Explicit teaching is a key focus area in Our Plan for NSW Public Education to deliver outstanding leadership, teaching and learning.
What Works Best 2025 continues to support explicit teaching as a powerful practice. Explicit teaching is the thread that runs through every theme. Explicit teaching is a scaffolded and ambitious approach grounded in cognitive science and demonstrated through applied classroom research. It sets high expectations for all students and provides the means to achieve them. By enabling students to experience success, it creates a sense of agency and belonging that fosters wellbeing. Effective feedback is integral to explicit teaching both for learning and behaviour. It is strongly connected to effective classroom management. Evidence-based assessments and analysis of data guide teachers’ collaborative decisions about planning and programming for explicit and systematic teaching.
This is why the explicit teaching practical guide (PDF 1770KB) and illustration of practice (PDF 2520KB) are being published first to complement and extend the statement on Explicit teaching in NSW public schools, and to underpin the wide range of evidence-based explicit teaching resources endorsed by the department.
