Characteristics of Direct Instruction:

Direct instruction is an educational approach in which educators directly educate learners face to face, by

breaking up a course material into many components and teaching them step by step.

According to Fisher and Frey’s article, district instruction has the following characteristics.

  1. Reduce the difficulty by dividing the task into smaller parts.

First of all, educators should identify the content of the course that they want learners to learn, and then divide the content into several parts to teach learners step by step. This method helps students absorb knowledge more easily and makes complex knowledge easier to understand.

  • Use guidance to support students during practice.

Educators should provide students with examples of the content or exercises for students to practice in the process of education. In order to help students better understand the course material. Also, the teachers should develop a set of criteria to identify whether the learner has mastered the course material.

  • Provide feedback to students.

As the learner completes each part of the course content, the teacher should provide feedback to the learner. Moreover, when the learner has a problem, the educator should answer them in time.

This approach has been used in the topic we chose. Because the topic that our group chose is to teach learners about public goods. Therefore, we should break the whole content into smaller parts. For example, we will first teach learners the characteristics of public goods, and then the problems that public goods will cause to society. We will also provide some examples of public goods and some practice questions for learners to help learners better understand the concept of public goods. Thus, this approach does align with our chosen topic. However, we also use some other educational approaches in our topic, such as cooperative learning and experiential learning.

Reference: Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2020). Direct Instruction in Early Reading: Direct instruction is key to teaching reading but is often misunderstood. Educational Leadership, 78(3), 76–77.