On April 13, 2019, over 400 family members, friends, admirers and colleagues of Siegfried "Zig" Engelmann gathered for a memorial to his life and professional career. The memorial, hosted by Randy Sprick, featured speakers representing various facets of Engelmann's career in education. Speakers about the early years of DI included Carl Bereiter, Cookie Bruner, and a letter from Jean Osborn, read by Leslie Zoref. Doug Carnine, Hill Walker and Geoff Colvin spoke of Zig's work at the University of Oregon. Evan Haney, Jerry Silbert and Susie Hanner reflected on Engelmann's contributions as the senior author of the Direct Instruction programs. Gary Davis and Mary Gleason talked about his contributions to teacher training and implementation. Finally, Tom Torkelson appeared via video, and Owen Engelmann and Kurt Engelmann made compelling remarks about the legacy Zig left. The memorial closed with Zig's grandson, Nathan Engelmann, reading an excerpt from Engelmann and Carnine's landmark book, Theory of Instruction.

A unique feature of the memorial was the inclusion of excerpts from a 2005 interview with Zig. Each segment of the memorial included comments from Zig himself about the aspect being addressed. People commented that it was as if he were telling his own story.

NIFDI has created a webpage designed to be a central resource to house information and tributes to Zig. Currently this page has Zig's obituary, a full video of the memorial, all of the speaker's notes, some key videos about Zig, and many links to tributes from the field and press coverage. You can view this page at www.nifdi.org/zig. We will update the page as new items come in. If you would like to submit your own tribute or some other news item related to Zig's work, please send it on to bwickman@nifdi.org.

As the winter rain is falling in Oregon, we are busy planning the 45th National Direct Instruction Conference and Institutes and the 7th Southwest Direct Instruction Conference. The National Conference will be held in Eugene, Oregon, July 22-26. The Southwest Conference will be held in San Antonio, Texas, June 10-14. Both events feature high quality training on most Direct Instruction programs. The National DI Conference includes many additional sessions related to DI, such as behavior management, research on DI, fluency building and much more. We also will continue to offer the very popular Trainer Training, Coaching and Administrator Institutes at the conference in Eugene. The Trainer Training Institute will also be offered in San Antonio.

Additional details will be available next month, and registration will open in February. Until then, view this short video and imagine yourself in Eugene or San Antonio this summer!