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Comment by numeromancer | Hacker News Reader

This instruction book was authored by Siegfried Engelmann, who, among others, developed Direct Instruction. In the late 60s/early 70s there was a thorough comparison of various teaching methods called Project Follow-through; Direct Instruction did far better than all of the other methods. The results of this study were devoutly ignored by the educational establishment, and often denigrated as being "authoritarian".

Englemann, along with another educational researcher, Douglas Carnine, authored a work called Theory of Instruction, which is as disciplined and scientific a work as you can find in a "soft" subject like education, and expounds the theoretical basis behind their effective methods.

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From the his wikipedia page [0], he seems to have spent at most 4 years actually teaching (from "early 1960s" to 1964), was a marketing guy among other things before that, and spent a long career writing eductation books and articles and seminars after that.

You have valid point on his work being assessed and valorized in studies, but parent's point also stands stronger in my mind. The ratio of actual experience in the field vs spending time telling people what to do is pretty surprising.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Engelmann

What you wrote about the Wikipedia page is not consistent with what I read on the Wikipedia page:

>While working as a marketing director in the early 1960s, Engelmann became interested with how children learn.

>[...]

>In 1964, he left his job in advertising and became a research associate

>[...]

>In 1970, he moved from the University of Illinois to the University of Oregon in Eugene, becoming a Professor in the University's College of Education.[2][3]

He was never a public school teacher, although he may have taught students as a research associate. He was apparently teaching as a hobbyist, including homeschooling.

The kerfuffle about whether he was "actually teaching", however, actually misses the point. While you can, at least in principle, understand the experience of a student by experimenting on students, you will never understand the experience of a teacher by experimenting on students. Whatever method you come up with or promote must ultimately be implemented by real flesh-and-blood humans working under real constraints (including the limits of their own abilities and emotions) with realistic organizational and community dynamics. This is what I interpreted the original complaint about researchers versus engineers as analogized to software development to mean.

You're right, I misread the "He began working with preschoolers" bit as professionally teaching the kids.

> you will never understand the experience of a teacher by experimenting on students

I'm not sure to follow, wouldn't you at least understand your own experience as a teacher by actually teaching to students ?

I (O.P.) want to be clear for the record that I am not endorsing (though not discouraging either) that Engelmann's or DISTAR methods be the new guiding light in schools. I can certainly envision that implementation going awry for lots of reasons.

I'm just stating that this particular book, in a 1:1 parent:child setting, has a great track record. 100 days of spending 10-15 minutes with your kid doing these lessons is a low risk intervention with tremendous upside. You don't have to have a teaching background to utilize it (the intro for parents is fairly extensive and important pre-reading), you just follow the parental directions.

Hi numeromancer, I am surprised to hear mention of Engelmann and Project Follow Through here on HN :). I would love to connect and learn more about how you discovered DI. FWIW, I am a former principal engineer at a FAANG company turned educational researcher / edtech founder. I am working to revive Engelmann's Theory of Instruction and democratize access to the explicit, systematic teaching of the skills of reading (e.g., phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition).

Hello :) . Pleasantly surprised and happy to see folks who know about Engelmann and DISTAR here. Random tidbit: I too quit software work to launch experiment in ed-tech two years back. Randomly stumbled on Englemann through a rabbit hole. I'm obsessed with his ideas around sequencing the lessons correctly. Beyond reading, I was interested in using it to improve how we teach Maths. Unsuccessfully tried that mixed with video games. But I agree that Engelmanns research on theory of instruction remains a treasure trove, as it came from his practice and not writing a PhD thesis.

I taught my 4 year old to read English through the book. She's far ahead in reading amongst her peer group (English is not our native language). I know sounds cheesy, but please count me in for exchanging ideas or fixing education using his methods.

Hi havercosine, I would love to (my contact info is in my profile).

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