Direct Instruction works wonders in Northern Territory schools

When they told Cath Greene about the change to Direct Instruction she was indignant. Everyone who had visited her little school in the red dirt north of Alice Springs seemed to love what she was trying to do with the kids. One of the nation’s top indigenous educators, Chris Sarra, called the classes beautiful.

Ntaria School principal Cath Greene with Faye Ratara. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

 There was just one problem. Four years after she became principal of Ntaria School, most of the children still struggled to speak English, let alone read it. Many were leaving for high school — or just leaving — with Year 1 levels of literacy and numeracy. Greene knew this couldn’t go on. Reluctantly, she agreed to give DI a go.

Three years on, the results are in for Ntaria and 38 other schools in remote reaches of the Northern Territory, Western Australia and Queensland that participated in a $23.5 million trial of Direct Instruction teaching.

The controversial back-to-­basics method was developed in the US in the 1970s to assist African-American children struggling at school in the urban ghettos. Its champion in Australia is Noel Pearson, the high-profile thinker and Aboriginal community leader who ran a pilot program of DI on his home turf in Cape York Peninsula. Sarra, a fellow Queenslander, is chief among the critics who deride it as a “drill to kill” throwback to rote learning.

It’s fair to say the report card from the DI rollout is mixed. Pearson acknowledges that it flopped in about half the schools for a combination of reasons, some “structural”, such as low student attendance or high teacher turnover, but in other cases because of the failure of school leaders to buy into the project and give it the full-throated support that Greene soon delivered in Ntaria.

Despite this, Pearson’s Good to Great Schools Australia organisation says the progress is encouraging: at the start of the trial in 2015, only 8 per cent of the 3244 prep, primary and high school-age students placed in testing at Year 2 level or higher. That proportion is now nudging 30 per cent across all 39 schools.

“The trial has demonstrated that children from the most disadvantaged schools can learn to read if they are provided with an effective instructional program,” Pearson says. He doesn’t gloss over the issues of teacher churn, leadership and student attendance, all part of a challenging landscape for indigenous education. The DI initiative is about mitigating the first, inspiring the second to be better and attacking attendance through student achievement. “Where we have seen leadership at the school level we have seen the students achievements rise,” he says.

Ntaria is a case in point. The school has 200 pupils on its books, all indigenous and many from deeply troubled homes in and around the old Lutheran mission at Hermannsburg, where the campus is situated, an hour up the bitumen from Alice Springs. On any given day, at least a third of them will be absent.

Greene believed her team of teachers and teacher assistants was doing a good job in difficult circumstances, which is why she resisted when she was told by the Territory Education Department that Ntaria had been signed up. She had Sarra visit to back her up. “He said my teachers were brilliant, he sat in on a class and said it was beautiful,” she remembers.

But if they had to teach DI, it would be done properly. The kids deserved nothing less. The results of the initial placement testing conducted by Good To Great Australia were sobering. The teenagers notionally in years 6, 7 or 8 were at the same reading level, and in some ins­tances below that, of the little ones in preschool transition, aged five or six. For most of the children, lilting Western Arrernte is their first language: many simply did not understand enough English to follow instructions in class.

At first, progress was achingly slow. A lot of the children were put through a remedial course called Direct Instruction Spoken English, which ran for the first 150 days of the program. By then, implementation manager Betsy Frisch had arrived from snowy Wisconsin on a contract with GGSA. She had taught DI in Chicago, where it was pioneered by Siegfried Engelmann, and later in Milwaukee. This time, the teachers were her priority. DI is particularly demanding of them. “You need to stay on script and that’s not always easy,” Frisch says. “It can be quite a test of stamina.”

Pearson was initially attracted to the method because of its tightly structured form: every step of every lesson is set out, down to what the teacher tells the class, workbook in hand, and how the children respond. That made perfect sense to him because Engelmann’s script could iron out the shortcomings of the inexperienced young teachers who tended to be sent to the far-flung Cape York communities.

The proving trial at four GGSA schools on the peninsula was widened when the then federal education minister, Christopher Pyne, stumped up $22 million in seed money in July 2014 to mainstream DI and its cousin, Explicit Direct Instruction. A committed advocate of phonetics-based learning — whereby children are taught to read by sounding out words — Pyne liked how this was used in DI programs. He predicted that the Literacy in Remote Schools trial would start a “revolution” among parents demanding that their children by taught through Direct Instruction.

At Ntaria, Greene was surprised and then delighted by the change in the kids. She was sitting in church one Sunday when one of her Year 3s, Shivani, began fiddling with a set of keys. “What is this?” the little girl asked a playmate, echoing the routine in class. “A key,” the other child replied.

“Spell ‘key’.”

“K-E-Y.”

“What colour is the key?”

“Blue.”

“Spell ‘blue’ …”

“That was the eye-opener for me,” the principal says. She gave the teachers the choice of embracing DI or transferring out. Two left. The program run by GGSA mandates 2.5 hours of reading and writing a day, every school day. The children are called to assembly at 8.45am and sit cross-legged in the 6C chill while Greene takes them through breathing exercises to calm them. Noses are blown, eyes wiped and ears cleaned in the hygiene drill.

Literacy starts at 9am sharp in Robyn Freeman’s class, where the children are hunched over their green reading books. They have been taught to track words on the page with a finger. Each lesson is numbered and they won’t move on until “mastery” is achieved and tested by the teacher. The children are up to lesson 69. A careful record is kept of where they are placed — that way, those who miss school will be able to chime back in seamlessly.

“Word one is ‘refinery’,” Freeman intones. “What word?” “Refinery,” the kids say.

“Spell ‘refinery’.”

“R-E-F-I-N-E-R-Y.”

“If you got it correct, tick it.”

Yes, it’s repetitious — but that’s the whole point. GGSA’s executive director of schools, Michael Roberts, says an item of information needs to be repeated 16 to 24 times before it is committed to long-term memory. In any event, the class seems to be engaged. There’s no fidgeting, none of the cheek that the Ntaria teachers used to get.

At 63, Freeman has been teaching in the bush for nearly four decades and there’s not much she hasn’t seen or had to deal with. “This is the first time I have had … a lot of kids learning their sounds and reading,” she says. “That’s because of the rigour. The children feel safe with it. The content stays the same even if the teacher comes and goes.”

Maths starts at 11.15am, following morning tea. Pearson’s remit is limited to literacy, but DI is also used to teach mathematics at Ntaria and the Territory government is picking up the tab. After lunch, the children have another intensive hour of reading and writing instruction before closing out the day with standard Australian curriculum units (not taught to DI). Today, they’re looking forward to performance.

Every Friday, Frisch uploads a log from each teacher detailing their students’ attendance and progress. Greene then goes through the data with the teaching coach, assistant principal Eileen Hay, who is out from Victoria with her husband, Brent, also a teacher at the school.

DI is as demanding of teachers as it is of the students. If a child shows up and fails, it can’t be their fault. “If you get a … teacher who does not like that accountability they get pretty uncomfortable pretty fast,” Greene says. She points to the results. Kiaasha Hall, 9, who barely spoke English two years ago, is reading fluently with the Year 3s alongside Fabrianne Fishhook, also 9. What was once the exception at Ntaria is now the rule. “We unlocked their potential,” Greene says.

The story at Yipirinya School is similar: quiet classrooms, involved children, a sceptical teaching staff won over to DI. Ranging up to 17 in age, students are drawn from the troubled town camps of Alice Springs and dusty settlements and bush blocks 50km into the desert, where people still hunt for meat.

The independent school’s history is storied. It was started under a tree 40 years ago, and the community fought to get it to where it is today. The kids have a swimming pool and air-conditioned classrooms painted with traditional murals. But their results were sadly consistent: two years ago, nine out of 10 were non-readers, most in Year 6 didn’t know their word sounds and 80 per cent probably spoke more traditional language than English, according to principal Lorraine Sligar.

The transition hasn’t been easy. School board member Harold Furber, who has grandchildren at Yipirinya, thought DI smacked of “old-style learning”. “I just said, ‘Hang on, hang on, let’s be careful about what we’re getting into,’ ” he recalls. Now, the board’s main worry is what will happen when the DI money runs out at the end of the year.

“You can see the calmness, you can see the learning happening,” says another director, Dawn Ross. “We have got a good opportunity … to set the foundation … expose our kids to a curriculum where they are wanting to learn and know how to learn.”

Sligar says the results speak for themselves. One of her “superstars”, Adrian, a barefoot little boy in Year 3 who rated zero in a benchmarking test for reading in 2015, is about to hit Year 5 level, leapfrogging his age group in a mainstream school.

Most of the high school-age students are reading, though at varying levels of competency. The point is, those who show up, catch up. Attendance is still the crucible on which performance turns. It hovers stubbornly at about 60 per cent at Yipirinya, a function of the traumatic home life endured by many of the kids, Sligar says.

Sometimes the absenteeism is beyond anyone’s control. Greene says Ntaria has had to contend with four deaths in the community since June. Sorry camp can take kids out of school for up to a month, and she is trying to get parents to agree to a week away.

In some schools involved in the trial, the turnover of teaching staff is endemic. For all the progress made, the environment remains confronting, especially for newcomers. Unable to cope, teachers leave with monotonous regular­ity. Pearson says there is also a systemic issue, as those who stay are frequently employed on 12-month contracts. “We delivered (DI) training at the beginning of 2015 and we have had to train almost an entirely new cohort at least once, sometimes twice,” he says.

Greene is already experiencing the pinch as the end of the school year approaches. (The original grant of $22m to GGSA was topped up by a further $1.5m to take the program through to the Christmas break.) Greene has already lost her implementation manager, Frisch, who, uncertain about the future, is reluctantly returning to the US. Asked how her experience at Ntaria School compared with teaching DI in Wisconsin, she says: “It was the same. Absolutely the same.”

The ball is now in the court of Pyne’s successor as Education Minister, Simon Birmingham. Through a spokesman, he said yesterday that the “best pathway forward” would be recommended by an independent review of the Literacy in Remote Schools program by the University of Melbourne; interim findings are now on his desk, Inquirer understands.

The critics of DI — and they range from educa­tion unions to thought leaders in education faculties and practitioners such as Sarra — will no doubt seize on the near 50 per cent failure rate among the LRS schools and the inability of those that persisted to lift their National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy scores. That may account for Pearson’s uncharacteristically cautious proposal to “double down” on the 20 or so indigenous schools where DI has worked and grow “those green shoots”, rather than push on into the 250 disadvantaged schools that, he says, could ultimately benefit.

GGSA managing director Julie Grantham, a former director-general of education for the Queensland government, says NAPLAN doesn’t “tell the story” of the DI trial. “You can’t use NAPLAN as the tool of measure … you have to look at where the children started, where they’ve come from … a whole lot of factors in remote Australia that are not evident from a NAPLAN score.”

But that doesn’t mean it won’t, in the fullness of time. Greene says she is expecting an uptick in the reading scores of her Year 3s when the results of the NAPLAN tests they sat in May come through, while Sligar is adamant that the utility of DI is finite and her students will move on as they pro­gress through the grades.

“People think they will be doing this forever, but it’s not the case. We are doing this to get to the mainstream … to give our kids the same opportunity as everyone else,” she says.

The Weekend Australian travelled with assistance from Good to Great Schools Australia.