The libertarian side of the blogosphere is all abuzz about “Direct Instruction” at the moment, thanks to a Marignal Revolution post by Alex Tabarrok touting the method:
Ayres argues that large experimental studies have shown that the teaching method which works best is Direct Instruction (here and here are two non-academic discussions which summarizes much of the same academic evidence discussed in Ayres). In Direct Instruction the teacher follows a script, a carefully designed and evaluated script. As Ayres notes this is key:
DI is scalable. Its success isn’t contingent on the personality of some uber-teacher….You don’t need to be a genius to be an effective DI teacher. DI can be implemented in dozens upon dozens of classrooms with just ordinary teachers. You just need to be able to follow the script.
Contrary to what you might think, the data also show that DI does not impede creativity or self-esteem. The education establishment, however, hates DI because it is a threat to the power and prestige of teaching, they prefer the model of teacher as hero.
Jim Henley also takes this up, and raises a sensible market-based objection to the idea:
Direct Instruction fails for different sociological reasons. Star teachers don’t solve the problem of education because not enough teachers are capable of stardom. Direct Instruction doesn’t solve the problem because not enough teachers are willing to do that work. Direct Instruction sounds like utter drudgery from the teacher’s perspective. I’m inclined to think the resistance to it in the existing education establishment indicates not that the class of teachers are full of themselves, but that you could no more fill America’s schools with people willing to speak the same script day in and year out than you could fill them with Jaime Escalante clones.
This is still essentially about the scripting issue, though, which seems to me to be missing the point. After all, if you look at the summary of Direct Instruction provided at the first of Tabarrok’s links, the scripts are really only one part of the method, and frankly, they don’t look all that important, relative to the other bits:
- Homogeneous Skill Grouping: Children are grouped
according to their levels of ability, rather than
according to age or other factors. If you are going to
teach the same material to a group of children, they
clearly benefit most if they are all able to follow the
material.
- Scripted Class Sessions: Teachers use
pre-designed scripts when teaching. The scripts are based
on extensive research regarding student retention, and
every aspect of every script is based upon results that
were demonstrated through research. The great advantage
of this approach is that every teacher using the script
becomes the beneficiary of that research and will
probably teach much more effectively than if left to his
or her own devices.
- Intense, Constant Student Interaction: The
scripted sessions consist primarily of sequences of
stimulus/response pairings, wherein the teacher
stimulates the class with a description of a concept, an
illustration of the concept through an example, and
finally a request that the class repeat the example. The
class responds orally, usually as a group.
- Teaching to Mastery: The group does not move on until everyone in
the group understands the material.
Frankly, the scripts look to me like the least important part of that. I suspect that if you had the “Homogenous Skill Grouping” and the “Intense, Constant Student Interaction” parts, you’d see big improvements regardless of whether everybody taught from the same script or not. I suspect that the only real effect of the scripts is to make it easier for some teachers to do “Intense, Constant Student Interaction,” when their natural inclination would be more in the direction of non-interactive lectures.
As someone who teaches a lot of intro classes, I can say that there are few things more maddening than teaching wildly heterogenous classes. It really sucks to look out into the room and see that the weakest students are being completely blown away, while the best students are being bored out of their skulls. There really isn’t a good way around that, either, in classes where you’ve got students with a huge range of abilities, unless you’re naturally one of the “heroes” that Tabarrok thinks are overemphasized, and can put in extra hours either tutoring the weak students, or providing extra enrichment for the strong students.
If the whole class is weak by some objective standard, there are things you can do to deal with that– step down the level of the lectures, increase the amount of time spent on practice problems and repetetive drill. If the whole class is strong by some objective standard, there are things you can do to adjust– push the pace of the class, explore additional topics of interest. But when you’ve got a mix of really good and really weak students, all you can do in good conscience is to pitch the class somewhere in the middle, and hope that neither extreme is suffering too much.
Just the skill grouping by itself would make a substantial difference, I think. And “Intense” interaction among students and between students and faculty is well known to be an effective teaching tool. There are no end of studies showing that “Active Learning” techniques do a better job of teaching students physics concepts than traditional lectures do, and I have no doubt that extends across disciplines. That’s why good humanities classes use a discussion format, after all, and it’s a big part of why students are willing to spend $40K to attend small colleges.
As for the general issue of teaching from a script, I think it would really have to depend on the script. If it’s really a minute-by-minute sort of script, then yes, it sounds absolutely stultifying. If it’s more of a “you will teach these topics on these days, using these examples” sort of thing, then that might not be too bad. That’s really not that different than what you face in teaching one section of a multi-section course.
It would depend a lot on the subject– the example lessons on this page look pretty hideous to me, but that’s largely because they’re primary school material, and I’m not cut out to be a primary school teacher.
As with most education-related issues, there are a number of other elements about the arguments Tabarrok and other make that I find kind of dubious– if someone suggested teaching, say, Introduction to Econometrics off a strict script, would he happily sacrifice his own “power and prestige” as a teacher? It’s really easy to suggest these sorts of measures for other people, after all.
Really, though, I think the script thing is probably a red herring. At least based on the descriptions linked from the original post, I think other parts of the method are a lot more important to its success than the script business.