ViewPoint; Direct instruction

If we know something about the way people learn it it should logically imply something about the way we teach absolutely critical is the building of those reading skills it just underlies everything. I don't believe that the brain grant itself. Thank you. Recht instruction in the public school system. Tonight you. Viewpoint with the community spotlight shined on island ideals an issue beyond viewing the Western Pacific Smolin Public Affairs magazine show. You. Need to. Have a Child Left Behind Act of 2001 states that every child should be able to read by the end of the third grade.

William J Bennett U.S. Secretary of Education under President Reagan said the elementary school room is sublime and most solemn responsibility. The task of teaching every child in it to read any school that does not accomplish this has failed. Tonight on viewpoint we examine the struggle to provide a minimum fundamental public education for elementary school students. Historically schools and the public school system has easily met Secretary Bennett's qualification for failure. Making reading a top priority of primary education is one of the specifically stated goals of the No Child Left Behind Act through the Reading First initiative. The U.S. Department of Education provides funding for scientifically based reading programs designed to ensure the achievement of this minimal goal that every child should be reading by the end of the third grade. The typical one third grade over the last decade or so read barely half as well as the average

third grader in the rest of the United States. By the time students become seniors in high school and far too many don't make it that far they are hopelessly behind. And I want to tell you that when I look at the statistics and the numbers are astounding. At George Washington only 48 percent of the 12th graders were reading at level 10 at John F. Kennedy High School. It was it was 60 percent of the kids would be level by the 12th grade cited such as high school won't get we 90 percent reading at grade level and at Southern high school for kids for twenty seven percent and we had great level profound systemic reform has been needed for years. But the system the administrators and the teachers were doing previously clearly didn't work.

GPL says has embraced a controversial but dynamic program to achieve positive change to meet the fundamental essential goal of teaching every child to read direct instruction. Our public elementary schools have undergone a change in curriculum an instructional approach. Over the last few years and experience they have shared with thousands of schools across the country. It is controversial here and in most other places where it has been put into practice. Direct Instruction force is serious and often extensive adjustments for teachers students and parents. Some welcome even embrace these changes. Others oppose D-I just as ardently and for various reasons. Direct Instruction with choir is not just replacing the curriculum and materials but it also necessitates a change perhaps a radical change in educational philosophy and teaching style. Most teachers including those trained at University of Guam have little or no

significant background in D-I whole language is the approach to literacy Most teachers and parents experience as students and it is predominant in college teacher training across the country. Understanding direct instruction takes us to the root of educational theory. What is it and what makes it so different from the previous approach. GPA says had powerful motivation to implement a different program even a drastically different program. But why direct instruction. To learn about direct instruction and the story of public schools. We talked in the viewpoints studio with the people responsible for the program on Guam. I'm here with Rose RIAs the reading and the acting associate superintendent for elementary schools for the public school system and with her is Dr. Donna du against the project. For in the

National Institute of direct instruction. And these women join me today to discuss education reform. Donna thank you so much for being available. Thank you. That is directly. A direct instruction is a system of instruction that is really based on. A theory of instructional design. Developed by the authors of these programs and empirically tested. It's been recognized and the author of a woman has been recognized by the. The National Association of scientific researchers as being really the only. Fully. Research based theory of instructional design that draws from. A. Developmental psychology and cognitive psychology. Behavioral psychology and and basically it takes what we know from those fields of

research and says if if we know something about the way people learn it it should logically imply something about the way we should teach. And so. Using the research and the knowledge that we have from those different fields. The authors of the program conducted. Have conducted research over the past 45 50 years. On the way children learn and what's the best way to teach them. And that has evolved into a clearly articulated theory of instructional design which is the underpinning of a number of curriculum materials. In math and reading and language arts. So it is. A systemic approach to teaching. That. Doesn't leave anything to chance so to speak. I know many different programs and curricula designed to address the needs of underachieving are under-served kids are on the market. Why did the public school system choose direct instruction.

Well actually Jackie this began way back in 1999 and has been what five years. OK. Back in 1999 2000. There was several division heads that got together and we kind of looked at the division heads kind of looked at some of the data that we had as far as how our kids are functioning with the set nine at the time and what they had found was our kids were pretty much steady in the 20th percentile. Rick Ross the across the district schools were the 20th percentile ranks so obviously they knew that something had to happen. We needed to do some kind of reform. At the time that No Child Left Behind was just starting up at that time. And so what had happened was they got together and said Well let's look at different things they established at the time the reading the Reading First Committee that that had all these principles in it. I think there was maybe about 10 to 12 and also some of the

division heads and they got together and said let's look at the programs that are available. Well that's interesting to know because certainly when I first began hearing about D I was under the impression that that was something that was just recently implemented. I had no idea that truly it had been a full adoption process and quite quite a bit of dialogue going on for years leading up to it. So like I said number of people involved in it. Yes. Yes. What is the difference between direct instruction and language or the phonics method of teaching reading and why do you consider direct instruction to be more desirable. Well actually direct instruction uses a phonics based approach to teaching beginning reading skills. OK. And Whole Language is more of what we call whole word methodology and historically those have always been kind of the two. Main. Models for teaching reading. And I don't know if you're old enough to remember Dick and

