Direct Instruction (DI) provides a clear path for evaluating instructional design. Here are 20 rules and recommendations for effective programs:

1. Maintain stable difficulty. Difficulty should rise slowly and predictably so students never hit a sudden cognitive spike. 2. Tasks must allow high response frequency. Aim for roughly 9–20 learner responses per minute to keep attention, cognitive processing, and provide diagnostic data.

3. Lessons should contain multiple short “tracks” to coordinate and interleave knowledge and skills.

I fundamentally believe we’re missing something when we talk about spacing and interleaving without talking about track design. @Kris_Boulton’s Substack is an excellent resource for learning about such blind spots. This is a case of cog sci providing principles without solutions. What is track or “strand” design? First you have to understand atomization, or decomposition of material into its smallest units. This is aligned with cognitive load theory: kids are easily overloaded when given material that contains too many new elements

The recording of my recent webinar on Direct and Explicit instruction is available on YouTube:

Here are some of my favorite slides!

1. Cognitive load theory suggests that novices are easily overloaded by unguided problem solving youtube.com/live/p-qMhvdy4…
2. Understanding limited WM gives rise to all sorts of techniques that can be used to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of instruction. For example, drawing on a blank canvas allows you to funnel just one item at a time into WM compared to presenting everything at once.

So, your school has bought you a bunch of vertical whiteboards and says you have to use them to teach math. When would it work?

Well, let's start with how novices and expert process information, cognitive load theory, and the instructional hierarchy. 1/

thescienceofmath.com/how-teachers-c… Students who do not know the material very well are in the acquisition stage of the hierarchy. They are novices, in the sense that they don't have much prior knowledge to draw from. It wouldn't be a good idea to have students work on an unknown problem on these whiteboards... 2/

As someone who taught LEGO class for two years, here's what I observed:
1. Kids that have LEGO at home are quickly bored of it at school, and not necessarily better at them
2. Teaching kids to do anything useful with them (make an arch) requires di, not discovery 🧵

https://twitter.com/LEGO_Education/status/1777728232466399700

3. The kids actually don't like free play with them for that long. They much prefer following the instructions. If your idea of good education is learning to read instruction manuals, then 👍
4. They are not a good way to teach math. Kids need to work problems to learn math.

When I watch good math teaching, I see purpose and urgency in the instruction - "not a minute to waste". This on its own is not to everyone's taste, same with the concept of bell-to-bell teaching. These teachers "teach briskly" both for attention and to fit in more practice. 1/ Kids like these teachers. It feels like they are athletes getting their reps in. The briskness makes it so other kids don't have time to disrupt the learning. But above all, they feel successful because they are getting adequate practice and seeing their own rapid growth. 2/

A major element of teaching with examples is being clear about what something is and what it isn’t so they learn a “general case” rather than isolated facts. Here are five principles from Direct Instruction:

1. Wording Principle: use the same wording whenever possible. 2. Set Up Principle: During initial teaching of a concept, pair examples with non examples that
differ in a single feature, so only
one interpretation is possible. In later lessons, use additional examples to further expand the range of the concept.

6 "shifts" to consider in your teaching as part of a Direct Instruction approach:

Shift #1: Shift #2:

Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction summarizes the actions of the teachers with the most achievement gains. It's unknown in the USA despite Rosenshine being American. The following are forms of pushback and important considerations to take when implementing it in schools. 🧵1/ 2/ "This is wrong since it conflicts with my beliefs."

Though rare, I have encountered people who would dismiss this research on the basis that students should lead their learning. Rosenshine's describes a model in which the teacher is very active. He called it di, after all.

I just went to my first conference that didn’t have any icebreakers or kumbaya circles. All we did was talked research and effective teaching. Weird, I know.

Here were the highlights of @EducationFestUS, the best conference I’ve ever been to.

🧵 1/ 2/ Instead of a poet or an inspirational speaker, we had a keynote by an expert cognitive scientist, @DTWillingham. He kindly emailed me to apologize for having to miss my session, which was later in the day.

Sometimes I think instructional coaching is one of those things in education with a strong, strong justification that is very, very challenging to do well. For example:

1. Teachers often don’t appreciate getting feedback from a peer. Friendship and performance improvement 1/ Don’t always mix well.

2. Union contracts often entitle teachers with the right to refuse coaching. Some people will refuse help on the principle that they don’t need to accept it, contractually.

3. There is a subbing shortage in many districts here. Instructional coaching 2/

If you're an instructional coach or have experienced instructional coaching, let me hear your thoughts on this series of 10 polls about this field:

1. Teachers should always choose the topic of their coaching 2. Teachers should always be able to choose whether they engage in coaching or not

It’s possible to turn around a school in a relatively short amount of time. I’ve seen this recipe work, in more or less this order:

1. Ban phones
2. Concentrate admin efforts on behavior
3. Standardize routines and procedures
4. Build a culture of academics
5. Teach bell to bell 1. Ban phones
If a teacher sees one, they call an admin to pick it up. No warnings. The phones are organized in the office and can be picked up at the end of the day. Repeat offenders must have their parents come pick it up. The number of phones collected will decrease quickly 2/

Teaching is so weird because nobody seems to want to talk about how to explain things... which seems like it'd be something we'd talk a whole lot about. There are a few things I've learned from research into clarity of explanations that I wish I'd been taught earlier 1/ Vagueness. Using unclear sets of words or words that are uncertain will clutter an explanation. Researchers have manipulated vagueness and consistently find that it interferes with learning 2/

New teachers: one thing we’ve been socialized to do is read text in Round Robin style. This means hearing disfluent readers read while only one reads at a time. And nobody is paying attention because once my turn is over I don’t have to listen anymore. Some alternatives: 1. Echo reading. The teacher reads an excerpt of text while modeling fluent reading, and then the class choral reads directly afterwards, mimicking the fluent reading.

1/7 Just four years ago I thought that this pyramid was based on science. 2/7 Despite a college education at an esteemed university and undergoing a teacher preparation program culminating in a Masters degree, I'm pretty sure I endorsed all of these neuro-myths no more and no less than the general public 👇👇👇👇👇