S6E1: Kurt Engelmann and Alisa Kerr on Sold a Story, Season 2

Direct Instruction Podcast / Progressively Incorrect. Speakers: Zach Groshell (host), Kurt Engelmann (NIFDI President), Alisa Kerr (NIFDI Outreach Director) – Auto-transcribed.

Zach: Welcome back everyone to the Direct Instruction podcast sponsored by the National Institute for Direct Instruction. I am so excited for this podcast to return because today we are gonna be talking about Sold a Story season two with Kurt Engelmann and Alisa Kerr. Also, if you are joining us from Progressively Incorrect, this is the first episode of the new season of that podcast. So welcome to all of my listeners from Progressively Incorrect. My name is Zach Groshell.

I am so excited to be stuck into what has been an obsession of mine, which is waiting every Thursday for Emily Hanford’s podcast to drop. And so I thought I’d bring in the foremost experts in direct instruction here to the podcast so that we could talk about our reactions to what was perhaps surprising to many and what has been exciting and inspiring to so many people around the world. Kurt, Alisa, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Maybe, Kurt, you can begin by reintroducing yourself to our audience. You’ve been on the show before, but talk us through what you do.

Kurt: Zach, great to be here. Yes, I’m the president of NIFDI, the National Institute for Direct Instruction, a nonprofit organization that was founded by my father back in 1997 to help schools and districts get the most out of the DI programs. As you may know, as I know you know, the direct instruction curricula are commercially available. Well, my father saw that there were some schools that were getting the training support, data analysis, capacity building, all those things that make sure it’s successful, not only in the short run, but the long run, but he saw that the number of schools getting that were way too few. And so he founded NIFDI to provide that.

We do some other things too, like the National Direct Instruction Conference and help out with research projects. But our main goal is to help schools and districts get the most out of DI. And I’m gonna plug it later, perhaps. I am the author of Direct Instruction: A Practitioner’s Handbook. If you wanna know how to implement DI school and in particular, pick up a copy near you.

And I am waving it on my screen too, even though people cannot see it.

Zach: So happy, yeah, I love this book. It’s great. Direct Instruction: A Practitioner’s Handbook. Alisa, we often have to go back and forth in a lot more emails than Kurt and I, because you hold me accountable to things. What do you do, Alisa, in your work?

Alisa: Thanks for having me, Zach. I’m Alisa Kerr. I am the Outreach Director for the National Institute for Direct Instruction. And I have the pleasure of getting to meet potential partners that are interested in starting a direct instruction implementation. small, large, and I get to meet with them and we get to talk about what that might look like in getting started.

I also support outreach events. So we hold trainings remotely or in person across the United States and really globally. So planning those out and then really just sharing as a nonprofit our mission and trying to get that out to everybody so that students can really maximize the benefits of DI and really just trying to reach broad audience to share that from our space. And I’m just a, I have been a teacher with DI, I’ve been a peer coach and assistant principal, regional leadership with DI. I’ve been a trainer, consultant, partnership liaison with DI.

So I’m a parent that teaches DI to two of my children. And so I’m just really passionate to bring all of those levels that I’ve experienced to DI in this role and get to meet people that are on a similar journey are hoping to be in that journey and help them be successful.

Zach: Awesome. And you mentioned so many things. One of them is the conferences, the national direct instruction conferences in Eugene, Oregon, definitely want people to come, I would say that you would be thrilled to learn that there are a lot of sessions that could, you know, be helpful for just learning about DI for the first time. If you are also wanting to bring DI back, because in my school, you had all these books sitting on the shelves, and you wanted to learn actually how to use them, this is for you. And even the science of learning and theoretical folks, there’s something for everyone.

I know last year Anita Archer was there. I know that I did a session on the science of learning and direct instruction. So check out the show notes, get involved. There’s literally nothing better in this space than that conference. And I will say that it is even better than the stuff I put on.

So come to it where the cool people meet every year in Eugene, in Eugene, Oregon. Let’s get started then on this sort of post-watch party or celebration of Sold a Story season two. At this point, several episodes have come out. I think we’ll try to talk about the first half as far as we can get of the show. And perhaps by the time you listen to this, the rest of the episodes have come out.

We know that the first episode, I mean, my phone was just off the hook. People were tweeting me and texting me and messaging me. Episode one was called, “It’s Not Just Reading”. A lot of grainy sounding audio footage in this one, going back even to the beginnings. Kurt, I kinda wanted to start with you.

One of the great stories of this was just the clock lesson with Eric. And it talks about a guiding principle of Siegfried Engelmann. If they made a mistake, it was probably my fault, he says. Let’s just start here, cause I think a lot of people were inspired, I think by the mission, the urgency, just the sense of like social justice of DI that they hadn’t heard of before. What is this principle of like, you know, if the student hasn’t learned it, the teacher hasn’t taught it, how does, what does this mean for lots of things, teaching, instructional design and so on?

