According to the Web site for The Silent Child,

The Silent Child film centres around a profoundly deaf four year old girl named Libby who is born into a middle class family and lives in a world of silence until a caring social worker teaches her the gift of communication.

When fresh faced social worker, Joanne turns up we see Libby transform. This once withdrawn four year old suddenly feels connected to the world and over a short period of time Joanne and Libby’s relationship blossoms.

That is about all there is to it…except that the film is so expertly done that it also weaves in many other matters that we folks concerned with disabilities will immediately find relevant. There’s some (not-so-pleasant) parent-child relations, a bit of debate about oralism vs. sign language, instances of behavior issues, and more. And, warming for my heart, there is the fact that Libby, the deaf child, is played by Maisie Sly, a deaf child.

We will have doubts about some things. It is a bit heavy handed in places. The film moves very rapidly. Libby learns signs almost miraculously. All it takes is a little love and such. But it has lots (and lots) of strengths. Watch it…share with others.

It’s not just about Deafness. It’s not just about signing. It’s not just about a young woman who teaches a child. It’s not just about a deaf actor. It’s not just about love. It’s about taking care of our kids.

The Silent Child won many awards (see the IMDB entry and the movie’s Web site). It is a short (i.e., ~20 minutes) and it is available on YouTube.

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• When: 12 November 2026 at 4:00 PM (Eastern US time);

• Cost: free and open to both members and non-members of CEC;

• Registration: Register here.

Given the substantial changes in the elected officials in the US, Ms. Tavalin’s analysis should prove to be valuable. I plan to watch the Webinar.

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SET should not be confused with a product that uses essentially the same name and is published by the Council for Exceptional Children. SET predated CEC’s publication by decades. Despite my appreciation for CEC, this product is not designed to promote that organization nor should the views expressed here be considered to represent the views or policies of that organization. A membership in CEC does not get one a subscription to SET and vice versa!

The curve ball that I am throwing here is that thinking about the normal curve gives us perspective about interesting topics. This post is about using the normal curve to examine popular topics such as the importance of “the teacher effect” and of “curricula.”

The “normal” curve?

First, though, let us start by remembering the basic properties of that curve. The “normal” (aka, the “Bell” or “Gaussian”) curve describes a theoretical distribution of the frequency of scores ordered along a range shown on the abscissa (the left-right or x axis). The ordinate (up-down or “y” axis) shows the “frequency” (how many) of the scores occur at any given spot along the abscissa.

A tallness version of the curve

Let’s just imagine that we gathered a lot of data about some phenomenon. Suppose that we got millions of humans from all around Earth to tell us their birth year and gender, and to allow us to measure their height.

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The contents of the newsletter are pretty standard: a photo, an update about the status of SET, a table of contents for the past week, and some commentary.

…and we are off!

Photo

It is “leaf-peeping season” in central Virginia. Tour companies bring busloads of people for rides through the country roads where they can see the patchwork of colorful trees on the hillsides and mountains. Here is a colorful tree that none of those bus riders will see. It is in our backyard, just a few meters away from the window in front of my desk.

I am no great photographer, but the tree seemed photogenic to me. The Piedmont mountains in the background are the (let to right) Monticello and Mount Alto as seen from the west-southwest of them. This image does not show them well, but those hillsides are really quite pretty. If you use your favorite mapping app and locate Monticello, you will find the location from which this photo was taken a bit less than 5 K (as the proverbial morbid lies) to the west.

Status

Here is a special welcome to Elizabeth K., though she does not need a welcome because she’s been around SET for at least a couple of years. Maybe, in this sense, a better word might be “thanks,” as in “thanks for upgrading.” She is right in there now with Angelique W., Bob P., Christine T., Clay K., Dan H., Dimitris A., Ed M., Ed P., Janet J., Jennifer S., Joel M., Judy V., Kata S., Kristen A., Kristin S., Larry M., Linda L., Mary-Anne L., Michele M., Mike N., Nancy S., Paige P., Pam S., Sally B., Vince C., and, of course, Anita A., Mike G., and Kathy M.

