Teachers can't do it all: Let them focus on teaching

Superman could run faster than a speeding bullet and leap tall buildings at a single bound, but he never tried to design his own engaging, motivating, culturally relevant curriculum and teach it to the children of Metropolis. That would have been too much to ask.

Let teachers teach using curricula proven to be effective, argues Robert Pondiscio. They don't have the time or the training to be do-it-yourself curriculum designers, "hunched over laptops, crafting lessons from scratch or scouring Share My Lesson and Teachers Pay Teachers for curriculum materials."

Teachers average seven hours a week on DIY curriculum, a 2017 MDR report found. "That’s seven hours not spent studying student work to see where Sarah’s still tripping over fractions, or giving feedback that turns confusion into clarity — high-yield stuff that only a classroom teacher can do, and that moves the needle for kids," writes Pondiscio.

Direct Instruction, was created by Siegfried Engelmann, "an instructional engineer decades deep in cognitive science, scripting lessons like a coder writes software," he writes. His team spent years honing lessons, and sequencing them across grades, so third-grade science prepares students for fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade science, and "fourth-grade math tees up algebra," he writes. "A single teacher, no matter how sharp, can’t map that in isolation."

Imagine Ms. Smith nailing a unit on the water cycle, while next door, Mr. Lee’s kids miss it because he went big on dinosaurs. Come sixth grade, half the class is lost when it’s time to study erosion.

Teachers can still teach their favorite projects, writes Pondiscio. If students already have learned the content, they'll be able to "engage in more meaningful projects."

"Project Follow Through, a huge experiment on what works for disadvantaged students from 1967-76, found Direct Instruction students outperformed students taught by progressive methods, writes Cathy L. Watkins. DI students did significantly better in "Basic Skills (word knowledge, spelling, language, and math computation), and in Cognitive-Conceptual Skills (reading comprehension, math concepts and problem solving), but in Self-Concept as well–the category emphasized by the 'progressive' teaching models."

However, "progressive” educators and education professors "did not agree with Direct Instruction, so they distorted and suppressed what they found disagreeable," Watkins concluded.