In His Own Words: Siegfried “Zig” Engelmann Talks about What’s Wrong with Education and How to Fix It

Siegfried “Zig” Engelmann devoted his life to developing and refining Direct Instruction (DI), a powerful teaching system that combines logical analysis of the content students are to learn, thoughtful selection and sequencing of instructional examples, clear communication between teacher and student, high rates of active student responding, reinforcement and corrective feedback, practice to mastery, and judicious review. In 1992, Engelmann served as guest faculty member for Ohio State University’s Teleconference Seminar on Applied Behavior Analysis (Heward, 1989; Heward & Dunne, 1993). In California, where I ended up suing those guys [Engelmann v. State Board of Education, 1989] and the Court of Appeals upheld the decision, they just introduced a new law that gave them years before they had to comply with [the ruling]. The fact that people use it is [because] there’s no respect for teaching. Because all you need to do is take any concrete situation and sit down five, 5-year-old kids.