My general feeling is “How can this possibly work?” I can’t imagine anyone teaching, say, calculus who doesn’t understand calculus thoroughly enough to answer every possible question. If this Direct Instruction thing has mechanics for dealing with that, I don’t see them. Maybe the lesson plans involved are so wonderful that every student gets it straight off and doesn’t have questions? Then the trick is in the wonderful lesson plans that I don’t see how anyone could come up with without a 10-year experience of teaching calculus.
I suppose having better-than-average lesson plans and making teachers stick to them would yield an improvement when the teachers don’t really know what they’re doing. I don’t know if that constitutes a novel education method. It certainly doesn’t seem to be the way that Direct Instruction claims to succeed, so if that’s what’s good about it, that’s a problem.
I also don’t see any other feature of Direct Instruction that would actually make it good for teaching. But it’s possible that by reading this post and the Wikipedia article, I haven’t actually discovered the key insights of DI, and now I’m trying to figure out how the hell a horse runs so fast just by having a tail.
In that case, OP, the ball is in your court. What are the things that make DI work?
Edit: after looking at Vaniver’s post I think maybe I misunderstood the idea; maybe the point is to have really really good lesson plans. This doesn’t address the issue of answering student questions, but I can imagine a way it potentially gets addressed. Maybe students who are confused by something (and we hope there are not too many of them) are just left alone until they do poorly on the next assessment, at which point the lesson plan targeted at them tries to answer all possible sources of confusion.
Is this how it’s done? If it is, I suppose I’m not confident that it won’t work well, and I’d be open to considering those pretty graphs as evidence that it might work well. My main worry is that this method seems like it would do worse and worse as the material gets more advanced, and it might not work at all past middle school level material.
My general feeling is “How can this possibly work?” I can’t imagine anyone teaching, say, calculus who doesn’t understand calculus thoroughly enough to answer every possible question. If this Direct Instruction thing has mechanics for dealing with that, I don’t see them. Maybe the lesson plans involved are so wonderful that every student gets it straight off and doesn’t have questions? Then the trick is in the wonderful lesson plans that I don’t see how anyone could come up with without a 10-year experience of teaching calculus.
I suppose having better-than-average lesson plans and making teachers stick to them would yield an improvement when the teachers don’t really know what they’re doing. I don’t know if that constitutes a novel education method. It certainly doesn’t seem to be the way that Direct Instruction claims to succeed, so if that’s what’s good about it, that’s a problem.
I also don’t see any other feature of Direct Instruction that would actually make it good for teaching. But it’s possible that by reading this post and the Wikipedia article, I haven’t actually discovered the key insights of DI, and now I’m trying to figure out how the hell a horse runs so fast just by having a tail.
In that case, OP, the ball is in your court. What are the things that make DI work?
Edit: after looking at Vaniver’s post I think maybe I misunderstood the idea; maybe the point is to have really really good lesson plans. This doesn’t address the issue of answering student questions, but I can imagine a way it potentially gets addressed. Maybe students who are confused by something (and we hope there are not too many of them) are just left alone until they do poorly on the next assessment, at which point the lesson plan targeted at them tries to answer all possible sources of confusion.
Is this how it’s done? If it is, I suppose I’m not confident that it won’t work well, and I’d be open to considering those pretty graphs as evidence that it might work well. My main worry is that this method seems like it would do worse and worse as the material gets more advanced, and it might not work at all past middle school level material.
Thanks for your feedback. Does this and this help?
And the rewrite added to the beginning of the original post as a replacement for the whole long thing?