From the United States to Sweden, explicit teaching guided by the teacher is once again central. Research on cognitive load and data on learning reopen the debate on frontal lessons and the role of the teacher.
There is an almost automatic reflex in the contemporary educational debate: just saying “frontal lesson” is enough to raise suspicion. It has become the form to overcome, the symbol of a school that no longer works, the residue of a past to be archived. If a class is distracted, the frontal lesson is to blame. If students are demotivated, we need to “go beyond frontality”. If we call for renewal, we begin by distancing ourselves from that word.
Yet for years the wrong target has been hit, and perhaps the wind is changing, if we look outside Italy: in the United States, for example, the debate onexplicit instructiondirect and explicit teaching guided by the teacher. After seasons marked by an almost exclusive enthusiasm for models entirely centered on autonomous discovery, many schools are reevaluating the need for clear, structured, sequential explanations. On the other hand, the results on learning – also in national and international surveys – have shown that without competent guidance many students, especially the most vulnerable, fall behind.
The same research on cognitive load theory clarified that, in the initial stages of learning, explicit guidance reduces dispersion and promotes deep understanding. In Sweden, after years of strong digitalisation and teaching oriented almost exclusively towards individual autonomy, the government has promoted a return to paper manuals (incredible but true, they are more effective!), to handwriting (incredible but true, it is more effective!), to the centrality of the teacher as a cultural reference (I avoid the third similar parenthesis, but we understand each other).
It is not ideological revisionism: it is a pragmatic outcome, also born from the observation of a decline in reading and comprehension results detected by international surveys such as PISA. Above all, it is not a restoration, a return to the “old school”, but only the exit from the ideological conflicts that had cornered the most effective way of teaching, as long as one knows how to give, and on the other hand one knows how to receive.
The problem is not the shape, but the quality
The frontal lesson is not the problem of the school: the problem, if anything, is the empty, improvised, unthought lesson, the one made of tired words, without passion, without preparation, or without enough of all this.
Be careful, however, this warning applies to any methodology: even a laboratory can be superficial, just as group work can become an elegant way of not tackling the crux of knowledge, and a lesson considered immersive or technological can definitely be boring. It is not the form that guarantees the quality of a lesson, but the stature of those who build and carry it out.
And let’s say it clearly: the systematic demolition of the frontal lesson was also a symbolic demolition of the role of the teacher. If explaining becomes suspect, if transmission is considered intrinsically authoritarian, then the one who teaches is no longer the one who guides, but only the one who facilitates. How horrible: no longer a guide, but a discreet director – hidden, anonymous? – which almost has to justify the fact that it has something to say even if only from a methodological point of view.
The word that founds community
Our civilization is born from the spoken and listened to word. Homer sang and someone listened. Socrates questioned in the squares. Jesus was called Master because he spoke. There is no need to mythologize these figures; it is enough to recognize an elementary fact: the authoritative word, when it is true, establishes community and generates knowledge.
Dante Alighieri also builds the Comedy on a pedagogy of listening: he passes through, sees, experiments, but continually listens to explanations, receives clarifications, asks questions and is guided. Trying to explore the various subjects, even the most different, even the most modern, the substance does not change.
So enough with the stereotypes: a well-done frontal lesson is not a monologue in a silent room, on the contrary it is a lesson that questions, that provokes questions, that ferrets out simplifications, that asks us to take a position. It is dialogic in substance while being structured in form.
The word master comes from magis, “more”. The teacher is the one who is “more” in terms of responsibility and competence. He is the one who leaves a mark, who allows us to reach higher, to where we perhaps wouldn’t have reached on our own.
Having crusades against frontal lessons was a cultural error even before a didactic one. Today, while elsewhere positions taken in an oppositional manner are being reviewed and the value ofexplicit teachingperhaps we too can get out of this mess.
Defending the frontal lesson means recognizing that explaining is not a pedagogical crime and, in a time that distrusts any verticality, we should not leave students alone in the noise of information and instead guide them in a complex world, with a thread to follow. And sometimes that word is enough – said with rigor, competence and passion – for someone to really start to grow.