In addition to Elizabeth’s upgrade, there were about a dozen new subscribers at the free level this past week. They include a couple of people from outside the US, a couple from higher education, some peeps with serious administrative chops, and at least one whom many folks will likely recognize even if I use my usual convention of only referring to the first name and last initial: Reid L. (truth be known, he registered a second address, so he now has two SET accounts!). Including those with two accounts, SET now has over 1325 subscribers and more than 1800 followers.

Thanks for the many likes and other assorted positive feedback (e.g., back channel letters).

Special flashes of the electrons (tips of the cap?) to those subscribers who dropped comments on posts this past week. They include Tom Z., Tina C., Betsy T. (twice), Laura M., and Paul C. Those comments not only give all of us a chance to learn from each other, but they also tell the robots that the posts on SET are attracting readers and, therefore, should be shown earlier in results of searched on key topics.1

Table of SETlettes

This past week’s posts were all on the free side and I was the solo author on all of them. Here is a list:

• Special Education Today newsletter 6(18): What happened with SET for the week that began 26 October 2026?

• Repost: Smoke signals in reading education: What is with the spate of articles about changes in reading instruction?

• K. Tavalin Webinar slated 12 November 2026: What is Ms. Tavalin going to say about current and future policies?

• Looking ahead to the next act: What will the US do for children and youth (and their families) in the next 10 years?

• Sold a Story 2(5): DI programming and literature review: What did E. Hanford and colleagues report in this episode?

• Friday catch-up notes—6 November 2026: What about these tidbits?

• Virginia Laycock McLaughlin—1949-2026

Because the posts were all out in the wild, all subscribers got email invitations to read them. If you are reading this message and did not get those email invitations, you might want to establish a subscription so that you will get the notices about new posts. Better yet, establish or upgrade your subscription to the paid level to make sure you get all the forthcoming messages (including those that do not go out to readers in the free world—teehee) as well as the authority to comment on posts and full-time access to all 1800+ previous posts in the archive.

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Commentary

Last week I mentioned in this space that Direct Instruction (Big DI) seems to be “having a day.” There has been a good bit of “buzz” about DI out in the Intertubes. Sadly, much of what I have seen has seized on what I consider the less relevant aspects of DI. I hope we can be prepared to counter arguments about the value of DI by clarifying a couple of what I consider critical elements.

Recently, I have seen (and I’m not going to link to the examples here) posts, articles, and comments-discussions of DI that focus on specific features of DI such as modeling, choral responding, scripting, repeated practice, and so forth. A commentator will latch onto a particular feature to advance or attack DI. You, Dear Readers are probably familiar with the variations on the argument:

• About repeated practice, one comment will go heavily on it being “drill and kill” but another will suggest that lots of practice opportunities are needed to support long-term memory. Blah…blah…blah.

• About scripts, one observer will extol the value of having field tested wording to make teaching more understandable, another will observe that they reduce a teacher’s ability to adapt instruction on the fly to meet the needs of individual students, and still another will admire the reduction in class preparations that scripts afford teachers. On and on…and on.

The problem that I am illustrating here is not so much the actual arguments, pro and con, about the various features. I do not want us to bog down in correcting these analyses, whether the correction is refuting misunderstandings or massaging nearly accurate takes. The problem is that such analyses miss the bigger picture and overlook critical components of DI.

The bigger picture is that DI is not scripting, repetition, choral responding, or other features alone. Those features are integrated. They work together and they work with other, often-overlooked aspects of DI.

Emily Hanford and company’s fifth episode (see Sold a Story 2(5): DI programming and literature review), gave the world a glimpse of the rarely discussed programming principles that undergird DI. Most readers of SET probably were not alarmed—they may have even been pleasantly surprised—when she devoted a part of that episode to Theory of Instruction and the importance of selecting and sequencing examples and not examples in teaching.

