Jared Brewer is a classroom teacher with the Baltimore Curriculum Project who just moved from second grade up to fourth. At the NIFDI conference, he spent the week in sessions on upper-level reading and language programs. We talked about a side of DI people rarely picture: how it builds students from short, well-formed sentences up to complete, published essays.
In this Interview:
- The writing progression from sentence structure and short paragraphs in the early levels to complete essays by fourth grade
- How drafting and publishing a long piece puts years of small, practiced skills to work
- The trouble with “make up your own prompt,” and why a structured path keeps every writer supported
- What Jared is taking home: a specific approach to active monitoring and shared paragraph-grading standards across grades
▸Show full transcript
[00:04] Welcome back, everyone, to the Direct Instruction Podcast. My name is Zach Groshell. I’m here with Jared Brewer, who’s from the Baltimore Curriculum Project. You may have listened to the episode with Laura Doherty about the history of the Baltimore Curriculum Project. It’s an extremely inspirational episode about the work they do day in and day out — in many cases in neighborhoods that are, quote-unquote, disadvantaged, or with students who have diverse learning needs. And we’re here now with a teacher who’s in the thick of it. What are you learning about at this conference?
[00:41] So I went from the second-grade curriculum to now the fourth-grade curriculum, so I’m doing a lot of work with the fourth- and fifth-grade reading and language curriculums here.
[00:48] Nice. I wanted to dig into the language piece, because we all know about the reading and the funny letters in DI — people are familiar with that. They might even think of math facts; they can picture that. But we often don’t associate DI with the careful teaching of language. You’ve gone through almost the whole sequence. Can you describe how DI teaches language, from the early beginning levels up to the upper levels?
[01:18] Absolutely. I’ve found that the lower levels definitely teach the conventions of writing. So it’s a lot of sentence structure — how to put a sentence together — and writing short paragraphs. In the second-grade curriculum, they’re responsible for writing anywhere from four- to six-sentence paragraphs. As you go up, in what I’ve seen in the fourth-grade curriculum, there’s almost complete essay writing. And getting into that is really interesting, because they have the skills, so now it’s the application of those skills.
[01:54] Yeah, sometimes people think of DI as only teaching the itty-bitty pieces or the facts, right? “I’m going to teach you facts, I’m going to teach you to say this — say the whole thing.” And it’s because they’re observing the beginning levels, where that’s what they’re working on, right? Tell me a little bit about — for example, when you’re teaching, I think it’s Level 4 — a task you might give students that leverages reasoning and critical thinking.
[02:24] An example would be something like going through the steps of creating, drafting and publishing. They have the skills to create maybe a five-sentence paragraph. They have the skills to go back and check it for correct punctuation — they learned punctuation in the early levels. They learned capitalization and all the small pieces before. So when I start it, I can say, “Hey, we’re going to do this long piece. You’re going to publish it. It’s going to get typed.” They start with a basic draft. We write about a predecided topic, and we move through all the steps in small steps, as they would in the early levels. But then they gradually get to where that entire thing has to be completed. And I think the publishing step is really positive for them, because they can see a final piece that they’ve done.
[03:29] I’m kind of jealous of them, because how I was taught to write was usually, “Make up your own prompt and write this long thing.” And then the teacher would circulate and reprimand kids who weren’t doing a lot of writing. I would be in the circle that did a lot of writing. So the class became kind of bifurcated: who wrote the most at home, maybe, and then who struggled. In this case, because everyone’s moving up that step ladder, they’re supported. Tell me anything else that’s been going on with you in terms of DI.
[04:08] One thing I’ve found — and I think as teachers we all do this — is active monitoring. We’re always working the room, walking around, checking in. But doing DI has really taught me a very specific way to do it. And one of the things I’m most grateful for from being here is paragraph grading. Paragraph grading is something we all do differently. None of us are going to think the same things should be docked or considered an error in the same ways. So the most important things I’ve learned are definitely active monitoring — making sure I’m consistent, so every student gets some of my time during their independent work period — and paragraph grading, which is so important for consistency. And once I have it, I know my co-workers have it too, so it’s consistent from grade to grade.
[05:05] Man, that’s awesome. You’ve come to all these conferences — I know they’ve announced the 53rd. It’s just been so great to meet you, and to be in all of this — these obsessive people who are like, “We’ve got to figure out everything; it all has to be so precise,” because it’s all about the kids. Listeners, thank you for tuning in to these little slice-of-life podcasts I’ve been doing. Check out nifdi.org, because they can give you information about how to attend the conference, what the DI programs are, and how to get coaching and implementation support. So thank you so much for tuning in, and take care.
