When everybody seems to be writing about the same educational topic, like Emily Hanford’s recent foray into what kind of pedagogy we should embrace, I usually think my best bet as a blogger is to read other people’s thinking and commentary, then share the pieces that ring my chimes.

There are plenty of credible, smart, deeply engaged people taking on Emily Hanford’s decision to go after the cornerstone of classroom practice—instruction—since she garnered such success (and fame) in influencing the teaching of reading.

Trevor Aleo and Nick Covington have been tracking the Sold a Story2 Series, poking at its evidence (such as it is) and conclusions. Nancy Bailey gets into the nuts and bolts of the efficacy of multiple models of instruction. You can get some excellent perspectives on the Have You Heard podcast. Even research-critique stalwart Daniel Willingham at University of Virginia notes that some people who object to direct instruction do so because it does not meet their goals for what children should experience at school. And that’s not a trivial consideration.

Despite all this good commentary, the question remains:

What gives Emily Hanford the cojones to believe she’s the go-to authority on how best to teach? And even more important, why are people (not teachers—the general public) giving credence to her idea that instruction can be standardized or scripted or applied right out of the box to any group of age-appropriate students? That’s nuts.

And I say this as a person for whom direct instruction was the expected daily norm, for all 30+ years of my teaching career. You don’t see many band rooms where students discover the best fingering for F# by trial and error or uncover the stylistic richness of music without someone standing on an elevated platform in front of them, giving clear direction. With a baton, no less.

Everything about traditional secondary musical performing groups is based on a direct instruction model, from assessments that measure how close students come to perfectly reproducing what’s on the page, to the endless technical skills required and taught sequentially. And everybody has to get up to speed—for the sake of the group.

My challenge, as a secondary band director, was to include instruction that stepped outside the rehearse-rehearse-perform box. I wanted my students to see where the music they were learning originated, and how music is embedded in our culture. I wanted them to try their hand at creating music, to see the making of music as a rewarding portable skill, available all their life, not just at band contest, football games or concerts.

My most satisfying moments, as a conventional school band director, were not earning top marks at competitions. They were seeing individual kids grow and stretch as young musicians, and finishing a concert with a piece we couldn’t play six weeks earlier, one that a bunch of twelve year-olds had come to love.

Emily Hanford asks how we can get the best results, but her definition of results is clouded by our national love affair with unreliable, competitive educational data and a heavy dose of, for lack of a better term, nostalgic misinformation.

Direct, whole-group instruction has never gone away. It was the norm when I began teaching, in the 1970s, and certainly when Emily Hanford was in school. We used to discuss instruction around student interests, the pedagogy of the oppressed and experiments like Summerhill in my grad classes, but in public schools, it was mostly one teacher in front of the classroom, calling the shots.

Over the course of my career, lots of constructivist, place-based, hands-on, project-based student-focused, yada yada instructional ideas bubbled up. But they never replaced direct instruction, except perhaps in boutique independent schools. What also bubbled up were a dozen ways to turn direct instruction into something often described as participatory—choral responses, turn and talk, and whatever this is supposed to demonstrate.

Once there were videos widely available, you could watch classes perform like trained seals, uniformly declaring right answers after a 60-second turn and talk, performing little verbal routines. Direct as all get out. And, on the surface, kind of impressive. If you wanted to see a class humming along.

But the goal is long-term habits of thinking, not a snazzy formula for repeating right answers. Which is why I am bedeviled by the influence Emily Hanford has wielded. These are educators’ issues, to wrestle and experiment with.  Designing lessons is the fun part of the job. Teaching them is the action research.

In a similarly themed post, Peter Greene quotes Hanford:

I thought about being a teacher in my early 20s and I had a friend who was teaching in New Orleans, and a bunch of her third graders couldn’t read, and she was supposed to design all of her own lessons. And I thought to myself, where would you even start? It was such a stressful job. It was basically impossible, and she eventually quit teaching, as a lot of people do, because we make this job too hard.

Bingo. So stressful! Basically impossible! It made me think of this experience:

A decade ago, I was e-mentoring a group of career-change teachers, who’d been given a retirement incentive from a famous technology corporation with a 3-letter name. The idea was that 30 years in the workforce would provide the content expertise. And Big Corp agreed that novice teachers might need some help from experienced teachers to get up and running. Before they could start, umm, giving back to the community.

One of my mentees was starting his first job as a physics teacher in a suburban school in Connecticut. When he arrived for orientation, he was given the textbook and a blank plan book. He’d already gone to the principal and asked if he was expected to write all his own lesson plans (yes) before he turned to me.

Because he also had an assigned mentor teacher next door, I suggested that Mentee ask this mentor for some guidance on what to do on Day One, and perhaps a few sample lesson plans that had worked next door, in the chemistry room.

It isn’t exaggerating to say that he was outraged. Write his own lesson plans! For the whole year! This would never happen at Big Corp. They would have already designed the optimum protocol for teaching physics to HS seniors, something he could seamlessly follow.

I tried gentle conversations about how you couldn’t write plans for students you hadn’t met. In fact, his basic plan may well need to be tweaked between second period and sixth period. Because kids and classes are different.

I wish I could tell you how it turned out, but Mentee shut our conversations down within a few months. He remained frustrated and angry and said lots of unkind things about public education. Maybe things improved.

But I do know how a major shift (legislatively boosted, like the Faux Science of Reading) in instructional strategies toward all Direct Instruction, all the time, would turn out.

And it’s not good.