The examples are part of the reason that one needs scripts. Remember, things are integrated in DI. One has to present those examples distributed across time in such a way as to induce generalization and mastery (also known as long-term memory). Instruction cannot simply flood the learners with dozens of examples in some willy-nilly fashion; doing so would increase the chances that the learners would misunderstand the concept being taught (form a misrule). So you need to design instruction so that consistent presentation formats force (yes, “force”) the learner to attend to the differences among the examples.

Ms. Hanford moved quickly from an exposition of the power of examples (with quotes from Doug Carnine, who probably knows more about this matter than any living human) to an anecdote told by Marty Siegel (another super-well-informed expert) to cognitive psychology (with Carl Hendrick, who has figured out that Zig Engelmann and Doug Carnine were onto something valuable).

The rapid move from the discussion of examples to cognitive psych’s studies of expert-novice differences and then on to evolutionarily primary and secondary learning was, well, fast. Covered a lot of ground in a hard gallop. We lost the thread about the importance of programming, of generalization and mastery being products of instruction, and of how these features all fit together. To be sure, there was a lot to fit into this episode (and Ms. Hanford also included many minutes of the episode to the meta-analytic work on the 100s of empirical studies of DI), so she had to move through the topic rapidly.

We need to be careful that we do not let the programming of instruction that is wired into DI curricula be overlooked. It was Engelmann’s analysis of the concepts and skills (he sometimes called it “a sameness analysis”) that allowed him to reverse engineer instruction for skills like blending in decoding,2 analyzing specious advertising claims, acquiring knowledge about basic biological systems (e.g., musculature), and scaffolding of component skills needed for solving equations.

I hope we, Dear Readers, can help our educational colleagues to understand that DI is more than what one sees when one watches a lesson or two, reads the scripts for a few lessons, or attends a lecture comparing little di and Big DI. All these components of DI fit together pretty much like clockwork, interacting systematically, in service of building independent competence (that is, mastery) of generalized knowledge and skill.

So, okay. I’ll stop…but not without reminding everyone that we must take care of ourselves, our families, friends, and colleagues. We need to ensure that they are safe and healthy. And we need to make dang sure that they avoid the dreaded disease of Maleducation, that they know how to and actually do teach our kids well.

JohnL

Editor and Founder, Special Education Today

SET should not be confused with a product that uses essentially the same name and is published by the Council for Exceptional Children. SET predated CEC’s publication by decades. Despite my appreciation for CEC, this product is not designed to promote that organization nor should the views expressed here be considered to represent the views or policies of that organization. A membership in CEC does not get one a subscription to SETand vice versa!

Footnotes

Among those extracurricular contributions, Ginny was a member of the Virginia Board of Education, a leader in the Council of Academic Deans from Research Education Institutions, a member and chair of the board for Child Development Resources, and a member of the Williamsburg Community Health Foundation. This brief list includes only a few of the many community organizations she served.

After completing her doctoral studies at the University of Memphis, Ginnie taught in the public schools of South Carolina and then at Clemson and Old Dominion Universities. She returned to William and Mary—her undergraduate alma mater—in 1983 as an assistant professor of special education and began the run of leadership that earned her high praise from colleagues at the university. She retired as a Chancellor Professor, and William and Mary bestowed on her its Thomas Jefferson Award as well as the William and Mary Alumni Medallion and a host of other markers of esteem. Ginnie’s lifetime of service to William & Mary is honored through a professorship named after her, the “Virginia McLaughlin School of Education Professorship.”

Virginia Laycock McLaughlin was the daughter of Virginia Moore and Irvin Kembowski. She was born 15 December 1949 in Baltimore (MD; US). Survivors include John McLaughlin and two daughters as well as two stepdaughters and a stepson. She also leaves two sisters and their families.

