A quick Google search turned up this promising report on Direct Instruction. Unfortunately it reads very similarly to Owen's posts - lots of trying to convince me Direct Instruction is great great great, practically no information about what DI is, even in the section entitled What Is Direct Instruction? I've updated in the "DI is legitimately hard to summarize" direction.
Thank you very much for the IM convo you had with me resolving all those confusions I had about how I had miscommunicated various points. I just thought I should post this comment before I go and use what you gave me to write a much better clarification post for discussion, since the comment was almost done when you IM'd me.
I hope that report doesn't read too similarly to my posts! I only did the quickest skim of the "what is DI" section, but it seems to be like an abridgement of "Rubric for Identifying Authentic Direct Instruction Programs&...
[NOTE: This was a discussion post asking if anyone would mind giving feedback on a very rough draft in progress.
If you are downvoting it because you do not want to see discussion posts asking for feedback like this, then by all means, that's a valid use of a downvote.
But if you are downvoting it in order to express your opinion of the quality of the draft, I urge you to reconsider]
This is another work in progress coming at the DI issue from a somewhat different direction. It's contained in the comments of the original, and I'm posting this to ask for more wonderful beta-reader critics to tell me if it's a step in the right direction. (It's still very informal writing, but it's the ideas I'm dealing with now.)
And about what I'm looking for in the LW audience, someone asked me in a private message:
And I said:
Well, that's the major part of what I want that's important here. I also had to add:
But that's not important here (except to disclose that is where I'm coming from). LWers would first have to understand DI to fully grasp that. And I am significantly less certain of my current beliefs about those 'strategic twists' (although still pretty certain), and LWers proficient in DI would be the best to evaluate the ideas.