Four years ago, a podcast series about flawed methods schools were using to teach reading sent shockwaves through the education community, prompting states to pass new laws and many districts to overhaul their practices.
Now, the podcast is back for a second season, with a deep dive into another teaching method that promises to incite more heated debate over what works in the classroom—and grander questions about what the goals of education should be.
Sold a Story, an investigative series from American Public Media and helmed by journalist Emily Hanford, spent its first season examining the curriculum authors and publishers who popularized ineffective approaches to early reading instruction.
The podcasts had a swift impact that has transformed reading policy. In the years since, more than 40 states have passed legislation requiring schools align their instruction to evidence-based practices. Some have banned the methods Hanford investigated in her series.
In its second season, the series broadens its focus from reading to teaching writ large, focusing on an approach called Direct Instruction, developed by the late professor Siegfried Engelmann.
This “education outsider,” as Hanford calls him, developed a strikingly effective way to raise student achievement, she says in the first episode. But even though a government-sponsored study showed that Direct Instruction outperformed other approaches, the education establishment swept the findings under the rug, she says—because the method didn’t look like their idea of good teaching.
“Powerful people disputed the findings and sought to discredit them,” she says.
Season two is already driving conversations among researchers, teachers, and pundits. Writing in The 74, researcher Connor P. Williams hopes the episodes will “singlehandedly reignite public interest in making our schools better and fairer.”
Dylan Kane, a Colorado math teacher, offered a more cautious take on his Substack. Writing about math instruction, he says: “We can absolutely do better than we are now.”
“I think we have a lot to learn from Zig Engelmann and Direct Instruction. But I don’t think the answer is simply to go back to what people were doing before,” he writes.
Start here to learn more about the themes in the podcast, and Education Week’s coverage of some of these issues in our archives, which now span more than 40 years.
1. What is Direct Instruction? Is it the same as explicit teaching?
2. Does the Direct Instruction method work?
3. If Direct Instruction seems effective, why isn’t it more popular?
4. How do arguments over Direct Instruction inform today’s educational debates?
5. Do we know what share of teachers favor explicit teaching methods vs. inquiry-oriented ones?
1. What is Direct Instruction? Is it the same as explicit teaching?
Educators often say “direct instruction” to mean a synonym for explicit instruction, referring to any method in which teachers explain concepts step by step, offer concrete examples, model new skills, and require students to engage in lots of practice.
But Direct Instruction—the program and proper noun—is something distinct. The method does include elements of explicit teaching, but it’s more prescriptive.
Teachers follow scripted routines for activities like asking questions or reviewing concepts. They constantly prompt student responses, checking for comprehension, and only move on to more advanced content once students master basic skills.
A 1999 Education Week article profiled one Baltimore school using the approach. Englemann’s idea, wrote former staff writer Debra Viadero, is that “students learn best when instruction is so structured and clear that misinterpretation is impossible.” She describes the classroom environment:
Carpenter moves to another task in his students’ language arts textbook: identifying the parts of speech in a series of sentences. Carpenter reads the first aloud: “That last statement is very misleading,” then, scanning his script, asks, “What’s the noun in the subject?” He snaps his fingers, and the students shout, “Statement!”
“What’s the verb, everyone?” Fingers snap, and the students shout, “Is!”
“Good job,” the teacher replies.
Baltimore remains a hub of Direct Instruction teaching; a network of six schools began using the method 30 years ago and continues to do so. In 1997, Engelmann and colleagues founded the National Institute for Direct Instruction, a nonprofit that offers professional development to schools implementing the method and conducts research on its effectiveness.
There’s no official tally of how many schools use the approach, but the National Institute for Direct Instruction maintains a list of programs that meet its criteria. They include elementary reading curricula, such as Reading Mastery; interventions for older struggling readers, like Corrective Reading and REWARDS; and foundational math skills programs, among others.
