Episode Details

Dr. Sarah Brown and Dr. Kelly Powell-Smith, co-authors of Routines for Reading Results: A Practical Approach for Accelerating Growth, alongside Dr. Stephanie Stollar and Beth Madden unpack the principles of Direct Instruction and explain why effective reading instruction depends not only on what we teach, but on the intentional design and delivery of instruction.

They walk through the four phases of learning: acquisition, automaticity, generalization, and adaptation – and explain why students can appear to “get it” during a lesson yet struggle to retain or apply that learning later.

The conversation also tackles a common criticism of scripted instruction: Do scripts stifle teacher creativity and responsiveness? Sarah and Kelly explain why thoughtfully designed routines can actually reduce cognitive load for teachers, provide consistency for students, and free educators to focus on the thing that cannot be scripted ahead of time: how students are responding in the moment.

They also discuss how these routines can live alongside existing high-quality instructional materials, how educators can use data to identify gaps rather than continually purchasing new programs, and what school leaders can do to support implementation.

Key Takeaways:

• Direct Instruction (DI) defined & why both the design and delivery of instruction matter
• The four phases of learning: acquisition → automaticity → generalization → adaptation & how instructional needs change depending on a student’s phase of learning
• The role of precise, concise teacher language
• Modeling, leading, testing, firming, and providing individual turns – while building sufficient practice and intentional error correction into instruction
• How leaders can support implementation through collaboration, data analysis, ongoing learning, and coaching

Resources & References Mentioned:

• Book: Routines for Reading Results: A Practical Approach for Accelerating Growth - Stephanie Stollar, Kelly A. Powell-Smith, Beth A. Madden & Sarah Brown (Amazon)
• Book: Routines for Reading Results (Solution Tree)
• Book: Teaching Struggling and At-Risk Readers: A Direct Instruction Approach - Doug Carnine and colleagues
• Direct Instruction: the instructional approach originating in the work of Siegfried Engelmann
• Project Follow Through: “the largest and most consequential educational experiment in U.S. history, and its findings continue to inform NIFDI’s work to promote evidence-based, replicable instructional practices.”
• Research on connected phonation/continuous blending (Gonzalez-Frey, S. M., & Ehri, L. C. (2021). Connected Phonation is More Effective than Segmented Phonation for Teaching Beginning Readers to Decode Unfamiliar Words. Scientific Studies of Reading, 25(3), 272–285. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2020.1776290)

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