Features of Direct Instruction: Interactive Lessons

Direct Instruction (DI) teaches challenging academic content to a range of diverse learners. In order to do so, DI includes a complex system for organizing and directing teacher-student interactions to maximize learning. This system includes: instructional formats that specify the interactions between teacher and student, flexible skills-based groupings, active student responding, responsive interactions between students and teachers, ongoing data-based decision making, and mastery teaching. In this article, we describe each of these main features of the system, define their functions, reveal how they are interwoven throughout all DI lessons, and provide specific examples of their application during instruction. Our goal is to describe and clarify critical features of DI lesson presentation and teacher-student interaction so that instructional designers, teachers, and other practitioners can use existing DI programs effectively and include these features in newly developed programs.