Legacy of Learning

Zig Engelmann

"If we are humanists, we begin with the obvious fact that the children we work with are perfectly capable of learning anything that we have to teach them. We further recognize that we should be able to engineer the learning so that it is reinforcing - perhaps not 'fun,' but challenging and engaging. We then proceed to do it- not to continue talking about it."

Siegfried (Zig) Englemann

Siegfried Engelmann has been one of the key participants in this debate over the years, and a major contributor to its resolution. He first became interested in how children acquire knowledge when he was research director for an advertising agency trying to understand more about the learning process.

Pursuing this interest, Engelmann quit the advertising business in 1964 and became senior educational specialist at the Institute for Research on Exceptional Children at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. There, his research into the effectiveness of different teaching methods in the education of underprivileged children led him to develop the Direct Instruction method of teaching.

The Direct Instruction method involves teaching from a tightly scripted curriculum delivered via direct instruction to the class; i.e., giving children small pieces of information and immediately asking them questions based on that information. While Direct Instruction is teacher-directed instruction, it does not encompass all the possible varieties of teacher-directed instruction, including the common situation where a teacher delivers a content-rich curriculum to students but decides exactly "what" will be taught.

Engelmann's research on the effectiveness of different teaching methods was subsequently confirmed by the massive federal Follow Through project in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1999, the American Institute of Research looked at 24 education reform programs and concluded Direct Instruction was one of only two that had solid research vouching for its effectiveness. But despite all the research findings, Direct Instruction is used at only 150 of the nation's more than 114,000 schools.

After developing the Direct Instruction method, Engelmann became a professor of special education at the University of Oregon, in Eugene, Oregon, where he established the National Institute for Direct Instruction.