Grantcoulson's Blog

    Belief in the elites’ ability to solve problems is based on two faulty premises. The first is that “social policy” needs to be made which will curb the horrible excesses of individuals. The second is that the decisions about these policies will be made by enlightened individuals. Neither is true because social policy is usually shorthand for “what I know, in my infinite wisdom, is best”. The second is false because the deciders bear no responsibility for their actions. When consequences do not guide actions, nonsense invariably ensues. Both of these principles are illustrated in today’s examples.

    This is from Pat Buchanan’s column found here, concerning education.

     “And the bountiful fruits of this massive transfer of taxpayers’ wealth? In D.C., nearly half of all black and Latino students drop out. Of those who graduate, nearly half are reading and doing math at seventh-, eighth- and ninth-grade levels. D.C. academic achievement ranks 51st, last in the U.S.

      Yet last week came a report from New York that makes D.C look like M.I.T. Some 200 students, in their first math class at City University of New York, were tested on their basic math skills.

      Ninety percent could not do basic algebra. One-third could not convert a decimal into a fraction.

      If this was a representative sampling, nine in 10 CUNY students not only do not belong in college, they do not qualify for their high school diplomas. As for that third who can’t do decimals and fractions, they should not have been allowed into high school until they could do sixth-grade math.

       Given equality of opportunity, the brightest will inexorably rise, and the less talented — athletically, artistically, academically — will fall behind. All things being equal, the fastest kid will always win the race.

     This campaign to equalize test scores among unequal students is utopian and unattainable, and amounts to a scam by the education industry.

     How many times have they promised progress? And how many times have they delivered?

     It is time to look not only skeptically, but cynically, on further demands for billions for education.

     Rather, follow the money. Look for who is getting the jobs, the TV appearances, the consulting contracts, the grants, the titles, the limo drivers. Because, at bottom, that is what it is all about — the transfer of wealth and power from those who earn it and those who produce it, to those who produce little or nothing.”

     The second is from what is, potentially, the largest elitist scam ever, Climate Change.

     The current proposal is that evil capitalists have been polluting the atmosphere and must pay, and continue to pay, other countries, most in Africa, for this grave transgression. Now I entirely sympathize with this position. For one thing, there are dictators who have fewer than 10 mistresses and some of these are not even real blondes and some of these, oh horror, are not even Swedish. The transfer of wealth will take care of that.

    On a more serious note, go to this place on D-ed reckoning, look for “Things we don’t know”–November 19, 2009, and scroll down to the video.

    Here is shown what a lot of people know. 1) The scary climate change scenarios come from “projections”, and, 2) The projections are based on faulty assumptions.

    All of this comes from non-responsible elites making predictions without the discipline of incentives.

Cheers and ttfn,

Grant Coulson   

     Quoting others who agree with you is comforting, but may only represent a shared, mistaken opinion. Occasionally something pops up with opinion and data. The entire piece is here; Perhaps a little too doting on what government does and not enough on why it’s important that government stay out of the way of Individual Striving.

     “ And yet while Sachs and Diamond offer good insight into certain aspects of poverty, they share something in common with Montesquieu and others who followed: They ignore incentives. People need incentives to invest and prosper; they need to know that if they work hard, they can make money and actually keep that money. And the key to ensuring those incentives is sound institutions — the rule of law and security and a governing system that offers opportunities to achieve and innovate. That’s what determines the haves from the have-nots — not geography or weather or technology or disease or ethnicity.

     Put simply: Fix incentives and you will fix poverty. And if you wish to fix institutions, you have to fix governments.

     How do we know that institutions are so central to the wealth and poverty of nations? Start in Nogales, a city cut in half by the Mexican-American border fence. There is no difference in geography between the two halves of Nogales. The weather is the same. The winds are the same, as are the soils. The types of diseases prevalent in the area given its geography and climate are the same, as is the ethnic, cultural, and linguistic background of the residents. By logic, both sides of the city should be identical economically.

     And yet they are far from the same.

