Direct Instruction

Excerpted from Educational Psychology 3rd Edition, John Santrock, 2008:

"The direct instruction approach is a structured, teacher-centered approach characterized by teacher direction and control, high teacher expectations for students' progress, maximum time spent by students on academic tasks, and efforts by the teacher to keep negative affect to a minimum. An important goal in the direct instruction approach is maximizing student learning time (Stevenson, 2000).

"Some experts in educational psychology emphasize that many effective teachers use both a constructivist and a direct instruction approach rather than either exclusively (Darling Hammond & Bransford , 2005; Schwartz & others, 1999). Further, some circumstances may call more for a constructivist approach, others for a direct instruction approach. For example, experts increasingly recommend an explicit, intellectually engaging direct instruction approach when teaching students with a reading or a writing disability (Berninger, 2006 )."