‘Direct Instruction’ Paying Off

Eshelman Avenue Elementary School in Lomita would appear to have the cards stacked against it: Most pupils come from low-income households, and many speak little or no English at home.

So how did the school handily outscore its peers statewide on the Stanford 9?

Principal Winnie Washington gives much of the credit to “direct instruction,” a highly structured, step-by-step curriculum that requires teachers and students to follow interactive scripts.

Many teachers complain that it squeezes the creativity out of teaching--and learning--but the approach is winning kudos from many schools for improving the skills of pupils at risk of academic failure.

As schools in California and across the nation look for techniques to help boost student achievement in these test-driven times, many are turning to such prescriptive programs in reading and math.

Educators stress that many different methods can improve scores and that direct instruction doesn’t work everywhere. Still, schools relying on the method produced some very dramatic gains in the Stanford 9 scores, released last week.

Direct instruction requires teachers to snap their fingers or clap their hands to keep children moving--much as a metronome prods a pianist. Teachers point at letters or words in their “scripts” and repeatedly say,”Get ready.” Then they wait as pupils say the sounds or pronounce the words. The youngsters respond in unison so teachers can hear whether anyone is falling behind.

If a single student misses a beat, all repeat the task until everyone gets it right. Then the teacher moves on to the next page.

It isn’t just for schools with high numbers of struggling students. Even the high-performing Manhattan Beach Unified School District is finding that direct instruction can be a safety net.

In Baltimore, where Johns Hopkins University researchers are doing a five-year study of direct instruction, results have been promising. It has proved as effective or more so than other reforms. And at one of the poorest urban schools, students have shown remarkable gains.

Nationwide, the program can be found at hundreds of schools. In many cases, it is used to teach special education students and students from low-income families. The American Federation of Teachers endorsed the program in 1998, recognizing it as one of several worthy methods.

At the core of such programs is the notion that a teacher should tightly direct instruction, rather than serve as a facilitator as children introduce ideas and topics of their own--what educators call “discovery learning.”

Among the structured programs gaining steam in California is Reading Mastery, which is based on the original direct instruction program developed at the University of Illinois in the 1960s. Another is the Saxon math program, which constantly reviews older concepts as it introduces new ones. Both programs are used at Eshelman.

Open Court, a reading program that the Los Angeles Unified School District introduced in most elementary schools last year, also is a direct instruction program.

Many district elementary schools using Open Court showed solid gains on scores this year. Under the program, teachers also follow a script and have children respond aloud, but Open Court gives teachers more leeway than Reading Mastery. Teachers don’t have to cover a set amount of ground on a given day.

The gains at Eshelman, which uses Reading Mastery, have been substantial. Students in second, third and fourth grades outpaced their counterparts statewide in reading and math on this year’s Stanford 9 basic skills exam.

The school now has 54% of its fourth-graders reading at or above the national average, seven percentage points better than the statewide average and 25 points ahead of Los Angeles Unified’s fourth-grade average.

In 1998, the first year of the testing program, just 18% of Eshelman’s fourth-graders were at or above the national average, compared with 40% of fourth-graders statewide and 21% for the district.

The gains in math have been even more startling, with 63% of fourth-graders scoring at or above the national average, up from 20% in 1998. Joanne Vegher, a kindergarten teacher at Eshelman, initially feared that the scripted approach would stifle her creativity and undermine her usual technique of adjusting instruction to pupils’ various levels.

But now she is a believer.

“It has structure but within that structure there is a great deal of flexibility,” she said. “You are able to reinforce daily what you’ve taught before. . . . If children need to move to another group, either up or down, it’s easy to move them gracefully.”

Eshelman’s principal cites other benefits. “You see kids on task,” Washington said. “There are no more disciplinary problems.”

Still, many academicians frown on the method. Some call it “militaristic” or “drill and kill.”

Others note that the program’s creator, Siegfried E. Engelmann, lacks professional credentials. He has no education degree and was working as an advertising executive in Chicago when he stumbled onto the method he named Direct Instruction 40 years ago.

Unable in the 1960s to find reliable research on how children learn, he began his own studies, working with lagging students. Engelmann and his colleagues found that learning stuck when children were drilled in a highly structured way.

His Direct Instruction program has been copyrighted, but the noncapitalized term is widely used to describe variations of the method.

The concept holds particular appeal for many districts in less affluent communities because of its success in imparting basic skills that students might not be gaining at home.

Over the last four years, the Bassett Unified School District, a small, working-class district that is heavily Latino, has seen its scores reach or exceed the national average for math. They have soared by 30 or more points in second through fifth grades.

Scores also have gone up in reading, although less dramatically. Bassett’s superintendent, Robert Nero, said Saxon and Open Court are key reasons for the gains.

Teachers in Manhattan Beach also have found much to like in the Saxon program after a pilot program helped boost performance in kindergarten through second grade last year. It was so successful that teachers pushed to have the district approve Saxon for kindergarten through sixth grade next year.

“There was a core group of children who were not getting the basics,” said Michelle Mangan, a second-grade teacher at Meadows Elementary School in the coastal community.

Still, educators say direct instruction is far from the only path to success.

At Balboa Gifted and High Ability Magnet in Northridge, one of the 10 highest-scoring elementary schools in California on this year’s Stanford 9, teachers prefer to rely on their own creativity.

“I don’t think direct instruction would work at Balboa,” said Principal Raj Schindl.

Though acknowledging that direct instruction is producing good results in some schools, Schindl said, “I don’t think the program would meet the needs of our students. Kids here work at a very accelerated pace.”

Likewise, administrators said direct instruction had nothing to do with phenomenal test score improvements in Santa Ana, where nearly two-thirds of the district’s 61,000 students struggle with speaking and reading English.

Rather, said Chief Academic Officer Linda Kaminsky, district officials have encouraged teachers to do a better job of figuring out where individual students struggle and tailor their lessons accordingly.

“When we honor what teachers bring to their field, and when we support them in continuing to grow,” she said, “then we end up with children who are being served because their unique needs are being met.”

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Richard Lee Colvin in Los Angeles, Jessica Garrison in Orange County and Karima A. Haynes in the San Fernando Valley. Data analyst Sandra Poindexter also contributed.