Read remembrances of Ginnie McLaughlin:

• Virginia Laycock McLaughlin: December 15, 1949 - October 15, 2026 from Dignity Memorial;

• Virginia L. McLaughlin ’71 from the William and Mary School of Education;

• In Memoriam: Virginia Laycock McLaughlin, 1949–2026 from Women in Academia.

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• Over in the New England Journal of Medicine, Jan Buitelaar and Jeffrey Newcom published “Adult Attention Deficit–Hyperactivity Disorder.” They provided an overview of ADHD in adults that should be helpful for physicians in clinical practice.

• Caiti Wade of The Disruptive Educator, provided a thoughtful account of the benefits of using prepared lessons in “why ‘rote learning’ is what kept me in teaching

  The approach being blamed for driving teachers out of the profession is the one that kept me in it.” It’s not about special education (she’s mostly taught upper grades “maths”), but the defense of scripting lessons will be of interest to some readers.

• Chris Ulman of Special Books for Special Kids published additional interviews, including one with a young woman named “Mel.” Quoting the SBSK site: “Mel is diagnosed with thiamine transporter deficiency, a rare genetic condition that affects her movement and ability to speak. As a result, she is fully dependent on caregivers for personal care. Mel also communicates using an eye gaze machine that tracks her eyes, allowing her to select words, share her thoughts, and even write scripts about vampires falling in love.” See the interview with Mel on YouTube.

• Sally Bergquist, who’s publishing about writing instruction for the early grades, posted an extended and extensive examination of approaches to the teaching task on 6 November 2026. In “Addressing the range of writing skills in K-2: Yes, differentiation is still a thing,” she provided pros and cons about different ways of organizing instruction and lots more.

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Here is APM’s description of the episode:

Direct Instruction has decades of research behind it, but what makes it work? We dig into Zig Engelmann’s theory of instruction, what cognitive science reveals about how children learn and what hundreds of studies show about the program’s effectiveness.

Get the episode from the APM Reports pages for Sold a Story. Go beyond the podcasts and read the supplemental reports that are featured on this pages, too.

A lot of lawmakers’ attention (ahem) in determining this new direction will focus on. economic, foreign, farm, energy, and other policy aspects of US society. I hope that educational policies do not get lost in the shuffle. There is a lot of work to do!

We cannot go backwards. It is not a good idea to return to the policies and practices of the 2000-2010s (and earlier). There are some good features in the days or yore, but we need to go farther (as Reid Lyon noted 4 November 2026 noted). We do not need to go back. We need to go forward.

The damage done to the US special education infrastructure is great. How will the Department of Education recover from the slash-and-burn destruction of the staff in the Office of Special Education, the National Center for Special Education Research, and other agencies?

Let’s just imagine that new US lawmakers reinstate the functions of these offices. Who will have the institutional knowledge and skills to make things work? Who the hell is going to make those functions function? Will the folks who knew how to make this work and who were fired in 2024 come back?

Our path has been toward greater inclusiveness, and we should not abandon that road. We should pave the road with top quality macadam, making sure that children, youths, and adults who grow up in our world do not have limited opportunities. They deserve a smooth and gently sloped path, and we should work to make it so.

In my view, the special education path toward greater inclusion goes through evidence-based services. It does not depend on greater understanding of poverty. It does not meander through lovely gardens with flowering psychologies. We may admire the findings from neuroscience, sociology, and such, but those findings do not tell us how to change behaviors that are problematic for our kids.

As we work in the new political environment, we peeps who give a damn about kids with disabilities need to Think Big. We have to be very careful to keep the overall picture on our screens. It can become easy to focus on one specific part of that picture (ADHD, dyslexia, Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, gut-microbiota, gene-42-zy-12rf).1 Doing so will fractionate our overall effort.

We need to lobby our new lawmakers to

• Sustain the basic foundation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

  • Fund it like it was planned in the beginning (40% , or better)!