Kurt: Yeah, it really is an essential concept of direct instruction. It does differentiate it from so many other approaches, including discovery. So I would say, well, first of all, I’ve got to say, Emily Hanford and her team have done such a thorough job of researching and going back. And we’ll see that later when we talk about Project Follow Through. Going into the National Archives and all those boxes that no one else has done.

And it really is phenomenal, the amount of time that they put in, especially for how short those episodes are. I know there’s so much more they could do. But to answer your question, and you could talk from your experience, Zach, that in teacher preparation programs, there is a real stress on letting the child develop, whether you wanna call it the Piaget in stages of development or it’s better to be a guide on the side. That, yeah, you wanna provide a nurturing environment and expose them to different things, but most of the growing comes up with the kid. And so there just generally is not in the field of education, unless you get into behavioral programs, especially at the master’s level of the whole idea of the stimulus and response, that’s how they would say it, or simply the task and the kids response to it.

So it was super key that my father took this and he’s told this story to me before. And you can see as a parent, how much it affected him when he realized that what Eric was doing made perfect sense, that Eric was seeing things from the clock standpoint as though the clock was an animated object or something. And so, boy, did that ever burn into my father, that if the kid is making a response that doesn’t make sense, it does make sense. And it’s his responsibility to figure out why.

Zach: It’s interesting because you have to believe something that maybe we don’t emphasize enough in the world of learning theory. We talk a lot about cognitive load, we talked about space practice, but you first have to begin with just the idea that the student is an inferencing machine. It makes lawful inferences on the basis of, or consistent with the examples that are presented to them. So with the clock example, It was just that the child was interpreting it from their perspective and not from the perspective of the teacher.

Kurt: Right. But this is deeply ingrained. I mean, I remember with my father watching TV commercials, I was a teenager in which they talked about how some kids actually see B and D reversed. So there is a long tradition of trying to find something wrong with the child rather than trying to take a look at the instruction and what might be confusing to the child.

Zach: You bring up B and D, and it’s so important for scope and sequence and how to teach that. There was a story in there, not as much a story, but a description of like, the reason perhaps a child would interpret that way is because for their entire lives, they’ve grown to learn the rule that it doesn’t matter if you change the orientation of the object, The object stays the same. You move a chair around, you move a spoon around, you rotate it. It doesn’t change what it is. All of a sudden, you’re in reading, and you see a B and a D and a P and a Q, and you confuse them.

But that actually makes sense. It actually can be explained. It’s not something that’s about their development or their readiness or whatever.

Kurt: Correct, exactly. And just your listeners can’t see this, but I actually have two different types of cutouts of the BDPQ as an object. So I use that sometimes in explaining to people and they can see, well, of course, kids who grew up in the world of objects and learned that orientation doesn’t matter, it’s perfectly logical for them to confuse those letters.

Zach: Alisa, you taught DI yourself and Kurt kind of mentioned this, that the dominant theory or the dominant approach maybe to, for example, teaching math is like, You facilitate it, you create activities rather than teach it. And we saw the, you know, we heard audio of the math lesson, the famous math lesson that’s on YouTube, where we saw joy and we saw kids just having a blast showing what they know. You know, how does that jive with kind of your experience watching teachers teach with DI, you yourself growing up in this world and teaching with DI?

Alisa: I’m going to speak from a space of having NIFDI support because I think that really is going to share more about my experience. But being able to start with DI and have really strong coaching and training, I had a lot of the rationale as I was going through and I knew what to expect going in. I knew what mastery should look like and I was lucky to have that standard set for me in training. And then for teachers that are new and have been told to facilitate lessons, they move from this space of overgeneralizing student problems. So for example, saying students are struggling and then they start getting the coaching and the training for DI and they start, they’re able to move to very specific student performance problems.

I noticed the students were at mastery on these specific skills and now they’re struggling on the final E-rule, right? So having this really type of structured instruction that is designed very specifically really has helped teachers move from just overgeneralizing to being really specific on student performance problems. And it’s great because all of the instructional guidance that we provide to the teacher and remedies is about the student performance. It’s not about the teacher. It’s looking at the student data and the built-in data that is within the programs and determining what our next steps are.

And so it’s just great to see as a teacher experiencing that at the beginning and moving to understanding where this all leads. And then at the end of the year, not even at the end of the year, I had kindergartners who were on the first grade reading level mid year and ended, were testing into the third grade level, you know, at the end, because that’s, we were using the script, right? And we had the coaching and just being able to see that myself personally, and being able to experience that with teachers that are following the script and implementing with fidelity, they their mindset changes and the buy in is there.

