Why Unison Response Works in the Classroom
What is unison response?
Unison response, also referred to as choral response, is when students collectively respond to a question or prompt on a teacher’s cue. Students may verbalize a letter's sound, read a word, identify numbers, or solve an equation.
Direct Instruction, a research-validated, teacher-led instructional methodology rooted in homogenous grouping and explicit instruction, leverages unison response to boost student engagement, create opportunities for immediate feedback, and give teachers access to real-time insights into student needs. In a Direct Instruction lesson, teachers often cue students to respond by saying, “Get Ready!” and after students respond, teachers immediately correct any errors.
What does unison response look like in the classroom?
When implementing Direct Instruction, teachers use scripts to deliver explicit instruction at a brisk pace. The scripts prompt unison responses at a rate of twelve to fourteen responses per minute. By the end of a thirty-minute lesson, every student will have responded two hundred times or more.
Why does unison response work?
The pedagogy behind Direct Instruction prioritizes explicit, efficient, clear instruction with specific examples and immediate error correction. It ensures students get exactly the information they need, presented in the clearest method possible, and leaves no room for misconceptions. In a meta-analysis of 50 years of studies on DI, researchers wrote:
“Like the constructivist approach, DI assumes that students make inferences from examples that are presented to them. But, unlike constructivism, the theory underlying DI states that learning is most efficient when the examples are carefully chosen and designed. They must be as unambiguous as possible, sequenced to promote the correct inference for learning a new concept, and involve the fewest possible steps to induce learning.” (1)
Researchers go on to explain that mastery is central to DI. The curriculum is structured in such a way that builds new knowledge and skills on prerequisite knowledge and skills. Together, explicit instruction, unambiguous examples, and a curriculum carefully structured for mastery all allow students to learn more in less time.
While DI relies on instructional scripts for teachers to drive the elements described above, unison response is also an important piece of the pedagogical framework, allowing students to engage with the instruction while teachers continually gauge progress toward mastery in real-time. Here’s a closer look at why unison response works within Direct Instruction:
Engages Students: Unison response is a powerful tool for engagement. The task of listening to an example, thinking of an answer, and verbalizing that answer along with their peers keeps students actively engaged with the lesson and focused on the content the teacher is delivering. Of course, the opportunity to yell confidently in class is an exciting activity!
Unison response requires a degree of multimodality. Looking at the provided example, listening to the content, and speaking their answer aloud holds students’ attention and activates their working memory. Additionally, unison response can help prevent behavior issues. There’s no time to act out when you have an answer to shout out with your peers!
Yields Formative Data: Each of those verbal student responses — sometimes over two hundred in a single thirty-minute lesson — is a data point for teachers to determine if students understood the lesson or if re-teaching is necessary to reach mastery. Unison response allows teachers to gather a high volume of clear, actionable, formative data in a short amount of time. When students are responding incorrectly in a lesson, teachers will repeat an exercise. Within Direct Instruction’s homogenous grouping framework, unison responses reveal which students move on and which receive remediation. Each day, teachers know exactly how students are performing.
Fosters Efficient Instruction: Put simply, pairing explicit instruction with unison responses is an efficient way to teach. As educators work to accelerate learning and close gaps to mitigate the lingering effects of post-pandemic learning loss, every instructional moment matters more than ever, particularly when it comes to the mastery of foundational skills. Direct Instruction’s fast-paced, focused, explicit lessons allow teachers to teach important concepts quickly, and unison response allows students to practice while teachers gauge progress all at the same time.
For example, Corrective Reading, a Direct Instruction intervention program, uses unison response to help teachers regularly determine progress toward mastery and guide instruction. The “Word Attack” portion of daily lessons ends with teachers checking individual students for word reading mastery. If the group meets the criteria, the teacher moves on in the lesson. If the group does not, the teacher knows that students are not at mastery level and re-teaching is necessary.
Reaches All Learners: The underlying, foundational philosophy of Direct Instruction is that all students if properly taught, are capable of learning (2). Direct Instruction is designed to support all learners, despite their needs, backgrounds, and abilities. Its commitment to explicit instruction of foundational skills is particularly effective for students with dyslexia and multilingual learners. Unison response has even been shown to support students with autism spectrum disorder, specifically students who exhibit interfering behaviors (3).
Unison Response in Reading Mastery Transformations
Reading Mastery Transformations, a Direct Instruction intervention or alternative core program, builds unison response into lessons to ensure students master foundational concepts. The script of a first-grade lesson in blending (Reading Lesson 1, Exercise 2) gives the teacher the details she needs to deliver this important phonemic awareness activity briskly and accurately. The lower-case vowel letters (written in blue to cue the teacher into what they should say aloud) indicate a short vowel sound. The upper-case vowel letters within the script indicate the long vowel sound. If a letter is repeated three times, it indicates a continuous sound. Using this precise tool, the teacher will know exactly how to segment the sounds in a spoken word.
“Group responses are efficient ways to test students’ mastery of the material they are learning. Unison group responses enable each child to generate their own answers, like each voice in a choir adds their music to the song.” — Owen Engelmann, Senior Author, Reading Mastery Transformations
Learn more about Reading Mastery Transformations here:
For more on Direction Instruction, see:
This story was edited on 6/22/23.
References
(1) Stockard, J., Wood, T. W., Coughlin, C., & Rasplica Khoury, C. (2018). The Effectiveness of Direct Instruction Curricula: A Meta-Analysis of a Half Century of Research. Review of Educational Research, 88(4), 479–507. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654317751919
(2) National Institute of Direct Instruction (n.d.). Basic Philosophy of Direct Instruction. NIFDI. Retrieved May 31, 2023, from https://www.nifdi.org/what-is-di/basic-philosophy.html
(3) Thompson, J. L., Wood, C. L., Preston, A., & Stevenson, B. (2019). Teaching Unison Responding During Small-Group Direct Instruction to Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder Who Exhibit Interfering Behaviors. Education and Treatment of Children, 42(1), 1–24. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26623021
