Explicit Teaching in Mathematics

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Detailed Lessons

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Explicit teaching is a proven and effective instructional approach that enhances student understanding in mathematics by providing clear, structured, and purposeful instruction. At Learning Through Doing, we embed explicit teaching strategies into every lesson, equipping teachers with the tools to deliver content in a consistent and meaningful way.

Who Can Benefit from Explicit Teaching in Maths

You’re sure to have already encountered different learning styles throughout your teaching career and will in the future. When you’re struggling to cut through and make the lesson stick, you may need to try explicit maths. This teaching style focuses on being direct with maths teaching and includes you speaking each small step aloud to clearly explain the mathematical logic. By breaking down the lessons into steps, this model gives you ample opportunity to check in on your students and ensure they understand before moving up to the next step.

As we’re sure you already know, maths is a hierarchical learning system, so core concepts must be laid down first before they’re built on later. As you introduce a new core skill, turning to explicit maths can help ensure you’ve laid a good foundation for your students’ future education. It’s usually best to use the style when introducing new concepts and then use other teaching styles to ensure a good understanding and continued engagement. It can also be used one-on-one or in small groups on an ongoing basis to help struggling students catch up. As you move through explicit teaching in maths, you’ll gradually move the responsibility for solving problems to your students. They’ll then feel confident to prove their skills with different teaching styles before you go back to explicit maths if needed for the next core concept.

How This Teaching Style Can Help Your Classroom

The Australian maths curriculum gives topics that must be covered, but how you do that is up to you. Explicit maths is popular with many Australian schools as it ensures their maths program is high-quality. There are many benefits to adding explicit maths to your varied teacher toolkit, and we’ll look at the positives for you first.

• It’s efficient. By breaking down the topic into small steps that are easier to take in, you’ll be able to cover more quickly than if you tried to do the concept as a whole.
• It’s easier to see where students need improvement. By using small steps, you can see which part is a struggle and focus there for longer. This improves overall comprehension of the new topic and saves you the frustration of getting to the end, assessing knowledge and finding gaps.
• It’s easy to teach. Most educators like using an explicit maths program as it allows them to speak aloud their own thoughts and logic for a maths problem, so it feels like a natural way of teaching. It’s also easy to adapt explicit maths to accommodate different learning styles and paces.
• It improves your skills. You’ll be solving the problem with the children at first, and out loud, so your own communication will benefit. Silently filling in worksheets or reading textbooks has its place, but more engagement helps ensure you have well-rounded skills that can be used in other subjects, too.

Your students are sure to love this approach too, and here’s why:

• It improves confidence. With smaller steps, there is a greater chance to practice the new knowledge and students are given tasks based on their abilities. This lets students work at a pace they’re happy with, and each step is easier to conquer, so they get a rush of excitement and confidence regularly, and they’re not stuck with work they can’t master.
• It’s easy to follow. As their teacher, you’ll be explaining the logic of each step, so your students quickly understand what’s expected of them for each task. This makes your students more efficient and ensures you don’t have to mark work you weren’t expecting.
• It’s easier to recall. Students don’t always enjoy core subjects because they can feel overloaded with new information, and this leads to stress and makes it harder to take it in. With explicit teaching, the smaller steps prevent overwhelm, and they’ll find it easier to recall the information later. Explicit teaching also focuses on connecting the new information to previous learning, which creates deeper maths understanding among your students.
• It’s active learning. Explicit teaching methods focus on getting the students involved, asking questions and helping demonstrate knowledge. If students are more involved in the process, they’ll enjoy learning more, leading to more interest in maths.

Sign up to Access our Explicit Maths Program and More

We’ve shown here how explicit maths teaching can solve some of your core subject difficulties. At Learning Through Doing, we can help you pick up this new teaching skill quickly. We have more than 400 lessons available through our subscription, and each has a video to help you and other educators at your school quickly absorb the information and hit the ground running. We have a passion for hands-on maths education, and our testimonials show our thought-out lessons and detailed lesson plans boost student interest and engagement and lead to improved results.

Sign up for our monthly or yearly subscription plans now, or get in touch with our friendly team through our contact form, and they’ll help you with any queries to help you get started.

We have created high-impact lesson plans that use visual mathematics models to help engage and support all students learning and upgrade your approach to teaching.

Complete lesson plans designed to include worksheets and how-to videos. All plans coincide with the Australian Primary School curriculum and are created to inspire a love for Maths.

A complete and comprehensive list of visual resources to aid you in keeping your students engaged.

Share your learnings and up skill with other teachers and principles with our webinar and coaching sessions.

A classroom teacher for 17 years. Specialising in Maths education and an advocate for the use of hands on materials in primary and secondary classrooms. Guy has worked at the Queensland University of Technology focusing on maths education in schools.

Receiving her doctorate in 2011 Judy started teaching in 1987. Focusing on teacher professional development and student reasoning in mathematics. Judy worked at the Queensland University of Technology as well as being a lecturer.