Or, as I suggested last week, there might have been something in the top-down teaching practice that didn’t fully engage them because it didn’t positioning them to be protagonists in their own learning.īut what would that look like when it comes to something like punctuating dialogue? They might not have found “correctness” important. They might not have had enough time to practice for the learning to take hold. This seemed to be another case of students having been taught something they didn’t fully learn, which can happen for a number of reasons. These were 9th graders who, I’d be willing to bet, had been taught to punctuate dialogue ever since third or second grade.

Clearly, she adheres to the features of direct instruction as stated in the book, but I couldn’t help thinking that something was wrong here. If you go to the link, you’ll see a teacher providing direct instruction on how to punctuate dialogue to her 9th grade class. That led me to watch one of the videos that can be found on Corwin’s resource page for the book.

They believe that surface learning is the foundation on which deeper learning is built, and among the recommended practices for that phase, I saw direct instruction, which comes with an effect size of 0.59. And for each phase, it recommends specific teaching practices based on their effect size, i.e., “the impact a given a approach has” on accelerating student learning.īeing someone who tends to want to get to the deep stuff right away, I was curious about what the authors had to say about surface learning, along with what practices pack the greatest punch. The book breaks down the process of teaching and learning into three phases: teaching for surface learning, deeper learning and ultimately for transfer.

Like many literacy educators, last year I found myself reading Visible Learning for Literacy, by Doug Fisher, Nancy Frey and John Hattie.

Visible learning for literacy