Direct Instruction

Direct Instruction

            Direct Instruction is both useful and can be helpful in assisting students learning in the classroom.  The use of direct instruction is for the teacher to model the lesson through a lecture and offer guided practice for the individual students in order for them to master the lesson or learning target.  Looking at two different sources, I was able to see based off of my own biases that direct instruction, while not vastly accepted nowadays as an extremely useful form of teaching, can actually assist the individual in ways that cooperative learning cannot.  For instance, in the article, “The Development of Early Academic Success: The Impact of Direct Instruction’s Reading Mastery,” Stockard suggests that direct instruction has actually proven more useful for reading in students in kindergarten through 3rd grade.  The study that they did found out that more students were at a higher reading level and were able to comprehend a larger range of material after being taught in this way.  There is also the Direct Instruction website that discusses how this particular technique has allowed students to grow as readers.

            In my experience, direct instruction in moderation has been useful for me in learning specific skills and goals throughout my student life.  I agree that some direct instruction is necessary, such as going through math and some of my writing skills I learned through direct instruction.  I also agree with the article that direct instruction is useful for age’s kindergarten through 3rd grade, though cooperative learning should take place just as equally.  Through my student teaching, however, I can see how teachers would lean more to direct instruction based on how often the students are on their phones and utterly distracted most of the time.  Teachers need to be able to adapt to more noise and I do not have enough experience to give more advice on the subject, since I am pretty new at this whole thing. 

            As for me as a teacher, I have to keep in mind that direct instruction is a useful way of teaching in some instances and cooperative instruction can sometimes not be the right way to teach a goal or learning target.  Based on what I have investigated, I will probably not view direct instruction with such disdain, rather calculate when the time would be appropriate for me to use this teaching process to help better my students in the classroom.  This research is highly applicable to my students in that it affects how they will learn the material necessary to precede to other areas of life and into high school.  If I used direct instruction all of the time, my students might not always reach that deeper understanding nor advance to a higher level of thinking that they would through indirect instruction or cooperative learning.  Now that I have more of an understanding of the positive sides of direct instruction, I would definitely use this more often than I have and potentially have a little more control in my 5th period classroom. 

            The most profound part of doing this research for me was finding my own biases that I was not even sure I had in the first place.  We are told that direct instruction is the old school answer for teaching and some professors have said that only lazy teachers use direct instruction.  After understanding the depth of direct instruction, however, I think it is most important to try all different kinds of teaching models and use them all during appropriate times in teaching.  Holding on to a bias with that kind of fervor can actually cause a teacher to be just as close-minded as the teachers we are told to never become.

Works Cited

“NIFDI-National Institute of Direct Instruction.” NIFDI-National Institute of Direct Instruction. Web. 20 May 2014.

Stockard, Jean and Kurt Engelmann. “The Development of Early Academic            Success: The Impact of Direct Instruction’s Reading Mastery.”            JBAIC. Vol. 1, No. 1. Pgs 1-24.