. It's more prescriptive than explicit instruction, though both sit on the more teacher-directed end of the pedagogical spectrum.

Then there's inquiry-based learning, project-based learning, collaborative learning, constructivist approaches; each with its own theoretical grounding and evidence base. These tend to be more student-centred, more open-ended and more focused on students actively constructing understanding through investigation, questioning and collaboration. In the current debate, these approaches often get treated as a single undifferentiated blob (essentially: 'not explicit instruction'), which does them a serious disservice.

The Australian Science Teachers Association, in their 2025 position paper on this very debate, put it plainly: both explicit and inquiry instructional strategies work and both have their place. I think that's right. And yet somehow, acknowledging that simple truth still feels controversial.

Where explicit instruction genuinely helps.
I want to be clear about something, because I think it matters for this conversation to be an honest one: explicit instruction has a strong evidence base, and in certain contexts it is exactly the right tool.

John Sweller's research on Cognitive Load Theory is genuinely important. When children are learning something new (particularly foundational skills like phonics, early number facts or a new writing technique), they can't simultaneously manage the cognitive demands of the content and figure out how to learn it. Their working memory has limits. Clear, structured, teacher-led instruction reduces that load. It gets information in efficiently and reliably. For novice learners, this matters.

At Woodleigh, we don't shy away from this. Our Junior Campus programs explicitly state that the foundations of literacy are developed in the early years with a strong emphasis on phonemic awareness and language development. We teach these things directly and intentionally. When we talk about the PYP's commitment to conceptual understanding we're not suggesting children discover how to decode text on their own. Of course, we teach that.

But here's the crucial part: even the researchers most associated with explicit instruction acknowledge its limits. Sweller himself has said that explicit instruction is essential for novices but that as students develop knowledge and skill there should be an increasing emphasis on independent problem-solving and self-directed learning. The argument for explicit instruction has never really been an argument against inquiry. It's an argument about sequence and scaffolding. Yet in public debate, it gets weaponised into something much more totalising than its own architects intended.

The false binary and why it matters.
A 2024 paper in Educational Research Review, co-authored by thirteen leading researchers from Europe, the United States and Australia, made the case directly: framing instruction as either explicit or inquiry-based is a false binary. The paper, titled Beyond Inquiry or Direct Instruction: Pressing Issues for Designing Impactful Science Learning Opportunities, presented evidence that inquiry-based learning, when well scaffolded, supports deeper conceptual understanding and problem-solving in ways that direct instruction alone doesn't. These are complementary, not competing approaches.

The ASTA 2025 position paper went further, warning that the current debate is leading some schools to misunderstand what explicit teaching actually means, creating a culture of 'this versus that' that ultimately doesn't serve children. It argued that the interweaving of student inquiry and teacher input happens in far more complex and subtle ways than any single model can capture. That feels true to me.

Education researcher Alan Reid has observed that creating simplistic binaries in a field as complex and nuanced as teaching and learning impoverishes the debate. I agree. And more than that: it can genuinely harm children when schools or systems adopt a single approach as doctrine and close themselves off to the full range of what good teaching can look like.

What holistic education is really asking.
I want to spend some time here, because I think this is where the debate most consistently goes wrong. Holistic education gets caricatured as the absence of structure, or as a kind of wishful thinking that assumes children will just flourish if you leave them to it. That's not what it is. That's never been what it is.

What holistic education is really asking is a deeper question: what is school actually for? If the answer is 'to transmit a body of knowledge efficiently,' then yes, structured explicit instruction will often be your primary tool. But if the answer is 'to develop whole human beings who are curious, capable, resilient, ethically engaged, and able to keep learning across a lifetime' (and I believe that's the right answer), then the picture becomes considerably more complex.

At Woodleigh, we educate students Heart, Head, and Hands. That phrase isn't marketing language. It reflects a genuine commitment to the idea that intellectual development, social and emotional growth, and active engagement with the world are not separate streams; they are deeply interwoven. A child who is anxious and disconnected will not learn effectively, no matter how well-structured the instruction is. A child who has never been asked a genuine question will not know how to ask one themselves. A child who has never experienced the satisfaction of working something out (really working it out, with all the productive struggle that involves) is missing something essential.

One of my favourite articulations of this comes from a former Woodleigh principal, Michael Norman, whose words still hang over us in the best possible way: 'We ought never to do for young people what they, with a struggle, could be expected to be doing for themselves.' That's not an instruction to abandon children. It's a deep belief in their capacity, and a recognition that our job is to develop that capacity, not to replace it.

After World War II, the parents of Reggio Emilia began building schools for their young children with their own hands, literally, from the rubble of bombed buildings. What grew from that act of collective determination became one of the most influential early childhood education movements the world has seen. At its heart was a profound and radical idea: that children are not empty vessels waiting to be filled, not problems to be managed, not deficits to be remediated. They are, in Malaguzzi's words, rich in potential, strong, powerful, competent, and above all, connected to adults and other children.

This is what Malaguzzi called the strong image of the child. And it stands in quiet but firm opposition to a view of education that sees children primarily as novice learners who need to be brought up to speed, filled with knowledge they lack, and corrected toward a standard. That view is not wrong exactly. Children are novices in many things, and they do need to be taught. But it is dangerously incomplete. Because it misses who children actually are.

Malaguzzi also gave us one of the most beautiful and challenging ideas in all of education: the hundred languages of children. Children, he argued, express and make sense of their world through a hundred different languages: movement, drawing, painting, sculpting, dramatic play, music, shadow, light, storytelling, mathematics, words. An education worthy of the name honours all of these, not just the ones that fit neatly into a lesson plan or a standardised test. When we narrow the curriculum to only what can be measured and explicitly taught, we are not just limiting children's learning; we are also limiting their ability to learn. We are silencing most of the ways they know how to speak

I think about this often in my role at Woodleigh. When I walk through our Junior Campuses and see children deep in investigation, building something together, arguing about how a system works, creating a representation of an idea that surprises even them, I am watching those hundred languages in action. That is not the absence of learning. It is learning in its fullest, most human form.

