How a rural WA school overcame the pandemic slump

OTHELLO, Wash. – Kayla Garza’s eyes whipped around the room, watching her fifth-grade students at Wahitis Elementary in central Washington scribbling down the answer to a math question. When they were done, they set their pencils down.

“How do you feel about your understanding of that question?” Garza asked.

Tiny fingers darted into the air. Some kids held up two fingers to show they didn’t understand it well. Others held up four fingers, or flashed between three and four to show they have a pretty firm understanding of the question.

Garza circled the room, now knowing which students to check in with and assist on the next question.

This is what direct instruction looks like: highly structured, carefully planned lessons, with teacher-guided practice and learning that happens in small, repetitive increments. Students answer questions in unison or race to write them on whiteboards the size of chocolate bars.

This long-standing teaching method has become controversial over time, with critics charging it is no different from rote memorization. They complain that it teaches only enough for kids to pass tests and squashes curiosity. But at Wahitis, a school serving a rural population learning English whose families live on the edge of the federal poverty line, it’s been transformational.

Test scores rose at Wahitis when the school adopted direct instruction a decade ago based on its success in a school in Auburn, Washington, called Gildo Rey. And they’ve just kept rising.

During the pandemic, when schools across the country saw academic test scores plummet, Wahitis’ scores improved. While Wahitis saw a drop in test scores the year following the pandemic, scores have rebounded to be on par with those recorded in 2018-19, which makes the school better off than most Washington public elementary schools.

“We didn’t just rebound (after the pandemic) – we are exceeding where we were to begin with, which is so cool,” principal Justin Johnson said. “It just shows that this kind of teaching, this kind of attitude, working together is working.”

Wahitis continues to be a standout in the state, doing significantly better than other schools with high numbers of students from low-income families. In 2014, 26% of Wahitis’ fifth-graders passed the state standard for reading assessments and 38% of fifth-graders passed the math assessment. In 2023, with the learning loss from the pandemic still in evidence, almost 60% of fifth-graders passed the reading assessment and 48% of fifth-graders passed the math assessment.

Johnson and other direct instruction enthusiasts, including many teachers at Wahitis, believe the method ensures students’ understanding of the fundamentals. It includes frequent testing to give teachers real-time feedback so they can adapt and fill in the gaps if students are struggling. Proponents say the gestures and repetitive urgency in the classroom help cement learning – something that builds student confidence.

Nationwide, only about 1% of schools use direct instruction, but Washington is one of the states that uses it most, said Bryan Wickman, outreach director for the National Institute for Direct Instruction.

How it started

Othello is a town with about 8,500 residents surrounded by potato farms and feedlots. The town produces more French fries than anywhere else in the world. The median household income is $63,824 and 81% of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Many families originally came to Othello as migrant farmworkers, which is why Wahitis has such a high number of students learning English as a second language.

When Wahitis opened in 2012, its first state test scores were incredibly low.

“I have a problem with the way people think about kids in our schools,” recalled Pete Perez, the principal of Wahitis at the time. Now the Othello superintendent, Perez grew up in town and was the first principal of Wahitis. “They put it on our kids and our teachers that they aren’t working hard, when they don’t fully understand the challenges that many of them face as multilingual learners or as students who deal with the issues that poverty brings.”

Perez wondered if another Washington school had a better solution. He started examining state test-score data for schools with similar demographics. When he sorted it, Gildo Rey floated to the top.

“Every time,” Perez said. “In every category. So we made a phone call.”

Perez, Johnson and two others from Wahitis went for a visit in 2014. They watched well-trained teachers with strong relationships with their students work efficiently in the classrooms. They saw kids who were just like their kids speak with confidence. They saw learning objectives being taught over and over and over again.

The secret to Gildo Rey’s success, as reported by the Seattle Times Education Lab in 2014: direct instruction.

“When we drove home back over the pass that day it was silent in the car,” Perez said. “We had seen something really special with people who we thought were just like us.”

Lesson planning for all

A key part of what worked at Gildo Rey and now works at Wahitis is having teachers meet almost every day to review the state education standards embedded in the state’s annual standardized test, said Lisa Horn, a principal in Mead School District, who worked at Gildo Rey 10 years ago as a teacher, Title 1 specialist and district instructional specialist.

Teachers tailor their lessons to the standards, making sure every concept uses the same vocabulary as the test.

The focus on vocabulary is especially helpful for students with limited English skills, Horn said. Multilingual kids and children raised in poverty often come into school with thousands fewer words in their vocabulary than their more affluent peers, although the research is not conclusive about the size of the deficit.

Horn said the matched language helps students understand the question, which is an immediate advantage when trying to pass a test. And it builds confidence. Even if they don’t know the answer, they aren’t confused by the question.

