Back to Zig Engelmann
Just some recollections....
Siegfried Engelmann, who lead authorship teams for a broad array of teaching materials and was the progenitor of the Direct Instruction model in education, was born on this day in 1931. He passed away on in 2019. I have many fond memories of Zig, and I want to recapture some of them, along with a few “facts and figures,” in this post. This post overlaps a bit with a 2022 post here on Special Education Today celebrating Zig’s birthday.
Zig was born and grew up in Illinois. He graduated from the University of Illinois with a bachelors degree in philosophy. While at Illinois, he studied with H. S. Harris, whom he credited with leading him to understand that “Philosophy is not a thing; it is the fabric of science and history, architecture and education” (Engelmann, 1969a, p. xx) and for engendering a broad understanding of the principle of parsimony.
Parsimony
Parsimony was important. It made no sense to Engelmann to beat around the bush. That perspective was an essential feature of DI: If one explanation accounted for facts while invoking fewer hypothetical mechanisms than another explanation, the first explanation was to be preferred (1969a). Accordingly, a guiding principle for Engelmann was that learners’ failure to learn was a consequence of inadequate instruction, it was not the consequence of some characteristic of the learner. That is, if the kid did not learn, it was the instruction that had failed.
For me, this idea forms a basic feature of special education: We take the learner’s performance where it is and we plot a course toward the outcome desired (i.e., the goal or objective). Now, how do we promote the learner’s acquisition of this objective within the universe of related objectives? Let’s do this parsimoniously. What instruction will get us there efficiently?
Thus, Zig sought “faultless instruction” (Engelmann, 1980).1 In his view of learner-centered instruction, teachers should employ logically designed and strenuously tested—and refined—instructional practices. Detailed field testing of coordinated systems of lessons should be completed before commercial programs would be published (Barbash, 2011). The testing should consider the students’ learning as the primary concern. “If a teaching demonstration isn’t helping the kids, get it the f*** out of there,” Zig might say.
DI programs
Many people will likely associate Engelmann with the myriad commercial programs that he and a dedicated cadre of co-authors developed. Among the earliest examples of them was the Direct Instruction Systems for Teaching and Remediation (DISTAR,2 usually written with a combination of large and small capitals), but the full array of programs spanned pre-kindergarten and high-school subjects (and even included work on graduate education). There was a long path to those products, described in a video interview with Geoffery Colvin (Palfreman, 2008).
Ever the advocate for improvement, Engelmann refined and revised the instructional programs with which he was associated. They could be improved, based on what the programmers learned about how learners responded to them. “The DISTAR reader program is not the end-all of instruction. We should see programs in the next few years that make DISTAR look as antiquated as the Model-T Ford. DISTAR is simply an attempt to show teachers a better way to teach” (Engelmann, 1975, p. 168).
Learning
I suspect that, as substantial as Engelmann’s effect on education has been, his contributions will only grow in coming decades. When he started to focus on education, there was an emphasis on blaming learners and, at best, providing learners *chances* to learn from or to receive indirect instruction. Fifty years later, many educators emulate at least some of features of Direct Instruction. Even it someone might argue that the transition is not entirely because of Engelmann’s work, he had a stunning effect on teaching.
But, few educators have been influenced by his most seminal works. Some The most important contributions, in my view, are not the diverse illustrations of applying DI to reading, writing, arithmetic, and etc. The long-term effects will be predicated on Engelmann’s understanding of what capabilities an organism must have and what it must experience to learn (Engelmann & Steely, 2004) and what instructional designers must know and do so that they can design faultless instruction (Engelmann & Carnine, 1982). To educators’ benefit (and my delight), one or two cognitive psychologists have discovered Zig’s work and explained its value (see, for example, Hendrick, 2025).
On a personal level, I am wonderfully glad that, when I was her teaching assistant in 1969-70, Teddee Blumberg3 loaned me a copy of Preventing Failure in the Primary Grades (Engelmann, 1969b) and guided me through reviewing DISTAR Reading 1. Teddee’s recommendations helped compel me to apply to the University of Oregon a few years later when I went to graduate school.
Some student memories
As a graduate student, I subsequently learned a lot from Zig. The first night of my first class at Oregon, Barb Bateman said to me, “If you want to learn about teaching, sign up for Zig’s class.” I took that advice and I am forever indebted to Bateman for the recommendation and to Zig for what he began teaching me in my first quarter at Oregon in 1973. I was one of the lucky ones in a class of 40-50, many of whom were there because they were trainees for Follow Through teaching positions. I got to see him explain the concepts behind reading, explanations that capitalized on, clarified, and corrected my previous understanding of reading. And I got to ask questions and get parsimonious answers.
