from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:
Each school should have a person whose sole responsibility is to ensure teacher compliance with the highly technical details of teaching. This "director of education" would hold teacher seminars, observe teaching, update himself on teaching techniques and avoid fads by the use of an efficient DIW filter. The person holding this position would ensure teaching is efficient by monitoring the classroom and staying in touch with the latest teaching procedures and curricula which represent improvements. The director of education must have the authority to ensure compliance.
When you, as a teacher, get the results that this kind of teaching creates, you will experience a thrill and delight that ranks with life’s best experiences. If you work with "exceptional" or "learning disabled" children you will really fly because you will succeed where others have failed.
One of the great traps of the social sciences is criticism of the real by the ideal. If someone doesn’t like your methods they will criticize your outcomes because they don’t reach an ideal level. The comparison is pointless because the comparison should be between the data of one method and the data of another. Skinner reports on an early algebra program which taught algebra faster and produced greater retention. One of the criticisms was that the students "really didn"t know algebra". They could do algebra better than other students and this did not appear to be enough.
Curriculum design cannot be done by "teachers drawing on decades of experience" which is a common description of the authorship of mathematics textbooks. The New Math failed because it tried to give students more than they needed. It was student-independent, as is much teaching. The 12-step programs of Alcoholics Anonymous and much of teaching is client-independent and comes about from a "logical" analysis which does not come in contact with the behavior of the clients it is designed to serve. One of the reasons most textbooks are truly terrible is that they are client independent.
As I have pointed out many times, experience is a poor teacher. No teacher can have the knowledge produced by decades of research, involving dozens of researchers and research projects. It is doubtful that textbooks will be improved since there is no research or conceptual guide for them. Curriculum designers have pointed out that one of the reasons for the failure of textbooks is that each topic is presented on its own. A useful curriculum depends on "sameness analysis" which shows how mathematics concepts and computation are linked across topics which appear unrelated.
Curriculum design seems centered on good graphics, culturally sensitive examples and high quality paper, assumptions which seem only important in North American schooling. The same factors appear in most educational software programs which are generally judged on their structure, how they look, rather than on their function, how well they teach compared to other methods. Educational software is rarely evaluated on the criterion of how well it teaches.
What are the results? What works best?
One thing that struck me immediately when I began to read the educational literature many years ago was the absence of data. In its place was a large amount of argumentation over the philosophy of education, some of it very heated. None of this argumentation had any positive effect on the education of students. Almost all of the controversies that seemed very important twenty-five years ago are forgotten. All that has been saved from these days comes from the insistence of a few on measuring the effects of teaching and letting student improvement tell them if the teaching was successful. Another common kind of article in educational journals is the "how to" analysis which shows what was done, but provides no comparative data to show if the technique is superior.
We know there are rules for separating what works from what doesn’t and what’s important from what isn’t important. Three of the rules are: Can the method make a large amount of improvement in a short period of time? Can the method produce better results than other methods especially with those for whom other methods have failed? Can the results be repeated by other people in other places?
There are many powerful findings in education. One of the most powerful is that explicit positive reinforcement adds to learning. Teaching occurs in a social situation and it follows that the more positive the situation, the better the learning will be. Several surveys of many studies each have shown that explicit positive reinforcement improves learning. The reinforcement may be given for attempts "Good try" accomplishment "Congratulations, you made your aim.", or classroom behavior "Great, everybody is in their seats and ready to work."
Linda Meyer followed up some inner city students who had Direct Instruction during the first 3 or 4 years of their schooling. She found that 21.9% more students graduated high school and 17% more were accepted to college. This last result is particularly useful because only 17% of the control group went to college. The Direct Instruction teaching represented, at the most, the first 4 of the 13 years of primary schooling. One wonders what the results would have been with these disadvantaged children if all grades were taught with Direct Instruction.
Patricia Daly found that, "Whole Language produced much more echoic (verbal prompted) behavior while Language Mastery (Direct Instruction) produced much more (approximately 76% vs. 6.6%) textual…what we call reading–(see the word, say the word…GC)… behavior than the Whole Language approach. Outcome data, describing the effects of instruction, however, have no direct effect on either funding or contract negotiations. Outcome data have no audience and therefore, they are not relevant." Daly’s analysis may seem pessimistic, but I’ve seen what she describes many times. The movement toward charter schools and education vouchers, both of which allow parents more influence on how their children are taught, should increase the number of children who are taught effectively.
Weisberg found that DI reading instruction produced much greater reading gains than standard education or the developmental approach used in Head Start. The students taught by DI were consistently above the standard accomplishment of comparable students.
Eric Haughton found that children could not do advanced arithmetic unless they could write digits at a certain speed. Students could not read meaningful passages at a useful rate unless they could read individual sounds and then individual words at a minimum rate per minute. The beauty and power of Precision Teaching is the interest the student immediately takes in the frequency aim because practice brings progress the student can see with the increasing aims making student motivation automatic. One argument against a highly structured teaching program is a vague notion that students will only work when they are in such a situation. The opposite is true. Students who learn basic skills have the freedom to do advanced academic work. Quite often, young students who have been charting their own behavior can clearly explain the procedure to adult visitors to their classroom.
Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
