Direct Instruction

As I was beginning my career as a reading specialist years ago, a colleague and I attended a workshop on Direct Instruction. Both former English teachers, we decided that there were good and not-so-good elements to this new program developed by Siegfried Engelmann at the University of Illinois. We liked the explicit instruction, guided practice, and the mastery portions, but we worried about the prewritten script, the choral response structure, and its effects on creativity and writing. I did try to integrate ideas from the workshop informally into my remedial reading classes in the areas of explicit instruction, guided practice, and mastery. I found this emphasis helpful in teaching struggling readers.

Here are the important facets of direct instruction:

The text provides a clear and sequenced objective for the lesson.
The teacher is provided lesson plans and prewritten scripts for explicit instruction in a consistent format.
Guided practice and teacher modeling provide support and feedback to students who are encouraged to be active participants, often by directing attention and with choral responses.
Mastery of the material for all students is advocated before moving on.
Independent practice and applications are encouraged after approaching mastery.

Fast forward 20 years later, 20 years of teaching remedial reading in a high poverty school district in my own way. We had now been labeled as a low-performing school in reading and math. Our text selection committee began a search of effective classroom reading programs for high-poverty schools. A three-inch thick guide to these programs became our nightly reading material. Eventually, we concluded that original Engelmann Direct Instruction program, updated by McGraw-Hill, would suit our needs for grades K-3 new textbooks. Grades 4-6 grades in our elementary building did not join us at that time.

In a future post, I will describe our experience* with direct instruction, both good and bad.

*(BTW, that book being read when George Bush learned that America was under attack on 9-11, was The Pet Goat, from the Second Grade Storybook of Reading Mastery (Direct Instruction). I knew it well.