Is Direct Instruction Obsolete?

In the first meeting after school experience program, my friends and I reviewed our understanding about models of instructional. I have mentioned what models of instructional are on my previous posting. They are direct instruction, lecture-discussion, guided discovery and group interaction model. Actually, I had pretty clear understanding about these models in previous meeting before school experience. Thus, I just realized that my understanding about direct-instruction was totally wrong after I got Ms Ine’s explanation in this meeting. My understanding of direct instruction before this meeting resembled with guided discovery. Teachers give some instructions about what students should do during learning and teaching process. Thus, today I understood that Direct Instruction is like a lecturing method. I underline “lecturing” word because that is the key word of direct instruction model.

The teachers’ role in this model is as deliverer material using lecturing only. Students do only listening to the lecture and become passive. The focus of learning and teaching process is the teachers’ lecture. So that is why this model is also called as teacher centered learning. Teacher will hold all of learning and teaching activities and may not develop students’ initiative in learning. So this model cannot encourage students to be independent learning. Based on my previous posting, creating independent learning is the good idea and need to be developed in our education.

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 Moreover according to me, even if the teacher is a good public speaker who can give lecture well, this model is pretty obsolete to be practiced nowadays. There are many limitations of this model. Students’ memory can overload and they by any chance will feel sleepy because students’ role in the class is only listening to the lectures which are given. Nowadays we may realize that students are multitasking and active learners. They may be not like only sitting in the class and listening to the lecture. They have many skills which should be developed as early as we can. They also need to interact with their environment and friend during learning and teaching activities.

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I have learned in LTM course that there is a mix-focus curriculum which is considered as better curriculum. This curriculum emphasizes in mixing content and behavior objective with the process. So we should not only focus on the content, but also the students’ behavior. In my opinion, direct instruction method is not suitable with this curriculum, because we cannot measure their behavior changing if we only do giving lectures. Besides that, I think it is not necessarily the students who are quiet and sit neatly have a good behavior. Based on my experience in school experience program, there are many students who were sitting neatly filled in crossword, did messaging, or fell asleep. That is the fact. J