Direct Instruction

Description

Built for mastering procedural knowledge, direct instruction involves four main elements.

1. Modeling - Teachers demonstrate the skill while narrating their actions.
2. Directed Practice - Teachers walk students through each step, explaining the reasoning behind each step. (teacher-driven questions)
3. Guided Practice - Students work through the process with the support of the teacher and other students. (student-driven questions)
4. Independent Practice - Students work through the process individually.

Why it works...

When present, the following characteristics of direct instruction lead to increased student outcomes.

• Effective Modeling - The teacher models procedures in a way that is clear and understandable to students by not only narrating the actions within each step, but by also covering, metacognitively, the thought process that goes into each step in the process.
• Emerging Independence - Teachers are deliberate about providing learners with a clear path to obtain independent mastery of the processes taught.
• Learning by Questioning - Teachers effectively mix procedural (what) and conceptual (why) questions to support deep understanding for students.
• Ongoing Assessment - The teacher is as available as possible to provide support for students throughout the process of mastering the processes covered.

How to plan it...

1. Identify the skill students need to learn.
2. Break the skill into parts or steps and create questions to support students in developing their own understanding of the skill.
   1. “What do you think should come next?”
   2. “Why do you think we did it that way?”
3. Model the skill using the developed questions.
4. Create examples that can be used for practicing individual chunks or parts of the skill. Students need to be able to practice the chunks before they practice the entire skill.
5. Build practice time for the skill into the lesson.
6. Provide students with an opportunity to apply the skill beyond the classroom somehow.

Tech Integration...

For strictly procedural concepts presented via Direct Instruction, videos and screencasts offer a great way for technology to support the modeling phase of Direct Instruction. Teachers can create a video to model the process taught and provide it to students in a way that is repeatable and accessible beyond the classroom. Once students have practiced and mastered the process, they can turn around and create their own videos demonstrating mastery of the process. Procedural knowledge is best assessed when it can be performed so that students can demonstrate their understanding of what to do and why they’re doing it.