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Dixons Manningham Primary School leaders Terri Leighton, Yasmin Ali, and Abigail Burrow discuss the school’s journey from implementing Corrective Reading, a remedial program for select students in Grades 3 (roughly equivalent to Year 4 in the UK system) and above, to implementing Reading Mastery Signature Edition reading and language tracks as core instruction for all primary-grade students. They describe the remarkable changes in students’ ability to read and understand grade-level texts. Clips of students receiving instruction and participating in other activities are interspersed throughout the video.
Kris Althoff provided training and support to Dixons Manningham Primary School as it implemented Direct Instruction (DI) for core literacy instruction for all of its students. In this interview, Kris talks with Bryan Wickman, Outreach Director for the National Institute for Direct Instruction (NIFDI), about the steps that led to a dramatic increase in student performance during the COVID pandemic in the primary grades at the school.
This video highlights an academic preschool pilot project begun in the Fall of 2014 at Pharr IDEA Academy in Pharr, Texas. In this pilot, students in this predominately ELL school were taught using Espanol to English and/or DISTAR Language prior to entering kindergarten.
Direct Instruction (DI) is often used to help students who are struggling academically. DI can be used to accelerate the learning of higher performing students, too. The 16-minute DVD, Helping Kids Soar: Children Reaching Their Full Potential with Direct Instruction, portrays two schools in different parts of the country that have used DI successfully with all children, including high-performing students: Emerson Elementary in Alliance, Nebraska, and Fickett Elementary in Atlanta, Georgia.
Both schools follow a similar formula for achieving success:
The DVD shows how a careful implementation of Direct Instruction with NIFDI support can help bring out the joy and wonder of reading as it prepares students for advanced content.
RESOURCES FOR THIS VIDEO
pdf
Video Guide
pdf
Transcript
Helping Kids Soar (with subtitles in Spanish)
Translations and subtitles courtesy of Carlos Vílchez-Román and Juan Villaorduña Velarde.
Gering Public Schools, a small district in northwest Nebraska, used to suffer from an achievement gap in reading. In 2004, 36 percent of all Hispanic students in second grade met fluency benchmarks compared to 59 percent of all white students in the district's three elementary schools. Low literacy performance was also a problem at the district's sole junior high school.
That was before the district implemented the comprehensive Direct Instruction model with the support of the National Institute for Direct Instruction (NIFDI). Now the achievement gap in reading has been closed. Over three-fourths of all students meet second-grade fluency benchmarks, with a higher percentage of Hispanic students meeting benchmarks than white students! At the junior high school, the need for remedial reading programs has declined drastically as students are much more able to comprehend content area texts.
This 20-minute DVD, Closing the Performance Gap: The Gering Story, portrays the district's transition from one with literacy problems to one in which all students receive an education that meets their literacy needs. The video describes the changes that have taken place in instruction, progress monitoring, and professional development through the implementation of the comprehensive Direct Instruction model.
RESOURCES FOR THIS VIDEO
pdf
Gering's data before NIFDI support -- and AFTER!
pdf
Video Guide
pdf
Transcript
Closing the Performance Gap (with subtitles in Spanish)
Translations and subtitles courtesy of Carlos Vílchez-Román and Juan Villaorduña Velarde.
The Battle of City Springs Epilogue tells the story of a school in a high-poverty area of a large U.S. city that experienced years of failure before implementing the full immersion model of Direct Instruction. Until Baltimore’s City Springs Elementary started implementing the full immersion model of Direct Instruction in 1996, the school was considered to be the epitome of failure. Over 90 percent of the students were (and still are) eligible for free or reduced lunch. Academic performance was at sub-basement levels. No students in the 3rd grade or the 5th grade passed the Maryland state test, the MSPAP, in either mathematics or writing. The Abell Foundation rated City Springs as the 2nd lowest-performing school in the city of Baltimore.
The school climate was just as poor. Students ran the halls, and teachers locked classroom doors in order to control them…and keep others out. The 2000 PBS documentary, The Battle of City Springs, captured the difficulty of transforming the school during the second year of DI implementation, 1997-1998.