  • Ensure that parents’ voices are welcomed and authoritative;

  • Make sure that IEPs are central, sensible, simple, and implemented;

  • Keep the basic structures of child-find, non-discriminatory assessment, and collaboration with general education intact

• Identify and remove barriers for individuals with disabilities, especially including in the areas of

  • Work

  • Housing

  • Recreation

Much of what I have written here refers to civil rights. Individuals with disabilities should not be denied work, access, services, opportunities, or other privileges of citizenship simply because they have disabilities.2 We need to implore our governmental leaders3 of the next few years to preserve, protect, and appropriately expand the rights of individuals with disabilities.

I hasten to add, though, that there is a special education underpinning or base to this article. Here it is: Our kids not only deserve physical access, they should also have learning access.

Our kids do not deserve “business as usual” nor the latest fad teaching.4 They deserve the most effective instruction available. That is, the instruction (whether it is for personal hygiene, spelling, or financial investment) that has been regularly shown to be most likely to lead to competence, mastery, and independence.

Those of us who give a damn about individuals with disabilities need to convince the incoming lawmakers that our peeps must not be overlooked, that looking down on individuals with disabilities is a political mistake, and that advancing the civil rights of individuals with disabilities is a natural progression of democracy.

What on Earth are we going to do?

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Footnote

As of the publication of this reminder about the event, the results of the US mid-term elections should be mostly clear. Given Ms. Tavalin’s expertise and connectedness with US policy related to special education and disability, this should be a valuable Webinar.

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SET should not be confused with a product that uses essentially the same name and is published by the Council for Exceptional Children. SET predated CEC’s publication by decades. Despite my appreciation for CEC, this product is not designed to promote that organization nor should the views expressed here be considered to represent the views or policies of that organization. A membership in CEC does not get one a subscription to SET and vice versa!

Editor’s Previous Note: I revised this post 11 October 2024. Mostly I was correcting typos, but I also added a couple of links to more recent content.—JohnL

There’s been a lot of press about reading instruction lately. Is it just interpretations of puffs of smoke or is there something more important happening?

Writing in Ed Week, Sarah Schwartz reported about anticipated changes in some widely used early literacy programs that would de-emphasize teaching young children to use “multiple cues” in decoding (Schwartz, 2021). Ms. Schwartz’s article is one of several reports that examine tension between different points of view in what has often been described as “the great debate” (Chall, 1967) or “the reading wars” (Silverman, 2019).

Because I’m opposed to metaphors that refer to “fights,” “battles,” “wars,” and similar references to violence, I hope to use different language; but here where I often quote the authors, the authors have used such martial metaphors.
—JohnL

The disagreement about reading

The tension in early reading, which was aptly captured in Emily Hanford’s series for American Public Media, is about whether early or beginning reading instruction should promote fundamental skills (letters and sounds; “phonics”) or higher-order skills (enjoying reading; getting the author’s ideas). Advocates of the latter argue that reading is, fundamentally, getting meaning from text—don’t focus on the print details as long as you believe you understand the author’s message. Advocates of the former argue that to understand an author’s argument, you must be able to covert her squiggles into language—to hear her speak.

Disagreements between these perspectives have become polemic. Advocates of one view disparge the advocates of the other view. For example, should educators promote “word calling?” Advocates of the other view argue that the their detractors are promoting guessing rather than decoding (“you’re telling kids to guess about this word”)

So, this polemic is probably an important part of the debate. Not only is the “great debate” about how to teach reading, it’s also predicated on using language that disparages advocates of alternative perspectives: “Let me characterize your argument in a disparaging way.” (I hope to avoid continuing that approach in this post.)

Recent news

Ms. Schwartz’s article connects with her previous reporting on the topic of the “three cueing” methods taught to huge percentages of children in the US as well as other articles about the topic. Among curricula adopted by US schools, the leaders (i.e., those curricula used by more schools than others) are those that recommend the three-cueing system (Schwartz, 2019).

In a nationally representative survey, the Education Week Research Center asked K-2 and special education teachers what curricula, programs, and textbooks they had used for early reading instruction in their classrooms.

