This paper will demonstrate how a hybrid methodological approach can reveal direct instruction’s (DI) implicit sociological and metacognitive messages and use its findings to argue for its reconciliation with inquiry strategies.

The study evaluates how Di’s instructional discourse addresses the following research questions (RQ):

RQ1. How representative of DI is the classroom practice in the case study?

RQ2. Where is DI’s classroom discourse positioned in Jean Anyon’s parameters of knowledge and social class, and how does this prepare students for the ‘second modernity’?

RQ3. What opportunities are there in the existing strategies used in DI to incorporate pedagogies of metacognition?

DI belongs to a didactic tradition that originated with Johann Herbart in 1883, and which continues to be widely used in the USA and Europe (Maulana et al., 2012). As an exogenous constructivist pedagogy, all learner-environmental interactions in DI are controlled by the teacher. The popularity of these strategies has expanded in response to meta-analyses of ‘big data’ derived from external assessments linked to state-mandated standards (Lewis & Holloway, 2019; Wescott, 2022).

In contrast, inquiry pedagogies belong within a tradition of endogenous constructivism, which claims that students learn by taking emotional and intellectual risks. This tradition operates within Vygotsky’s ‘zone of proximal development’ (Vygotsky, 1986) and has links to Jean Piaget’s developmental psychology (Dinsmore et al., 2008). Inquiry pedagogies favour the development of metacognition (Hipkins, 2015; Kuhn, 2008; Zohar, 2004).

The reconciliation of the two pedagogical perspectives has acquired a new urgency in the context of an epochal societal succession forecast by Ulrich Beck (1944-2015), the ‘second modernity’. Beck’s theoretical framework concerns the powerful and unpredictable shifts in public discourse and interests emerging as unintended consequences of human interaction with the physical world (Beck, 2014). According to Beck, the ‘first modernity’ was a historical period when the success of industrial society associated science with public ‘goods’. But as the invisible environmental hazards of industry emerged (e.g., radioactivity, global warming), hazards which relied on technology for their detection, science became associated with ‘public ‘bads’, and this eroded trust and confidence in its claims (Beck, 2009, p. 590; 2014). The new risks are inescapable, transnational and impact every social class. Beck did not live to see how his projections would be amplified by social media during the manufactured risk of the Covid-19 pandemic (Pietrocola et al., 2021, p. 210), nor the escalation of misinformation and post-truth assertions in societal discourse (Bonnet & Glazier, 2023; Wescott, 2022), but his insight validates the role of critical literacies in education.

Jean Anyon’s (1941-2013) theoretical framework, which defined social class by agency, relationships and cultural capital, was explicitly Marxist (Anyon, 1981, Luke, 2010). Her famous micro-ethnographic study delivered qualitative insight into well-established empirical evidence for sociological and cultural reproduction by schools. It found speculation and inquiry were evident only in the classrooms of elite and upper-class schools. Anyon’s insight validates the role of inquiry pedagogies for student empowerment and agency. 

Developmentally, during early- to mid-adolescence, metacognitive development surges and the ability to think introspectively about ideas is consolidated (Gilmore & Meersand, 2013; Kuhn, 1999; Kuhn & Franklin, 2008). Truly conceptual learning begins to emerge at around age 12 (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 98), the first years of secondary schooling, as students master clustering ideas, using frameworks and links. A longitunal comparison (Weil et al., 2013) found the developmental trajectory for metacognition plateaued by adulthood.

Thus, the topic of this study needed to be explored in a junior secondary school setting.

This is an interpretive case study (Levy, 2008) involving a limited but rich data set. Time-stamped transcripts of five audio recordings of one single or double lessons each in Year 7 English, humanities and science, and two lessons in Year 9 mathematics, were collected from three teachers in a school implementing direct instruction (DI). In each subject, the 50-minute lessons were numbered sequentially. This paper exemplifies how applying a hybrid of inductive/deductive thematic analysis (Proudfoot, 2023) can inform different perspectives on the pedagogy. An initial, deductive approach to the data used the lens of metacognition, which is developed in students by using a range of endogenous constructivist pedagogies. DI is an example of an exogenous constructivist pedagogy (Dinsmore et al., 2008), and therefore, the intersection of the data with 16 pedagogies of metacognition was anticipated to reveal deficits that could then explored from its potential sociological impacts, and from remedial pedagogical strategies, that are principally associated with speculation and inquiry. This analysis involved coding the transcripts semantically to 16 known strategies for fostering metacognition derived from the literature, organized into codes and code children on NVivo 2.0. Semantic coding involves only explicit themes, but metacognition is a ‘fuzzy’ concept (Mahdavi, 2014), so this strategy ensured that evidence could be matched to peer reviewed research Transcripts were analysed further to provide a quantitative breakdown of objective information derived directly from time-stamped spreadsheets. This strategy revealed empirical, objective evidence of fractions of teacher talk compared to student talk, numbers of turns, numbers of initiate-response-feedback (IRF) cycles, and the distribution of cognitive verbs and disciplinary terminology. This strategy confirmed classroom practice aligned with DI’s reputation. The subsequent, inductive approach explored the same data intended to reveal disciplinary nuance and identify exemplary teacher-student interactions. The recordings were ‘blocked’ into intervals of approximately ten minutes (determined by time stamps on the transcript spreadsheets). The shorter timeframes prompted a series of methodological decisions regarding the management of pauses, breaks, interruptions, and definitions of turns. Each block was categorized by ‘lesson function’ (Rosenshine, 2012), and representative dialogues identified. Mixed methods embedded in the inductive approach included a quantitative representation of lessons by their function, a representation of patterns of classroom discourse (teacher talk, turns and IRF cycles) and a qualitative identification of discourse themes and their presentation of teacher echo, chorusing, and dialogic discussion.

The transcripts’ quantitative discourse patterns confirmed DI’s reputation for pedagogical uniformity, throughout lessons and across subjects, increasing confidence in its propositional generalisations (White & Cooper, 2022, p.251). The deductive component of study found that classroom discourse in DI was consistent with parameters Jean Anyon characterised for middle class schools, in which knowledge authorised by the teacher was beyond criticism. DI focussed on declarative knowledge, which is a precursor for metacognition, but the snapshot of classroom practice provided limited evidence for the use of implicit pedagogies of metacognition, or for student self-reflection during extended tasks. Speculation and cognitive conflict were consistently absent. The inductive component of the study confirmed DI’s pedagogical uniformity extended to lesson structures, which were consistently sequenced according to Rosenshine (2012). Although the fraction of teacher talk remained high throughout lessons, IRF cycles occurred predominantly during ‘Lesson review’ (function 1) and ‘Presentation of new content’ (function 2). The qualitative analysis located teacher echo and chorusing within these two functions, but dialogic spell[s] (Nystrand et al., 2003, p. 172) were associated with ‘Feedback and corrections’ (function 4), when students practised complex tasks. The fine granularity presented by the block analysis suggested multiple opportunities for teachers to introduce inquiry elements, such as extending wait times during questioning (Rymes, 2015, p. 169) to extend students’ thinking. Some pedagogical strategies (e.g., chorusing) used in DI may be related to inclusion (Cummins, 2019). The provocation for reconciling the conflicting perspectives of exogenous and endogenous constructivism is located in students’ sociological futures. Anyon’s work suggested that students taught exclusively using DI will be disempowered for the ‘second modernity’ in which engagement with uncertainty and post-truth narratives are the expectation. Structured inquiry pedagogies, which impact developmental learning, are recommended for transitioning teachers to include ‘endogenous’ constructivism in their practice. The two pedagogical approaches are complementary.

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