di: Talk on DI to Jacksonville School Board -2000

[Bryan Wickman]

Sent on behalf of Jerry Silbert

Jlsilb20434 at aol.com<mailto:Jlsilb20434 at aol.com>

                                                                                Jerry Silbert on Direct Instruction

Duvall County School Board Work Session

June 13, 2000





            Thank you for inviting me to speak with you about Direct Instruction. Over 32 years I’ve been a Direct Instruction teacher, a trainer of other teachers, an author of Direct Instruction curriculum programs, an author of college texts on Direct Instruction and an advisor to school and district leaders using Direct Instruction.



            It’s a honor being here because to me the partnership between the school board, the district leaders and ICARE offers one of the best opportunities in the nation to create an academic program that can truly decrease the academic gap between rich and poor that is all too prevalent in our schools.



            The Direct Instruction Model originated in 1964 when Sigfried Engelmann wrote a book for parents entitled “ Give Your Child a Superior Mind.” The book discussed  the importance of providing clear logically sequenced teaching demonstrations to accelerate children’s learning and provided parents with specific suggestions on how to teach a number of concepts. The book which was translated into several languages sold very well.



            Several years later, a professor at the University of Illinois, Carl Breiter, on receiving funding to establish a demonstration pre-school program for low-income children contacted Engelmann to lead the project.  During the next four years Engelmann gathered and trained a team of teachers and worked daily with the children, translating the general ideas in “ Give Your Child a Superior Mind” into sets of daily lessons for teaching reading, language and math to the children.  The results were outstanding.  IQ gains of 24 points were obtained.  Children entered first grade reading at beginning second grade level and performing at mid-second grade level in math.



            The achievement gains achieved in the pre-school project led to the publication of the materials developed by Engelmann by Science Research Associates which at the time was owned by IBM. The programs which were called DISTAR (Direct Instruction System to Teach Arithmetic and Reading) were heavily promoted and produced a good deal of success in many cities.. Here is an exert from a newspaper article published in 1974 in the Chicago Sun Times.



The downward slide of Chicago public education is being reversed in one West Side school district by an experimental program which can teach some kindergarten children to read at third grade level.  The program is called DISTAR. It is credited with achieving remarkable gains in reading and math skills since its formal introduction in1970 as a standard procedure for the primary grades in Public School District 10 in the Lawndale Community.



            The data generated by Englemann’s Direct Instruction programs resulted in an invitation from the Federal Office of Education to Breiter and Engelmann to participate in what was to be the largest experimental education research program ever conducted by the Federal Government.  It was called Project Follow Through, and its purpose was to evaluate different approaches to educating economically disadvantaged students in kindergarten through grade 3.  Dr. Leon Lessinger, who at that time was an assistant commissioner in the Office of Education, has prepared several reports on the Follow-Through project.  The research phase of the project lasted for almost six years.  Over ten thousand low-income students in 180 communities were involved in the 500 million dollar project.  An analysis of the data showed Direct Instruction to be the most effective model in raising student achievement as indicated by scores on all academic and cognitive measures.  Furthermore, Direct Instruction students’ scores were quite high in measures of self-esteem. This result especially surprised the researchers who wrote”

          The performance of the Follow Though children in Direct Instruction sites on the affective measures is an unexpected result. The Direct Instruction Model does not explicitly emphasize affective outcomes of instruction, ... Critics of the model have predicted that the emphasis on tightly controlled instruction might discourage children from freely expressing themselves, and thus inhibit the development of self-esteem and other affective skills.   In fact, this is not the case.



            A number of other studies on the effects of DI have been conducted.  I’ll mention two.  In 1985, Dr. Paul Weisburg of the University of Alabama reported on a preschool/kindergarten project for low-income children. The project included the  use of the Direct Instruction  language and reading components  beginning in pre-kindergarten and continuing into kindergarten.  At the conclusion of year two, the students were given the end of first grade component of the Metropolitan Achievement test to evaluate their performance.  The data showed that the children who had been through the Direct Instruction programs for two years on entering first grade tested at the 80th percentile compared to their peers who tested at the 20h percentile.



            A report completed several months ago by researchers from the University of Houston summarized data collected on  the implementation of Direct Instruction in 10 low-income schools in the Houston School District.  The implementation which is being led by Dr. Thaddeus Lott,  former principal of Wesley Elementary School in Houston  is referred to as the RITE program, Rodeo Institute for Teacher Excellence.  The Direct Instruction  reading and language programs are being used along with high levels of professional development for teachers and careful monitoring of students’  progress. Here is an exert from the research summary:



                                     Overall, the results of the 1998-99 external evaluation of the RITE program indicate that the children involved in the RITE program are performing at levels comparable to or far exceeding those of children within the district who are involved in other active reading programs.

                                    The most dramatic development is seen for children who begin the program in kindergarten.  By the end of first grade, these children are performing at levels that were not only well above their district peers, but well above national averages.



            Most of the data I have reported on has dealt with the lower grades. A logical question is: Will the gains made with Direct Instruction in the lower grades be maintained during the upper grades?  A group of researchers studied this question in 1987.  With cooperation from the New York City Board of Education they obtained data on students who had been in a Direct Instruction Follow Through Project school in New York and on students who had been in the control group. Analysis showed that the Direct Instruction group had statistically significant higher rates of high school graduation, application and acceptance to college and lower rates of retention.



            Other studies also found that students who had been in the Direct Instruction programs ahead of their peers in control groups. Still, it was clear that there was a decreased level of performance for all students. In response to this data, in the  1980’s Engelmann and his team began developing curriculum for grades 4 to 6 and for middle school.  While much work remains to be done, there are a number of encouraging signs.



