There are many specific strategies you can use that contribute to effective and successful Pair-Sharing. (1) Desk Arrangement. Desks need to be suitably arranged so students have physical access to their pair-share partner. Move the desks if necessary. Most teachers are sliding rows of desks closer together. Also, students need to face the teacher to…
Pair-Shares are super important for multiple reasons. Here are fifteen reasons. Each one of them justifies the use of Pair-Shares. (1) Every student orally answers every question. Pair-Shares go beyond having students think of an answer. Now, all of them are actually saying the answer aloud. Think about it. Every student orally answers every question…
Usually in the Ask DataWORKS blog, we like to feature answers to questions that readers have asked. This time we are fortunate to have a special guest who has some definite opinions about education. Our guest is Yoda, the great 900-year-old Jedi Warrior, who played a starring role in the Star Wars movies. We…
Making a Difference In my experience, there are three types of teachers walking on to campus for their first day of school this month and each has a distinctly different focus: Creating a Good Learning Environment Teacher A spent the last four weeks of summer vacation organizing and decorating her classroom. She sat in front…
Welcome to our weekly Ask DataWORKS blog where we focus on questions from our readers. We are regularly asked about Explicit Direct Instruction and the research behind it. So today, we are going to focus on Explicit Direct Instruction (EDI). There are many preconceptions out there about what EDI is and isn’t and we’d like…
Narrower and Deeper Look at the two 5th grade assessment questions above. The first question is from a 2012 California Standards Test. The second question is from a 2014 Smarter Balanced Common Core assessment. In the first question, students only need to remember the formula for volume and complete the calculation. In the second question,…
I am a veteran, award-winning teacher who recently discovered how I could significantly improve my teaching. I did it by learning to use the research-based strategies of Explicit Direct Instruction (EDI) developed by DataWORKS founders John Hollingsworth and Silvia Ybarra. When I first heard about EDI, I was frustrated, skeptical, and a bit resistant…
Today, we are going to focus on general questions about teaching English Learners (ELs). These are questions we regularly get from teachers. If you would like further information about teaching English Learners, feel free to contact us. We also recommend the book, Explicit Direct Instruction for English Learners by DataWORKS co-founders John Hollingsworth and Dr.…
DI vs. di vs. EDI Direct Instruction (DI) Direct Instruction was developed by Dr. Siegfried “Zig” Engelmann during the 1960s. It is a scripted program where teachers are given cues to follow throughout a lesson. Student interaction is largely choral responses following a teacher signal. direct instruction (di) Dr. Barak Rosenshine used the term direct…
The Next Generation Science Standards Welcome to our weekly Ask DataWORKS blog where we focus on questions from our readers. We recently started this blog, so we don’t have many questions from you yet! What we do have is a list of questions that we receive regularly as we provide training and materials…