Welkom! Hoş geldiniz arkadaşlar! 欢迎! Vítejte u nás! Bienvenue! हमारे घर में स्वागत है। ¡Bienvenido! Chào mừng! ようこそ! Croeso! Hello! It is another issue of the newsletter for Special Education Today. This edition is the 1877th of all time (which is, as a long-time friend reminded me recently, a lot).
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?
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.
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
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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 SETand vice versa!
Footnotes
Readers can see this effect by searching with their favorite search engine for a topic covered recently on SET. For example, I suspect that one will find SET coverage of the passing of Ginnie McLaughlin among the first 10-20 items returned by GaaGLE or BlING.
DISTAR was the first curriculum that explicitly and systematically taught kids how to blend. There were some “phonics” programs in the 1960s and earlier that taught kids letter sounds and promoted sounding out, but I don’t recall a one that showed kids how to slide from sound to sound and then say it fast.