Direct Instruction is the American Default
But not the version that researchers want.
How do American teachers teach? In 1995 and again in 1999, a team of researchers randomly selected Grade 8 math classes from across the country and hired videographers to film them. All in all one hundred sixty-four American lessons were recorded, analyzed, and then compared with hundreds of classrooms in Australia, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Japan.
This pair of studies, about thirty years old, offers the most reliable (certainly the most detailed) picture of what American math teaching actually looks like. It mostly looks like this:
Here’s this lesson’s itinerary, per the whiteboard:
- Warm Up
- Go Over Homework
- Lesson 3-2, Writing Variable Expressions
- Homework Assignment
The teacher explains terms, offers examples, leaves time for notes. Students ask for clarification. She asks questions and calls on kids to answer them. There’s about twenty minutes of this; she then assigns practice problems. This was “normal” American teaching in 1999, or at least one version of it: “Most U.S. teachers chose to spend a considerable portion of the beginning of the lesson reviewing and then practicing new material at the end,” the researchers wrote.
Has this normal teaching disappeared? Matt Yglesias thinks so: he detects “hostility to explicit instruction” and an unwillingness in America to “show kids how to do the problem and make them practice.” Emily Hanford, in the first episode of her latest series, similarly laments that “something else took hold” in place of direct instruction—inquiry pedagogies where teachers are mere “facilitators” while students “discover math principles” and “teach each other.”
