Direct instruction: teacher – centered strategies

Direct Instruction: Teacher – Centered Strategies
Direct Instruction: The Research Base
Direct instruction offers a teacher-centered alternative to other strategies in the text. Teacher effectiveness research provides one source of support for direct instruction. Other support comes from research on observational learning, emphasizing the central role of teacher modeling.
Skills InstructionSkills permeate the K-12 curriculum. At the elementary level, basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic form a major part of the school day. These procedural skills become especially useful when students understand them thoroughly, develop them to the point of automaticity, and are able to transfer them to other content areas.
Skills in the School Curriculum
* Subtraction withregrouping is a skill, as are many mathematical processes children need to learn. The four basic operations—adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing— are skills.
* Skills are not limited to math. Applying rules in any content area involves skills. Consider the following:
* get ----- getting
* play ----- playing
* Skills can be very basic or very sophisticated,such as verifying identities in trigonometry; applying study skills, such as summarizing, in English; or using thinking skills, such as recognizing irrelevant information, in all curriculum areas.
Changes in Teaching Skills
* In addition to a renewed emphasis on skills, there has also been a change in the way skills are taught. In the past, skills instruction consisted of the exposure method,which consisted of a three-step sequence; the teacher described the skill, the learners practiced the skill, and then the teacher assessed learners' abilities to apply the skill. There was not much real teaching going on.

* Present-day conceptions of skills learning and teaching emphasize learner understanding of skills (rather than mere memorization of steps) and the central role of theteacher in explaining and modeling the skill.
Understanding Skills
* Skills are abilities that allow us to process information in a useful way. These abilities cut across many contexts and types of content. For example, the skill of addition allows us to combine apples as well as dollars and cents.
Procedural Skills: These skills-require that students apply a standardized algorithm or formulato generate answers. Common examples are found in mathematics, where students learn to perform operations such as multiplying, subtracting, and adding.
Procedural skills have three characteristics:
• They have a specific set of operations
• They can be illustrated with examples.
• They are developed with practice.
Like all skills, procedural skills are important because they provide uswith cognitive tools. Once we understand how to add and subtract, these tools remain valuable to us for a lifetime, and once we know the rules for subject-verb agreement, we have the beginning capacity to write clear, literate prose.
Goals of Skills Instruction
We have three major goals when we teach skills—understanding, automaticity, and transfer
* Understanding: We want our students notonly to know how to perform skills but also to understand the logic behind them. Students commonly memorize the steps in a skill without understanding why or how they should be used. Teachers can do much to ensure that this does not happen.

* Automaticity: When we teach skills in the classroom, we want students to overlearn them to the point that they can perform them effortlessly, evenunconsciously. Automaticity occurs when skills are overlearned to the point that they can be used with little mental effort.

* Transfer: When we teach skills, we want them to be used in a wide variety of settings and situations. It occurs when something learned at one time is applied later in another setting. Transfer occurs, for example, when writing skills learned in English class are...