The 5Es are an instructional model encompassing the phases Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate, steps which educators have traditionally taught students to move through in phases.

First, instructors open a lesson with an activity or question meant to engage students, snag their interest, and offer the opportunity for them to share what they already know on the subject. This phase might include helping them make connections between their preexisting knowledge base and the new ideas that will come down the pipeline in the lesson or unit. Many educators use traditional KWL charts, in which students list what they already know and what they want to learn during this step. At the end of the lesson, students go back to this chart to list what they learned.

After engage comes explore, in which students carry out hands-on activities. Through their experiments or other interactions with the material, they deepen their understanding of the content.

Once they’ve explored, students attempt to explain what they have learned and experienced with help from the teacher – who only then explains concepts or terms encountered during exploration.

From there, students elaborate on their understanding, applying what they’ve learned to new situations to deepen their skills. In the final phase, students evaluate, reflecting on and providing evidence of their new understanding of the material.

At first glance, this seems like a good model for hands-on, student-centered instructional learning. However, this model misfires in one critical sense: it is used as a linear progression. Engagement comes first, exploring, explaining, and elaborating follow, and then evaluating wraps up the process