DIRECT INSTRUCTION

Introduction to Direct Instruction

Early literacy development is very important; babies can begin to acquire information about literacy from the moment they are born. All these early years are the foundation and sets the tone how children feel about themselves as readers or writers. Educators should know that children have a tremendous capacity for learning and this learning must be consistent with their development. They also must understand the role of development as it relates to a child’s present behaviors, and also to what is coming next and that is how we can lead them to success.

Reading mastery is based on explicit instruction wherein the teacher models desired behavior and attainable skills for the students. This direct approach involves a carefully sequenced step-by-step approach, continuous assessment and immediate student-feedback. Teachers have detailed handbooks with scripted lessons designed to be comprehensive for both the teacher and the students. Students are given extensive opportunities and time to practice new skills, with the aim of developing fluency.

While a classroom lecture is perhaps the image most commonly associated with direct instruction, the term encompasses a wide variety of fundamental teaching techniques and potential instructional scenarios. For example, presenting a video or film to students could be considered a form of direct instruction (even though the teacher is not actively instructing students, the content and presentation of material was determined by the teacher). Generally speaking, direct instruction may be the most common teaching approach in the United States, since teacher-designed and teacher-led instructional methods are widely used in American public schools. That said, it’s important to note that teaching techniques such as direct instruction, differentiation, or scaffolding, to name just a few, are rarely mutually exclusive—direct instruction may be integrated with any number of other instructional approaches in a given course or lesson. For instance, teachers may use direct instruction to prepare students for an activity in which the students work collaboratively on a group project with guidance and coaching from the teacher as needed (the group activity would not be considered a form of direct instruction).

Zone of Proximal Development

Since Lev Vygotsky focused his research on the ways children were challenged and suggests that assessing students on what they know is not significant, instead educators should determine the ability to solve problems with the assistance of someone who mastered the concepts being learned. He argued that the most successful learning occurs when children are guided by adults towards learning things that they couldn’t attempt on their own. This is how he created the theory of cognitive development: Zone of Proximal Development, which describes the area between the child independence performance, and the child’s assisted performance. In other words, is the range of abilities that a student can perform by himself and the ones with which he needs assistance.

According to Tracey (2012), there are two levels within the Zone of Proximal Development; the actual development level, which are the higher tasks that children can perform independently, and the level of potential of development, which are the higher tasks that children can perform but only being assisted. He affirms that when students are in the zone of proximal development, providing them with the appropriate guidance, (usually known as scaffolding), gives them the opportunity to accomplish the new task. Later on, scaffolding can be removed and the student will be able to perform that task independently.

Direct Instruction an Approach to Reading

Engelmann’s (1983) conceptualized Direct Instruction as an approach to teach reading. It emphasizes the use of small group and face-to-face instruction using carefully articulated lessons in which cognitive skills are broken down into small units, sequenced deliberately, and taught explicitly. Direct Instruction is carefully thought out, strategic, and designed before activities and lessons are developed.

A teacher using direct instruction models, explains, and guides the students through extended practice of a skill or concept until mastery is achieved. The lessons are fast paced, students are academically engaged, and teachers are enthusiastically delivering instruction. Direct instruction is appropriate instruction for all learners, all five components of reading, and in all settings (whole group, small group, and one-on-one). Direct Instruction is made distinctive, pedagogically and philosophically, by its originator, Siegfried Engelmann, and the curriculum programs that he and his colleagues have authored over the past 25 years.

Techniques of Direct Instruction

1. Establishing learning objectives for lessons, activities, and projects, and then making sure that students have understood the goals.

2. Purposefully organizing and sequencing a series of lessons, projects, and assignments that move students toward stronger understanding and the achievement of specific academic goals.

3. Reviewing instructions for an activity or modeling a process—such as a scientific experiment—so that students know what they are expected to do.

4. Providing students with clear explanations, descriptions, and illustrations of the knowledge and skills being taught.

5. Asking questions to make sure that students have understood what has been taught.

(Engelmann, 1983).

Key philosophical principles of Direct Instruction

• All children can be taught.

• All children can improve academically and in terms of self-image.

• All teachers can succeed if provided with adequate training and materials.

• Low performers and disadvantaged learners must be taught at a faster rate than typically occurs if they are to catch up to their higher-performing peers.

• All details of instruction must be controlled to minimize the chance of students' misinterpreting the information being taught and to maximize the reinforcing effect of instruction.

Strands of Direct Instruction

According to Adams (1993) Direct Instruction Reading has three strands: Reading, Oral Language/Language Arts, and Literature.

1. The Reading Strand addresses all five essential components of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics and word analysis, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension; and provides spelling instruction to enable students to make the connection between decoding and spelling patterns. Students develop decoding and word recognition skills that transfer to other subject areas.

