Grantcoulson's Blog

   Three carpooling friends are gathered at a bar where they go every Thursday night for a beer before going home. There is a Scotsman, an American and a Canadian. On their way home, their car is demolished by a train at a level crossing when the signals failed.

    On arriving in Heaven, the admission clerk says there has been an rare error, and none of the men is scheduled to arrive in less than 50 years. He tells them they have a procedure for such errors and, in return for a $50 processing fee, each will be returned to Earth.

    “Och ay”, says the Scot, “I cannae speak for the others, but my life is worth $50.” He pays and leaves.

    “Listen, buddy”, says the American, “This is a marginal cost and can’t be worth more than $37.50.” The clerk relents, the American pays the money and gets back to Earth.

    Next Thursday, the Scot and the American show up at the bar causing the bartender to believe he’s in the presence of ghosts. The two explain the unusual event and allay the bartender’s fear. “One question”, the barkeep asks, “What happened to your friend, the Canadian.”

    “I don’t think we’ll see him again.”, says the Scotsman. “He’s still up there waiting for the government to pay for it.”

from my book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

The Best Way

    There is an unwritten rule in the social sciences that one should never use phrases such as "The Best Way".  One should use the more modest, "A Better Way".  This is based on the notion that the social sciences must be based on the democratic ideal where all techniques are given equal value.  If I hadn’t passed the following through the DIW filter, I wouldn’t write about it.  I could call it "A Better Way" or "Another Way" or "One of The Best Ways" or "The Way I Like Best".  What would be the purpose of that? That would show that I had not done my work.  On with The Best Way.

    My first exposure to behavioral-based education was in the early 1970s when I met Eric Haughton who had been a student of Odgen Lindsley who in turn had been a student of B.F.  Skinner.  Dr.  Lindsley had developed a method of daily educational measurement called Precision Teaching.  Precision Teaching has two main components: The first is the Standard Behavior Chart on which the student’s behavior is charted daily.  The second is the emphasis on fluency of responding.  Students who are not taught to fluency will tend to forget the skill and become mired when fundamental behavior is required in complex academic work.  For example, if the student cannot do the multiplication table, he will not be able to perform decimal multiplication.  Precision Teaching has discovered, using fluency as a basic assumption, a teach-once, remember-always method.  For example, when finding out what skills a student has in mathematics, it is very common to find that the student can only do part of the multiplication table correctly even if the student "tests" at Grade 8 or Grade 9.  Once the student can produce 70 to 80 digits correct per min.  in basic arithmetic exercises, he will not forget these basic facts.  The student will also be able to transfer the multiplication skill to more complicated mathematical questions.  Precision Teaching is an easy way to solve the problem of testing student knowledge.  Rather than providing academic progress reports once every 3 or 4 months, Precision Teaching procedures provide information on progress several times an hour.

    "Continuous measurement is like navigating by knowing where the ship is each minute as opposed to knowing where the ship is every three years. Which ship would you rather be on? When we must navigate without measures, we are lost most of the time. No doubt that is why it is called dead reckoning." Bushnell and Baer, 1994.

    Fluency pervades other areas of psychology, but has had little impact on education outside of behavior analysis.  Expert musicians, dancers, chess players and athletes, according to an extensive review, are only fast and accurate in their own area.  They have no superior abilities in skills other than those they have practiced much more than their less "talented" colleagues.  For example, an expert musician has a very good memory for musical scores but average memory for random words or digits. 

     Haughton’s technique fulfilled many of the Power Criteria formulated in the first chapter.  It worked quickly.  It worked where regular school failed.  It produced vast change in Pauline’s everyday functional behavior, such as writing, which improved markedly.  These results were published in a journal on exceptional children distributed throughout Canada and, surprisingly, did not result in one inquiry.  I should have known then that results do not impress public educators.  However, Pauline became functionally literate and numerate.  Her "motivation", which in behavior analysis terms is something the program produces, not an internal or eternal property of the student, was so great that she worked at this project seven days a week and would have done much more than 20 minutes a day had we allowed her.  Progress shown on daily charts has that effect.  Motivation is a variable we change by good programming and not a property we attribute to students we like.  As usual, the social services have reversed cause and effect when they talk about mysterious, "internal" causation located deep within the student and outside the realm of the program. This conceptualization, of course, takes the responsibility away from the programmer and places it on the client. who is responsible for "resistance" and "denial", but not for success.