There is something else in the Reggio tradition that I think deserves more airtime in the current debate, and it connects directly to the question of what childhood is actually for. Reggio educators speak of valuing the present tense of childhood, not rushing children toward the next stage, not treating childhood as a preparation phase to be gotten through efficiently on the way to adult competence, but honouring what it means to be a child, right now, in this moment, with this particular way of seeing the world.

I feel this deeply. One risk in the current push for structured, measurable, explicit instruction is that we lose sight of something irreplaceable. Childhood is not a deficit state. It is a rich, particular, important time of life, with its own ways of knowing, its own forms of meaning-making, and its own legitimate relationship with learning, play, and wonder. When we treat it purely as a production line toward future academic performance, we rob children of something they cannot get back. And we also, paradoxically, undermine the very motivation and curiosity that make deep learning possible in the first place.

At Woodleigh, we have always tried to resist that. The question we ask is not only 'what do children need to know?' but 'what does it mean to be a child here, in this community, at this stage of their life?' That is not a soft question. It is one of the most important questions we can ask.

Agency isn't a luxury: the research is detailed.
I want to ground this in something beyond philosophy, because I know that in this debate, the word 'research' gets used as a battering ram by both sides, and it matters to be specific.

Self-Determination Theory, one of the most extensively studied frameworks in educational psychology, developed by Deci and Ryan, holds that genuine, sustained motivation depends on three things: a sense of competence, a sense of belonging, and a sense of autonomy. Autonomy here doesn't mean doing whatever you like. It means experiencing your learning as something you have genuine ownership over, rather than something imposed from the outside.

A 2024 paper published in Science Advances by Simon Cullen and Daniel Oppenheimer at Carnegie Mellon University demonstrated that, despite strong evidence that autonomy enhances motivation and achievement, very few educational interventions are actually designed to promote it. Their own autonomy-supportive interventions produced measurable improvements in both attendance and subject mastery. A 2024 scoping review of research on learner agency found that self-regulation and self-direction are foundational to students' development as independent, lifelong learners, and that these capacities must be deliberately cultivated rather than assumed.

This is exactly what we are trying to do at Woodleigh. When our Junior Campuses describe teaching and learning that focus heavily on increasing student voice and agency, alongside the acquisition of essential skills, these are not competing goals. The research suggests they are mutually reinforcing. Children who experience genuine agency in their learning are more motivated, more persistent, and better able to transfer what they've learned to new situations. That is precisely what we want for our young people.

What skilled teachers actually do.
Here's something I notice, spending time in classrooms: the best teachers don't actually choose between explicit instruction and inquiry. They move between them, often within a single lesson, with a fluency that looks effortless but reflects deep professional knowledge.

They teach explicitly when children are encountering something genuinely new and unfamiliar, when the conceptual foundations need to be laid clearly before exploration becomes possible. They step back and open things up when students have enough grounding to benefit from investigation, questioning, and collaborative sense-making. They read the room constantly, adjusting pace, level of support, and mode of engagement in response to what they see.

This is what pedagogical expertise actually looks like. It cannot be reduced to a single method. The ASTA position paper describes it beautifully: the teaching process involves the interweaving of student inquiry and teacher input in more complex and subtle ways than the 'I do, we do, you do' framework can capture. The teacher's art must not be constrained. I love that framing. The teacher's art. Because that's what it is. And constraining it, whether in the name of explicit instruction or in the name of inquiry, does a disservice to the professionals doing that work every day.

This is also why I get wary of mandated, scripted approaches. Not because structure is bad, but because the diversity of our children and the complexity of what learning actually involves require teachers who are empowered to make professional judgments. Our children are not uniform. Neither are the moments in which they learn.

What I believe.
Let me be direct about where I stand, because I've tried to be fair to both sides of this argument and I don't want that fairness to read as indecision.

I believe explicit, structured teaching of foundational skills matters enormously, particularly in the early years, and particularly for children who don't have the luxury of rich literacy environments at home. I believe in systematic phonics instruction, in clear mathematical modelling, in the deliberate teaching of research and writing skills. None of that is in question.

I also believe, just as firmly, that children who only ever experience being taught (who are never asked a genuine question, never given the space to investigate something that matters to them, never trusted with real agency over their own learning) are being shortchanged. Not academically shortchanged, though I think even that case can be made. Shortchanged as human beings.

The education we offer at Woodleigh is built on the conviction that these things belong together. Rigour and warmth. Structure and curiosity. Explicit teaching and genuine inquiry. Academic development and the nurturing of the whole child. These are not opposites. They are the complementary elements of a rich, coherent education, one that prepares young people not just for the next test, but for the complexity and beauty of the life ahead of them.

And woven through all of it, for me, is something that Malaguzzi understood deeply: that childhood itself has value. Not as a runway to adulthood, not as a series of developmental checkpoints to be achieved on schedule, but as a genuine and important phase of human life, with its own ways of knowing, its own relationship to wonder and play and discovery. When we reduce education to the efficient transmission of skills and knowledge, we are not just making a pedagogical choice. We are making a choice about what we think children are for. And I think that choice, made too narrowly, costs us something we can't easily measure or recover.

Raising resilient, curious, and compassionate young people is a shared endeavour. I said something like that in a newsletter to our families recently, and I meant it. It is shared between teachers and students, between school and home, and between the different traditions of educational thinking that, at their best, are all trying to answer the same question: how do we help children become fully, wonderfully themselves?

That question is too important to reduce to a binary.