      On one side of the border fence, in Santa Cruz County, Arizona, the median household income is $30,000.  A few feet away, it’s $10,000.”

      Ensuring that incentives will work means that efforts to improve one’s well-being will result in lasting improvement which can be retained, safe from taxation or other kinds of confiscation. The incentive lattice may be complex to some, but it’s simple: “If I work hard and intelligently will it benefit me enough beyond my effort to make me want to continue?”

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

    An ardent communist asks his neighbor what he has named  the puppies in his new litter. “I’m a good Communist, of course, so I named them Mark, Engels and Lenin.”

    “I’m glad”, says the friend, “The Party will be pleased.”

    The ardent Party man comes by a few weeks later and asks about the puppies.

    “Smith, Bastiat and Friedman are doing well.”, says the friend.

    “I thought the names were Marx, Engels and Lenin”, queries the shocked believer.

    “Yes they were,”, says the neighbor, “But now their eyes are open.”

    My eye-opening experience came when I was sitting in a “clinical meeting” with a bunch of fellow government employees discussing a case. It came to me (yes I was once a government employee. I’m an atheist but, just in case, I hope there is a Limbo where you can expiate your sins and dodge Eternal Damnation) that none of this discussion had any point. The scales fell from my eyes and it occurred to me, a) There was no reason to be useful so no one was and, b) for my own sanity I needed to be useful. In my defense, I had tried to set up programs to reduce recidivism, but these were thwarted, mainly by being ignored. The government folks were spending Other People’s Money so no one care. No one cared because caring wasn’t necessary for salary, promotions, status. Why it took me so long to realize this is a mystery to me.

    Personal stories are usually boring, but this one illustrates a point. Theoretically, I knew all this, but it took awhile. Now, all my activities are useful and I’m not waiting for the pension when I can be bored while not having to pretend to work.

    More bloviation from the Global Warming cartel–predicting horrible things while temperatures fall. Note that the terror comes from the projection, not the actual. They change the forecast and then get hysterical.

    What has this to do with psychology, you well may ask. It’s related because the elites are wrong so often that when they’re right, it’s a miracle.

Cheers and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

     The purpose of taxes is to pay for trendy illusions, delusions, beliefs, and philosophies. All of these are on the IS, or intention side, and are never checked for DOES, what really happens. Academics and politicians are famous for this. Politics and academies are places where cleverness and intention substitute for accomplishment.

    The bailout on GM is working, politicians would have us believe, because they are losing less money than before. This game is going to be as much fun to watch as global warming.

    Today’s offering is mainly musing about what causes people to become and continue to be governments workers. Why do some choose the hammock and others the plow?

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

    I saw a really scary textbook used in government schools just recently. In my jurisdiction, all textbooks are published in Ontario demonstrating once again that, “Schools are not where children are taught, they are places where adults are paid.” These textbooks are truly terrible, violating every concept of effective teaching, but local textbook publishers make a nice living.

    “A cad”, so the saying goes, “is easy to get and difficult to get rid of. A gentleman is hard to get and easy to get rid of.” Show me an outfit where it’s hard to get rid of an employee and I’ll show you a government entity, a union-dominated operation backed by government indifference and/or enforcement and/or government subsidy, or a business about to go under.

    “Before lunch, we talk about what we’ll have for lunch. After lunch, we talk about what we had for lunch. Later in the afternoon, depending on the day, we talk about what we did on the weekend or what we’re going to do on the weekend.” Civil Servant. Before civil servants get excited, or even if they do, it’s not about how hard a civil servant works. It’s about how hard he has to work which will account for how hard most of them do work. And that, of course, is not even a large part of the problem. If the work involves activity which is non-productive or counterproductive, in the first place is does not matter if it is done and in the second, it matters because it should not be done.

    “Our most important job is to change reality by describing it differently.”

    Politics is grounded on the conceit of those who have ordinary ability to direct their own lives, based on complete information about their own circumstances, but believe that they have extraordinary ability to direct the lives of others, based on limited information about the circumstances of the directed.

