Chapter 9 Summary

Teaching Strategies for Direct Instruction

Chapter Overview
This chapter presents seven instructional events that form the structure of the lesson
plan and strategies for direct teaching that include explanations, examples, review,
practice, and feedback in the context of a presentation and recitation format that builds
on subsequent chapters. This chapter provides a variety of teaching strategies that can
be used to compose lesson plans and to create and maintain an atmosphere of interest
and variety in the classroom using a direct instruction format.
Student Learning Objectives
The students will do the following:

 Distinguish between Type 1 and Type 2 outcomes and explain how your selection of
each impacts your instructional choices.
 Use direct instruction in your diverse classroom to promote student interaction, respond
to unique responses, and demonstrate support and caring for students’ needs.
 Recognize when direct instruction is the appropriate choice for achieving mastery of
content.
 Implement direct instruction strategies that allow you to monitor and diagnose
students to gauge their progress, present and structure new content, ensure guided
student practice, provide feedback and correct errors, provide opportunities for
reaching mastery, and conduct regular reviews of content over time.

CATEGORIES OF TEACHING AND LEARNING

There are two types of broad learning outcomes:

Type 1— emphasizes facts, rules, and action sequences and presents behaviors at
lower levels of complexity in the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains. Facts,
rules and action sequences are most commonly taught using instructional strategies
that emphasize knowledge acquisition. Direct instruction strategies are most effective
with Type 1 learning outcomes.

Type 2— emphasizes concepts, patterns, and abstractions and presents behaviors that
are higher in complexity in the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains.
Concepts, patterns, and abstractions are most commonly taught using strategies that
emphasize inquiry or problem solving. Type 2 learning outcomes are best taught
through indirect instruction.
INTRODUCTION TO DIRECT INSTRUCTION STRATEGIES
The teaching of facts, rules, and action sequences are most efficiently taught through
direct instruction. Direct instruction is a teacher-centered strategy in which you are the
major information provider. The role of the teacher is to pass facts, rules, or action
sequences on to students in the most direct way possible. The lecture format for direct
instruction is a quickly paced, highly organized set of interchanges that the teacher
controls, focusing exclusively on acquiring a limited set of predetermined facts, rules, or
action sequences (see Table 9.4 and Figure 9.2). Indirect instruction, which is
discussed in Chapter 10, emphasizes concept learning, inquiry, and problem solving to
teach concepts, patterns, and abstractions.
Direct instruction strategies work best when the teacher’s purpose is to disseminate
information not readily available from texts or other information sources. Direct
instruction strategies can heighten students’ interest in the text and/or enable the
achievement of content mastery.

Mastery learning is directly related to the time students spend engaged in the learning
process. The goals of mastery learning are achieved by the instructional sequence of
reviewing, presenting new content, practicing, providing feedback, and re-teaching (see
Figure 9.3). There are teaching situations when direct instruction is not appropriate;
these include presenting complex material having objectives at the analysis, synthesis,
and evaluation levels of the cognitive domain or content that must be learned gradually
over a long period of time.

DIRECT INSTRUCTION STRATEGIES

The six phases in direct instructional strategies are:
1. Monitoring and diagnosing – to gauge progress and inform teaching. The function
of this step is to emphasize the relationship between lessons. This is particularly
helpful for engaging students who do not have the appropriate level of prior
knowledge for the task.
2. Presenting and structuring new content. Material needs to be partitioned and
subdivided and taught in small steps. If portions are too large the teacher will lose
student attention. Some ways to structure content are as follows:
o Part-whole relationship – topic is introduced in its general form then divided into
subdivisions that are easily digested
o Sequential relationships – content is taught according to how they occur in the
real world
o Combinations of relationships – to bring together in a single format combination
of elements or dimensions that influence the use of facts, rules, and sequences.
o Comparative relationships – in this structure, the teacher places different
categories of content or topics side by side so learners can compare and contrast
them.
o Rule-example-rule order – as exemplified in the previous section’s scripted direct
lesson.
3. Guided student practice is the third step in the direct instruction model. There are
several suggestions for this step, where practice is elicited from presented material
with a desired behavior.