The top five include three sets of core instructional materials, meant to be used in whole-class settings: The Units of Study for Teaching Reading, developed by the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, and Journeys Into Reading, both by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. There are also two early interventions, which target specific skills certain students need more practice on: Reading Recovery and Fountas & Pinnell’s Leveled Literacy Intervention.

There can be little doubt that cognitively, readers have many cues (what we behaviorists would calll “Sds”) when they encounter a word or words while reading. And, I’d agree that competent readers adjust their reading on the basis of multiple features of what they are reading.

What cues? Well, competent readers translate the letters of words to their spoken representations very quickly. They do so so smoothly and efficiently, that their use of sound-symbol associations, blending, and such is almost invisible.

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—> Read the full original (it goes on for another couple of 1000 words) here:

This newsletter is for the week that began 26 October 2026. This article is the 1870th in the history of SET. Some articles have actually been read more than a few 1000 times, but this one is in front of you for the first time.

The newsletter has a regular structure and this issue adheres to it. There is a photo followed by notes about the status of the community. Those two sections are followed by two more sections: a list of posts from the past week and, in turn, an editorial. Please be advised that no AI was abused, annihilated, or even used in writing this newsletter…well, unless I missed something.

Let’s get going…and here we go!1

Photo

At this time of year, I often have taken and shared photos of decorations for the season that I have seen during my (once) regular walks in my neighborhood. I have not been walking2 and, thus, have not had the opportunities to photograph the inventive and intriguing ornamentations and enhancements my neighbors have on display in their yards.3

However, there is a somewhat ghoulish display right outside our mudroom door. It is not even an ornament purchased at a nearby business. It is, just a real (no joke) skull.

Well, let me be a little more accurate in describing this object. It is some parts of the bones of a goat. Over the years that it has been on the porch, it has suffered some indignities. A year or two ago, we noticed that some living creatures had apparently removed some of the bones in the nose area. More recently, we noticed that some part of the jaw had been extracted, and part of it was left (as shown in the photo).

Sorry if this shocks any Dear Readers’ sensibilities. I am not seeking squeamish responses. If it does bug you, just scroll ahead. Forget about it. Go look around your own neighborhood for actual decorations!

Status update

There was one new subscriber who gained access to the full archives and the authority to comment on posts this week. Welcome to Lisa H. of CT (US). Lisa joined the 100 or so subscribers who have similar subscriptions. And, speaking of those folks, thanks of to Chen S., Judith H., Lori M., Sonja de B., Melissa J.-B., Jackie R., Micky D., Stephanie A.-O., Monica Mc.-S., Jennifer S., Sunil G., Nour A., Em D., Jamie J., Mike C., Gerry W., Vince C., Laura M., Bill R., Joel M., Joel I., Bev J., Marilyn F., Jim P., Vicki W., Lori M., Roberta B., Linda L., Bob P., Jane B., Tina C., Debbie R., Clay K., Michael K., Judith H., Larry M., and Susan O. for joining or renewing recently.

There were about a dozen new free subscribers to SET over the past week. Folks seem to be finding our little island of news, facts, and fun. I have to suspect that the new free riders found out about SET from some of the > 1320 of us who are sunbathing (even though it is a getting a bit cooler here at SET Central) on the island, sipping beverages with little umbrellas in them, listening to fine local musicians, etc.

Thanks to all of y’all who are reading the posts. And thanks for showing your engagement by dropping “likes,” “💚,” or what-have-yous.