2. The Oral Language/Language Arts Strand teaches the oral language skills necessary to understand what is spoken, written, and read in the classroom, while helping students to communicate ideas and information effectively. Students develop the ability to use writing strategies and writing processes successfully.

3. The Literature Strand supports the reading strand with a wide variety of literary forms and text structures, multiple opportunities for students to work with useful and important words, and gives ample opportunity for each student to read at his or her independent level.

Scheme of Direct Instruction

According to Bryant (1990), Direct Instruction Reading targets the development of five reading-related skills, in sequential order:

Phonemic Awareness

Children are taught how to segment or break words down in their smaller sound-units. Common, high-frequency letters and sounds are taught first. Children are also taught how to blend phonemes together to form words.

Decoding

Children are then taught to use what they have learned in decoding and spelling words. Direct Instruction Programs uses a specific orthography at this stage, designed to aid children with decoding words. The orthography provides visual cues about, for example, which letters are stressed and which are not. It is gradually faded out so that students read conventional letter-formations after having sufficient practice with phoneme awareness.

Irregularities

The next step involves teaching sight recognition of common irregular words, i.e. those which cannot be decoded phonetically. It involves repetition and practice.

Reading Accuracy and Fluency

Children read stories aloud which are primarily composed of words they already know. This is meant to foster both reading comprehension and a sense of success on the part of the student. A high emphasis on oral reading (vs. silent reading) means that students can be constantly monitored for reading the words correctly and quickly.

Reading Comprehension

In the context of teacher-guided activities, children learn to answer questions about a story, as well as how to draw conclusions and make inferences while reading. Emphasis is placed on learning new vocabulary, understanding literal meanings, making interpretations, and using reasoning strategies.

Why does Direct Instruction work?

There are four main features of DI that Biemiller (1999) found to ensure students learn faster and more efficiently than any other program or technique available:

Students are placed in instruction at their skill level.

When students begin the program, each student is tested to find out which skills they have already mastered and which ones they need to work on. From this, students are grouped together with other students needing to work on the same skills. These groups are organized by the level of the program that is appropriate for students, rather than the grade level the students are in. The program’s structure is designed to ensure mastery of the content.

The program according to Engelmann (2008) is organized so that skills are introduced gradually, giving children a chance to learn those skills and apply them before being required to learn another new set of skills. Only 10% of each lesson is new material. The remaining 90% of each lesson’s content is review and application of skills students have already learned but need practice with in order to master. Skills and concepts are taught in isolation and then integrated with other skills into more sophisticated, higher-level applications.

All details of instruction are controlled to minimize the chance of student’s misinterpreting the information being taught and to maximize the reinforcing effect of instruction. Instruction is modified to accommodate each student’s rate of learning.

A particularly wonderful part about DI is that students are retaught or accelerated at the rate at which they learn. If they need more practice with a specific skill, teachers can provide the additional instruction within the program to ensure students master the skill. Conversely, if a student is easily acquiring the new skills and needs to advance to the next level, students can be moved to a new placement so that they may continue adding to the skills they already possess.

DI programs are very unique in the way they are written and revised before publication. All DI programs are field tested with real students and revised based on those tests before they are ever published. This means that the program your student is receiving has already been proven to work.

Features of Effective Instruction for Beginning Readers

Teach phonemic awareness explicitly

Phonemic awareness is prerequisite to learning phonics so the tasks do not yet involve the children in reading. Though the importance of phonemic awareness has only recently received attention in the research, Reading Mastery I has included instruction in phonemic awareness for years. Engelmann (1983).

Phonemic awareness is developed by first starting with something all children can typically do, saying words fast:

Teacher: "Listen. Ham-burger. Say it fast. Hamburger.”

Then later the task becomes more focused on blending phonemes:

Teacher: "Listen. Ssssllllaaaammmm. Say it fast. Slam.”

Introduce each new letter-sound correspondence explicitly: Most reading approaches did not present letter-sound correspondences explicitly. Instead they recommended that letter-sound correspondences be presented implicitly.

Select and sequence letter-sound correspondences carefully: Many reading programs expose students to too many letter-sound relationships and taught non-essential verbal rules about phonics. For example, one basal reader, although not known for providing intensive phonics, tried to teach over 200 letter-sound correspondences (American Book Company, 1980). These included such low-frequency letter-sound correspondences as “ch” sounding like “k” as in “chorus” and “sc” sounding like “s” as in scene.

Reading Mastery analyzes the language carefully to identify the most frequent, highly useful letter-sound correspondences. Only 40 letter-sound correspondences are taught in Reading Mastery. The special orthography used by Reading Mastery reduces the number of letter-sound correspondences the children must initially learn to get started reading interesting stories.

This is because of this special orthography; the stories for beginning readers are more interesting and meaningful than the stories in programs using regular orthography. Although Reading Mastery is a phonic or code-emphasis program, the special orthography and interesting stories allow reading comprehension to also remain a focus in initial reading instruction.