     During four years at Sacajawea elementary in Great Falls Montana, Precision Teaching for 20 to 30 minutes per day was incorporated into the usual poor curriculum for public schools. Compared to similar schools in the district, this modest and inexpensive addition produced advances of 25 to 43 percentile points on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. All "learning disabled" students in the school took the criterion test whereas these lower functioning students did not take the test in the comparison schools.  As is inevitable with all spectacular successes in public education,  a new principal dropped the program and results settled back to dreary mediocrity after bright and undeniable accomplishment.

     Power Teaching, or hyper-accelerated education as a more descriptive label, is a blend of Precision Teaching, Direct Instruction, Programmed Learning, the Personalized System of Instruction and Behavior Analysis. This combination is practiced by many people, in private educational enterprises and developed independently because of the usefulness of the various components and the formidable usefulness resulting from their combination. This combination was "formally" introduced by Johnston and Layng in 1992 as the "Morningside Model of Generative Instruction", in a paper which provides an excellent introduction and overview.  Power Teaching depends on two concepts largely ignored by other techniques.  The first is fluency, accuracy and speed, in tool and basic skills before moving on in the curriculum.  The second concept is opportunity to respond or practice.  Students learn by doing and the more opportunities to practice they have, the more they learn.  This combination requiring fluency and providing many opportunities to respond consistently produces faster results than any other method, yet attracts little attention from public education systems.

    In basic mathematics, fluency is measured by digits correct per minute.  For example, in fraction calculations, the aim is 70 digits correct per minute on a practice sheet with all the different types of fraction problems presented in random order.  When students reach a fluent level in an academic behavior, they remember, are less distractible and are more likely to apply the skill to new types of problems (Johnson and Layng, 1994).  Fluency goals provide the framework for the academic curriculum and must be met before the student is given more complex work.  For example, it is not unusual for a student to score in the Grade 5 to 9 level at intake assessment in mathematics, according to standard tests, and be slow and inaccurate in simple multiplying, dividing, adding and subtracting, a situation which is a red flag for future trouble.  The first academic task with these students is to bring their responding to 70 correct digits per minute or higher for the basic mathematics skills of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing.

    Basic skills are always assessed initially and brought to a level of fluency which makes them functionally useful for further work.  One of the reasons for the emphasis on fluency in basic skills is that it is difficult for the student to succeed with complex calculations, for example, those involving negative numbers, brackets, exponents, and decimals, without being fluent in the basic skills of mathematics.  As Johnson and Layng (1992) point out, once basic skills are mastered to fluency, more complex skills are easier to teach than those supposedly simpler.

    Greenwood, Hart, Walker and Risley (1994) have found that in ordinary classrooms, teacher behavior consumes much more class time than student behavior thus depriving the students of the opportunity to practice.  The hyper-accelerated method requires that, even when new procedures are being introduced, student responding must be at a rate of at least once per six seconds.  This is contrasted to standard teaching procedures in which the teacher "explains" the concept and the students listen, without responding, for long periods of time.  This is required by mainstream teaching philosophy because the teacher is "imparting knowledge" rather than teaching academic behaviors.  Remember, if you’re not teaching behaviors you’re teaching non-behaviors.  This makes it very difficult to determine what you’ve taught and puts it beyond measurement.

  Bushnell, D., & Baer, D.. (1994) Measurably Superior instruction means close, continual contact with the relevant outcome data. Revolutionary?   In R. Gardner, D.M. Sainato, J.O. Cooper, T.E. Heron, W.L. Heward, J. Eshelman, & T.A. Gross (Eds.).  Behavior Analysis in education: Focus on Measurably Superior Instruction. (pp. 4-10). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.

  Greenwood, C. R., Hart, B., Walker, D., & Risley, T. R. (1994). The opportunity to respond revisited: A behavioral theory of developmental retardation and its prevention. In R. Gardner III, D. M. Sainato, J. O. Cooper, T. E. Heron, W. L. Heward, J. W. Eshleman, & T. A. Grossi (Eds.), Behavior analysis in education: Focus on measurably superior instruction (pp. 213-223). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.

     Johnson, K.R. and Layng, T.V.J. (1992). Breaking the structuralist barrier: Literacy and numeracy with fluency. American Psychologist, 47, 1475-1490.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson