Well, you get another chance.

Last week, I wrote about Siegfried Engelmann's book The Outrage of Project Follow Through: 5 Million Failed Kids Later, which for the past several weeks has been appearing and disappearing on his Web site one chapter at a time, like Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat. Many people e-mailed me to ask where they can buy the book (they can't, it hasn't been published in print) or how they could get access to the earlier chapters.

There's been a lot of interest on a number of education blogs I follow, too.

One reader called to let me know that Zig has relented, and will allow the entire book one final curtain call, from March 12 through March 18, on zigsite.com. Go grab it and read the whole thing.

And here is an example to help you understand why Zig's method of Direct Instruction (note the capital letters; this is much more specific than just having the teacher give instruction) is so effective.

From Chapter 6 (external quotation marks omitted for clarity):

Here's a highly effective sequence for teaching red.

A white ball appears on the screen. "Watch this ball. I'll tell you when it's red."

"My turn: Is it red? No."

The ball becomes blue: "My turn: Is it red now? No."

The ball turns red: "My turn: Is it red now? Yes."

"Your turn: Is it red now?" "Yes."

The ball gets bigger: "Is it red now?" "Yes."

The ball turns blue: "Is it red now?"

The ball turns red and moves to the left: "Is it red now?"

The ball turns green: "Is it red now?"

The ball gets smaller and turns yellow: "Is it red now?"

The ball gets smaller and turns red: "Is it red now?"

The learner responds to possibly four more examples.

Then they go on to do the same exercise with flowers.

Several very interesting things are going on here.

• The children are being primed for success. By the first time they are asked to respond, they know what the right answer is; Zig, or one of the teachers he has trained in DI pedagogy, has just told them.

• It's very engaging. People who deride DI (or even lowercase di) as "drill and kill" are not foolish enough to argue that when the cheerleaders begin the drill, "Give me a C!" and the crowd roars back, "C!" that the exercise will kill enthusiasm for the team. If that were true, we wouldn't have cheerleaders.

• It goes very fast, so even the children who know what red is scarcely have time to be bored.

But even more important, though less obvious, is that the exercise begins with things that are not red, to rule out possible mistakes before they ever happen. Since only color changes in the first three examples, " 'color' is the only feature that the teacher could be describing as 'red' versus 'not-red.' "

If I hold up an object and say "This is 'flink' " you don't know whether I want you to notice its color, its shape or its size, or any of innumerable other properties it might have. If you guess wrong, your misunderstanding may persist for a long time before I even realize it, and by then it may be hard to eradicate.

Yet many teachers don't use these "negative examples" for fear of confusing their students. That's exactly backward.

These exercises are carefully designed and extensively field tested. That's why they work with all kinds of students. Why not your students?

Linda Seebach is an editorial writer for the Rocky. She can be reached by telephone at (303) 954-2519 or by e-mail at seebach@RockyMountainNews.com.

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