Adrienne Kinder, Kirsty Tatere and Femke Castles flew halfway around the world from New Zealand to Eugene to find out whether Direct Instruction could help the teachers they support back home. They were the only attendees from their corner of the world and proudly called themselves “newbs.” They gave an honest picture of what teachers back home are up against and what struck them in their first week of DI.
In this Interview:
- What brought them to Eugene: older students who are struggling, and a Project Follow Through story they’d never heard before
- Teachers left to build their own resources, and the gaps that grow from one year level to the next
- Teachers who “don’t know what they don’t know,” and how fully designed programs close that gap
- What the DI veterans in Eugene kept describing: students who succeed, stay motivated and feel good about their learning
▸Show full transcript
[00:04] Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the DI Podcast. I am here with three amazing educators who have flown probably multiple flights — I’m not sure — to get here to Eugene, Oregon, for the National Direct Instruction Conference, run by the National Institute for Direct Instruction. I’m just so excited to be talking to you all about why you chose to come out here and what your experience of the Pacific Northwest has been. Adrienne, how would you introduce yourself to everyone?
[00:37] Sure. Hi, my name is Adrienne Kinder. I’m a literacy coach. I work primarily with teachers in primary and lower secondary. We’re getting more requests to work with students who are older and who are struggling, and that’s what really inspired us to come out.
[00:54] And then — you can pass the fuzzy mic over.
[00:56] Yeah. Well, I’m Kirsty Tatere. In our role, we support teachers and work with many schools around New Zealand, and we feel like teachers are having to put so much work into teaching — having to create lessons. So we really wanted to come out here and see what Direct Instruction was all about, and whether it might be something we can take home and have a go with. So yeah — noobs. We’re all noobs here.
[01:28] Awesome. And Femke, tell us about yourself.
[01:31] Hi, everyone. I’m Femke Castles, also from New Zealand. I’ve been really interested in DI since I learned about Project Follow Through and the immense impact it had on students. And I thought, why don’t we have that in New Zealand for our struggling kids? Why am I only just learning about it now, when it happened so long ago? I’d really like to know more.
[01:57] Tell me a little bit about the landscape. It’s hard to make sweeping generalizations, of course, but I have a feeling some of the struggles in New Zealand are similar to the struggles in many parts of the United States. What is possibly in place — what are some of the systemic barriers — that make it so we can’t get 100% of kids on grade level?
[02:20] I think historically, we’ve been very strong with whole language or balanced literacy as the foundation for training our new teachers, and that has been across our schools as well. Coupled with that has been a very constructivist-based approach. In the last probably 20 years, there was a really big push for children to learn more through discovery and inquiry learning. Phonics was a bit of a dirty word, so it wasn’t often encouraged in the early years. And we’ve had a curriculum where teachers have had to — as Kirsty alluded to — create their own resources to teach with. So we have real, huge differences in learning opportunities for students, and many students leaving primary school knowing different things and having different abilities.
[03:15] Yeah, add on to that. I’m especially curious about teachers having to make their own resources, especially when they’re strapped for time. And as we’ve learned at this conference, there are these intricacies and complexities that have to go into teaching very, very precise things to young kids — things you maybe weren’t trained to do, because teachers are trained in delivery and other things. So yeah, talk us through that.
[03:41] I see a lot in our schools where we’ve got teachers teaching the same year level in one school, but they don’t necessarily know what’s happening in the classroom next door. So as students move through our year levels, you might be teaching a Year 5 class, but you don’t know what the students were taught in Year 4. The Year 4 teacher doesn’t know what’s been taught in Year 3. And often the Year 3 teachers — there might be ten in a school — don’t know what the Year 3 teacher next door is teaching. So we have students moving schools, and we have students leaving primary school with different sets of skills. And so I think bringing some consistency around what’s being delivered — what our students are being taught — would be hugely helpful to all students.
[04:35] And as a teacher, you sort of have to spend all this time reteaching things, because you get a cohort of kids and you don’t necessarily know what they all know — and they all know different things. And so you yourself get frustrated. It’s hard as an elementary teacher to not play the blame game, but it’s kind of true: “I wish they came more prepared.” But it all kind of comes down to the curriculum, in a sense.
[05:01] Yeah, I think it’s also really difficult for teachers if a particular subject is not their strong point. They don’t know what they don’t know, right? So they think they’re teaching it the right way. But with something like DI, it’s all there for you, and you can’t really go wrong.
[05:18] Yeah. I think it’s awesome you got to feel this out, because many of us here at this conference have been teaching with DI for a long time, and we’re so bought in — there’s a culture, it’s all in the air. What’s the vibe been like as you’ve talked to people?
[05:35] They’re so friendly.
[05:37] Yeah, we’ve loved it.
[05:39] Yeah, we’ve loved it, and it’s been really interesting, because we’re the only Kiwis here. But it seems that teachers across the world have the same problems in their countries. So that’s been really interesting — but a great vibe.
[05:56] Yeah, super friendly presenters and attendees.
[06:00] Yeah. I think something else we’ve really noticed is that the people who have been doing this for a while all talk about how successful their students are, how motivated the students are, and how good they feel about their learning. So that’s been a consistent thing we’ve picked up as well.
[06:18] Yeah, you get to come somewhere where every mention, every story, every anecdote is so much less about the things that “I” did — because a lot of it is that the materials themselves support you, to the point that now I can see my students and look at how they’re doing. You can’t go back. You can’t go back. And so I’m just so grateful that we’ve got all these newbies coming in to the conference. And listeners, you can be one of those newbies. You just have to come to Eugene next year for the National Direct Instruction Conference. Keep listening to this podcast, and check out nifdi.org for any information about their programs or their implementation support. And yeah — Kiwis, take care.
[07:04] Thank you. Thank you.