    "There is nothing which power cannot believe of itself, when it is praised as equal to the gods." Juvenal.

    "Who will guard the guards themselves?" Juvenal

    How can anyone work in a stultifying environment where inefficiency is mandated and practicality absent?

    A government employee is basically told, "Have the right credentials, show up for work, do what looks good, don’t get taught doing anything outrageous, here’s some money, job security and an indexed pension. Our spin doctors will take care of the rest."

    Just as members of American teachers’ unions often send their own children to private schools, so unionized workers at government-run hospitals in Britain have insurance that allows them to go to private hospitals. In both cases, those on the inside realize how bad these institutions are, regardless of what they say to those on the outside.

    What is it about the person who "…prefers the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom."? Samuel Adams.

    I personally do not have discussions with government workers unless it’s absolutely necessary. They are political creatures and usually use only emotional arguments at war with reality. Because of their arrogant self-righteousness, they can also get very vicious, something which should always be avoided. Any discussion  involving coercion, emotion, illogic, unreality, viciousness, politics, ignorance, arrogance and hubris on one side will eventually turn bad.

    Any government worker must realize he can have respect or a guaranteed income, never both.

      There are some who are so sublimely sure of their knowledge that they feel that forcing their solution on others is righteous and necessary.

     It would be instructive to determine what attributes of those who work for the government allow them to work in such a stultifying environment without accomplishment except political buck and wing. In free enterprise, one must perform well all the time or customers tend to leave. When government favor or a government job is obtained, the effort goes into the acquisition of the advantage and day by day activity can then be free of effort and accomplishment.

     The Peter Principle: "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his or her level of incompetence."  In government, the only level of competence of any importance is competence in the barren, dreary pageantry of politics, so the only level of incompetence people rise to is political.

    Government workers I have know show a weary sense of acceptance. “Just waiting for the pension.” “It’s all pensionable time.”
“Who cares?” “Not my job.”

      Here’s my question, “What is the fundamental difference(s) between government workers and entrepreneurs?” I would believe that these differences would be greater than those between government workers and workers in free enterprise.

Cheers and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

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

      This chapter can end with a quote from Andrew J. Coulson (no relation) on productivity and education. "Far from being an engine of wealth creation, the education system is bleeding the economy to death. The U.S. spends 2.3 times as much per pupil in real, inflation-adjusted dollars as it spent in 1970, but the return on this ballooning investment has been less than nothing."

    Student achievement at the end of high school has been flat for nearly 40 years, according to a recent study by the Education Department, while the graduation rate fell over the same period, according to a report by James Heckman, a Nobel laureate economist.

    If the efficiency of U.S. public schooling had merely remained at its 1970 level, the country would enjoy the equivalent of an annual $300 billion tax cut.

    The productivity collapse in education is more than staggering; it’s unparalleled. Can you name any other service or product that has gotten worse and less affordable over the past two generations? The reason you can’t is that no other field is organized as a state-run monopoly."

    To sum up public education in North America: 1) It is expensive, 2) It is much less important for social and individual reasons than the hysterical propaganda maintains, 3) It is done very poorly, 4) The notions of "social justice" and "environmental concerns" are misguided in the extreme.

Coulson, Andrew J. (2009) Time To End The Monopoly In Education, http://www.ednews.org/blogs/time-to-end-the-monopoly-in-education.html. Retrieved July 22, 2009.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

   World leaders, apparently, have put off the "difficult" decisions on climate change. I smell a beginning of realization that, as warming turns to cooling (actually, it’s not turning, it’s turned), political face must be saved. It will be fun to see how this unravels and how all those who were foolish pretend that they were wise.

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

     When committees give recommendations for reform, these recommendations always miss the point. The reforms concentrate on better teacher training and better pay. They regularly ignore teaching methods, data-based curriculum, supervision of teaching, evaluation of teaching by results, and classroom management. These factors are the ones which, in combination, produce powerful results.

    With a little planning, Power Teaching allows true individualization of the curriculum as students move through a subject’s curriculum at their own pace.  At the same time, they are laying the foundation for further improvement by not advancing until more basic skills are mastered.