Meanwhile, please keep an eye out for new notes on the blogs of fellow SET subscribers. They write, of course, on the particular topics that they cover, but their posts may overlap with the interests of we SET folks. Here are links to a few (only some) of them:

• Callie O.’s Special Education Action

• Carl H.’s The Learning Dispatch

• Emily K.’s Learn with Dr. Emily

• Holly K.’s The Bell Ringer

• Sam Peter’s Built Different

• Tom Zirpoli’s (…uhm…) Tom Zirpoli

• Sandra Fraser’s Multimodal Learning & Autism

I especially want to call readers’ attention to a new kid on the beach. This past week, Kurt Engelmann (yes, you may have connected that last name correctly) launched a pseudonymous ‘stack that will be devoted to Direct Instruction (yes, “Big DI”). I first met Kurt a gazillion4 years ago when he was quite young (okay, less hyperbolically, it was actually about 1974-75), but I’ve gotten to know him as a devoted professional in the years (starting around the turn of the millennium?) while he has been working with the National Institute for Direct Instruction. I highly recommend subscribing to his ‘stack.

I dearly wish that I could talk about discussions that we are having over on the Chat section of SET, but there is little happening over there. I think it presents a means for us to have brief discussions of current events and such. Thanks to Jannie KT and Betsy T. for contributing there. Come on over and add a note or ask a question.

SETlets (that is, the “Table of Contents”)

SET is a source about the education of children with disabilities. At SET we are also quite concerned about supporting the families of individuals with disabilities who much navigate special education practices, policies, research, and lives of our shared kids. That’s is a broad charge, no?

This past week reflects SET’s eclectic portfolio. Dear Readers read (!) posts about policy, teaching, public opinion, research, and more. We hope that the SET articles proved to be of value to you, Dear Readers.

Here is the list with the one post for the Very Special Dear Readers in the first clump and the public posts in the second. Note that no authors’ initials are in brackets after posts because I wrote all of them this week.

For the paid peeps

1. The educational research evidence we need—No. 1: Evidence-based means...uhm, what?

Out in the wild

1. Special Education Today newsletter 6(17): What happened over the last week?

2. US NPR: Special education teachers’ jobs—1: What did a group of special education teachers have to say about the beginning or their school years?

3. The Arc about changes in SNAP: What might families need to know about the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

4. Sold a Story 2: We have success in Houston: What happened when a school used Direct Instruction to teach effectively?

5. M. Kennedy gave the CLD lecture: How about our colleague having this honor?

6. K. Tavalin Webinar on US policy post-2026 election: What are the implications of the US election for current coming activities?

7. K. Engelmann launched a blog devoted to Big DI: What do I hope will be available there?

Of course, please be advised that not all of the posts are available to the general public. Free readers cannot have access to the first item in the first lists. That one is reserved for readers with paid subscriptions. Please join us!

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Comments

Okay. Here is the point of this week’s editorial: Big DI seems to be having a day, and we should celebrate it, but we shouldn’t piss off our fellow educators as we ride the wave.

In addition to the widely read-heard episodes of the deservedly popular Sold a Story 2 by Emily Hanford and colleagues, new resources that emphasize Big DI have been emerging recently. Many Dear Readers will know that people very closely allied with Big DI have become widely available. Examples are in the list following the next paragraph.5

Most readers will know that I am—and have been for a long time—an advocate of Direct Instruction. Dear Readers will recall my earlier admissions of my background (e.g., "Defining ‘DI’—My history) and some will know that I have actually conducted research (yes, empirical—somewhat scientific!—studies6) about DI and its features.

• Kurt Engelmann, one of Zig’s sons and now an Earth-wide advocate for Big DI

• Linda Diamond, who has a substantial history with using an promoting Big DI

• Zach Groshell, a teacher who stumbled onto Big DI and got it, and then recorded interviews with SET supporters like Kathy M., Marcy S., Anita A., and Owen E.

• Doug Carnine, one of the goddesses of education (and should be in the GOAT conversation), and probably one of the—if not the—closest living collaborator with Zig on Big DI.

Given my bias for Big DI from my teaching-learning history and my admiration for these folks, it might seem odd that I want to sound a note of caution. I do. Here is that note of caution.

One of the reasons that Big DI has met the substantial resistance that it has encountered since the 1960s is that the way it was presented to the general education community was—uhm, errr—dismissive and even “in your face.” That is, Zig p*ssed off people.