Zach: I definitely as a recipient of NIFDI coaching, like I totally felt that and I felt that like how much more successful I felt when my students were successful and, you know, and the coaching being tied, I think this is so important. And Marcy Stein, a frequent guest on this podcast would make me say this, like, the coaching being embedded in the implementation of the program just makes it so that success, success is so much more likely. The other thing that I thought about with the clock example, right was not really said, but it made me think about how I tried to teach clocks intuitively at the very beginning. Like the first thing is I didn’t really know the key discriminations that kids need to make when doing a clock. So I kind of taught it all together.

And I kind of did that. I I kind of did that style where you just keep on trying to get them to learn the clock, and then you get one more kid who can figure out that when the hour hand is a little bit closer to the next hour, it’s still that hour. And you get another kid the next week. And at some point in time, you kind of give up on a quarter of your class or three of the last final three kids because you have to move on. And what DI does so, so, so well is it does that decomposition of that, you know, of that, of that content area, that task, and then it actually identifies the key discriminations that kids would make.

And I was just thinking like another thing a child could need to know was that could mess up on was just mixing up the hour hand and the minute hand if you just all do it at the same time. And I mean, maybe, maybe, Kurt, you can kind of talk a little bit, it’s a big question, a little bit about the design of these programs. Because that was your kind of closing keynote. I remember maybe two years ago, it was all about that.

Kurt: Yeah, thanks for that. Well, you hit on a key design element, which is to identify what are the key discriminations kids might need to know in order to do this larger thing, time telling. So you need to know which is the hour hand, which is the minute hand, what you say at different points, how you count with each of those and what their position means before you start putting it all together. So the direct instruction programs, first and foremost, do look at the content and try to identify what are those prerequisite skills, pre-skills that should be taught in isolation and then integrated together so that kids are then ready for the more advanced type of application that can occur. And so identifying the pre-skills, teaching them to mastery, and then having an incremental step design where there’s only 10 to 15 percent that’s new each day.

And most of what happens is application review and review of what’s been introduced previously, so that kids are integrating the knowledge that they have been introduced to in previous lessons. And they’re ready now for the next steps going on. So those are all important parts of the design, as well as what was described in the most recent episode having to do with teaching any single concept that’s new to the kids.

Zach: It’s awesome. To that episode, you said something in there that I thought was so key, Kurt, which was that, Zig, your dad, he never uttered the word social justice, but it was at the center of what he did. I heard that and I just, I thought of like kind of what we’ll talk about next about Project Follow Through and these social justice warriors who we wouldn’t have called them that at the time. What does DI mean for equity? And what happens to kids I suppose that don’t get extremely precise, high quality carefully designed instruction?

Kurt: Well, first of all, to ensure that students achieve the most they can in any single year, they’re placed at their skill level. So no matter what their background is, seeing what skills they’ve already mastered is absolutely critical. And then students are grouped and placed homogeneously. And then that greatly facilitates the instruction because it corresponds to this incremental step. If kids are at each step, each lesson, there’s only 10 to 15% new.

So one of the problems that occurs in schools, and I addressed this in this past year’s closing keynote, is that kids are placed, not in DI, but placed way beyond their skill level. So you see this almost tyranny of tier one at grade level that all kids are getting that, even though it’s quite obvious that quite a few of them don’t have the prerequisite skills to be able to really absorb what the lessons are at that level. So they’re spending, and quite often, they’ll spend most of their time in tier one. They maybe they’ll even have an hour or 90 minutes in tier one, and then they’ll get a couple, three times a week, 20 to 30 minutes. So most of the time they are struggling, they’re failing, they’re not absorbing as much, they’re not mastering as much as their peers who already have that those prerequisite skills and the instruction is at the right level.

And then they just have a few times a week to try to close the gap. And so what happens is the gap expands over time. So it’s really ironic and tragic, as I say in my closing keynote, that you have really good people who are trying to do good, that they are trying to make sure that all kids will succeed. They think the way to do it is to give them the opportunity to be successful at grade level stuff, even if it’s quite obvious the kids don’t have those skills. Whereas the best thing to do would be to put them into the efficient program that would actually catch them up.

Zach: And Alisa, you have probably the most experience when it comes to like, actually problem solving, like with placement, problem solving the data, you know, like what do you do when there’s a group and so on? I mean, how does this actually look like an action when you’re in a school that’s like a NIFDI school, a NIFDI like implementation school?

Alisa: Great question. Starting with the placement test is so important because we test everybody. So nobody gets left out. We’re not making these general assumptions that so-and-so is doing really good and they’re going to, nope, we’re going to place them exactly where they’re at because they can also, even if they’re doing well, they can accelerate. So I talked about that a minute ago.

