Direct instruction at home
Direct instruction is a way of teaching where the adult shows the skill clearly, practices it with the child, and then lets the child try, in small steps that keep the child right most of the time. It is one of the most tested approaches to teaching young children, and it fits a parent and a child on a couch very well.
What direct instruction looks like
A direct-instruction lesson has a simple rhythm. You show the new thing: "This letter makes the sound mmm." You do it together: "Say it with me: mmm." Then your child does it alone: "Your turn." If they get it, you move on. If they miss, you show it again right away, try again, and check again later.
Three things make it work for small children:
- Small steps. Each lesson adds one new thing on top of what the child already knows well.
- High success. The steps are sized so the child is right about four times in five. Success is what keeps a three-year-old at the table.
- Quick, calm correction. A miss gets the right answer modeled right away, with no lecture and no guessing game.
Behind all three is Engelmann’s rule: if the child has not learned it, the teacher has not taught it yet. The remedy is always teaching, and a well-made lesson tells the adult how.
Where it comes from
Siegfried Engelmann developed Direct Instruction in the 1960s, starting with Carl Bereiter in a preschool for children from low-income families. His programs, beginning with DISTAR, wrote out every step of the lesson so that any teacher could deliver it the same way.
In the Project Follow Through evaluation (1968 to 1977), a large federal study of teaching in kindergarten through third grade for children from low-income families, researchers compared nine teaching models across thousands of children. Engelmann's model had the strongest results in basic skills. Critics have questioned parts of the study's design, and results varied from school to school, but the basic-skills finding has held up in later reviews. The story of Engelmann and Follow Through is told in the second season of APM Reports' Sold a Story podcast.
The school the season spends an episode on is Wesley Elementary in Houston, where Thaddeus Lott ran Direct Instruction for twenty years from 1975 and a school of children from a poor neighborhood became one of the highest-scoring in Texas. A 2018 review of more than 300 studies of Engelmann’s programs found effects around half a standard deviation, lasting into high school, for every kind of student measured.
Direct instruction and the science of reading
The science of reading is the large body of research on how children learn to read. One of its central findings is that children learn to read by being taught the code that links letters to sounds, in a planned order, and practice sounding words out until they read them instantly. Direct instruction is a good way to teach that code to a young child, because each letter-sound is shown clearly, practiced together, and checked.
Most strong evidence for formal phonics comes from children four and older, much of it five and up. For younger children we are ahead of the research. Two short questions at sign-up flag a child who may be early, with honest advice on what helps in the meantime, and you decide whether to start.
Direct instruction at home
Many parents first met direct instruction through Engelmann's own book for parents, Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (Engelmann, Haddox and Bruner, 1983). It gives a parent a scripted lesson for each day, and many families taught their children to read with it.
Rumpus Reading uses the same basic ideas: a short scripted lesson, one new sound at a time, a high success rate, and a calm correction for misses. It adds a few things a book cannot do: a new story on story days written only from the sounds your child has learned, a review schedule that brings back each sound just before it would be forgotten, and pacing that waits until the current sounds are solid before adding a new one.
Rumpus is its own program, built from the research. Rumpus is not affiliated with or endorsed by Siegfried Engelmann's estate, the National Institute for Direct Instruction, McGraw Hill, or the publisher of Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.
Ten minutes a day, you and your child, built on direct instruction and the science of reading.
Sources
- Engelmann, Becker, Carnine and Gersten (1988). The Direct Instruction Follow Through model: Design and outcomes. Education and Treatment of Children 11(4), 303-317.
- Stebbins, St. Pierre, Proper, Anderson and Cerva (1977). Education as Experimentation: A Planned Variation Model, Vol. IV-A. Abt Associates. ERIC ED148490
- House, Glass, McLean and Walker (1978). No simple answer: Critique of the Follow Through evaluation. Harvard Educational Review 48(2), 128-160. doi.org/10.17763/haer.48.2.j2167r4594027x87
- Stockard, Wood, Coughlin and Rasplica Khoury (2018). The effectiveness of Direct Instruction curricula: A meta-analysis of a half century of research. Review of Educational Research 88(4), 479-507. doi.org/10.3102/0034654317751919
- Engelmann, Haddox and Bruner (1983). Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. Simon and Schuster.
- National Reading Panel (2000). Teaching Children to Read. Report (PDF)
- Rosenshine (2012). Principles of instruction. American Educator 36(1), 12-19, 39. Article (PDF)