Also see Part One: Why? and Part Two: How?
If all this has seemed good to you, you may still be wondering how we fit this in when teachers are already pressed to the limit in terms of time management.
Direct Instruction
There will be times in every classroom when the teacher needs to address the whole class to demonstrate a skill, raise a question, or present new information. By employing technology, realia, and visuals, teachers can make their content comprehensible to more students than if they simply use their voice. Nevertheless, even the best direct instruction will likely leave out some students who still don’t get it and others who already know it. Classrooms that employ direct instruction for the majority of the day probably aren’t as effective as they could be in terms of making content comprehensible for all or as far as engaging students.
Fitting It All In
The way I have managed to fit it all in is to move as quickly as possible through direct instruction as possible so that I have time to move on to activities like I’ve written about in part two as well as a special time of day we call independent work time in which all students are working on their own while the teacher calls small groups to work on needed skills.
Teachers need to be getting to this dedicated differentiation time of day (IWT, Workshop, Universal Access Time, etc) as a bare minimum. However, differentiation is not just about a special time of day. In order to differentiate instruction, teachers need to value each student for the unique talents that each brings to the classroom and plan activities that allow them to demonstrate their learning in different ways.
Actually, the research suggests that direct instruction has a far more profound effect than almost everything else.
Check out this article:http://www.mathematicallycorrect.com/honestft.htm
Adso, your article compares direct instruction to “methods aim specifically at improving cognition or boosting self-esteem.” It doesn’t compare direct instruction to a whole class to small group instruction which is what I’m talking about. Also, independent practice, which I’m also talking about, is a part of the direct instruction model but many teachers never get to that part. For them, direct instruction is lecturing a class which it is not.
I am in complete agreeance with you Mathew. The school I work in seems to be comprised of teachers who have lost their knack for adventure in the classroom. I struggle with that when I have the kids, because I want to do something they have never seen before. We just finished up a Google Earth Tour of Europe and Australia to help the students set up some background knowledge and it ended up disrupting class as students were in complete disbelief as to what they were seeing (I plan to blog about this). For me, I know I have start things early in the year and really focus on getting the class past the wow factor. This way students get used to it and can handle it as the year progresses.
Adso – actually the Direct Instruction model works as follows:
1. Students are split into small groups (about 5 to 7) depending on prior knowledge and how much repetition they need to remember things (so, say, two kids starting school, one already knows their alphabet, the other doesn’t recognise a single letter, are put into different lessons, so the first kid doesn’t have to relearn the alphabet, and if over time it turns out that the first kid needs a lot of repetition while the second kid, once exposed to the alphabet, eats it up like a starving dog, then the first kid is put into a slower lesson plan, while the second kid is accelerated).
2. The teacher spends about half the day working with each small group of kids in turn to talk them through the lessons for that day (so the teacher will spend about 20 minutes say with one group, 20 mintues with the next, etc), while the remainder of the class does independent work, looked after by an aide. Apparently in one school, they didn’t have money for the aides, so every adult in the school was roped in to do the reading lessons to all the kids at once first thing in the morning. In some implementation models, the kids who were further behind and/or were slower were given more direct lessons in these small groups than the faster kids were, but there’s nothing in the Direct Instruction model that requires such a split.
Direct Instruction was developed and tested on elementary children, though there are some courses for older kids, and of course very young kids need more adult attention than older kids, for things like tying shoelaces. A secondary school teacher who has the classroom under control may be able to work with a subgroup of kids without having to have a minder for the rest of the class.
It was not the most brilliant idea of the developers of the Direct Instruction Curriculum to call it Direct Instruction, as it’s so easy to get muddled between the one particular curriculum and the general idea of direct instruction.
@Tracy,
Maybe in your district. Direct Instruction when I refer to it is a lesson explicitly planned to have a clear objective. The sequence is teacher models>guided practice>independent practice.
What you’re referring to, we call independent work time and in our district it’s 20-40 minutes, certainly not half a day. If a teacher never meets with smaller groups, how do they individualize their instruction for students, reteach those who need it, and effectively assess student learning?
Matthew – Adso was referring to the curriculum called Direct Instruction (DI), the one that was most effective in Project Followthrough at educating kids from disadvantaged background. The DI model provided specific lessons for learning reading and mathematics, on the basis that those were the fundamental skills kids needed for success at school (mathematics because it builds on itself, reading because nearly every subject requires reading).
If a school uses both the DI mathematics and the DI reading curriculae (is this the right plural?), they have about half the school day left for other subjects such as music, art, sciences, etc. I understand that schools are encouraged to use such DI principles as relating new knowledge to things the kids already know, for the other half of the day, but the focus of the DI guys in the Project Followthrough implementation was on the reading and mathematics lessons.
The half-a-day was referring to the total time the two courses require – including both the time the teacher spends working with the small groups, the time the kids spend doing independent group work while the teacher is working with a different small group, and the time spent transferring between the two activities, not to the total time the kids spend working independently of the teacher.