This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Let's see. How do I want to say this? I don't think you can plan to have that kind of impact. Making meaningful changes in education seems to take a combination of top-down and bottom-up movement. People listened to the first season of the podcast, including many lawmakers, and thought, “We need a new law,” and I think some of those laws are well-intended and have good results, but passing a law isn't enough and sometimes has unintended consequences. So I have mixed feelings about it all. At least 26 states have made some legislative or policy change around reading instruction since the podcast came out in the fall of 2022, but they are also part of a more than decade-long series of changes in laws and policies related to reading instruction.
There are states where there has been some measurable change in reading outcomes–Mississippi is the one that people point to immediately. Alabama is another—a big report on that came out last week. Legislation is almost always part of the story, never the whole story. One of the reasons we are trying to get inside the question of direct instruction in Season Two is that instruction does matter, and matters maybe more than some people think.
In some ways the field maybe was ready for it. There was a group of parents and teachers pushing for change. Reading instruction was on a lot of people's radar. But one of the remarkable things was particular people, who were very critical of me at first, changing their minds, and writing later to say, "Oh, I didn't know. I understand this differently now." I mean, I still have plenty of critics out there.
Education has always had surprising politics. A lot of the kind of holistic, big reforms in reading have come in more conservative states, more Southern states, states that were further toward the bottom of the reading scale. Maybe they had more pressure on them to make changes. And some of the states that do better in education haven't had as much pressure on them—although changes have been happening in states like Massachusetts and California as well.
The new season of your podcast is about a teaching technique known as direct instruction. Would you say it is what some people call rote learning?
One way of describing this season is that it is another resurrection of an old-fashioned technique. Is that accurate?
But he was doing it in the ‘60s, so it's not new now.
How else does it differ from other teaching methods?
Are the political battle lines drawn in a similar way?
You unearth a huge study, Project Follow Through, that looked at 350,000 students and 22 different programs, and found that on average Direct Instruction worked best in nearly all measures. Why was that not the end of the story?
Is Direct Instruction right for every teacher? If you are a very effective teacher, might you not object to having your autonomy and hard-won skills be replaced by this very scripted technique?
Would you want to teach like that?
Are there students who do better with Direct Instruction than others?
But how would that work practically? If it's call-and-response, it's throwing the ball back. Eventually, the child who's getting it quicker is going to tune out.
Fewer than 200 schools in America are DI schools at the moment. That's not many. Why don't schools stick with it?
What should a parent do if they hear your podcast and are very persuaded by it? Would you go so far as to encourage them to change schools?
If Season Two were to have an effect akin to the first season, what would you like it to be?
It would be people starting to ask questions about why we can't agree on some more basic things about teaching and learning. There is a body of evidence in education. It's out there. Established professions—medicine and accounting and nursing and aviation—have a body of knowledge that they agree on. Why don't we have that in teaching and learning? I just don't think we're going to get very far until we have that.
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