After six years of implementing the full immersion of DI with support from NIFDI, the school is the epitome of success. The halls are clean and orderly. Students are well-behaved. Most important, student performance has improved dramatically. Students, teachers, and the principal take great pride in their accomplishments.
RESOURCES FOR THIS VIDEO
pdf
City Spring's data before NIFDI support -- and AFTER!
pdf
Video Guide
pdf
Transcript
This video is courtesy of the Center for Applied Research in Education (CARE) based in Hillsboro, Oregon. The school featured in this video is not supported by NIFDI but exemplifies the benefits of Direct Instruction (DI). Special thanks to Bonnie Grossen, PhD., Executive Director of CARE.
RESOURCES FOR THIS VIDEO
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Transcript
Through proper active monitoring a teacher can keep students on-task and just as importantly, keep them accurate in their responses.
When students are working independently on written assignments, the teachers should move around the classroom looking closely at students' work. The teacher should not be seated at a desk. It is not possible to scan student work from one position. The teacher must get close enough to read what students have written. Desks and chairs should be arranged so the teacher has easy access to each student.
The teacher should show that s/he cares whether or not students are getting the material right. Active monitoring is most effective when the teacher appears to be excited about students getting correct answers. Giving recognition to students with correct answers motivates students to care about their work.
The teacher can complete a lot of correcting while walking around the room. The teacher can put a star next to every correct item s/he has looked at on a student's paper. Those items won't have to be reviewed later. The teacher should spend no more than 30 seconds with each student.
An equally important component of active monitoring is to indicate when items are wrong. The teacher should make a mark on the student's paper next to the incorrect item and tell the child something like, "Oops. That one is wrong. Look carefully and try it again."
The teacher can be sympathetic but should NOT stop to teach a student who has made an error. If the teacher teaches students individually, students will learn that they don't have to pay attention in class during instruction because the teacher will help them individually.
If three or more students have the same error, the teacher should immediately stop the class and provide a whole-group correction. The correction should be worded exactly as in the original instruction.
It is critical for the teacher to have a system in place where s/he can frequently reinforce students for following classroom expectations. Here's the rule: The teacher should reward good behavior at least four times as frequently as s/he corrects inappropriate behavior.
The teacher needs to provide consequences for students who are not on task. The teacher can take a point as part of the Teacher-Student game. The teacher can say something like, "Gee, I'm sorry you're not working, I get a point. When I see you working, you can get a point."
Mastery is at the core of all Direct Instruction (DI) programs. Each DI program is constructed using a small-step design that ensures that all students can be taught to mastery every day if they are placed properly in the program. Only 10-15% of a DI lesson contains new material. The rest of the lesson reviews or applies material taught in previous lessons so students can master the material and perform correctly on every task or exercise by the end of a lesson.
Appropriate placement is critical to teaching children to mastery. If students are placed in material that's too difficult for them, the amount that students have to learn is much greater than 10-15% of a lesson. They cannot master the material in a single day when there is too much that they do not know.
Students should be placed at a lesson where they can perform correctly on every item the first time they see it, at least 70% of the time for new material and 90% correct on the review material and applications that have been taught previously. If students have these first-time correct response rates, by the end of a lesson they will be able to learn the material they didn't get right the first time. Teachers will have enough time to correct errors that students make, and students will be able to absorb the new material presented in each lesson.
Teaching to mastery has several important benefits to students. Students who master material in a lesson can more easily learn new material. The skills and concepts students acquire provide a very strong foundation for learning new skills and concepts. Students' self-esteem increases when they master material presented to them. They are confident that they will be able to learn new material. They know they are successful. They look forward to going to school, participating in groups and doing their assignments.
IMPORTANT: Assigning students material they can't understand can be very punishing to them. Forcing a 3rd grade student with beginning decoding skills to read a grade-level text, for example, communicates to the student that s/he can't read nearly as well as many other 3rd graders. The overall message is that the student is deficient, which can lead to serious self-image problems. Students who are put in material that is too difficult for them often generalize from their experience and anticipate that they will fail on any new material they encounter. Conversely, students who are placed in material they can master in a reasonable amount of time develop very positive self-images. They anticipate that they will master any new material they encounter, and they are ready for the challenge!