They can go a year, two years beyond in reading, writing, you know, language. And so placement testing, everybody is the starting point to make sure that nobody gets and that really we’re able to determine materials and training from there. So just from a logistics and operations standpoint that’s really necessary for the implementation but going kind of back about the social equity and making sure that students are getting what they need is able to determine based on those prerequisite skills that students have which program is appropriate for them and that’s not always the same for even the same grade level of students and I’ll give an example. So students may come in and are not native English speakers, they may need, you know, a DI language program that’s going to support them. And I’m actually shocked that, you know, there’s schools that I’ve talked to before.

And they’re like, I’m like, what are you doing for the MLL students? And they’re like, we don’t really know, we have them on, you know, a computer app, you know, helping them learn. And then the results, they’re not getting immersive language is not enough for them, they need the explicit language. And so, in terms of social equity to me that thinks about having a strong implementation and understanding what a strong implementation looks like means nobody gets left behind and every single student is able to have the appropriate program and then we track data every single day. There’s no waiting for a benchmark, there’s no waiting for a weekly you know test at the end of the week.

DI already has the data analysis component and every single lesson for mastery, for every single task for independent work, for fluency checks, for writing. So it’s it’s, it really does find the student performance problem on a daily basis. And students are able to be successful right away. And we know that that impacts the trajectory of where they go the rest of the year or the year after that. And we love to start that at a very early age so that we can prevent problems.

Zach: Man, we got to keep going because we got all these episodes. I feel like we’re gonna, we’re gonna run out of time. But we’re somewhere in episode 1.5. And I think we should shift over to two and more stuff’s gonna come out, including what I’ll probably have a very, very troubling or not very politically sound take on small DI at some point in time. But the I wanted to talk about Episode Two, which was called “The Remedy Is Always Teaching”.

And at this point, I I think people might start to start to be figuring out as they listen to this, that this is about capital D I direct instruction. Like it’s not clear, I think, to everyone just yet. And it caused a ruckus online as things always do when it comes to scripts. Scripts and people not understanding the scripts, not understanding their purpose and what they can do. Um, Alisa, let’s just just maybe maybe you’re nodding your head.

Like what what is your what are your thoughts on the on the script controversy of 2026?

Alisa: I think people are making this assumption and they’ve never seen the script. First of all, that’s the first problem. The second. So what does the format look like? What does the script look like?

They don’t even understand the level of detail that the script goes into. And then two, not being able to see a teacher that does it effectively with a group that’s appropriately placed that has the implementation that is started from the very beginning, and that makes a big difference. And thinking about this, when we look at the script, or when I’ve looked at the script with teachers in a campus, we start looking at how the script has written everything, the correction procedure, the individual terms, the teacher doesn’t have to think about those things, the independent work, the assessment, the data analysis, all of that is integrated into the script, and the teacher doesn’t need to go spend time figuring out when and where is the best place to put those pieces in. It makes me think just yesterday I was on LinkedIn and I saw this post and this leader was like, I’m really proud of my teachers because we spent the day unpacking like this lesson. And I just thought they spent the day unpacking, right?

With DI, it’s already created. You can just focus on delivery and the data, the mastery of the students and focus on the students and just thinking about What is the return on the investment in terms of time?

Kurt: I want to make clear, Zach, that we don’t necessarily endorse all scripts. That’d be like endorsing all plays. You know, there’s Shakespeare and then there are other things. So these scripts contain all the elements that we’ve already talked about, the content analysis, the faultless communication, making sure that possible areas of confusion are addressed, teaching one thing at a time, incremental step design. And then they’ve been field tested and tried out and then revised based on those field trials.

As you know, because you interviewed my brother fairly recently about how the Engelmann-Becker Corporation and the that’s the for-profit arm and the authors go through this very exacting process of looking at the field tryouts in the in the student responses and then revising it and retrying them out again. That’s the gold standard. So I just want to make sure we’re not saying, oh, yes, script it. And that’s the thing to do. It depends on what script it and whether it’s been tried out and then revised based on that.

Zach: This is where I’m going to go into small DI for a sec, because I’m just so I’m just so annoyed. I’ve, I’ve fully converted over into the big DI world. And I’d love everyone to join me as someone who’s written a small DI book. The thing is, is that the scripts contain an approach to teaching that is very example-based. It’s largely example-based.

As a teacher, I found that the hardest thing to do. In fact, all I could manage to do was include a non-example in my teaching. And I would talk and I would talk. And this was what people were saying at the time was great explicit instruction, right? And it took so long.

It took teaching with Corrective Mathematics, to be honest. It took actually teaching with a math program where I went, oh, like, I’m not just giving this big old exposition, this big preview. There’s a series of sameness examples and difference examples and these tests that try to get to the edge cases at the end and so on, an expansion of the examples, you cannot do that without these scripts because they program it so that you can do it so that it works every time. You see what I’m saying here?

