Direct instruction

Draft

Definition

Direct instruction (DI) is a behaviorist instructional design model for classroom teaching.

Direct Instruction grew out of the work of Siegfried Englemann and Carl Bereiter with disadvantaged children (Bereiter & Engelmann, 1966)

This method is somewhat related to mastery learning

Features

• Scripted Lesson Plans. Such lesson plans should be made "teacher-proof", if necessary with the help of coaches/Facilitators
• Skill focused: Skills are taught in sequence until students have them automated.
• Rapid pace: teacher-directed instruction followed by small collective or individual learning/repeating activities.
• Frequent assessments
• Direct instruction is not just drill & practise. Learners can engage in more complex tasks during certain activities.

According to Huitt (1996), direct instruction can be summarized as follows.

1. More teacher-directed instruction (> 50%) and less seatwork (< 50%).
2. Active presentation of information (could be by teacher, computer, another student).
   1. Gain students' attention
   2. Providing motivational clues
   3. Use advance organizers
   4. Expose essential content
   5. Pretesting/prompting of relevant knowledge
3. Clear organization of presentation.
   1. component relationships
   2. sequential relationships
   3. relevance relationships
   4. transitional relationships
4. Step-by-step progression from subtopic to subtopic (based on task analysis).
5. Use many examples, visual prompts, and demonstrations (to mediate between concrete and abstract concepts).
6. Constant assessment of student understanding (before, during and after the lesson).
7. Alter pace of instruction based on assessment of student understanding (you're teaching students, not content).
8. Effective use of time and maintaining students' attention (appropriate use of classroom management techniques).

Koslov et al. (1999) identify the following typical phases of a lesson (see also Gagne's nine events of instruction.

1. Attention and Focus: Short wake-up
2. Orientation or Preparation: Teacher presents goal of the lesson demonstrates how the lesson builds on prior work.
3. Model: Teacher demonstrates concepts, propositions, strategies and/or operations. This can include repetitions, variations with different examples in order to help generalization
4. Lead: Teacher organized some guided practice. Firstly all together and then more individually. If necessary, he goes back to model.
5. Test: Students have to practise individually.
6. Feedback: Students are corrected (using positive rewards)
7. Error correction: Persistent errors are identified and if necessary teacher has to start over with model/lead/test.
8. Additional material: Learners are engaged with different materials where the same strategies have to be applied to a common feature (more generalization)

• Problem solving and strategy discrimination skills are introduced in future lessons (once students master a certain vocabulary of basic strategies).

Discussion

Draft

Direct instruction is model advocated by what could be labelled more "traditional" teachers". However, DSchneider believes that some of these teachers do not understand that such behaviorist/instructionalist models also require to engage students at some point in more complex learning activities that will lead to acquisition of some higher cognitive skills (like goaling, planning, strategy selection).

Research from the often cited "Follow Through" study did show some superior testing results compared to other teaching strategies. However results seem to be controversial and the only agreement seems to be that "structured" models are superior. One particular critique was that "within-model" feature variations were very high or to put it more bluntly: Good implementations of design (no matter what strategy used) are always better than bad implementations of alternative designs. (ref ???)

See the good Project Follow Through article for the moment.

Links

Lobbying pages

• Association for Direct Instruction

• National Institute for Direct Instruction

• Direct Instruction Resources

Summaries

• Huitt, W. (1996). Summary of principles of direct instruction. Educational Psychology Interactive. Valdosta, GA: Valdosta State University. Retrieved 19:28, 22 May 2006 (MEST), from HTML

• Teaching Methods - Direct instruction

• Wikipedia direct instruction

Other

• Project Follow Through

References

• Bereiter, C., & Engelmann, S. (1966). Teaching disadvantaged children in the preschool. Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

• Kozloff, Martin A., Louis LaNunziata & ames Cowardin (1999), Direct Instruction In Education, HTML, retrieved, 17:17, 15 September 2006 (MEST).

• Schweinhart, Lawrence J., David P. Weikart, Mary B. Larner. 1986. Consequences of three preschool curriculum models through age 15. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 1, 1, 15-45.