← Return to Blogs

The Differentiation Dilemma: Why Targeted Teaching is the Key to True Explicit Instruction

Published by on Print print

In the current Australian educational landscape, “Explicit Instruction” has become more than just a buzzword; it is the gold standard for literacy success. With the rollout of the Australian Curriculum Version 9.0 and state-specific mandates principals and teachers are working harder than ever to align their classrooms with the Science of Reading (SoR).

However, a common point of confusion often arises during professional development sessions and leadership meetings: “If we are following a Structured Synthetic Phonics (SSP) program that differentiates based on student ability, are we still delivering whole-class explicit instruction?”

The short answer is: Yes. In fact, without differentiation, explicit instruction often fails to reach the students who need it most.

In practice, the PLD program is designed as a cohesive whole-class experience that explicitly exposes all students to each other’s learning. Rather than splintering the room into isolated pockets, the teacher leads a structured lesson block consisting of three key components:

  1. Whole-Class Review: The session begins with an active review where the teacher facilitates practice of phonic concepts covered over the last few weeks for all three groups. This ensures that every student is frequently revisiting past learning and staying primed for what comes next.
  2. Whole-Class Explicit Teaching: The teacher introduces the new phonic concepts and models reading the specific word lists. By teaching the three word lists within the same block, students are consistently exposed to the previously covered phonic concepts and pre-teaching of what concepts are coming up.
  3. Application: Finally, the whole class applies their learning through a task, whether that be a speech-to-print activity, a vocabulary-focused task, or a dictation exercise. While the task is the same for everyone, the content is differentiated to match each student’s current ability, allowing for independent success and mastery.

At PLD, our core philosophy recognises that every classroom contains a wide range of ability. We believe that true explicit instruction isn’t about teaching the same thing to every student at the same time; it is about ensuring that the instruction every student receives is systematic, teacher-led, and matched to their current stage of literacy development.

The “Whole-Class” Trap: Why One-Size-Fits-All Fails

A common misconception is that “whole-class instruction” means every child must be on the same page of the same book. When we teach to the “middle” of a diverse class, we inadvertently create two problems:

  1. The Bottom 20%: These students lack the prerequisite foundational skills (such as phonemic awareness or phonic code knowledge) to access the lesson. They quickly become disengaged or develop compensatory strategies like guessing.
  2. The Top 20%: These students have already mastered the content. For them, the lesson lacks the desirable difficulty needed for growth.

Research by Dr. Anita Archer and Charles Hughes, authors of Explicit Instruction: Effective and Efficient Teaching, emphasises that instruction must be “matched to the students’ level.” If the content is too hard, the cognitive load is too high, and learning stalls. If it is too easy, the opportunity for growth is lost.

The Inclusion Gap: Rethinking Intervention Models

Beyond the cognitive challenges, there is a significant social and logistical problem with the one-size-fits-all approach: how we support students who have fallen behind.

Of course, it is important to acknowledge that a small percentage of students with significant learning difficulties will always require intensive 1:1 pull-out intervention (often referred to as Tier 3 support). However, for the larger group of students who are “just behind” or less significantly behind (Tier 2), traditional models often fail them by default. In these models, one of two scenarios inevitably occurs:

  • The student is taken out of another curriculum lesson (such as Science, History, or the Arts) to attend an intervention session.
  • The student is removed from the classroom during the literacy block to work with a teacher aide or specialist.

In both scenarios, the student is denied an inclusive learning environment. They either miss out on a well-rounded education or feel segregated from their peers.

The PLD approach solves this by ensuring that differentiation and inclusion happen simultaneously. By grouping students within the core literacy block, Tier 2 students receive the targeted, high-impact instruction matched to their current skills and knowledge while remaining an active part of the classroom culture.

Crucially, this model creates a collaborative “ripple effect” of learning:

  • Revision: For the students who have already moved beyond a concept, hearing or seeing the instruction again as they transition through the room acts as vital retrieval practice.
  • Pre-teaching: For students who have not yet reached a specific concept, exposure to the teacher’s explicit modelling with other groups serves as “pre-teaching,” priming their brains for when they eventually reach that stage of the continuum.

PLD’s approach facilitates this by using Tracking Sheets to identify exactly where each student sits. This ensures students are being taught exactly what they need, right in the classroom.

Defining Explicit Instruction in the PLD Framework

Explicit instruction is a teacher-directed, systematic, and engaging approach where new skills are broken down into manageable units, clearly modelled, and practised with feedback. This isn’t discovery learning, it is a purposeful sequence designed to move knowledge from short-term working memory into long-term memory.

The key components of this approach are mirrored in PLD’s methodology:

1. Teacher-Directed & Planned

Effective literacy instruction doesn’t happen by accident. It requires a structured, sequenced syllabus. Our SSP Kits provide teachers with the exact roadmap needed to move students from simple to complex phonic structures. Lessons align with the capabilities of the students, ensuring that the teacher is always the architect of the learning.

2. Explicit Modelling (The “I Do”)

During a PLD lesson, the teacher clearly defines the learning goal. For example, if a group is learning the phonic concept ‘ai’, the teacher doesn’t ask students to “guess” the sound. They explicitly teach the phoneme, show the grapheme, and demonstrate the blending process step-by-step. This reduces ambiguity and prevents the formation of incorrect mental models.

3. Guided Practice (The “We Do”)

Teachers and students work together, often using whiteboards or choral responses. In this stage, the teacher provides immediate, corrective feedback. This scaffolding ensures high success rates before moving to independent work.

4. Independent Practice (The “You Do”)

Students then apply their knowledge independently to further practise and automate the new learning through either speech-to-print mapping, word study, or dictation tasks.

Active Engagement: The Pulse of the Classroom

A frequent critique of explicit instruction is that it can be “dry or boring.” On the contrary, high-quality explicit instruction is high-energy.

PLD encourages techniques such as:

  • Active Review: Placing students in frequent testing scenarios (e.g., rapid-fire reviews or whiteboard tasks) can provide teachers with an immediate survey of the room, providing the teacher with knowledge to see who has mastery and who requires further scaffolding.
  • Frequent Verbalisation: Students should constantly vocalise new concepts to strengthen learning pathways e.g.,
    • Teacher: “We are learning that /ay/ can be represented as ai as in rain and ay as in tray. What sound are we learning?”
    • Students: “/ay/!”
    • Teacher: “And it can be represented with ai as in…?”
    • Students: “…rain!”
  • Choral responses: Ensuring every student is participating and preventing passive learning.

Conclusion: Differentiation is Embedded in Effective Explicit Instruction

The goal of every educator is to ensure that no child is left behind. Ironically, the “one-size-fits-all” whole-class model is often the greatest barrier to that goal.

By using the PLD program schools are not “abandoning” explicit instruction. Instead, they are embracing it. They are ensuring that the teacher-directed “I Do, We Do, You Do” cycle is delivered with surgical precision to the students who need it.

When we differentiate, we boost student confidence and ensure that every child in the classroom from the most struggling reader to the most advanced has the opportunity to access literacy development.

For more information on how to implement PLD in your school, explore our School Support Packages or contact our team of experts today.

← Return to Blogs