Anything but boring: The power of direct instruction

Something of a movement is brewing in education these days. A renewed interest in the science of how kids learn has led to greater adoption of effective teaching principles: We should regulate student attention, manage the cognitive load of tasks, over-practice concepts with students, and use student responses to adjust lessons.

This is called direct and explicit instruction, but it gets a bad rap.

It’s called boring, controlling, mechanical, and unfit for 21st century learning. It’s often confused with dry and ineffective lecturing, like the famous “Anyone, anyone” scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

However, direct and explicit instruction is grounded in research, from the Direct Instruction model of Project Follow Through to the randomized controlled trials of cognitive load theory. The most successful schools emphasize this approach, and practitioners like myself cannot ignore the results on the ground. Systematically designed, content-rich direct instruction is joyful, leaving students with a sense of purpose, enjoyment, and accomplishment.

I’m excited to share with you this recent interview I did for the Triple R Teaching podcast with Anna Geiger titled, “Anything but boring: the power of direct instruction”.

Link to Podcast and Show notes

In it, we discuss what direct instruction is and why it’s so effective for student learning. I also share specific classroom strategies teachers can start using right away.

Learn more from Dr. Zach Groshell:

• His book, Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching
• Professional development from Steplab
• Progressively Incorrect, the podcast
• Presentation with The Reading League Illinois on Cognitive Load & Explicit Instruction
• Just Tell Them: Explicit Teaching, presentation with Mind the Gap
• Exploring Explicit Teaching, with the Thinking Deeply about Primary Education podcast

Additional resources mentioned in this episode:

• Direct Instruction: A practitioner’s handbook, book by Kurt Engelmann
• Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, book by Siegfried Engelmann
• Anita Archer’s Explicit Instruction website