    Power Teaching has been used at several sites in North America.  At Morningside Academy in Seattle, it has been used to teach children who were not learning when taught with traditional methods.  The results for the last 5 years from an article by Johnson and Layng in the November, 1992 issue of The American Psychologist, show gains of 2.42 grade years per year instruction in reading, 3.18 grade years/year instruction in language arts and 2.62 grade years/year instruction in mathematics.  These results are more startling because they were achieved with students who "suffered" from "…the so-called learning and attention disorders." 

    In Chicago, the Morningside Model has been used with disadvantaged adults who were aiming for entrance to and continued success in, community college.  Results with adults were even more dramatic than those with children.  Follow-up indicated that the students were achieving their community college goals and maintaining their Grade Point Averages.

    One of the great mistakes of the standard education establishment in North America is the "spiral curriculum".  The spiral curriculum is based on a layman’s "logical" analysis, rather than a facts-based analysis.  In the spiral curriculum, a topic, such as fractions, is examined in greater "depth" on successive occasions, spaced apart by other mathematical topics.  This is supposed to provide greater understanding of a topic, but it "ensures that each year"s curriculum will be a bewildering array of many topics, superficially covered." The students, who are not taught to a fluency criterion, forget most of the instruction which should be, but usually is not, extensively reviewed before new material is given.  The opposite of the spiral curriculum is the "teach once, remember always" curriculum.

    Vouchers should be issued for the full cost of education.  Those parents who would use voucher would be the kind of parents who demand better results.  One of the arguments against vouchers is that they would lead to  "student flight" from public schools. This is like saying the Berlin Wall should have stayed in place  because it stopped "people flight" from East German worker’s paradise. The teaching profession, from educational "experts" in schools of education to teacher unions, are violently opposed to any form of education which departs from the kind currently in place. In spite of their constant emphasis on creativity, these people are rigidly non-creative in providing alternatives which work.

    Social sciences are the last refuge of scoundrels.  If a chemist told you the chemical reaction did not occur because the chemicals were "resistant" and not "ready" for change you’d laugh.  If the engineer told you the bridge could not be built because the steel had suffered a traumatic event while being changed from iron ore, you’d fire the engineer.  If the veterinarian told you your cat was incurable because she was denying she was a cat and insisting she was a dog, you’d get another veterinarian.  Teachers insist on blessing their students with characteristics that make them impossible to teach.  "Learning disabilities, emotional upset, poor socialization.  Forty percent of our students are so "damaged" that teaching them is impossible.  So it goes in the social sciences, however.  Causes are mixed with effects, lack of change is attributed to the subject of change and ignorance of technique is graced by assigning it to factors beyond the grasp of the social scientist.

    Homework

    Homework is unnecessary if correct teaching programs are used.  There is ample time, even in the short-day, short-year, days-filled-with-learning-politically-hot-topics North American school, to learn the important skills, if they are taught correctly. When the public education system smells accountability, it seems to pile on homework, a weak substitute for effective teaching.

Tips for Teachers

    One of the strangest things I see in teaching is the amount of time teachers spend in creating exercise sheets.  This is unnecessary and inefficient.  It is unnecessary because many exercise sheets exist from commercial and other sources.  It is inefficient because much better sheets exist which are based on research.  There is no need to reinvent the wheel, especially if the reinvented wheel is square.

    My second tip is to let the students do most of the work in copying, distributing, marking and collecting materials.  The students can keep their own data and do their own analysis.  In a class where high intensity work is done, this a necessity.
    How to do really bad teaching

         Hijack the good words

    Use words like progressive so that your opponents are regressive Whole Language so that your opponents are teaching Part Language child-centered so that your opponents are centered on the walls, perhaps developmentally appropriate so that your opponents are developmentally inappropriate co-operative learning so that your opponents are practicing uncooperative learning, humanistic so your opponents are `anti-humanistic, creative teaching so your opponents will support robotic teaching.