Zig didn’t just know about teaching reading, arithmetic, and such. One time early in our connection I mentioned that I was teaching myself about identifying birds and trees. He said something like, “Oh yeah. Birds. Barb [Bateman] is good with birds.” After a moment, he continued, “Yeah, and I know a bit about trees.” He explained that he had a tree farm “outside of town” and that it was pretty easy to identify lots of trees simply by looking at their leaves: “It helps to look at the bark and the shape of the tree, to be sure, but you can usually just get by with the leaf.” About a year later, for the final exam in a class about instructional design, Zig assigned the students (I was one) the task of selecting examples of tree leaves and putting them in a sequence that would teach learners to discriminate among the oak family of trees.4 The following image shows three different varieties of oak leafs; I think Zig gave us a couple of others (Black Oak and maybe Live Oak), too.
Beers
As I got advanced degrees over those three years, I took another two or three classes (where are those transcripts?), but I also had many beers and conversations with Zig. We talked frequently after classes or on afternoons at the corporate offices about issues (e.g., “OK, reinforcement is a given. Let’s talk about the stimulus side of the equation…” as we considered a follow-along article for one of his 1960s papers, Engelmann, 1968). Those were tremendous learning experiences.
After classes we retired to college-neighborhood bars for wide ranging discussions. I learned lots more about research, instructional design, and teaching during those informal sessions. I also learned about how discouraging it was that the outcomes from studies of DI, especially Follow Through, were being down-played. In subsequent conversations, after I had graduated, Zig told me about efforts he and Wes Becker undertook to convince the federal government to report that their DI model had clearly taken first place in the outcomes in Follow Through (later documented in Engelmann, 2007). He was frustrated by those responses. On more than one occasion, he told me it was enough to make him want to quit. I am so glad he didn’t quit.
I am so glad I had a chance to learn from a person who I think will have even more influence on education over the next 10-50 years as people learn more about teaching and learning. I expect the influence of the base works (Engelmann & Carnine, 1982; Engelmann & Steely, 2004) may ultimately have substantial effects on machine and artificial learning.
Meanwhile, I’m going to miss Engelmann. He was inspiring, not just because of his educational leadership, but in that he could weave f*** into more sentences than I could, he knew sh**, and he was a good friend.
Happy b’day to Zig Engelmann.
Sources
Barbash, S. (2011). Clear teaching: With Direct Instruction, Siegfried Engelmann discovered a better way of teaching. http://education-consumers.org/pdf/CT_111811.pdf
Engelmann, S. (1968). Relating operant techniques to programming and teaching. Journal of School Psychology, 6, 89–96.
Engelmann, S. (1969a). Conceptual learning. Belmont, CA: Fearon.
Engelmann, S. (1969b). Preventing failure in the primary grades. Chicago: SRA.
Engelmann, S. (1975). Your child can succeed: How to get the most out of school for your child. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Engelmann, S. (1980). Toward the design of faultless instruction: The theoretical basis of concept analysis. Educational Technology, 10, 28–36.
Engelmann, S. (2007). Teaching needy kids in our backward system: 42 years of trying. ADI Press.
Engelmann, S., & Carnine, D. (1982). Theory of instruction: Principles and applications. New York: Irvington.
Engelmann, S., & Engelmann, T. (1966). Give your child a superior mind. Simon and Schuster
Engelmann, S., & Steely, D. (2004). Inferred functions of performance and learning. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Hendrick, C. (2025). 10 Rules for designing effective learning
Or how to plan teaching that works for all students, not just the strongest. The learning dispatch: Exploring the Science of learning. 19 September 2025, https://carlhendrick.substack.com/p/10-rules-for-designing-effective
Palfremon, J. (2008). Biography of Siegfried (Zig) Engelmann. http://zigsite.com/video/ZigBiography.html
Footnotes
Zig was roasted by critics in the press for saying one of his goals was to create curricula that were “teacher proof.” Detractors took that idea as Zig disrespecting or demeaning teachers. In my interpretation of “teacher proof,” I’d say that he didn’t mean disrespect for people who are teachers. He meant disrespect for the common conception of teachers using a roll-you-own approach in which instructional practices, procedures, and lessons are composed of a little of this, a little of that, a dab of magic jelly, and a lot of hope.
I’ve also heard people refer to the acronym as “Direct Instruction System for Teaching Arithmetic and Reading.” Sometimes on walls in the suite of offices where Zig worked, one might see handwritten signs that read, “DI☆.”
Teddee admitted great admiration for Zig when we talked about him in the 1960s. She told me she had seen him speak and she wished “he just didn’t use so many four-letter words.” Later I learned first hand that Zig could cuss with the best of ‘em.
I remember that in the class sessions, he brought leaves—the real things; hands-on learning!—to class and led us through what he might have called a concept analysis. He showed us how the lobes on black, red, and white oaks differed,
Love this piece, John. Engelmann came to UK in the early ‘70s as an invited speaker by our department. He was every bit as colorful a speaker as you recount. He also conveyed a great message that instruction should be systematic and precise.
Nice story, Mike. Thanks!
I was reminded that Zig wrote some valuable articles in his early days (and later days, too). I want to go back and review a couple of them for the SET readership. They are of renewed relevance in the current discussions about teaching reading.