Teach students to blend

Blending sounds together to make words (sounding out) is a critical step in reading. The reader approximates the word by sounding out and then matches the approximation to a real word from her oral language that fits the context of the passage. Teachers who spend more time on blending produce greater gains on reading achievement tests of young readers.

Beck (1981) found that only Reading Mastery had a definite and effective instructional strategy for teaching blending. The unique strategy used in Reading Mastery to teach blending is included in the Early Literacy program of the American Federation of Teachers as "the Engelmann blending strategy" (Hastings, Tangel, Bader, & Billups, 1995)

Provide immediate feedback on oral reading errors: Most beginning reading programs recommends silent reading. However, having children read silently when they are not proficient will only make their errors and misrules more difficult to correct. The best way for a teacher to identify inaccurate reading tendencies is to listen to children read orally. It is crucial that students receive corrective feedback on all errors during oral reading so they do not develop inaccurate reading habits.

Another common instructional practice is to correct only errors that change the meaning of the passage. If a child reads “girl” for “lady”, the child is not corrected. If the child reads lunch, for lady, the child would be corrected. The rationale for this approach is to encourage students to use context. However, comparative research shows that both comprehension and reading accuracy improve when all reading errors are corrected, whether the errors changed the meaning of the passage or not. In Reading Mastery all errors are corrected.

Corrective feedback though is consistent with the child's knowledge of phonics and children are expected to use context to adjust the pronunciation of the word to match their oral language. In Reading Mastery every error is corrected and children learn to use both phonics and context in constructing understanding

Debate

In recent decades, the concept of direct instruction has taken on negative associations among some educators. Because direct instruction is often associated with traditional lecture-style teaching to classrooms full of passive students obediently sitting in desks and taking notes. It may be considered outdated, pedantic, or insufficiently considerate of student learning needs by some educators and reformers. That said, many of direct instruction’s negative connotations likely result from either a limited definition of the concept or a misunderstanding of its techniques. For example, all teachers, by necessity, use some form of direct instruction in their teaching—i.e., preparing courses and lessons, presenting and demonstrating information, and providing clear explanations and illustrations of concepts are all essential, and to some degree unavoidable, teaching activities. Negative perceptions of the practice tend to arise when teachers rely too heavily upon direct instruction, or when they fail to use alternative techniques that may be better suited to the lesson at hand or that may improve student interest, engagement, and comprehension.

While a sustained forty-five-minute lecture may not be considered an effective teaching strategy by many educators, the alternative strategies they may advocate—such as personalized learning or project-based learning, to name just two options—will almost certainly require some level of direct instruction by teachers. In other words, teachers rarely use either direct instruction or some other teaching approach—in actual practice, diverse strategies are frequently blended together. For these reasons, negative perceptions of direct instruction likely result more from a widespread overreliance on the approach, and from the tendency to view it as an either/or option, rather than from its inherent value to the instructional process.

Conclusions

In my personal opinion Direct Instruction is one of the most effective teaching methods. Nevertheless, it needs to present precise example sequences, high-pace questioning, continuous instant feedback, extended practice, and rapid corrections of misconceptions.

In addition to the Direct Instruction approach of ability grouping, scripting, mastery learning and stimulus response teaching, these programs often include characteristics associated with the “gold standard” for effective reading teaching: relentless attention to the component skills required for understanding the letter-sound relationships in written text, and reinforcement of these components in the context of book reading.

References

• Adams, G.L., & Englemann, S. (1996) Research on Direct Instruction: 25 years beyond DISTAR. Seattle, WA: Educational Achievement Series.

• Biemiller, A. (1999). Language and Reading Success. Cambridge, MA: Brookline Books.

• Bryant, P. E., and others. (1990). “Rhyme and Alliteration, Phoneme Detection, and Learning to Read,” Developmental Psychology, Vol. 26, 429–38.

• Engelmann, Sigfried & Bruner, Elaine C. (2008). Reading Mastery Signature Edition. Columbus, OH. Mc Graw Hill.

• Engelmann, Sigfried & Bruner, Elaine C. (2008). Reading Mastery Workbook A. Columbus, OH. Mc Graw Hill.

• Engelmann, Siegfried & Haddox, Phyllis & Bruner, Elaine (1983) Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. New York, NY. Science Research Associates, Inc.

• Estes, T. H., and J. L. Vaughan. 1973. “Reading Interest Comprehension: Implications,” Reading Teacher, Vol. 27, 149–53.

• Scarborough, H. S., and W. Dobrich. 1994. “On the Efficacy of Reading to Pre­schoolers,” Developmental Review Vol. 14, 245–302.

• Schieffer, C., Marchand-Martella, N., Martella, R., & Simonsen, F. (2003) The Research Base for Reading Mastery. Direct Instruction Reading.

• Tracey, Diane H. & Morrow, Leslie M. (2012). Lenses on Reading. New York, NY. The Guilford Press.