Using Direct Instruction to Promote Inquiry

Direct instruction sometimes gets a bad reputation. But it can be more than the teacher lecturing at the front of the room.

As an inquiry-based educator, I use aspects of direct instruction to give students the knowledge to engage with inquiry. I do this through questioning, intentional review, and the “I do, we do, you do” teaching strategy (though not always in that order).

Blending both inquiry and direct instructional techniques can provide a balanced delivery to students and scaffold them toward free and guided inquiry. Here are some of the direct instruction strategies I use to support student inquiry.

Direct Instruction Strategies

Questioning: Questioning is an important component of direct instruction because it’s a way to check for understanding. When educators ask questions in a lesson, it offers an opportunity to alter the direction of a lesson based on students’ responses. Those responses set the pace of the lesson. In my classroom, I do this with whiteboards, miniature quizzes, surveys (using a tool called Slido), and true-or-false questions.

Review: I begin lessons by reviewing what was previously learned. Varying reviews helps to avoid over-predictability. Sometimes I ask students to type a short response to a question in their digital portfolios, after which they share their responses with each other in a think-pair-share. Other times, students review their homework with a peer while I circulate to check on conversations.

I tell students that their homework review conversations inform the lesson (which I find helps them take group work more seriously). As I circulate, I listen for key phrases and words. I ask myself: Are students understanding? Which students would benefit from more support?

Routine: After review, students engage in a class routine. I recently shifted classroom routines to the middle of the lesson to allow time for review. This is because during a routine, I can have time to take attendance and make adjustments to the lesson slides (we use HyperSlides) based on what I observed during the review phase of the lesson.

I may, for example, add a “random review” to the slides, in which I give students a very short quiz on the content (one, two, or three questions). During these short random review quizzes, I intentionally ask questions that I found the class had difficulty with during the review. Students who do not need review time have an opportunity to solidify understanding, hopefully moving the review material toward long-term retention and mastery (being able to teach others).

As a department, we created new routines that hone the cohort’s growth opportunities, another way to prepare students for inquiry. In my particular context, students were experiencing challenges in developing interpretations and analyses for a variety of different text types. Our department created a new routine that involves selecting a random text type related to the unit’s driving question and then having students annotate the text for up to 10 minutes to develop a viable interpretation. After they finish, I project one student’s analysis and interpretation on a screen and discuss its strengths and areas for augmentation. Students learn that there are a lot of ways to interpret a text.

I do, we do, you do: This teaching strategy usually works to teach student content and skills. For example, I may model an analysis of a sonnet and then give learners a less complex sonnet to analyze with partners. Once students are scaffolded, it’s time to weave in inquiry.

Inquiry and differentiation

I weave inquiry and differentiation into direct instruction lessons. After students work with partners, I offer them options with different challenge levels, putting the decision on learners and encouraging metacognition. Options should relate to the unit’s inquiry questions or driving questions so that everything connects. As a department, we also encourage students to choose from different text options when they do a summative assessment, and we make our questions open-ended enough to apply to multiple texts.

By the end of the lesson, students will have engaged with up to three different poems and experienced modeling and questioning formats.

Further inquiry

Though learning is not always linear, our department finds that once students possess knowledge and understanding of content, inquiry-based learning experiences bloom even further.

In formative assessments, the questions should synthesize skills developed in other lessons—such as justifying a stance through quotation and examples. I repeatedly tell students that their responses to quizzes and checks for understanding inform me about how to plan and pace.

We use teaching strategies that empower students to inquire, such as “thoughts, questions, epiphanies,” Spider Web Discussions, and the chalk talk thinking routine. These teaching strategies provide students an opportunity to transfer skills gained from direct instruction to an inquiry-based learning experience, expanding their learning.

By beginning with a provocation, educators can use that inquiry experience to inform how direct instruction is used in the unit, allowing flexibility for both educators and learners.