Prompting strengthens and builds learners’ confidence by encouraging them to

formulate the correct response by using some aspects of the answer that have
already been given. Prompting includes the following:
o Verbal prompts—cues, reminders, or instructions to learners that help them
correctly perform the skill being taught
o Gestural prompts—model or demonstrate a particular skill for learners that they
are to perform. Gestural prompts can be used routinely and are helpful when the
teacher anticipates the learner may make a mistake.
o Physical prompts—use of hand-over-hand assistance to guide the learner to
the correct performance
o Least-to-most intrusive prompting—least intrusive prompts should be used
when first guiding a learner’s performance. Verbal prompts are least intrusive and
physical prompts are most intrusive. Overuse of intrusive prompts may impede
learners in operating independently of the teacher in developing the skill or
behavior.
o Full-class prompting—checks for understanding and responses using the full
class; may also include the use of ordered turns

Modeling demonstrates what you want learners to do or think. It is a direct teaching

activity that allows students to imitate from demonstration or infer from observation
the behavior to be learned. The four psychological processes needed for learners to
benefit from modeling include the following:
o Attention—learners look and listen.
o Retention—teacher models or demonstrates so learners can retain and repeat.
o Production—learners do what the teacher modeled or demonstrated.
o Motivation—learners experience desirable outcomes, usually teacher praise.

4. Providing feedback and correcting errors. There are four broad categories of
student responses based on studies by Rosenshine and Stevens, with direct
instruction strategies for handling them.
1) Correct, quick, and firm—the student response teachers strive for as a result of
instruction. This most frequently occurs during the latter stages of a lesson or
unit, but it can occur almost anytime if content is divided into portions or sections.
2) Correct but hesitant—frequently occurs in a practice and feedback session at
the beginning or middle of a lesson. Positive feedback is essential, and the
teacher can restate the answer to assure the student that the response is correct.
3) Incorrect because of carelessness—can occur due to time of day, fatigue, or
inattentiveness. The teacher should acknowledge that the answer is wrong and
move immediately to the next student for the correct response or allow the
student to correct him or herself.
4) Incorrect because of lack of knowledge—typically occurs during the initial
stages of a lesson or unit. The teacher can provide hints, probe, or change the
question or stimulus to a simpler one that engages the students in finding the
correct response.

Strategies for incorrect responses include the following:

o Reviewing key facts or rules needed for a correct solution
o Explaining the steps used to reach a correct solution
o Prompting with clues or hints representing a partially correct answer
o Taking a different but similar problem and guiding the student to the correct answer
Students can make both active and passive responses. Active responding includes
orally responding to a question, writing out the correct answer, calculating the
correct answer, or physically making a response. Passive responding includes
listening to the teacher’s answer, reading about the correct answer, or listening to
classmates recite the correct answer.
5. Mastery through independent practice. Independent practice provides the
opportunity to make a meaningful whole out of the bits and pieces in a carefully
controlled and organized environment. This results in the processes of unitization,
combining facts and rules into an action sequence, and automaticity, automatic
responses.
Guidelines for promoting effective independent practice are as follows:
o Students should understand the reason for practice.
o Effective practice is delivered in a manner that is brief, non-evaluative, and
supportive.
o Practice should be designed to ensure success.
o Practice should be arranged to allow students to receive feedback quickly.
o Practice should have the qualities of progress, challenge, and variety.

To ensure students become actively involved in the practice provided, teachers

should (1) be direct—talk the students through the practice; (2) schedule the practice
as soon as possible after eliciting and feedback exercises; and (3) circulate—walk
around the classroom to provide feedback, ask questions, and give explanations to
all students as equally as possible.
6. The final direct instruction strategy involves conducting regular reviews, making
sure of learning and which areas require re-teaching. Weekly and monthly reviews
will help determine whether the pace is right before covering too much content. Also,
students receive a second chance to grasp material they may have missed or only
partially understood. Finally, weekly and monthly reviews create momentum
resulting from gradually increasing the coverage and depth of each weekly review.

OTHER FORMS OF DIRECT INSTRUCTION

There are other means to a direct instruction model besides a presentation-recitation
format. These include computer-assisted instruction, peer and cross-age tutoring,
various forms of audio-lingual and communication tools, and the use of the computer
and C D-R O M as an information and practice provider. As you consider these
approaches be aware that there is less teacher control with these methods.

CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE DIRECT INSTRUCTION

In classrooms with a range of individual and cultural differences, student engagement in the
learning process can be a challenge during direct instruction. Hesitancy to respond may be
cultural, and metacommunication—body posture, language, eye contact used
unintentionally or intentionally by the teacher—can influence student responses. Student
engagement is promoted by accepting unique learner responses, reducing competitiveness
by increasing opportunities for social reinforcement, promoting peer interaction by
facilitating group achievement, and conveying a sense of nurturing and caring.
To counter any negative metacommunication and convey a sense of nurturance and caring
teachers can:

 Use appropriate examples to clarify concepts and model performance

 Accept the student’s way of understanding new concepts
 Reduce the feelings of competitiveness
 Increase opportunities for social reinforcement
 Facilitate group achievement
 Use culturally appropriate eye contact
 Recognize longer pauses and slower tempo
 Respond to unique or different questions during response
 Balance compliments and reinforcement equally