Frank Vasquez already uses plenty of DI programs, and this year he finally made the trip to Eugene, also known as “the mothership.” Frank and I often end up in the same online debates about instruction. Here we got into the big questions behind them, along with what his special education work has taught him about inclusion and catching kids up.
In this Interview:
- The “big versus small” questions: breaking instruction into small parts or teaching it whole, and how much the learner leads versus the teacher
- Minimally guided instruction and the big, rich tasks the other camp favors
- Why Frank keeps going: watching DI reach some of the hardest-to-teach children
- Full inclusion at all costs, and what his own data says about moving kids ahead too quickly
▸Show full transcript
[00:04] Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. I’m here with my friend Frank Vasquez, and we’re talking all about his experience at the NIFDI conference. Is this your first time here, by the way?
[00:14] Very first time.
[00:15] Nice. So you’re not from Eugene, are you?
[00:17] Not from Eugene, no, no. From down the coast, yeah.
[00:21] So tell me, what have you learned so far, and perhaps what brought you here? What piqued your curiosity to want to come and learn more about Direct Instruction?
[00:33] Yeah, so I use a lot of DI programs already. And I mean, this is the mothership, so to speak. I’ve had my eye on the conference for many years and just really wanted to come, and I was finally able to make the journey. I got some support from my doctoral program at MSJ to do that. And so I’m here and digging in.
[00:55] Yeah. And you and I cross over on a lot of different social media platforms, kind of trying to feel out the debate and see where it’s going. I’m curious — what are the main areas of contention in the world of instruction and learning?
[01:15] Yeah, I think there are quite a few, as we were talking about. But one of my big ones now is how much of the larger instructional goals to bake in at the intervention level — how much to atomize instruction versus fully integrated instruction. That’s both a research question and a debate. And then how much to let the learner lead versus the teacher lead. So these kind of big-versus-small questions, to put it simply.
[01:50] Yeah, it seems to come up over and over again that there are these camps, I guess. A lot of the camps support the idea of a larger grain size of instruction — maybe minimally guided instruction, instruction that tries to withhold the examples and the feedback and the explanations, especially toward the beginning — and then giving students not things at the level of the atom, but large chunks: big, rich tasks. Have you seen some of these back-and-forths?
[02:28] Yes, yes, all the time. And I think not only from your constructivist lens versus DI lens, but even within the so-called evidence-based and research world — people interested in similar things — I think there are still some of those debates living.
[02:47] How do you keep your patience and your temper in some of these? Because I know you’re always in there, same as me. We’re in the realm of persuasion, and we’re also defending a tradition that I think works really well with a ton of kids.
[03:05] Yeah, that’s the thing. I’ve seen DI programs, or programs similar to DI, reach some of the hardest-to-teach children. And it does lead to some generative outcomes, and it leads to their ability to reach into rich tasks. I’ve seen it enough in practice that — you know, I’m here, I’m learning more, and I’m keeping going with it.
[03:35] And I know you work with kids with special educational needs. One of the things that’s hard to explain to people is that they assume DI is only for kids who need more support — struggling students. And then on the other side, there’s a view that kids who struggle should be encouraged to be included in mainstream classes for which they don’t have the prerequisite skills to even understand what’s going on. Take me through that whole thing.
[04:13] Yeah, I see this a lot in my work. There’s a huge push for full inclusion — full grade-level access, often at all costs. But I think the reality in our schools these days — and we all know this — is that if early intervention isn’t strong enough, kids lose ground pretty quickly. You can catch kids up in some pullout interventions, things like that, but it gets harder and harder as we go along. And I feel like meeting the learner where they’re at, at each step of the way — and I think a lot of DI programs suggest this in a full implementation — is how you get the best results. I see that time and time again. So it’s a constant struggle to push back against moving kids too quickly. Because I’ve tried to accelerate kids too quickly, I’ve tried to bridge them as much as possible, and I keep pretty strong data — and it does not support that in my own practice either.
[05:17] I totally agree. Just from my own personal experience working with lots of different students, our ultimate goal is to accelerate all students and get kids back up to grade level. It’s very possible — especially when certain kids have certain gaps in their learning, we can help them catch up, right? But at the same time, to absolve ourselves as adults and educators of meeting those needs by masking them in a classroom where they’re doing a trivial task in the back of the room — that just doesn’t seem right to me. And so I think these programs and this approach are a great option — Corrective Reading, Corrective Mathematics — for getting kids back up, especially in the middle school and secondary years. Frank, what’s next for you when it comes to what you’re learning? I know you’re in the middle of a PhD program.
[06:12] Yes, yeah. An EdD.
[06:14] EdD. Yeah. Similar.
[06:16] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I’m working on the EdD, but getting deeper into research, and really digging in here too, because of some of the DI language programs I’m interested in. I’m really looking at the language comprehension side and trying to accelerate some of those areas. I think there are a lot of answers and tools here that haven’t been fully explored — Language for Learning, Language for Thinking. It would be amazing to see more schools use them. So yeah, that’s my general interest now, and we’ll see where it all goes from there.
[06:54] Yeah, I need to explore that very path myself. So listeners, thank you so much for tuning in to the podcast. I’m doing these little slice-of-life interviews all week, and I think you should come down to Eugene every year for this DI conference. But if you can’t make it, go to nifdi.org and check out everything they have to offer. Thank you, Frank, for coming on the show.
[07:15] Cool. Thanks for having me.