Kurt: I do see what you’re saying there. I mean, you’re preaching to the choir as they say. We’ll say again though, having the training and the support is critical, making sure those kids are placed is critical. There are other things that I go over in my book about scheduling, about organization, about management. But yeah, you have summarized it quite well between DI and many other forms of explicit instruction.

DI, small DI explicit instruction, it’s like a continuum of different types of things. But in DI, capital DI, uppercase, it’s all been tried out and revised and complete and completely perfected.

Zach: And it sort of kind of brings me to the forgotten experiment this episode three, because I just wanna, I just wanna put this out there that there were kind of small DI-esque models in Project Follow Through, the Kansas model, which are good friends with Wes Becker and with Zig. I think they even had two sites that had big DI programs. I’m not, if my reading is correct. There were other approaches that just sort of had generic heuristics to teaching and that would be somewhat teacher led, I suppose, along with some discovery things and some project-based things, some developmental things. And Project Follow Through was big online.

People discussing it, people debating it. I mean, it’s 2026, maybe Alisa, like you’ve led so many of these presentations, like what, hearing about Project Follow Through and hearing Emily kind of talk about it, what were your initial reactions?

Alisa: I mean, I’m thrilled, it’s been around and it’s just exhausting to just feel like we’re saying, you know, there’s all this research and people aren’t moving and implementing DI, you know? So hearing about Project Follow Through on a larger scale, I was, I was, I’m just, my hope is that people are finally going to listen and, and take action and hear what the research has to say.

Kurt: Let me stress one thing is that the criticism, the critiques, and there were responses, very well written, thought out responses to those critiques, which Emily Hanford doesn’t talk about. That’s one set of the data analysis, comparing to the other title one schools that didn’t receive instruction from any model. And direct instruction came out top on those. But there were also assessments using standardized test measures in reading, language, mathematics, et cetera, that are beyond dispute. There is no comparison that was done at all, no statistical analysis.

Here’s what the kids scored on average. And on average, they scored above the 40th percentile. These are Title I kids who, on average, should score, the greater population of them scores around the 20th percentile. But they were scoring at the 40th percentile. And it went even higher till language was the 50th percentile.

Spelling was at the 51st percentile. So that seems to be missed in a lot of the critiques. It shows that at scale, the achievement gap was largely closed decades ago using this method and using the training and support methods that NIFDI provides to schools and districts.

Zach: Am I right in kind of portraying NIFDI like this, which is like, it’s basically the successor of the implementation model that was originally pioneered in follow through. That it’s the whole wraparound structure, not just the delivery of what the teacher does and the generic type of stuff, just the directness of it. And actually not even just the scripts, but the whole thing, the data collection, the placement, the supervision, the monitoring, the coaching, am I right in portraying NIFDI as sort of the successor of what was pioneered during follow through?

Kurt: Yes, you are. And largely, many of the exact same techniques are used, the same structures. There are some differences. Just during Project Follow Through, you had project managers who lived in the area. And so they provided intensive coaching.

We do some things remotely. You didn’t have Zoom then. We would like to come on site as much as they did back in Follow Through. We always want to come on site because it helps establish relationships and you see so much more as a coach. So that’s one of the differences.

And then there are things that NIFDI has developed that they didn’t have back then, such as in-service videos and in-service follow-up form to go in and make sure that all of the teachers are demonstrating the skills that were covered during an in-service. So rather than the usual, what is it like eight or 12% of what’s covered in professional development in services in general nationally are actually used in the classroom with NIFDI, we we go for 100%. We wouldn’t be having an in service on it, unless it would help teachers, let’s say it’s on think time or error correction, and then the coaches go in and make sure, well, are the teachers providing enough think time? Are they doing the full error correction?

Zach: Alisa, this is for you. This was news to me, and I’ve been trying to memorize the entire canon of DI. Was that the first year of the data in Project Follow Through wasn’t really good for anyone. Even DI, that’s what Emily brings up, is that it just sort of like it was sort of a wash. And Zig is portrayed as saying, it’s going to come out this way.

There are many more years and months, and we’ve been putting a lot of work into this. I’m curious about this because in my experience implementing anything, it often gets a little bit worse before it gets better. Like you just, you have to start off with some agreements and sometimes it feels like you’ve got to kind of generate some consensus. Can you tell me like, what is it like when a school just launches DI? Like what are some of the things to avoid and some of the things to do to make it so that it really gets kicked off correctly.

Alisa: Because it really takes the leadership buy-in. So the people that are going to be making the decisions for master schedules, large-scale implementation purchases, they have to understand the full model in order for them to train and understand the commitment for training for the leaders and schools that they’re going to roll this out to. So if there is not that buy-in and somebody else is making that decision, they don’t have the information to be able to hold people accountable to do that. And then it goes, it trickles down from there, right? Principles, instructional coaches, assistant principals, they all need to be trained and coached as well.

