According to research, direct instruction is one of the most effective teaching strategies. Although often misunderstood, students who are taught using the direct instruction method perform better in reading, maths, and spelling than those who weren’t.
If you have no clue what direct instruction is all about, you’ve come to the right place! This blog post covers the most frequently asked questions about this teaching method. I’ll give you the what and how, and include some practical examples.
What is direct instruction?
Direct instruction is a teacher-directed teaching method. This means that the teacher stands in front of a classroom, and presents the information. The teachers give explicit, guided instructions to the students.
So, isn’t that how everything has always been taught in a classroom? Not entirely. Nowadays, experimenting in education is “hot”, as teachers find that not all students benefit from listening to a teacher talk all day, and not all lessons are best taught through direct instruction. Teachers now match the type of instruction to the task. Using direct instruction is effective when it suits the skill students have to learn.
Here’s an example:
- The order of the planets is best learned via direct instruction.
- Teaching what materials are magnetic is better learned through experimentation.
The direct instruction method is based on two core principles:
- All students can learn when taught correctly, regardless of history and background.
- All teachers can be successful, given effective materials and presentation techniques.
The 6 functions (or steps) of direct instruction
Direct instruction doesn’t stop at the teacher explaining a concept. There are 6 steps that are very important in the process. I’ll briefly describe them below, but if you want to dig deeper, make sure to read “Teaching Functions”
1. Introduction / review
Build upon a previous lesson, or get an understanding of their background knowledge of the subject you are about to teach them. To show your students what exactly they have to learn and what is expected from them, you can give them lesson objectives.
2. Present the new material
In the direct instruction method, you can present new material through a lecture or through a demonstration.
Lecture method
There are a few essential steps for a lecture to be successful:
- State the main points of the lecture.
- Introduce a main organizing idea or theme.
- Use examples to illustrate each idea.
- Use repetition to reinforce the main points.
- Summarize and refer back to the main organizing idea.
But how you go about these steps? This is where the fun comes in, and where every teacher gets to use their creativity. This is where you get to engage your students. So, if you think a lecture is boring, you got it all wrong.
Demonstration
Here, the teacher demonstrates the skill or principle in small steps. Visual demonstrations will engage more students than a pure auditory lecture. This method is often used in science classes.
3. Guided practice
The guided practice is conducted by the teacher. The purpose of this step is to guide initial practice, correct mistakes, reteach (if necessary) and provide sufficient practice so that students can work independently.
It’s very important to ask good questions to verify your students’ understanding.
4. Feedback and correctives
There are 4 types of student responses to questions and actions a teacher should take depending on the answer.
Student answerTeacher actionCorrect, quick, and firmAsk a new question to keep up the pace of the lesson.Correct, but hesitantProvide encouragement.Incorrect, but carelessSimply correct and move on.Incorrect and lacking knowledgeProvide hints, ask a simpler question, or reteach.5. Independent practice
During this phase, students usually go through two stages: unitization and automaticity. During unitization, the students are putting the skills they’ve learned together and use them in new situations. As they keep on practicing, students reach the “automatic” stage where they are successful and rapid, and no longer have to “think through” each step.
6. Evaluation/ review
There are much evaluation and reviewing methods, so make sure to pick the right one to find out data that really means something. Make sure your evaluation says something about your students’ learning process. Formative assessments are better suited for this.
15 Engaging direct instruction examples
After reading the 6 important steps above, you might think: what room is there for the teacher to be passionate and creative in his teaching? If everything is so well-structured, a teacher can’t control learning? That’s not entirely true. I’ll show you some direct instruction lesson plans that you can use in the classroom, while still meeting the direct instruction model functions.
Introduction/ Review
1. Entry ticket
You can do this digitally with BookWidgets.
2. Mentimeter
3. Math - Arithmetic
Here’s how it works (Click on the image):
In this example, students have already learned to make sums. The exercise encourages them to review this math topic again, and when they have found the right solutions, a word will reveal what they are going to learn next. Can you find it?
Present the new material
4. Storytelling
This tool lets you create engaging explainer videos in minutes. So why stick to just you explaining things when it can be visually much more appealing and fun?
You can also use InVideo and create your own lesson videos. The video making website is very intuitive and has many ready-to-use templates.
5. Photo widgets
BookWidgets has many more photo widgets that can serve as illustrations, and that make images more interactive.
6. Demonstrate
Guided practice
7. Group work
The teacher asks many questions to make their students think about what they’ve just learned. In the end, they can see the explanation again.
8. Think, pair, share
9. Buzz session
Correctives and feedback
Check out the four corrective teacher actions above.
Independent practice
10. Quiz
If you are using BookWidgets quizzes, you have many feedback options. Questions can be automatically graded so students have a really short feedback loop and know what aspects they have to learn again. A teacher can also see the student’s answers immediately after them submitting.
11. Planner
As a teacher, you can review the student’s work. So, in the next step (Evaluation/review), you’ll be able to collect data out of these exercises. If you notice a student is still struggling with the content, you can set up a personalized planner with more guidance if necessary.
12. Flashcards
Create BookWidgets flashcards and let your students use the ‘practice mode’ and practice independently. As a teacher, you can add text, images, and audio. The more connections you make between those content styles, the better all students will understand, because combining images with text is one of the most effective learning techniques.
Here’s an example:
Evaluation/ review
13. Kahoot
14. Mind Map
Here’s an example of a mind map:
15. Digital Quiz/ worksheet
- the average score per question
- the median, maximum and minimum score per class
- the grade per student on each question
- and the grade evolution per student on each test
Conclusion
Some teachers will realize that they actually were already using the direct instruction teaching method all this time. Others will consider this method as an opportunity to teach more effectively, as they know now direct instruction is not just a boring teaching strategy.
Looking for more interactive teaching strategies? Check out this post with 20 interactive teaching activities.
If you’d like to get started with this teaching method and create examples of direct instruction like I showed in this post, just click on the button below.