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Today we’re speaking John Hollingsworth. John is the president and co-founder of DataWORKS. He has a  varied background as a systems analyst, engineer, and musician, and has had a long and influential career, along with his wife Dr. Sylvia Ybarra, focussed on transforming the lives of teachers and students across the United States, and the World.

As the inventors of Explicit Direct Instruction, a process that you’ll be hearing all about in this episode, John and Sylvia have aimed to operationalise much of the education research from their intellectural forebears such as Barak Rosenshine, Madeleine Hunter, and others, to present teachers with a highly structured and actionable approach to classroom instruction.

Patreon supporters this month will receive a pdf copy of Ollie's summary of Hollingsworth and Ybarra's book ‘Explicit Direct Instruction'. If you’d like to support the Education Research Reading Room podcast, please check out the ERRR Patreon page to explore this option. Any donation, even $1 per month, is greatly appreciated. 

In this episode John and I speak in great detail about many ideas central to Explicit Direct Instruction, and instruction more broadly, such as ‘How should I create a Learning Intention from a content standard?’, ‘How can I ‘activate prior knowledge’?’, ‘What are the best ways to check for understanding?’, and ‘How do I react when a student gets an answer wrong.’ This was for me a deep and exciting pedagogical discussion and I hope you take as much from it as I did.

Links/resources mentioned in the show

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