The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [113]
“Goodbye ssss.”
The teacher made an x over it. The pencil pointed to the next one. “Get ready.”
“Goodbye ee.”
We watched a different group blending sounds together.
“First you say sssss, then you say at. First you say sssss, then you say at,” the kindergarten teacher sang, and with each sound came a gesture.
The child said ssss and at as instructed, and then the teacher requested it be said the fast way. “Sat.”
“Yes, sat.”
As we left, one of the boys who was returning to his seat held up his tickets. “I got three tickets!”
“Nice work,” I said.
The tickets were a reward system that this school had created; DI did leave room for individual schools to add their own systems or tweak as needed. If schools used Direct Instruction as their primary program, they might be considered a “DI school.” That needn’t be the only way, though. There were teachers who’d completed the DI training and used the material themselves, alone. Of course, DI worked best when the kids could build on the same skills from year to year.
Our last stop was another first-grade class, at a different level of Reading Mastery than the first room we visited. The kids were placed by skill level early on. It was crucial that every child have a firm foundation in the basics, but kids who already knew them shouldn’t be allowed to get bored. This solidified my support for DI. The first graders who were working on Reading Mastery level two rather than level three were getting more instruction time with the most important steps of phonics. Even if they were behind the other class, you couldn’t call them remedial readers. Unlike “slower” reading students in other school systems, these guys would be caught up and integrated with their grade-mates somewhere around fifth or sixth grade at the absolute latest, when they’d all be independent readers.
DI has been around for quite a while. In the 1960s, marketer-turned-educator Zig Engelmann realized that what was most missing from elementary education was clarity of instruction. The kids would absorb whatever the teachers presented, but teachers might be vague, or they might not give enough examples—or enough counter-examples—to reinforce the points they were trying to make. Through continual testing, Engelmann and his colleagues built a scripted method of instruction designed specifically to enhance clarity, thereby accelerating learning for all children.
Benjamin had met with Jerry Silbert, a coauthor of several DI programs, at the National Institute for Direct Instruction, headquartered in Eugene, Oregon. Silbert had given him a teaching guide for Spelling Mastery, and Benjamin had randomly flipped it open to “Junction changes!” Those oft-awkward meetings of roots and suffixes (or prefixes) had been responsible for many a typo we’d found on the trip. Benjamin examined the page that went over all the rules of consonant-doubling and when not to consonant-double. There were example sets first teaching kids how, and then helping them recognize when to use the rule and when not to. These were basic mechanics of spelling.
Seeing it in action helped me understand how all the pieces fit together. The script gave the students recognizable cues that all of them understood the same way. In effect, they shared a classroom language, obliterating a legion of communication barriers, from lack of specificity to cross-cultural confusion. Better still, the cues fit into a rhythm of call and response that radically increased the number of times each child got to respond during the class period. More practice with the material leads to better assimilation of that material. The positive effects compound as the call-and-response setting, along