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CHAPTER 3

Conducting Direct Instruction Lessons

As discussed in chapter 1, the second major category in The New Art and Science of Teaching is content. This category involves strategies teachers use specifically to help students learn the information and skills that are the focus of instruction. This category includes design areas with strategies for three distinct types of lessons: (1) direct instruction, (2) practicing and deepening, and (3) knowledge application. A final design area within the content category includes those strategies applicable in all three types of lessons. Effective pedagogy is the teacher’s use of the strategies within all four design areas in a coordinated fashion. In this chapter, we focus on direct instruction lessons.

In some circles, direct instruction has a tarnished reputation. It is commonly associated with didactic, lecture-oriented presentations during which students are passive consumers of information. While it is true that teachers can execute direct instruction—and all other types of instruction—in an unparticipatory manner. In fact, research continually supports the necessary role of direct instruction. Such recognition usually occurs amid loud calls for inquiry-based instruction. To illustrate, in 2011, I wrote an article in Educational Leadership titled “The Perils and Promises of Discovery Learning” (Marzano, 2011). There I report on a meta-analysis of 580 comparisons between discovery learning and direct instruction in which the authors (Alfieri, Broocks, Aldrich, & Tenenbaum, 2011) find that direct instruction is superior to discovery learning in most situations. As I will discuss in chapter 5, discovery learning has a place in the rotation of lesson types, but direct instruction is foundational to its success. More specifically, direct instruction is essential when teachers present new content to students.

Regarding direct instruction lessons, the desired mental states and processes in students are:

When content is new, students understand which parts are important and how the parts fit together.

The following elements are important to effective direct instruction.

Element 6: Chunking Content

When information is new to students, they best process it in small, understandable increments. This is because learners can hold only small amounts of information in their working memories (see Marzano, 1992, 2007). To illustrate, a teacher presenting students with new information about the topic of global warming might do so using a few pages from a textbook. To present the content in digestible bites—chunks—for students, the teacher first reads through the pages in the book, looking for natural breaks in the content. He might decide that he will have students stop after the first three paragraphs and provide time for them to reflect on the content. The next stop would be at the bottom of the page, and so on. Regardless of the form or venue, the practice is the same—the teacher halts input regarding new content at strategic points so students have time to think about what they just experienced.

The strategies within this element appear in table 3.1.

Table 3.1: Chunking Content

Strategy	Description
Using preassessment data to plan for chunks	Based on students’ initial understanding of new content, the teacher presents new content in larger or smaller chunks.
Presenting content in small, sequentially related sets	The teacher chunks content into small, digestible bites for students. If presenting new declarative knowledge, the chunks comprise concepts and details that logically go together. If presenting new procedural knowledge, the chunks comprise steps in a process that go together.
Allowing for processing time between chunks	The teacher has students work together to process chunks of information.

Source: Adapted from Marzano Research, 2016e.

Unlike strategies in most other elements, those listed for chunking are best employed sequentially. The first strategy in this element—using preassessment data to plan for chunks—deals with determining students’ readiness for new content. This is important because the more students already know about content, the bigger the chunks can be; the less they know about the content, the smaller the chunks should be. A preassessment can be quite informal. For example, a preassessment about a strategy for multicolumn subtraction might simply be presenting a problem to the entire class and asking students to describe how they would approach the task. If the vast majority of students seem to understand how to approach the problem, the teacher could conclude to present the process in two sets of steps since students already seem to have a general sense of what to do. If students do not seem familiar with the process, the teacher would spend more time presenting and exemplifying individual steps. A preassessment could also be more structured and take the form of a hardcopy test that addresses the various levels of the proficiency scale.

The second strategy deals with the actual execution of the chunking process. While doing so, the teacher continually monitors the extent to which students understand the content. If the students seem confused, the teacher delves back into the content before presenting a new chunk of content.

The last strategy in table 3.1 deals with providing a structured time for students to interact about the content the teacher previously presented. This processing time is structured so that students are organized in groups and group members have specific responsibilities.

When the strategies in this element produce the desired effects, teachers will observe the following behaviors in students.

• Students actively engage in processing content between chunks.

• Students can explain why the teacher stops at specific points during a presentation of new content.

• Students appear to understand the content in each chunk.

Element 7: Processing Content

During pauses between chunks in the new content the teacher is presenting, students should be engaged in activities that help them analyze and process new information in ways that facilitate their understanding. Such processes must be well-thought-out and structured. If students simply share their thoughts about the chunk of content they just experienced, they might not interact in a way that is rigorous enough to augment their learning.

The strategies that are involved in this element appear in table 3.2.

Table 3.2: Processing Content

Strategy	Description
Perspective analysis	The teacher asks students to consider multiple perspectives on new knowledge using perspective analysis.
Thinking hats	The teacher asks students to process new information by imagining themselves wearing any one of six different-colored thinking hats representing six different types of perspectives: white hat (neutral and objective perspectives), red hat (emotional perspectives), black hat (cautious or careful perspectives), yellow hat (optimistic perspectives), green hat (creative perspectives), and blue hat (organizational perspectives) (de Bono, 1999).
Collaborative processing	The teacher asks students to meet in small groups to summarize the information he or she just presented, ask clarifying questions about the information, and make predictions about upcoming information.
Jigsaw cooperative learning	The teacher organizes students in teams of equal size (for example, four members) and the content into as many categories as there are team members (for example, four categories). The teacher assigns individual team members to each content chunk to become experts. They then return to their teams to present their content.
Reciprocal teaching	After the teacher presents the chunk of content, the discussion leader in a group asks questions about the information presented, and the group members discuss each question. Someone from the group summarizes the content presented so far, and the group members make predictions about the upcoming chunk of content, beginning the cycle again.
Concept attainment	The teacher asks students to identify, compare, and contrast examples and nonexamples of a concept.
Think-pair-share	The teacher asks students to think critically about a question, pair up with another classmate to come to a consensus on their answer to the question, and then share their response with other groups or the whole class.
Scripted cooperative dyads	Students take notes about the main idea and key details of new content. The teacher breaks students into groups of two and assigns each student to act either as the recaller or the listener. The recaller summarizes the content without looking at his or her notes, while the listener adds missing information and corrects any errors in the recaller’s summary. Students switch roles during the next chunk.

Source: Adapted from Marzano Research, 2016bb.

All the strategies in table 3.2 focus on helping students process the content in such a way as to increase their comprehension and retention. However, they do so in different ways. Two of the strategies—perspective analysis and thinking hats—require students to think about the content in unusual ways. For example, perspective analysis requires students to identify their own position on a topic and the reasoning supporting it. Students next consider a different position on the topic and the reasoning behind it.

A few strategies provide very specific procedures for how students are to process the content. For example, the jigsaw strategy requires students to meet in groups to become local experts on specific aspects of the new content being presented. Local experts then report back to their original groups, sharing what they have learned.

Some of the strategies focus more on the collaboration process. For example, the strategy of scripted cooperative dyads requires students to interact from the perspective of one of two roles: (1) recaller and (2) listener. Students continually shift roles, providing for a systematic dialogue about the new content.

When the strategies in this element produce the desired effects, teachers will observe the following behaviors in students.

• Students appear to be actively interacting with the content.

• Students volunteer predictions.

• Students can explain what they have just learned.

• Students voluntarily ask clarification questions.