What About Direct Instruction?

Key to understanding Direct Instruction (DI) and operant conditioning is the use of scripts and the manipulation of environment. Memorizing the alphabet, multiplication tables, books of the Bible, etc. does not require the use of operant conditioning. Classical methods of instruction involve a different type of strict "drill", not Skinnerian drill. Regular "drill and kill" is not operant conditioning. There is a difference.

Skinner's approach was to manipulate the environment to induce certain behaviors. In this respect, one's behavior is not the result of individual agency but rather becomes an unconscious act or series of acts in response to his surroundings. No conscious thought or individual deliberation required – merely a reaction to stimuli or lack thereof.

Put into the context of education, the same principle applies. In Direct Instruction, the teacher asks a question based on her script; the student gives a scripted, memorized response. Is it connected to other learning? Did the student "learn" it? Or is it reaction to stimuli? In DI, it is a reaction to stimuli. While one might argue that the child at least "knows" the scripted answer, will the child be able to find answers to questions that are not part of a "script"? Has the child acquired a principle or tool of "learning"? Or has the child acquired memory of a grouping of facts that allows him to perform a certain task?

In DI/operant conditioning, the latter of the instances prevails. As long as the task is required of the student in the same sequence, he can do it every time. The animal can ring the bell. The fundamental question is: Can the student transfer the performance of that task to another task that is not the same but requires similar abilities? This is the dilemma of sequenced learning when it does not introduce divergent information and processes along the way, instead of merely enlarging the grouping of task-specific performances of the student.

Early phonics/reading programs identified words that sounded the same but had different beginnings to introduce the concept of individual letters having sounds which, when added to other letters, produced certain words. Making sentences with those words allowed the transfer of knowledge to a broader context so that the child did not remain dependent solely upon either memorization or the sounds – to broaden the concept of words as language with meaning and purpose.

Direct Instruction was designed to be used with "disadvantaged" children who were viewed as not having cultural experiences which stimulate their use of language, one of the things for which it was designed. Thus, rudimentary stimulus – response mechanisms – were relied upon to teach the child a foundational language base (unconscious recognition of sounds).

Today, most children are well beyond that level when they enter any type of schooling, therefore the s-r method is totally unnecessary and stunting to children who have already been exposed to language, etc., through media everywhere they turn. It creates a false sense of accomplishment within an educational environment, and limits the "learning" to the scripted/sequenced facts put before them.

This produces great test results primarily because the tests are patterned after the script/sequence!! Since the new "assessments" have been changed to reflect the new "learning", we're going to see the illusion of much better test results as time goes forward.

Look to each state's restructuring of it's standards and assessments to see the changing paradigm from "learning" to "performing", from "teaching" to "training", and this will provide the context for why we have a "new" method that fits so neatly into the plan.

The whole school design model, Success For All, is a prime example. SFA tells schools precisely what to teach and how to teach it – to the point of scripting, nearly minute-by-minute, every teacher's activity in every classroom every day of the year. Schools adopting SFA send their top administrators for a week of intensive training, followed by SFA trainers who come to the schools for 3 days of teacher training. Schools must then designate a full-time SFA "facilitator" and a full-time parent "coordinator". SFA representatives visit the school 3 times a year, and students take a SFA reading test every eight weeks (can you say "train to the test"???).

As is typical of DI programs, SFA completely controls the classroom, student, and teacher. There is virtually no autonomy for the teacher, neither is there any local control of the curriculum. Everything and everyone is controlled by the method. Teachers must use a series of hand signals and catch phrases specifically prescribed by SFA. In K and grade 1, every piece of classroom material (posters, readers, tapes, videos, lesson plans, books) is provided by the program, with no room for deviation. The teacher is turned into a drill instructor, the children into compliant workers who conform to the group.

Regardless of "what" it is used to teach, the method itself conditions the student to be dependent on the stimulus in order to exercise mental activity. There is no transfer, no development of individual mental discipline or thinking for oneself. Every action is taxonomized, and broken down into prescribed steps that are externally controlled and which do not develop over time to operate from an internal locus of control (as independent thinkers). Every action is preceded by the correct stimulus and reinforced with the prescribed subsequent stimulus and reward. Key to this process is the fast pace of the stimulus-response-reinforcing stimulus, also used in animal training. Children are often timed with a stop-watch within a certain time frame. Skinner said that rate of response (at first) was essential in order for conditioning to take effect. Once the initial conditioning of the child or animal is programmed into the subject, then intermittent reinforcement will keep the subject conditioned.

The chief criticism of SFA is that it is designed to train students via a behavioral method to produce higher scores on a couple of tests that are chosen by its inventor, Robert Slavin, for which the control groups do not "train" their students. The gains in reading scores it produces are substantially limited to the initial years of the program. This trend has been found with other DI programs as well, as comprehension and reading scores drop in the later elementary grades.

DI programs depend on systemic reform of the entire school, and are not effective in changing the education paradigm unless the school principal and the teachers are all required to cooperate. Thus the external controls on educators and parents through the full-time monitors, mandated curriculum and methods. As the new education system is fully implemented, parents and educators can expect other controls that contribute to the overall goal of getting administrators, teachers and students to conform to the group: uniforms, new union leaders that are more cooperative, turnovers in the teaching staff, mandated parental involvement, and legislated methods of instruction that use operant conditioning techniques to control what the teacher does in the classroom.

You can bet there will be proposed legislation to mandate DI for low-performing schools as part of the continuing Tucker plan to change the entire system. Specifically, there will likely be national legislation that will tilt the entire Title I program toward whole school designs such as SFA. Already, many cities and states that have taken over "bad" schools have combined Title I funds and other federal education programs to pay for new curricula that are both intensive and imposed. The new goal of the STW architects is to devise punitive changes to local school boards, principals and teachers via state performance mechanisms, while creating greater central control of the curriculum through mandated DI.

This is how the "accountability" mechanisms have been employed to mandate curriculum content and methods of instruction at the local level. Republicans have mastered the art of sophistry and are using it to deceive the parents into thinking that it's about teaching phonics, when it's really about driving a new behavioral paradigm.

To say that it is okay to learn "by whatever method works", especially if you view the nature of man as being different from that of an animal, is to promote animal training techniques. The end does not justify the means, at least not with a Christian world view, and in the case of operant conditioning the "end" doesn't produce real learning or transfer anyway – as there is no transfer or real learning with animal training techniques.

Rebecca Bocchino

© February 2000

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