Important aspects of instructional design
What can we learn from a psychologist about teaching?
Many readers of Special Education Today will know that I sometimes find cognitive psychology a bit less deserving of the high place that it seems to be occupying in contemporary discussions of education. As I have discussed in these pages 13 April 2022,1 my friends of that persuasion too often focus on variables that have limited value in the act of teaching, which is aimed at changing behavior.
What is more, when some cognitive psychologists join we educators to discuss how educators might do a better job of inducing changes in behavior, they (understandably) spend their words-time on explaining how results from their research about the mind and thinking should guide teaching. Too often, they seem not even to have consulted what we educators already know about instruction.2
Every now and again, though, a cognitive psychologist doesn’t follow that path. Someone from mind-land gets it right. Woohoo! That’s a great time to celebrate, in my book. And, this post is a celebration of a psychologist getting it right!
Over on his ‘stack called The Learning Dispatch, Carl Hendrick (who is an accomplished psychologist) posted an extended discussion about designing instruction that draws directly from the work of educators,3 Zig Engelmann and Doug Carnine. In his post, “10 Rules for Designing Effective Learning: Or How to Plan Teaching That Works for All Students, Not Just the Strongest,“ Professor Hendrick provided explanations of important principles of Direct Instruction programming in non-technical language and with specific examples.
I won’t reproduce Professor Hendricks’s entire catalog of rules here. However, to give readers a hint, here is the head and first paragraphs for the first of them:
1. Boundaries matter more than definitions.
Students don't just learn what something is, they learn what it is, versus what it isn’t. Without clear boundaries, concepts become fuzzy and useless. A child who's only seen red roses will call pink flowers "red." A student who's only seen mammals on land won't recognise whales as mammals. Show the boundaries explicitly, or students will tend to overfit everything.
Students can memorise that "democracy means rule by the people" and still have no idea how to identify one in practice. The definition provides no guidance for distinguishing democracies from other systems that might superficially seem to involve popular participation. But show them democracies versus dictatorships, democracies versus anarchies, democracies versus oligarchies, and the concept crystallises with remarkable clarity.
This rule echoes ideas in the SET post about using examples in teaching (“The power of examples…” from 13 August 2025). Showing boundaries is built on providing examples and not-example. As Professor Hendricks explained here, using examples to show boundaries or the edges of concepts is critically important in program design. It’s important that his rules got at this fundamental feature of design.
Another of the reasons this post is important is that it addresses one of—some of us would say the most important—differences between d.i. and DI.4 Professor Hendrick showed his understanding of the guiding principles of instructional design that undergird DI. His post is not so much about the teaching behaviors (frequent questions, choral responding, etc.) but about the creation of the scripts. It’s the selection and sequencing of the teacher presentations on which he centered his post.
The “10 Rules” post is an excellent entry into the world of instructional design. To be sure, one might quibble with aspects of the analysis and presentation, but those quibbles would be few and minor. (It’d make for a helluva fine conversation over suitable beverages.) I encourage Dear Readers of SET5 to zip right over to his ‘stack and read the post. It’s a great example of a psychologist who gets it.
And, what is more, there will be at least one opportunity to hear him talk about these ideas. Carl Hendrick is slated to provide the keynote presentation at the National DI Conference in July of 2026. Stay tuned. I post more about this event when the details are available.
Reference
Hendrick, C. (2025). 10 Rules for designing effective learning: Or how to plan teacher that works for all students, not just the strongest. The Learning Dispatch, 19 September 2025. https://substack.com/@carlhendrick/p-174016607
Footnotes
See my post on that date, “Concerns about brain-based analyses: Are we chasing the right squirrel?” (Note that a paid subscription is required to read it.)
My reference to what educators know here goes much farther than educators’ “craft knowledge.” I’m referring to the the knowledge predicated on rigorously conducted research. There is, for example, an extensive body of quasi-experimental and frankly experimental research about educational practices that owes essentially nothing to cognitive psychology.
OMG! Our educators’ work is not being ignored!
Here are links to a couple of earlier posts on SET that take up the topic of “little di and big DI”: Comparing di to DI (23 May 2022); Defining DI (again) (27 March 2024). For an excellent analysis, see Kurt Engelmann’s Direct Instruction: A Practitioner’s Handbook (available from lots of places, and I make no $$ from clicks on this link).
By the way, Carl Hendrick is one of you, Dear Readers.