Teach Effectively!

Effective instruction has been a central feature of my professional life, a grail I’ve pursued since the 1960s. I started on this quest as a beginning teacher–actually a teacher aide–when I was still in my teens. As a beginner, I was intially enamoured of the pop theories of that time, some of which still resonate with me and are still popular. However, the more I thought about those theories, they seemed to be self-reinforcing. I didn’t see any standard against which I could measure them other than my own internal standards. It seemed like the ultimate game of For-Us-or-Again-Us: If (and only if) you swore allegiance to our theory, your theory was O.K.

I thought my own preferences were just that–my own preferences, not a means of determining effectiveness. I wanted an objective measuring stick. So I began casting about for a meter stick, a scale, a way of comparing theories about education.

Of course, the measure of effectivenes is research validation. I got to that understanding by the courtesy of working with Alice Thompson while at Cal State LA and Steve Sheldon while taking research classes there. Their efforts probably were not aimed at the outcome I sought, but they pushed me to consider important ideas. Abetted by my reading of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, their influence led me to graduate study at the University of Oregon College of Education.

At Oregon I got lucky. I had the good fortune of being advised by Barb Bateman and studying with a group of professors and students who shared my bent. When we applied the effectiveness metric to what was available in education, there wasn’t much that reached beyond the subjective mark. But the conceptual foundation recommended by Zig Engelmann seemed quite solid and the initial data were very respectable. So I started from Zig’s “Direct Instruction.” Although I’d known about DI while teaching in southern California, it became apparent that Engelmann was basing his product development on the same premise as I was basing my academic interests: Compare alternatives and see which most closely approximates the desired outcomes, then refine those alternatives and test them again.

In collaboration with colleagues at Northern Illinois University–especially Mike Epstein and Doug Cullinan, but also Diane Deitz and Alan Repp–I was able to conduct a couple of studies of instructional practices with students with learning disabilities. We learned that it was possible to make a difference in those students’ outcomes.

In 1978 I moved to the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education to work with the faculty of special education on the U.Va. Learning Disabilities Research Institute. At U.Va. I have been fortunate enough to work with wonderful colleagues such as Jim Kauffman and Dan Hallahan–among others–and able to pursue research about how teaching methods change students’ performance.

At present, I am collaborating with Paige Pullen and others (for example, see MyTeachingPartner). Though the specifics vary a tad, the idea is still the same: Identify those teaching methods that produce better outcomes for learners.