Jane. Dick and Jane is a good example of that whole word methodology. That where you're just taught to recognize whole words and initially with a limited number of words. Go go go go. Run. OK so you have very few words and a high number of repetitions of words right. Gradually the reader's progress over different levels and where. You've. Dramatically reduced the number of repetitions on words and dramatically increase the number of new words being introduced. But it's still whole word you're expected to recognize that word and just read it. AS. The as we call it the fast way with no breaking it down into its parts.

The problem with the whole word methodology historically has been. That. The data over the last. 50 years really doesn't support the use of that model. And. But we're talk about Dick and Jane at one time it was used in 85 percent of the schools in states so they had a pretty good corner on the market and the research really started coming out saying wait a minute. The phonics based approach seems really to be more effective. And those are the old McGuffey Readers and some of the stuff from the late eighteen hundred. It's kind of like if you got 85 percent of the market you really want to hold on to that share of the market right. So it's kind of like to dress it up in some terminology bring out something else. And so in the 70s it came back out as language experience and we were teaching kids to. Write their own stories and we would write them down and then they would you know

kind of mysteriously learn to read these Words because they were interested in reading those words because they were their own stories. And so it still wasn't a very systematic approach and it still basically used the whole word. Approach. If you look at any of the phonics based programs and they've evolved over those 50 years also. But. Essentially what they say is that there's enough regularity in the English language. That if we teach children letters correspondences in other words that this letter usually represents the sound and words we give some kind of a strategy for using that information and applying it that they have skills are generalizable. It's not just rote memorization of a few words. And in fact there's research that's specifically at that. That you can use rote memorization and a mastery learning approach. You could teach this group of kindergartners this bank of 40 words. And when they're finished. They know those 40

words. But can the experimental group used a direct instruction approach. And they taught them the sounds that the letters may recall as sounding out strategies so that they could systematically say those sounds in a left or right progression. In the sounds together and then say the word THE FAST WAY. At the end of the study they would receive the same amount of instruction in terms of minutes. But a different kind of instruction. And so at the end they could read the forty words and could read the forty words but when they did a test for generalization. These kids could read on an average of eight hundred fifty words. You know they never say because they had a generalizable skill and a strategy for how to use that skill a generalizable strategy and skill knowledge so. Basically those two camps have evolved and

continue to evolve. And in the phonics camp you've seen programs that were what we call. Word family programs at Fat Cat. You know they they're they're at family are they and family and basically they've sought to teach those letters correspondences and give kids some strategies for how to use that in Word reading. Where the whole word methodology has continued to evolve in the most recent reincarnation so to speak was the whole language and the philosophy behind behind the whole language was kind of like if you just kids in this rich literacy environment. That they're going to develop this desire to learn to read and that that they are going to begin to memorize and remember these words and. The research really shows us that.

It will work for some kids. Unfortunately the true test of a program is the bottom 30 percent not the top 30 percent of your kids. And just like many of us learn to read with Dick and Jane. Fortunately I think many did learn to read very well with Dick and a lot of programs call themselves research based but I'm talking about. A research background where you have control groups and experimental groups and you've controlled for the intervening variables and you can actually show that the treatment did in fact work and it worked for a variety of kids under a variety of conditions. And so your research findings are in fact generalizable to the general public. While the whole language fad really grabbed in the United States it didn't really have that that base of research to support it. And in fact Robert Slaven

who's a well-known researcher and the author of success for heights. Robert. Kaplan refers to it as the G-Wiz school of educational research. And you know it's kind of worked in my class and it's a wonderful kind of thing to do with kids. But you know. When you get past that level of research you don't find hardcore results that support. The use of the program. What about the research design is that important. But what's also important is the development of a structured monitoring for students. We can monitor students performance on a daily basis. We have. Several forms out of the schools and it's work for the teachers. They have to

they have to monitor their kids and on a daily basis document how many lessons they're teaching the kids. And after five to 10 lessons they have to to to test the kids doing the mastery tests they would have to do that with the kids and then document that and then at the end of the week they look back at the documentation at the end of two weeks they look back at the documentation how the kids are doing and what what exactly did what didn't. To go back in. So that's a fantastic that's a fantastic way to. Are you looking at. Be focused. They're teaching. They're not only directly teaching but they're looking at the data and making decisions based on that data needs to be accelerated or needs to be decelerated.

