The Genius is in DI’s Design: A Conversation with Carl Hendrick

[00:04] Hello everyone, my name is Zach Groshell and I am so excited to be interviewing my friend and colleague Carl Hendrick in Eugene in 2026 for NIFDI’s National Conference on Direct Instruction. Carl, how are you doing?

[00:19] I’m doing great. I’m living the dream to be here in Eugene, the kind of birthplace of DI. So it’s like Disneyland for me.

[00:29] And what have you seen so far? Like when you come here, there’s all sorts of different institutes and things going on and different courses. What have you noticed? What’s been the vibe?

[00:41] So I think the vibe here is that people are very passionate about DI and people see it as a great lever of equity. I’ve heard a lot of comments from people saying — I mean, I’ve heard this comment over and over again,

[00:57] which is that really this is first and foremost about getting good outcomes for kids and that we know that this works, and this has proven to work.

[01:05] So there’s a real kind of passionate sense of mission here at the conference, which is just amazing.

[01:11] And I was there in attendance for your keynote. Tell me about your framing, how you were able to open up this conference, get it started on the right foot.

[01:22] One of the things that’s extraordinary about theory of instruction and then all of the DI programs is that Engelmann wasn’t really a cognitive scientist.

[01:37] He could not really have been aware of a lot of the research that came out probably from the 60s, 70s and 80s — and even after — that he wrote a lot of those earlier programs

[01:50] around the idea of how the brain attends to, encodes, stores, retrieves information, that we have a lot of evidence on that.

[02:03] A lot of it are based on models. But when you are paying close attention to that stuff — you know, what Sweller would call cognitive architecture —

[02:15] you realize that the stuff that he was writing is just a perfect imprint upon — like, if you take that stuff seriously, and these are things around,

[02:27] well, the brain is really kind of a small inference machine. And if it is an inference machine, then what becomes so important is not just how you tell something, but actually the content itself.

[02:42] The genius of DI is that the instruction is at the level of the content. And again, the counterintuitive thing about that is that the communication really comes from the content.

[02:56] It’s not that the teacher tells the kids stuff so much as that you design the content so the content tells the kid.

[03:04] And in theory of instruction, there’s a pretty incredible set of mechanisms through which examples, non-examples, the boundaries of a particular concept or idea are mapped out clearly.

[03:21] And I think that that is something that’s missing from science of learning, and certainly missing from what Rich Mayer calls the dominant view of pedagogy, which is what we call minimally guided instruction.

[03:34] Yeah, it’s pretty incredible to think that programs that were created in the 60s and 70s — like starting with Project Follow Through, the DISTAR programs — those older programs that have now been updated and revised through lots of iterations, that the original authors could have intuited so many of these principles.

[03:54] And not only that, have probably gone beyond some of the discourse now, like you were saying — like the fact that an example can tell the student what it is, and then a series of examples in sequence can teach students yes or no,

[04:10] and the boundaries of that concept, probably much better than a description. And I feel like we’re just not — that’s just not part of what we’re talking about.

[04:18] We’re just kind of like, you know, worked examples work, but we don’t have the details yet. And so I think it’s awesome to hear, you know, you coming in contact with those ideas.

[04:28] I have one final question, and this has to do a lot with curriculum design and instructional design. I feel like in the science of learning or in education discourse now, we’re really focused on techniques and delivery, like the visible moves the teacher does.

[04:45] How does this conference help you to reflect on the importance of design of the materials?

[04:51] What are the offshoots of DI? And when I say DI — so, theory of instruction is written kind of after a lot of the original DISTAR programs, but a lot of the — you know, we talk about Rosenshine, the EDI principles, Hollingsworth and Ybarra.

[05:09] These are principles that are going to get much better outcomes in a classroom than what is, you know, mostly in a classroom.

[05:17] But I think that’s where we can do better — is when those, as you say, those kind of activities or those visible layers are inextricably linked with what is being taught.

[05:28] So that’s one of the problems, I think, with generic pedagogy — that it serves a particular domain of knowledge. And it certainly works with — you know, we know that certain principles of instruction work with what we might call well-defined domains, like phonics, certain math programs.

[05:50] You know, one thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot this week, Zach, is there was this idea for a long time that DI doesn’t really apply to what we might call an ill-defined domain, like English literature for secondary or, you know, middle/high school students.

[06:06] And the reason — and it’s quite a persuasive argument — because you kind of say, well, where there’s more element interactivity, where you have much more moving parts in the domain of knowledge, where you have these interpretive frameworks, like discuss the character or, you know, Shakespeare’s characters or whatever, they’re not kind of binary, you know, where you define the boundaries of a thing.

[06:29] But what I’m sort of realizing is this idea that the knowledge — where you kind of index it at the level of an objective. So within those interpretive frameworks, like if you say, you know, was Macbeth morally flawed, or was he a victim of his ambition?

[06:48] Like, there’s not a kind of right or wrong answer for those. But within the kind of small objectives, there absolutely is right or wrong answers. And they are things like, what is this soliloquy?

[06:58] And so if you don’t know what that is, if you don’t know certain quotations, if you don’t know the meaning of certain — at the level of words — and a lot of Shakespeare is operating at two levels: at the conceptual level, but also the level of the language.

[07:12] So the level of the language mirrors a lot of the ambiguity of the theme. But you can index it at the level of, well, this kind of means this — like, there’s not much, you know. A soliloquy — there is a right or wrong answer for soliloquy.

[07:29] It’s a speech that a character makes at the front of the stage, and there’s a purpose to it. There’s a reason for it. Once you’ve kind of banged out those things, you could certainly use those principles to teach those hard concepts to the kids.

[07:41] Then, you know — and again, we’re back to the expertise reversal effect, Sweller’s idea — that actually, at that point, then you do want to take the foot off the gas, as it were. You want to get that much more, we might even say, dialogic, or that much more discursive discussion going.

[08:03] So that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot this week — and how a lot of those principles in theory of instruction can be applied even in the humanities, and even in ill-defined domains.

[08:13] Love it. Well, Carl, it’s been great hanging out with you. So excited. And listeners, I’ll be posting these kind of in-the-moment, conference, slice-of-life type of videos all throughout this week. Thank you so much for tuning in.