What ‘Sold a Story’ Misses About Direct Instruction (Opinion)

Journalist Emily Hanford, known for her “Sold a Story” podcast series on literacy instruction, has just released “Sold a Story 2,” focused on instruction, especially direct instruction

. Her first series apparently had an influence on the widespread acceptance of the science of reading. Could Season 2 do the same for the heavily scripted Direct Instruction program?

Today’s post is the first in a series from educators commenting on the new release.

‘Desperate Efficiency’

Nathan Parham is currently a special education administrator in the Bay Area with 20-plus years of experience in education as a teacher, mentor, and basketball coach:

Literacy was hardly my concern when I was first hired as a teacher in 2003.

I was hired to run a computer lab and teach computer skills at a rising K-8 school. I inherited a lab of already-outdated Windows 95 machines and spent a large part of my time before school started cannibalizing machines to get things running. So when I was first told that the school used a Direct Instruction program for reading, I didn’t quite realize that Direct Instruction was an entire system of education. But eventually, I was tasked with supporting more difficult classrooms as a de facto aide.

We had a structured daily literacy block in which students were assigned to ability groups in designated classrooms; that meant a 5th grader could share a classroom with a 2nd grader. (The enduring image I have of that literacy block is one particularly tall 5th grader who had been held back a couple of years at a 2nd grade desk during the block.)

Teachers would read from a script that they held, and students would chorally respond with the expected answers. Students were periodically reassessed to determine whether they were ready to move up a level. I have little recollection of all the machinations of it; Direct Instruction at my school was a strictly behaviorist stimulus-response method in ability groups. And what’s important is that this wasn’t just a school employing lowercase direct instruction principles drawn from cognitive science. Uppercase Direct Instruction is a comprehensive school reform model

for reading, writing, and math.

“First word, what word?” is the phrase that still echoes in my mind as I think back to that time.

In those harrowing early years of No Child Left Behind, Direct Instruction appeared to check all the boxes for engagement, time on task, and data-driven instruction. Looking back now, I find it’s also easy to see how elements of what we were doing then might bear some vague resemblance to an early MTSS framework

or Walk To Read model

.

Most importantly, there was little to no shaming of students if they were placed in classrooms well below their grade level. I vividly remember that 5th grader happily cramming himself into a 2nd grade desk and enthusiastically chanting choral responses along with his younger peers despite all the reasons to expect the opposite. In that space, he was competent, and if ever there was a selling point for Direct Instruction, that student was it: In a way, it was encouraging to see him “engaged” in “instruction” during the Direct Instruction block compared with other classes.

“At low performing schools attended by the least privileged, many educators have embraced Direct Instruction as a means of teaching basic skills,” wrote historian Jack Schneider in the Direct Instruction chapter

of his book How Scholarship Becomes Common Knowledge in Education. “They do not disagree with those who believe that students should be nurtured intellectually-taught to be analytical thinkers, amateur philosophers, and social critics. Nor do they disagree with the proposition that classrooms should be culturally sensitive and democratic places. But their immediate concerns are with teaching children to read, write, and compute, as well as with maintaining some semblance of order.”

All of these sentiments came flooding back to my mind as I was listening to the first two episodes of “Sold a Story 2,” specifically a moment in the second episode where APM Reports correspondent Emily Hanford references a clip of Direct Instruction architect Siegfried Engelmann describing the goal of his instructional model.

“The main goal of effective instruction should be to use time with desperate efficiency,” Engelmann can be heard saying in Episode 2. “I mean treat time as the most precious product you have.”

That line caught my attention because I could never shake the feeling that there was a problematic theory of mind underlying all that “desperate efficiency”: It essentially regarded the human mind as a black box, an empty void to be filled in order to deliver some output at a later date. It’s the information processing theory of learning

in which “ ... the mind is compared to a computer: it takes in information, encodes it, stores it, retrieves it, and produces a behavioural output.”

Clearly, that resonates with my academic background; it wasn’t why I decided to pursue a career in the classroom.

While Hanford seems to express bewilderment at why Direct Instruction didn’t immediately take off, Schneider lays out a whole host of reasons why people struggled to embrace it.

“For their part, teachers tend to side with the opposition, usually finding Direct Instruction philosophically incompatible with their beliefs and values,” wrote Schneider. “Direct Instruction seems to threaten teacher professionalism. It reeks of an approach to educational psychology long out of favor. And it is used primarily among at-risk populations, creating for them an educational experience quite different than that of their more privileged peers. Consequently, many teachers see Direct Instruction as a program that strips teaching and learning of their deepest rewards—a program that turns teachers into machinists and students into products.”

Others have already discussed

the views on teacher autonomy already present

in this season of the podcast series. But given my experience, we cannot have a discussion about Direct Instruction as an instructional intervention without also grappling with the fact that pedagogies of compliance

tend to be sold to schools serving our most vulnerable student populations.

We have to ask ourselves whether the efficient pursuit of improved performance on tests is actually what we want for our children, particularly those who already experience barriers to success due to classism, racism, and white flight. To loosely quote Schneider’s chapter, “Whatever people’s feelings about DI, it was difficult to argue with the fact that it raised test scores

… . As a method of last resort, it endures.”

I’d like to believe we can aspire to more.

Thanks to Nathan for contributing his thoughts.

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org

. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on X at @Larryferlazzo

or on Bluesky at @larryferlazzo.bsky.social

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