2. Does the Direct Instruction method work?
Direct Instruction was one of a collection of approaches to early elementary education tested in a large-scale experiment in the 1960s and ‘70s—the government-sponsored study that Hanford references in Sold a Story.
The research, called Project Follow Through, was funded as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty, the collection of policies that led to the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, among other social supports. The project sought to identify teaching methods that would help at-risk students make the most progress.
Results showed that students in the Direct Instruction schools made the highest average gains in basic skills, academic thinking abilities, and self-esteem. But as Hanford explains in her series, the results were contested.
Proponents of the other programs included in the study argued that some of the statistical methodology was flawed, and that evaluation measures didn’t fully account for other benefits they said their programs could provide—such as higher-level thinking abilities, or what the field would now call social-emotional skills.
In the years since, research on Direct Instruction has continued to accrue. A 1986 study found that children in preschools that used the method had worse behavioral outcomes as teenagers than kids in more “child centered"programs. (The study was conducted by researchers affiliated with one of the child-centered programs, and Direct Instruction creators disputed the results.)
A couple of studies over the past few decades have shown that Direct Instruction raised scores but was no more effective than other methods, or in some cases less effective. But the bulk of evidence shows positive results on test scores.
A 2002 meta-analysis of comprehensive school reform approaches from Johns Hopkins University identified Direct Instruction as one of three programs with the strongest evidence of effectiveness, out of 29 total approaches. A 2018 metanalysis on Direct Instruction programs found positive, statistically significant results on reading, math, and other academic subjects.
3. If Direct Instruction seems effective, why isn’t it more popular?
Here’s what makes all this more complicated. Proponents’ and opponents’ back-and-forths over competing evidence aren’t just about test scores. They’re rooted in deeper, philosophical questions about what the goals of education should be.
Hanford discusses this in the series, saying that direct instruction is at odds with discovery-based learning, an approach that has been influential for decades in American education. In discovery learning, she says, teachers serve mainly as guides, and “experience is the primary instructor.”
It’s a difference of opinion that often turns heated and emotional, in part because more teacher-led methods challenge long-established practices in the profession.
Discovery-based education has its roots in progressive education, which emerged in the 1910s and 20s, largely as a reaction to the rote learning that most teachers were trained with in American “normal schools” in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Theorists like John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick favored exploratory learning and projects over other kinds of teaching methods.
As normal schools became teacher colleges and, later, state universities, education professors embraced these theories as foundational to what it meant to prepare teachers. And child-centered lessons and exploration became part of the norms of the teaching profession.
That’s partly why critics argue that Direct Instruction prevents teachers from using their professional judgment, or that it robs students of the opportunity to explore their creativity and develop their passions. And some say it’s inequitable that Direct Instruction is used predominantly in low-income schools, while students from higher-income backgrounds have access to more open-ended learning experiences.
As Viadero’s 1999 article pointed out, these sociological arguments are still powerful. “Research or no research, many schools would say [Direct Instruction] is just not a program that fits with their philosophy,” she quoted Robert Slavin, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, as saying. (He knew this from experience: Slavin had created another prescriptive school reform model, Success for All. The model is still around but, like Direct Instruction, has never been wildly popular.)
Engelmann, on the other hand, has said that trying to teach higher-order skills without a solid grounding in the basics is like “throwing kids in deep water.”
In a 1990 Education Week article about the reading wars, he said that depriving students of explicit, skills-based instruction was “sentencing them to be non-readers.”
4. How do arguments over Direct Instruction inform today’s educational debates?
Official Direct Instruction programs aren’t largely popular in schools. Still, debates over how much teachers should emphasize explicit instruction and practice vs. inquiry and discovery span almost every discipline.
In social studies, for example, the debate often emerges this way: Should kids focus on memorizing the amendments to the Constitution and the checks and balances among branches of government? Or should more class time prioritize community service projects that put civic principles into action?
