di: So Long Zig

[Jerry Silbert]

https://gregashman.wordpress.com/2019/02/18/so-long-zig/
This weekend saw the passing of Siegfried (Zig) Engelmann. He was a giant among educators and a true social justice warrior. By that, I mean that he dedicated his life to improving outcomes for the disadvantaged, not that he was some great wet lettuce who opined about emotional labour and set his critics three books to read before he would discuss anything with them.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Engelmann took part in the largest educational experiment of all time – Project Follow Through. The aim was to give disadvantaged kids the best possible start to their education. The planned U.S. government funding was cut by congress, so what was intended initially to be a large scale intervention was stripped back to an experiment. The idea was that of ‘planned variation’. Different groups would develop their own programmes and implement them in different centres. Outcomes from the different programmes would then be compared in order to see which was the most effective.Engelmann and his colleagues developed the Direct Instruction model. This is not to be confused with just any form of explicit teaching. The Engelmann model had unique features that drew upon a specific theory of instruction and, controversially, employed the use of scripted lessons. Apparently, scripting the lessons was never the original intention, but the first teachers involved in the programme kept going off piste.Direct Instruction was the clear winner of the Project Follow Through experiment. Despite being labelled by researchers as a “Basic Skills” programme, it was the best performer in terms of higher order cognitive skills, such as reading comprehension and mathematical problem solving, as well as the affective domain of student self-esteem. This is despite the fact that many competitor programmes were explicitly set-up to focus on cognitive and affective skills – most of these actually had a negative impact.This evidence has been largely dismissed by the educational establishment. Because it was so big, Project Follow Through was also messy and so you can poke holes in the methodology. You might think that this would prompt academics to set-up more rigorous trials of Direct Instruction and the alternatives, but they have been strangely reluctant to do so. This means that much of the further research on the method has been conducted by Engelmann and his small group of Direct Instruction advocates centered on the University of Oregon. This then provides another line of attack for those who wish to dismiss the research.Why is it so important to dismiss Direct Instruction? It is inconvenient to the dominant ideology of educational progressivism or, latterly, constructivism. Who cares about kids’ life chances when there is an ideology at stake.This means that an independent school like mine will make use of Engelmann’s programmes, but his work is either unknown or dismissed in the schools and kindergartens he was trying to help.I think all of us would like to leave the world a better place than we found it. Zig Engelmann certainly achieved this, but I cannot help feeling that it could have been even better if more of us had listened.
Below is one of the comments to the post
Thank you, Greg, for this splendid obituary on Zig Engelmann. You’ve captured a good part of the significance of Engelmann’s contribution to the field of education. I’m hoping that many more tributes will continue to highlight the absolute importance of his work — to the field and the lives of so many children who’ve benefitted from his insights and methods. But, as you so perceptively mention, serious opposition and disappointments and sabotage tormented Engelmann. This is what he said in his 1992 book, “War Against the Schools’ Academic Child Abuse”:“Schools are guilty of much academic child abuse because they don’t approach the performance standards that could be met if they used enlightened practices. The school failure is not the failure of kids, and often not the failure of teachers. It’s the failure of a sick system that places more value on the whims of adults than on the obvious needs of children.”This last weekend I had the great experience of attending the researchED Conference in Vancouver, BC.
This is an event, staged out of the UK, which brings forth speakers committed to evidence-informed education practices and serves as professional development for many practicing teachers who attend. We heard people say that teaching is not a “profession”, but might be called a “semi-profession”. A keynote speaker said that education that is not backed up by research is “social injustice”. Many agreed that education, unlike professions like medicine and law, has yet to “grow up”. When Nat Hentoff , who wrote many education books (eg, 1977, Does Anybody Give a Damn?) died two years ago, we were reminded that he had written an article detailing how education was “The Greatest Consumer Fraud of All”. My comment today is not to digress from the immense loss we suffer from Zig Engelmann’s passing. I’m just hoping that maybe, maybe if we can mount some kind of undertaking to promote education’s maturing into a disciplined profession, then that would be a great legacy of Zig’s.




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