            In Moss Point Mississippi, a school with a poverty level over 85 percent implemented the DI Model  and obtained the second highest reading scores and the sixth highest language scores on the fourth grade state test administered in 1994.



            At Wesley school, data on the administration of the Texas State Test showed Wesley students in the upper grades scoring at a level which qualified Wesley to be recognized as an exemplary school.



            In Sacramento California, a middle school which had extremely low scores showed the greatest level of gains among all the middle schools in the district.



            An interesting development in the history of Direct Instruction is the recent adoption of Direct Instruction by a growing number of schools serving children from wealthier backgrounds. There have been several data reports that show that the academic performance of these more privileged  children can be accelerated with Direct Instruction.  While a child who enters school with low literacy levels may need two years to progress through a curriculum, the placement and skipping procedures incorporated in the DI programs allows the child who enters school more prepared to move at a faster rate.



            I’ve spoken about some of the research and history on Direct Instruction. Now I would like to talk about why Direct Instruction is such a powerful tool for teachers, especially those children who enter school with limited literacy related knowledge.



            When Engelmann began working in the preschool project, he noted that a high proportion of the children did not understand many of the words that  teachers typically use to explain things. The children did not understand words such as next, between, in front of , who, what, when,  and where.  He also noted that the children had trouble following directions and lacked much of the general information typically assumed of children their age.  Additionally, they had trouble with various types of reasoning such as if-then logic and with comparative concepts such as categories and same and different. They also had difficulty repeating or constructing statements.  It was this lack of language knowledge that was the main obstacle for the children.



            Engelmann's observations about the  language gap were supported by a study at the University of Kansas in which researchers counted and categorized parent interactions with children from the age of 12 months to 48 months. Their data showed that by the age of 36 months children in the homes of well educated parents knew almost twice as many words as children in the homes of less educated parents and that the difference in the rate of learning new words was  increasing at a significantly faster rate for the children of the more educated parents.  In other words, the gap was growing.



            Engelmann  and his colleagues worked at the preschool for four years to see if they could close this gap and prepare the children to be on an equal playing field with their more advantaged peers upon entering first grade.  Engelmann translated the logical and analytical techniques that he had presented in Give Your Child a Superior Mind into daily lesson plans for the teachers in the project.  Separate programs were prepared for reading, language and math.  The preschoolers would have three 30 minute group sessions, one in each subject area. The data I presented earlier attests to the success of these programs.



What is it in the Direct Instruction programs that contributes to their effectiveness?  The answer to this question could fill a textbook.  I have tried to briefly communicate some major points:



•      The Direct Instruction programs teach core foundational language skills typically assumed by other programs.   The teaching of this critical content is systematic.  Few other programs include an equal degree of teaching on these core concepts.

•      The words used in teaching new concepts are carefully controlled to ensure that all words in teacher explanations are words that the children understand.  Nothing is taken for granted.  Lessons are tried out with children and the errors the children make are analyzed to ensure that all explanations are clear.

•      The examples used in teaching demonstrations are carefully planned so that the presentations have only one possible logical interpretation. For example, let’s say that a teacher wants to teach the color red and to teach red, she shows the children a red wool shirt, pair of red wool socks and a red wool jacket, each time saying, “This is red.”  The naive learners could logically conclude that red refers to either a piece of clothing, something made of wool, something held up high or something with the color red. The instruction in the Direct Instruction programs was designed to minimize problems of ambiguity.

•      New concepts or strategies are introduced at a carefully controlled rate so that children can practice and become comfortable in applying one concept before new concepts are introduced.

•      Previously taught concepts are systematically reviewed to foster retention.

•      The program is made very interactive with teacher talk followed by student responses to determine if students did in fact understand what the teacher had just presented.

•      Frequent assessments are provided  to determine if children are mastering the content.

•      The reading program developed by Engelmann and his associates utilizes a systematic phonics approach. A recent  report of the National Reading Panel, a Congressionally mandated independent panel commissioned to conduct a review on reading research, found that the greatest gains for at-risk children were obtained with systematic phonics instruction in which students are explicitly taught to convert letters into sounds and then blend the sounds to form words. This is exactly the approach that the Direct Instruction programs utilize.



There are a number of other principles utilized in the construction of the programs; however given the limited time, I would like to close with some major thoughts based on my experiences over the past 30 years.



1.    The early years of school, from pre-kindergarten through  first grade provide the greatest opportunity to equal the playing field for at-risk children. The longer we wait to begin systematic instruction, the greater the size of the gap and the more difficult it will  be to level the playing field.



2.    To close the academic gap, it is necessary that at-risk children be fluent competent readers by the end of first grade with a solid language understanding so that they can read in and outside of school and use this reading to increase their vocabulary and background knowledge.



3.      Direct Instruction has shown its power in numerous implementations to bring at-risk children to grade level by the end of first grade.  These children read accurately, fluently and with comprehension on grade level materials.



4.    In order to bring at-risk children to grade level status with Direct Instruction at first grade, children must master the content of the first two levels of the Direct Instruction Reading and Language programs by the end of first grade. This goal has been reached in many schools over the past 20 years and is thus a realistic goal.



5.    In order to maintain at- risk children at grade level after first grade, an intensive program of reading and writing instruction is required.  The DI curriculums for reading, language and writing when combined with  a program of supplementary reading and writing offer great hope achieving in achieving this goal.


6.    Finally, the extent to which Direct Instruction is successful in improving student reading performance is directly related to the quantity and quality of training support provided to teachers and to the determination and leadership of the school leader and project leader in ensuring that all the elements of the model are being implemented well in every classroom in every school every day for every child. Critical elements are summarized on the next page.
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