A Comment on Joanne Jacobs' Post Re DI

The following was my comment on Joanne's stimulating discussion on 'Teachers wonder about direct instruction.'

Although my primary focus is currently on WHAT we teach rather than HOW, I must strongly endorse Mr. Strauss’ reasoned and thoughtful comments. Good teachers have always blended successful methods of the past with the best of what is currently known about the different ways that children learn. No single style can possibly meet the needs of our more and more diverse learners we encounter every day. There seems to be considerable confusion about the technical meaning of DI as developed by Mr. Engelmann. One would need to thoroughly study his rationale and approach to make an informed judgment and I suspect many are responding to the ‘label’ rather than its substance just as many react to ‘discovery learning’ as if it is a method to be used all the time. Effective math lessons I’ve observed for the past 10 years included the essential components of instructional/learning theory:
1. Motivated the lesson (a ‘hook’)
2. Articulation of the objectives of the lesson (what students will know and/or be able to do at the end of the lesson) - this must be carefully thought out during planning and conveyed clearly.
2. Connected current learning to prior learning
3. Reviewed the necessary prerequisite skills for success
4. Provided clear explanations both orally and in writing (on board, on handout or in an electronic presentation)
5. Maximized student involvement via questioning, promoting of dialogue or an activity
6. Assessed what was actually learned (e.g.,responses to questions or requiring students to complete a specific task).
When you remove all the labels, Joanne, it comes down to this: How do we know that the objectives of the lesson were achieved? When I am transmitting parcels of information directly to students, I am still engaging their minds by asking many many questions of different taxonomies to check for their understanding as well as checking if they are still conscious! When I propose a challenging problem and give them a few minutes to work on it in small groups, I am still monitoring their progress carefully and asking guiding questions.
If DI includes all of these components and allows children to explore at times and tackle unstructured open-ended questions for which there is no clear blueprint for solution, then I applaud DI and I guess I’ve been using it all along. If ‘Discovery Learning’ includes all of these components, then I guess I’ve been using it all along and I applaud that too.
Again, as Larry so ably expressed it, good teachers FIND A WAY that works for most of their students most of the time. There will always be some in the class who are not able to grasp the material for a myriad of reasons, often having nothing to do with the child’s ability. Rather than continue this general debate, perhaps we should be looking at REAL examples of effective teaching and then we can applaud these efforts and use them as models for the rest of us, rather than debate the category into which the lesson falls. Oh well, this will never happen, because real examples and pictures would obviate all of the rhetoric and we’d have nothing to blog about!