In science, is it more important for students to memorize the periodic table and master common formulas? Or should they be exploring scientific phenomena through experimentation?
Most teacher professional bodies and state standards call for some version of both. They argue that students need foundational knowledge—often acquired through explicit teaching—and opportunities to apply that knowledge in solving more complex problems.
But exactly how to strike that balance, and how to sequence it in lessons and units, is often contested. In math instruction, specifically, arguments over the question are once again hotly shaping the debate.
In the wake of the science of reading movement, which prioritized explicit step-by-step phonics instruction among its many components, some researchers and advocates have begun to promote what they call a “science of math.” They cite experimental research showing that explicit instruction in math can help students master tricky concepts—especially those students who are already struggling. They say it’s a myth that inquiry-based approaches boost outcomes.
This perspective is at odds with the math education field at large. National math teaching organizations call for math to be structured around inquiry, with students engaging in problem-solving while teachers offer support. Teachers might use explicit instruction at times, but it isn’t the main approach.
The disagreement seems academic and technical, but it has real stakes.
As of this summer, 23 states have passed laws or implemented new policies related to math instruction. They include measures like requiring schools to create personalized plans for struggling students and setting new teacher training requirements. Many say that teaching and professional learning should be “evidence-based.”
How states parse the research, and the ideological frameworks that underpin it, could have major consequences for how the laws are implemented in classrooms.
Along with disputes over the importance of explicit instruction, schools still engage in pitched battles over scripted lessons—another key feature of Direct Instruction.
Proponents argue that tightly structured curricula can offer support for newer teachers, and ensure that all students get the same educational experience. The push over the past decade for schools to adopt “high-quality instructional materials” leans on these arguments, with advocates encouraging schools to hew as closely to the lesson as designed as possible, even if it doesn’t have a word-by-word script.
But critics of scripted lessons—including many teachers—say the style makes it harder for educators to differentiate for student needs and devalues teachers’ professional expertise.
Scripted curricula has been a flash point in the 2023 takeover of Houston public schools by the Texas state education agency. Teachers have said the requirement to use these materials “diminished the curriculum.” In response, the school district has cited improvements in student test scores.
5. Do we know what share of teachers favor explicit teaching methods vs. inquiry-oriented ones?
Education researchers and theorists often separate themselves into ideological camps over instructional practice. But classroom teachers tend to be less doctrinaire.
There’s no national sample of classrooms that can help pinpoint exactly how much of the average lesson leans into one approach or another, nor a survey that would outline the same for teacher education programs.
But what we do know suggests a mix of approaches. Survey data from the EdWeek Research Center, for example, show that teachers spend, on average, about 30 minutes teaching phonics, how spoken letters correspond to written sounds. Research shows it’s the most effective way to teach children how to decode words.
But in that same 2022 survey, 64% of educators said they or the teachers they supervise also use three-cueing, a disproven method that asks students to use context clues and pictures to help guess at words.
In math, teachers are divided over whether inquiry works best, though they don’t hold absolutist perspectives either way.
A 2024 EdWeek Research Center survey asked educators their level of agreement with the following statement: “Students learn math and science best through procedures, not by solving big problems.” About half agreed and half disagreed, though answers were clustered around the middle—with most respondents saying they held their views “somewhat,” rather than “completely.”
Teachers tend to mix and match techniques from approaches that they see working in their classrooms. It’s one of the reasons that any large-scale attempt to overhaul instructional practice—whether that be a shift to the science of reading, or a schoolwide adoption of Direct Instruction—can be so difficult to execute.
A 2025 report on New York state’s adoption of a new reading policy highlights this phenomenon. The results, from a survey of educators distributed by the State University of New York at New Paltz, showed that while 90% said they were in favor of implementing practice aligned with the science of reading, only 28% said it was their primary approach. Fifty-seven percent said it was one of several approaches used.
Sarah Schwartz is a reporter for Education Week who covers curriculum and instruction.