Season 2 Discussion Guide

Welcome to the beta version of the Sold a Story, Season 2 discussion guide.

This is a work in progress. If you’ve got comments, questions or suggestions, you can write to us at soldastory@apmreports.org

Also, we would love to hear what it looks and sounds like as you use this guide to talk about the Season 2 episodes. If you submit recordings of your discussion (video or audio) to the Sold a Story staff (same email as above), excerpts may be featured in a future podcast episode or video.

The official Season 2 discussion guides will be published on the Sold a Story website on November 19, 2026, to coincide with the release of the season finale.

Episode 1: It’s Not Just Reading

In the 1960s, an education outsider named Zig Engelmann begins challenging conventional ideas about what young children can learn. He teaches his 4-year-old twins basic algebra. But he has a hard time getting anyone in education to take him seriously, until a professor gives him a chance to see if his ideas will work in a classroom.

Episode 2: The Remedy Is Always Teaching

At an experimental preschool in Illinois, Zig Engelmann and his colleagues begin turning his ideas into a classroom teaching method. Along the way, they make a series of discoveries about effective instruction. Their mantra: “If the student hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.”

Episode 3: The Forgotten Experiment

Zig Engelmann gets the chance of a lifetime: Put Direct Instruction to the test in one of the largest education experiments ever conducted. The results could have changed the direction of American education. Instead, they’re contested — and ultimately cast aside.

Episode 4: What Can You Do for My Black Children?

In a poor, Black neighborhood in Houston, principal Thaddeus Lott transforms a struggling elementary school with Direct Instruction. Soon, his students are outperforming students at much wealthier schools. The results are so remarkable, some people think it’s too good to be true.

Episode 5: Why It Works

Direct Instruction has decades of research behind it, but what makes it work? We dig into Zig Engelmann’s theory of instruction, what cognitive science reveals about how children learn and what hundreds of studies show about the program’s effectiveness.