What I’m learning, what I’m teaching, and what I’m learning about teaching
Paulo Freire was Not Anti-Teacher-Authority
On LinkedIn, Kirschner recently reposted a blog that he originally wrote in March 2025 called The Seductive Appeal of Discovery Learning. In other places, Kirschner has critiqued discovery-based learning, most famously in his 2006 article in Educational Psychologist, together with Sweller & Clark (Kirschner et al., 2006). In his March 2025 blog post he sought to explain why so many educators persist in their support for discovery-based learning despite the significant evidence that suggests it’s often ineffective for learning. In the blog post, Kirschner outlined ten reasons why he thinks the idea of discovery-based learning is appealing, despite being misguided. I agree with many of the reasons he lists. However, in his eighth reason, Kirschner mentioned the influence of Paulo Freire. He argued that educators, under the influence of Freire have been anti-authority and, therefore, “from this perspective, explicit instruction became equated with indoctrination, while discovery learning was seen as a path to emancipation.”
The Teacher’s Job is to Explain— To “Make Plain”
I have made the claim before that a teacher is essentially an “explainer.” I’ve sometimes felt some resistance from others to that claim, and I think I know why. When I state that a teacher is an “explainer,” for some it conjurers up an image of a dry, boring lecture such as the case of the economics teacher (played by Ben Stein) in Ferris Bueller's Day Off (“anyone, anyone…”). This is not my idea of an “explainer,” so let me try to “explain” my claim below.
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