They need to go to the program training. They need to come to our conference and go to the admin institute, go to the coaches training because they need to learn all of how to coach DI. You can’t, I’ve seen a lot of campuses think that they can just have an instructional coach who has done other curriculum come in and they don’t know how to help with DI. They don’t know then the data analysis piece. They don’t know how to model.

They don’t have the rationale. And so having NIFDI support at all of these stages is helpful to give the rationale on why we’re doing things for every single reason, right? Because if you’re not sharing that, then all of the stakeholders aren’t invested. Teachers think you’re doing things arbitrarily. Parents don’t understand the model.

you have the training coaching from the very top and that trickles down and it’s all done cohesively with NIFDI support, then it works really well. And if you’re able to scale that out across other campuses and,

Zach: Kurt, I see your hand up. Go ahead.

Kurt: Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt you because everything you’re saying is golden and it actually is a prerequisite for success, especially long-term or large-scale success. But Alisa, would you agree that there is a learning curve for teachers as well as coaches too, and a super strong need to have that pre-service training in which the focus is on practicing specific formats, specific instructional routines, getting feedback and then practicing throughout the year. And we help schools set up these regular practice sessions in which they’re doing role play. And so it does take, it seems to take teachers at least one year, like the second year they go through it, oh, they’ve been through it all and they understand how this piece when you’re teaching this part here of phonemic awareness, how it helps later on when you do blending when they’re reading words and things of that nature.

Do you agree with that, Alisa?

Alisa: Absolutely. The first year is really tough. You don’t understand everything. But again, I want to just restate and reiterate that having my NIFDI implementation manager when I was first a teacher, her name was Rosella Gibbons. Sorry, I have a bunch of NIFDI people in mine.

She’s life-changing. I still remember her 16 years later being right by my side modeling for me at a DI practice session so that it was never like, and I got you, I’m coming in and I got you, right? She would take the script, model it for me, have me do it and coach, focus on the students. So I mean, there’s definitely, there’s this side by side coaching and teachers, there’s a growth mindset also that needs to be there, right? Being open to being coached, that is a really important part of an implementation is understanding that this is about the students and as tight as we can deliver, the better outcomes they’re going to be, and knowing and owning that that’s going to take some to coaching and practice.

Zach: It kind of reminds me of another F word we had follow through, and the other one is fidelity. I guess people use it in different ways to mean different things. And I would say DI is certainly on the side of having very high fidelity to the model and to the programs. What does that mean and why is it important? When I feel like in education, It’s sort of fidelity has now become a bad word.

It means you’ve lost your autonomy. It’s like you’ve lost your ability to be a creative artist or something. Kurt, take me through that, fidelity.

Kurt: Well, fidelity is absolutely important. I mean, it’s essential. When you have the script, you must adhere to the script. And there are set responses, choral responses. There are also opportunities for kids give their personal reflection.

You’ll see in the script, it’ll say idea and then give some ideas or accept reasonable responses. So within the script, it has flexibility at the right times after the kids have learned the prerequisite skills. Fidelity, you know, I could go through and talk about all of the different aspects of what needs to take place either at the school level with proper scheduling and homogeneous grouping, etc. And then we can take a look at fidelity in terms of the teacher, which has to do with are they following the script using the correct signal, giving enough think time, correcting the errors and all that. But I’ll say I’ll say this, our ultimate, ultimate benchmark of fidelity is also whether the kids are succeeding.

So we take first time correct data to see whether the kids, what are they getting right the first time that they’re encountering something. It should be high and I’ve talked about it elsewhere. But it’s student oriented rather than really strictly having to do every single thing that’s on our list. And I’m thinking in particular about the types of signals that are given. when teachers go through the signals, they’re modeled by the trainer, but when we go into a classroom, if a teacher is using something unorthodox, but all the kids are responding together on signal, we don’t change that.

So we only change, we only coach on what needs to be changed to improve student performance.

Alisa: I just wanna add too, fidelity is the difference between the program working and the program not working. So people will blame the program and say it doesn’t work, but they never were implementing with fidelity, starting with placement tests. And so having the fidelity is what we keep talking about, maximizing the benefits of DI through appropriate training and support goes to that. So you can’t, it’s frustrating when people blame the program and they haven’t even been implementing it with fidelity, it just.

Kurt: In my book, Zach, I actually devote two chapters to the opposite of fidelity, which is pitfalls. In other words, if you want to mess up DI, how can you do it? And so I talked to Alisa and a bunch of other implementation managers and they gave me feedback. And it’s a top 10 list for teachers and a top 10 list for school leaders. there are many ways you can mess up DI by not teaching or implementing the fidelity.

And one of the big ones is simply not placing kids in the program at the lesson that corresponds their skills.

