What is the goal of using Direct Instruction for teaching academic content?

The goal of Using Direct Instruction for Teaching Academic Content in the classroom is to provide teachers with a model for designing and implementing academic material to individual students or groups. Using Direct Instruction will also be helpful for modifying instructional materials for students who are having learning problems.
 
What is Direct Instruction?

The term Direct Instruction refers to a curriculum and teaching model that utilizes (a) the general teaching skills that have been shown to increase student academic performance and (b) a framework for designing curriculum, learning sequences, and learning strategies. 

Why is using Direct Instruction in the classroom important?

The use of Direct Instruction teaching is important because research has shown that these teaching procedures are related to increases in academic performance for students with a history of learning problems in most academic content areas. Also, research has shown that if teachers increase the success of students the probability that these students will engage in disruptive behavior during instruction is decreased. Thus, teachers can make significant academic progress with students because of the related improvement in students' behavior as a function of implementing Direct Instruction. 

How to use Direct Instruction to teach students strategies? Teaching students specific learning strategies is a critical feature of direct instruction. Teaching students to use learning strategies can best be accomplished by following the six steps listed and discussed below. 

Five Steps for Designing Direct Instruction Teaching and Curriculum Design

Step 1: Specify Your Teaching Objectives. The first step in devising Direct Instruction teaching sequences is to determine and then specify your teaching objectives. Your objectives need to be specific and observable so you can evaluate whether students have met your teaching objectives. Objectives should be carefully selected by considering their importance for the students. All objectives should be sequenced from the easiest to the most difficult. 

Step 2: Devise a Learning Strategy for the Students.  The next step is to develop a teaching/learning strategy. Students should be taught strategies for, ultimately, applying strategies independently. Examples of strategies would be (a) how to sound out words, (b) using counting by numbers other than 1 to determine multiplication problems (e/g. 2 X  5 =    ); in this case the students would be taught to count by 2s two times to solve the problem). It is important to note that learning strategies can be developed for most content areas. 

Step 3: Develop Teaching Procedures. Teachers next develop specific teaching procedures for communicating strategies to students. In general, an effective teaching plan will  (a) be easy for the students to understand, (b) present only one new concept at a time, and (c) require the student to demonstrate they have developed mastery. 

Step 4: Select Your Teaching Examples. Next the teacher must develop an adequate number of teaching examples for students to learn the skills. One or two teaching examples are rarely enough for many students to master new learning content. A wide rage of teaching examples is recommended so students can understand the broad application of the skill. For example, when first learning to sound out words, students will need practice with many words to learn how to blend sounds together when reading. 

Step 5: Provide Students with sufficient Practice and Review.  Learning any new skill requires a lot of practice for most students, but particularly for students with learning and behavior problems. Consequently, the teacher must remember to provide students adequate practice during individual lessons and across all lessons in a unit of instruction. 

1. Use small group instruction when working with difficult students. Small group instruction is an effective organization for teaching students new, difficult content. Small groups allow the teacher to provide the students the necessary oral responding for learning. One key aspect of small group instruction is that it is important that the teacher organizes the students into  homogeneous groups with similar skill levels. 

2. Use unison responses when appropriate. When teaching early reading, language and math skills to young students (through 3rd grade), particularly students with leaning and behavior problems, it is important that the students actively participate throughout the lesson. Group/unison responding is one method for keeping students actively engaged in their learning. 

3. Monitor student performance. Monitoring older students (intermediate and high school) is relatively easy because most assignments are written. However, in the earlier grades, in reading, language, and math, monitoring is more difficult because many of the students' responses will be oral. During group/unison responding the teacher must carefully monitor the lowest performers in the group to be sure they understand critical concepts. Teachers can give individual tests to the lower performing students to carefully monitor their progress.

4. Use specified correction procedures. When a teacher hears a student error during oral responding or observes a written mistake on assignments, it is important to provide strategy corrections.

5. Make sure higher performing students are accommodated. Direct Instruction makes learning for students who are experiencing difficulty easier by breaking difficult tasks into more manageable component skills, One potential problem with Direct Instruction is that the higher performing students in the group or classroom will have their rate of learning slowed if they are not carefully monitored. However, higher performing students can benefit from direct instruction if they are paced through the lessons at an optimal learning rate. 

Resources

Carnine, D., Kameenui,E., & Silbert, J (1995). Direct instruction reading. Prentice Hall, Columbus, Ohio.