I think really become noticeable for some people here is that it's working for the academically gifted as well as the kids at the other end of the continuum. There were a lot of people who had hesitations about the program with higher level kids because they are gifted kids. This program allows us to do is assess any child and then place the child in the continuum of skills. Based on their individual needs and then gives us ways of accelerating those children that can be accelerated the faster pace of. Slowing the pace of instruction and teaching to the needs of the child at the other end of the continuum and allows us to monitor the progress of both of those kinds of kids so we can accelerate or remediation whenever needed.

And that way we're not leaving out 30 percent of the kids or 10 percent of the kids were really trying to address kids along the entire learning that direct instruction is drilling. Designed to be teachers teachers students and education itself. Intellectually restrictive. Do you understand these criticisms and responsive. Understanding on their part that beyond the kind of overt behaviors that they might see in the classroom to the instructional design. And this is what I was talking about earlier is talking about effective teaching behaviors. The research about effective teachers is that the things they explicitly teach and explain and they have a high ratio of student response to teacher response they can

overtly monitor of kids or get right classroom very fast and they're asking a lot of questions and kids are responding orally to those questions. They do a lot of what we call corrective feedback. When a kid gets the right answer and they do what we call sustained feedback and that's where they make sure the kid understands how to find the right answer or get the right answer. So those behaviors are all behaviors that were identified in this body of Educational Research called effective teaching research. And so direct instruction programs affective teaching behaviors are effective to yours. And it may appear to be robotic or drill like because teachers are eliciting a lot of responses.

The instructional design. The way the programs are put together. The sequence and introduce skills the skills are woven. And progress into more complex context. From very simplified introductions. The way strategies are introduced very overtly but transitioned into a covert application of the strategy and structural design principles that kind of underlie the way the programs are put together. That aren't necessarily readily. Readily available to the naked eye so to speak. Even though the program is designed to anticipate and address many of the common criticisms I have concerns many people have publicly expressed their concerns to the Education Policy Board.

The pros in the way it's put together and it really does teach kids how to think how to reason inductively deductive logic and it. The thinking skills. A lot of people from taxonomy that are the more literal thinking skills recall and recognition and recall. What people tend to think of as the rote kind of style but it also teaches what we call critical thinking skills which come by. Two or more of the basic thinking skills. It teaches higher order thinking skills that are like problem solving thinking skills where it requires a strategy. To a number of lower order things skills in a systematic way to come up with an answer to a problem or solution to a problem or come up with a new idea. That's where analytical thinking skills.

I believe they can first learn is a knowledge part which is really the basis to our education system and comprehension comprehension announces its own. I think personally that it's weird to be in such a is to listen to somebody and understand how they used in order to get yourself in a little piece. If we're saying we want to be in the current 50th percentile in the middle of the crux of this or that. You know. This is

where our kids have to be able to perform. In order to attain that. I don't think percentile scores tell the whole story. Certainly not. But if we have students mastery one in kindergarten and mastery in first grade then we are going to have children that aren't very literate. And very ready for the middle school or the high school curriculum when they get there. We're going to be sending a child to middle school academically significantly different. From the children the beginning of the past. Just implementing the program it's not just the other variables such as teacher training. A lot of training contract to train our people. As well and we have

about 20 right now but. We have. And we have teachers that it has been doing this for the last three. So there's a lot of teachers. We identified the teacher we're looking at students. We need to connect with a possible student teacher behavior that's not happening. We have to coach them as well. That's one of the big things that we're starting implementation. We have a POD structure. We

have a district. Will help four five six schools have their specific Cod. Not only that but we're coming into schools with implementation managers and the reading coordinators getting into the classrooms looking at the teachers looking at the data and say OK this is what needs to happen and we have to bring this kid back you know to two to three less so that he can master these skills because it doesn't seem that he mastered this very very very specific in looking at not only the behaviors or performance of the kids but also the teachers. Some of the community concern is about direct instruction as a program but much of it seems to be about the way the program is being implemented. And I understand it. It's just that we do not know

what we what we like to do with the nifty modern ways to get kids to a certain level of reading. And. And make sure that they can even read the content materials and also in the process of that we provide integrated science and social studies. But we get absolutely critical is the building of those reading skills it just underlies everything. Reading skills underlie everything. Is effectively implemented direct instruction the answer. For many the proof will be in the test scores over the next few years for others will be in the growth of their own children. The proof is in our future. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you next time on the bottom.