Zach: I do feel like you guys keep calling me out on that one. I’m gonna I’m gonna I’m actually gonna shift to the episode four, which I feel like is probably the most emotional episode and it speaks a lot to why all of this is worth it. You hear all these things and there’s all these parts and there’s a learning curve and there’s these expensive aspects that it take, you know, what it takes to get a school where the kids come from the other side of the tracks, they don’t have all the advantages that their more advantage peers can lean on, but to see those kids narratives and self-concepts change as a result of 20 years of DI program use in Wesley Elementary was just very, very, very inspiring, very even emotional in some parts. You know, Alisa, take us back. What was your reactions to hearing episode four, which the title is, “What Can You Do for My Black Children?”

Alisa: It was emotional. And my thoughts, I was sad because I thought about all of the children in similar situations that didn’t have a principal like him. And I was angry at that in and of itself and thought that was, it goes back to social inequity, not having that opportunity. And I think my other takeaway was how important the principal’s role is in the campus. That is really the driver of the culture that’s going to take place at that campus.

And it talked about him being in classrooms every day. And I think about to school that I’ve worked with or been a part of that have had successful implementations, the principal was at the DI trainings. They were at the coaching trainings. They had their calendars. Those principals on a daily basis are doing instructional rounds and modeling with the teachers and joining our conference calls on data analysis.

The principals know where the students are at. And so it sounds like Thaddeus Lott was doing all of those things and he was a driver and he had high expectations and I was just happy for those students and so excited and also really sad for those students and students still now who are in the similar conditions without a principal that is that motivated and committed to making change and doing their best to support them.

Zach: And Kurt, maybe you could tell us a little bit about what Emily wasn’t able to fit in about Wesley because it sort of lives as a shining sort of, two decades in DI lore. And for many people I’ve talked to always bring up Wesley Elementary. Like what exactly was it? What created the secret sauce there?

Kurt: It really was Thaddeus Lott and the staff that he knew that the children could succeed. He brought in staff members who had the same vision and then he implemented it very strong with fidelity. You know, I have a Substack and my latest post was on this episode. And in there, he came in 2000, he came a couple of times to Eugene to give the conference opening. And one of his messages was that leadership has to be through the program and all the ways that Alisa was talking about to make sure that it’s successful.

If it is successful, it’s wildly successful. And he also had a view for what else could the kids learn? What could they now learn that they know DI? One of the clips that I show, the audio isn’t very good or the visual. They, the kids in one of the classrooms, Killian’s kids, had a correspondence with my father and some of the other authors.

And this is a video clip in which the person with the camera goes around to each of the kids doing independent work. And they describe what they’re doing. And you can just see how confident they are and how much they’re enjoying the different things they’re doing, whether it’s a dictionary exercise or morphographic spelling or what have you. One of the things that was not talked about in that episode is one that I hope I get right now. And that is when Killian’s kids went to visit the University of Houston Medical Center.

And so hopefully I’ll get this correct. I’ll check with us, make sure I’ve got it all correct. But what happened is that they were divided up into smaller groups and there were like graduate teaching assistants who were gonna give them a tour and explain things to them. and they had a skeleton with all the human bones, obviously that’s what a skeleton has. And they asked one of the kids, well, can you name any of the bones?

And yes, that’s something they learn in Corrective Reading Comprehension C. And the kid went through and named, I don’t know, a couple dozen bones. And the graduate student, it’s like out of a B grade movie says, hold on one second. And then he went and he talked to the other ones and said, before you start trying to tell them anything, find out what they know. And after the tour, the director of the medical center came down and said that that group had a better working knowledge of the human body than any other group that had ever come to visit.

Because they also learned about the digestive system, the nervous system, all these things that are covered also in starting in grade too in the reading program, they have informational passages they learn, and then it’s incorporated into studies and review. So that was one story that didn’t make it that has always warmed my heart and shown shown the power of DI that a bunch of I don’t know if there were fourth or fifth graders, they they knew more than any other group of visitors at at major medical center.

Zach: You know, Kurt, it kind of makes me want to turn to something that maybe you missed it because you haven’t had to dealt with the Twitter wars and so on. But I know that Linda Diamond has talked about this on her Substack, but it’s sort of like this misconception of DI that you just brought up right there, that DI can only teach little itty bitty basic skills, like how to sound words out and maybe some math facts and things like that, and that it can’t teach knowledge, Like that it somehow sits out of this other movement or it’s in opposition to another movement around the fact that knowledge is so important to comprehension and to understanding the world around you. And this episode just kind of dispels a lot of that. But of course it was short. I wish it could have gone deeper.

Can you maybe speak to that and the misconception that people have around knowledge in DI?