Critics of the method worry that simplifying the language to align with test vocabulary means the teaching is too narrow and is only preparing students for test day.

Jackie Wilhelm, a parent of a first-grader at Wahitis and a seventh-grader who attended Wahitis from kindergarten to sixth grade, disagrees. She thinks the scripts help solidify what her child needs to know and prepares them for the test.

“It’s great,” Wilhelm said. “I know it’s different from what other schools do, but I think it works.”

Most published curricula have students practice something for two or three days of lessons, meaning kids might get five or 10 repetitions of a skill before moving on, Horn said. Research indicates kids who struggle with learning may need to practice with new skills like rounding big numbers or using new words in a sentence 50 to 300 times.

School leaders at Wahitis also plan for teaching instruction to finish three weeks before the end of the school year, so if teachers decide students need more time with a concept, they can return for a review. If the students have already mastered their grade-level standards, they can move on to the next year’s material.

Admitting confusion helps students succeed

At Wahitis, teachers try to build a culture of being honest about where each student stands academically, hence asking them to raise their fingers to indicate how confident they are in tackling a math problem.

Teachers often pair a weak student with a strong student so they can boost one another’s learning. When a student can explain a concept to someone, it reinforces the idea in their own mind.

In some classrooms, a student who’s learning at a faster rate than his or her peers serves as a “classroom helper” at each table to help classmates when they get stuck.

Students are tested every six weeks. Teacher teams use this information to adapt their lesson plans – revisiting topics with low student scores or tweaking the way an entire concept is taught. The data also helps teachers decide which student will go to which teacher for “walk to read” or “walk to math,” where every student gets up and walks to a small group for instruction based on their academic level in those subjects.

Every day, students get specialized instruction at their skill level in math and reading. Students sound out words with a small group of peers that learns at their reading level. Teachers are also evaluated on how much growth their students have exhibited week to week. All of this data is reviewed constantly by the principal. It’s also open for all teachers to view.

One criticism of direct instruction is that it’s too focused on the teacher telling students what to do, said Bryan Wickman, outreach director for the National Institute for Direct Instruction. He thinks it’s the exact opposite.

“Direct instruction is entirely student-directed,” he said. “Everything that the teacher does is in response to what the students are doing.”

Direct instruction vs. inquiry-based learning

While direct instruction is a rarity in Washington’s public schools, it has its advocates in the broader education community. Marcy Stein, a professor at the School of Education at University of Washington, Tacoma, teaches a course on direct instruction, and she said some parts of the method that critics dislike are actually among its strengths.

“Because teachers ask for unison responses, it can sound like rote memorization,” Stein said. “If you are asking kids to answer in unison it sounds like they are parroting.”

But she thinks having students answer in unison helps them stay engaged. The student can’t zone out, and they get more practice by answering with their peers.

And lesson scripts help ensure explanations stay consistent from day to day so students don’t get confused, Stein said.

Still, many education experts think direct instruction can be limiting. The concern is that students are only learning concepts on a surface level and not making connections, abstractions and generalizations, said Ton de Jong, professor emeritus at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. A method known as inquiry-based learning, when teachers ask students what they think they should do next, takes an approach that encourages making hypotheses and looking for evidence to prove or disprove those hypotheses.

Jong, who has researched both approaches, agrees with direct instruction proponents who say the method can be used to prepare students for inquiry-based learning. He points out that there is a large body of literature on “productive failure,” which shows the best results come from letting students fail first, then receive direct instruction.

Most experts agree that some combination of the two approaches is best, which is what Wahitis teachers are doing. In addition to using direct instruction to teach key concepts, they also use other strategies such as close reading, which is repeated reading of a text so that students can apply their knowledge of concepts like finding the main idea in a text or making an inference when reading a novel.

Schools elsewhere in the state, in Kent, Federal Way, Franklin Pierce, Battle Ground, Bethel and Tahoma, use direct instruction as an intervention method for students who are academically behind or in special education, said Deena Beard, an educational consultant at McGraw Hill who has sold the textbook company’s direct instruction curriculum to districts.

Fewer districts use it for general education, said Beard. Red Rock Elementary in the Royal School District, about 25 miles east of Othello, is using it in their general education classroom. Gildo Rey, Wahitis’ inspiration, used the method for many years but no longer uses it and has seen test scores plummet.

A group of fifth-graders, most of whom started at Wahitis in kindergarten, told a reporter they have a lot of fun at school.

“This school is amazing. I just love everyone here. I think the school is perfect the way it is,” Daniel Garza, 11, said. “My teacher wants everyone to be full of energy and always paying attention.”

Kori Lee Policarpio-Rodriguez, 11, likes that her teacher is always telling her “confidence is key.”

“Whenever he says that, I feel proud of myself.”