I’m thinking that, if you’re going to tell folks that their cherished notions are wrong (wrong), you should not do so in a way that that hurts them. When we advocates of Big DI discuss education with our colleagues, we have to be careful not to rub their noses in the poop that has resulted because of adherence to their practices, procedures, methods, materials, and recommendations. We need them to join us; we don’t need to alienate them.

Zig was too f’ing smart for most educational BS arguments. He not only zinged popular education ideas, but he conducted studies that challenged 1960s-cherished ideas about child development (e.g., “conservation”; Engelmann & Gallagher, 1966). He worked at the University of Illinois where the greatly—and deservedly—respected champion of education, Samuel Kirk, was searching for descriptions of child learning characteristics that would guide education to remediation of underlying cognitive processes; remediation of those processes (perception, memory, etc.) would presumably lead to improvements in reading, arithmetic, etc.

Zig (Engelmann, 1967) rejected those approaches to solving learning problems. He considered them to be indirect. He argued that if you wanted kids to get good at reading, rather than teaching memory, attention, and such…you should teach reading. Duh!

And, he told those folks so. He brashly (hulking athletic body, cigarette pack rolled into the sleeve of his t-shirt, and full-on cussing) told folks that their ideas were misbegotten. He teamed up with some other really smart people (Jim Gallagher, Carl Bereiter, Wes Becker, Elaine Bruner, and [of course] Therese Engelmann). And he systematically developed what we now call Big DI.

As Engelmann, Bateman, and I explained, too many arguments about educational reform take indirect and, frankly, illogical paths. They do not look at the problem in educational (teachable) terms. We special educators need to keep the focus on teaching what matters for our kids.

Those of us who champion Big DI must do so cautiously and gently. When a reading expert promotes systematic scaffolding for blending instruction, I have to resist replying, “Uhm, Distar, 1969.” When folks tout the benefits of providing pre-teaching components of algebra procedures, I must be careful not to dismiss them with “Yeah, you can find that in Ratios and Equations or Steins’s and Carnine’s work.” It’s way too freaking easy to point at the hyper-buzz about “science of reading” and say, “Well, we told you so. Don’t you remember?”

We don’t need to sneak up on them and then throw a big “gotcha.” We probably would be better off to use the “yes…and” approach of the improvisational workshop.

“Oh, wow! that idea sounds really good,” we ought to say. “And how about doing this, too?”

Now, just in case you think that I might have forgotten, here are the usual recommendations: (a) Wear your seatbelts (and make sure your children’s seats are affixed properly). (b) Get vaccinations as appropriate. (c) Eat healthy foods. (d) Exercise (I wish). (e) Watch out for your family, friends, and neighbors, and fellow denizens of Earth…and please, teach your children well.

JohnL

SET Editor guy

Charlottesville

Reference

Engelmann, S. (1967). Relationship between psychological theories and the act of teaching. Journal of School Psychology, 5(2), 93-100.

Engelmann, S., & Gallagher, J. J. (1966). A study of how a child learns concepts about characteristics of liquid materials: Final report. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED014428.pdf

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Footnote

6

I don’t want to bore readers with items on my curriculum vita by detailing the work. If, however, one or more dear readers is actually interested in these studies, she or they are welcome to write to me directly and I’ll provide a photocopy of articles.

SET should not be confused with a product that uses the same name and is published by the Council for Exceptional Children. SET predated CEC’s publication by decades. Despite my appreciation for CEC, this product is not designed to promote that organization nor should the views expressed here be considered to represent the views or policies of that organization. A membership in CEC does not get one a subscription to SET and vice versa!

I was pleased to see that you are bringing your knowledge and expertise about Direct Instruction to Substack. I enjoyed reading these first couple of posts:

• Announcing the Direct Instructio…

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==> https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2026/10/29/sold-a-story-s2-e4…

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Let us now proceed…

Relevance of evidence

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