Kurt: Oh, absolutely. Background knowledge is a focus starting at kindergarten. I don’t know if you saw the webinar I did on the Grade K language program in which I talked about building background knowledge and verbal reasoning. So that starts at the very beginning. In fact, kids go through at least 40 lessons of the language program before we try to start reading because it makes instruction so much, reading instruction so much easier when they understand the language of instruction which is part of the focus those first 40 lessons.

But but all the way up there is incredibly important content. In my book it’s really funny because because in my book I talk about one example that has been used by E.D. Hirsch and others that in order to read a novel or a short story about baseball, you need to understand baseball. And baseball is actually one of the things that’s covered in that reading track starting at grade two. So there’s a phenomenal amount of knowledge and how it’s tied together in certain organizing concepts are important too.

Really, really slick stuff like how do you teach how do you teach about fossils and geologic epochs? Well, my father decided to make the metaphor of the pile. Like if you have a pile, pile of clothes or whatever, whatever is at the bottom went in first. And so then he applies it to geologic strata. There are a lot of really interesting things with regard to convection cycles, which is important the water cycle, and climate, as well as geology too, and the movement of the Earth’s crust.

And kids learn these simple models that they can then use to address all these other aspects of science.

Zach: I don’t understand it. You have to get into a lot of the deeper knowledge and literature around DI, around big ideas, around knowledge systems, about generative relations between, that connects kids across the curriculum. And we’re comparing this, I think a lot of times to so-called knowledge building programs, which are just kind of spaghetti at the wall type of approaches where you just expose them way too high a tolerance for exposure and you expose them to lots of stuff and you hope that kids come out the other side knowing something and of course they don’t. I just don’t understand it. I just don’t understand it at all.

Kurt: Well, it’s part of the paradigm driven thinking. We talked about the developmental levels and this is another one which people learn of a certain paradigm and if you don’t fit into that, then it gets rejected or minimalized. And one of those paradigms having to do with knowledge building is also just having kids read. It’s ironic, it’s a little bit backwards from what Hirsch is talking about, having read a text that has content in it. You need to make sure they can understand all the concepts that are in there before they just start to read novels or other expository texts that contain these different facts and concepts.

Zach: And I think this episode, people got to listen to it, but they came out reading Shakespeare and using the word like, indolent and all of this structured approach that just was so controversial at the time that people were calling, they were calling the school a bunch of cheaters. I mean, it was on the news. I mean, Alisa, what were your thoughts or reactions to that?

Kurt: It just became part of another one of these cheating scandals in which the kids, the expectations were lowered for the kids.

Alisa: I think that’s exactly where my mind went. I was disappointed that that goes back to people’s beliefs that students can’t do things because they haven’t experienced a well-designed program that explicitly teaches that. And so that was what I was thinking is that it was so out of what their expectations were and their experience that it simply couldn’t be true. So it was frustrating to hear that, but I also am glad that it was shared in the sense of people realize that it is possible. And when done with fidelity, the students can really achieve results that are remarkable.

Kurt: And I think a lesson from this is to do observations. You have to understand enough before you go in and observe. You have to understand, for instance, what you’re seeing today is not what the kids will be doing two weeks from now. They’ll be doing something more advanced in which they merge their knowledge into a higher order application. But I think getting people in to see some of these schools and classrooms where DI is well implemented is one of the best ways.

I hope it moves from the Twitter sphere and the conversation sphere to, OK, let’s go in and actually look at places that are doing it well and all of the different aspects of what’s required as well as what the kids are able to do, including higher order thinking. And then pilot it, you know, select the program, make sure the kids’ placement tests into the program do all the things NIFDI can help with this. That’s what we would love to do. But then pilot yourself because there is is someone out there in substack land who I offered to buy the program so that he can try it out. Nope, he refused.

So try it out. You’ll see what we’re talking about rather than just listen to what we’re talking about.

Zach: I think we’ve got to close here with the promise that we can come back because there are more episodes coming out, yeah, it’s just crazy. I mean, like, you know, we’ve got to talk about some of our friends appearing here on the next one. I mean, Doug Carnine just sounds so good. It’s just, we’ve got to talk about all of these different things. There’s just more to talk about, but we’ve got to close out here for this episode.

Listeners, thanks for indulging us in an opportunity to just talk about these episodes that just came out for Sold a Story. Check out the show notes below for how to get involved. I know that sometimes you can start slow and so you can start small. I guess one place to start would be Direct Instruction: A Practitioner’s Handbook. That’s by Kurt Engelmann, who you just heard from.

And you can check out nifdi.org and you can start with something small, a small pilot that takes care or solves a problem in one area of your school before you can get to that big immersion view that we’ve talked about, you know? And so if you were inspired by this episode and by Emily’s investigation, definitely reach out. Alisa, Kurt, thank you. I can’t wait for our next, our part two of this Sold a Story watch party. Take care, both of you.

Kurt: Thank you so much, Zach. Great to talk with you.

Alisa: Thanks for having us on.