        Make it sound plausible

    Create an argument which is plausible in relation to laymen and to whatever intellectual world view is current.  Refer to each other’s opinions as "research".  Disregard as many of the DIW criteria as possible.  This is Argumentum ad populum, or argument by Appeal to the people.  Closely related is the Argumentum ad numerum, the greater the number of people who believe it, the more likely it is.  Laymen are known as really poor scientists.  As I have said many times in this book, facts do not care about votes.

        Institute large scale implementation

    This must be done without without any research safeguards.  Since you have a lot of non-scientific support, this means that your opponents are in a position to demonstrate the negative.  For those readers who are Latinically inclined, this is Argumentum ad ignorantiam, or argument from ignorance.  Something must be true because it has not been proved false.  This gives you a few years of breathing space.

        Question the research that goes against you

    In the social sciences you can question the results.  When the results are uniformly against you, question the assessment procedures which are used.  Create your own instruments.  When these are demonstrated to be invalid and unreliable, state that what you are doing is so spiritually profound, that it cannot be measured.  Question the political motives of your opponents.  This will complete the Great Circle by bringing you back to your start.  While you’re doing this, it is essential you use words and phrases such as excellence, rich, world class, reform, authentic and genuine.

    In the end, all of this sound and fury will be relevant only to historians.  Children will be taught phonics as their introduction to reading, data will be kept on the student’s daily progress by the student, lesson plans will be produced as a result of research and not by individual teachers who will then put their energies into classroom teaching.

    Educational "progressives", note the choice of a good word, are responsible for Open Classrooms, child-centered learning, Whole Language, Objective-Based Education, and other disasters.  Their methods were designed to solve the problems of self-esteem, creativity, boredom, lack of higher-order thinking, rote memorization and other vaporous evils.

    "Pianists are no longer required to learn chords which are unconnected to the experience of playing a concerto.  figure skaters are not longer required to practice landings which are disconnected from the experience of skating a program.  Baseball players are no longer required to take batting practice, disconnected as it is from the actual game experience."

The California Whole Language Experience–The Perfect Example of a Polgram

    There is no point discrediting something which has never been credited.

    1.  Creation by committee

    2.  Ignoring research

    3.  Domination by layman-based theory vaguely based on psychological and educational theorizing without data support.

    4.  Faith in teachers to apply concepts without training.

    5.  Accolades from those who don’t know anything about teaching reading but like the philosophy.

    6.  Lots of money made by those who taught the "new philosophy".

    If this had worked, it would have been the first time in the history of the social sciences, or anything else, that this had worked.  Those who don’t know what they are doing are sentenced to eternally commit the same sins under different names.
    Arguments with educators usually get distilled into, "My intentions are better than your results."

                    Why Engelmann and his colleagues were right

    "This works in practice, but does it work in theory?" OR "I can’t explain my  data in terms of your theory no matter how heartfelt your belief."

    From the beginning, the Direct Instruction people followed the principles of program construction outlined in the first chapter.  The programs are validated, powerful, tested and effective.  Results, not theory, are central.  Teaching, not students, is tested.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson   

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

     Why do those who love the planet hate the people living on it? Estimates of what might have been are difficult, but banning DDT (now reinstated) for decades has probably led to millions of death from mosquito-borne diseases. So long as hysteria was served.

    On a totally unrelated note, Paul (I have a history of failure, but people do like me because I give voice to all the things people think they know about economics ) Krugman is, in the New York Times, talking about the importance of job creation. In business, profits count, jobs follow. If you don’t believe that, try creating jobs without profits. Of course, that’s what governments do and end up with neither.

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

     The lesson starts with the teacher pointing to a series of letters and letter combinations.  The students respond chorally and the teacher watches for students who respond incorrectly.  Correct responses are reinforced.  In this lesson, the sound for the letter n is introduced.  The sound for n is introduced well after m to reduce the possibility of confusing the two.  One of the defining characteristics of "dyslexia" is the confusion of b with d, a with c and m with n.  When the distinction is taught, does the "dyslexia", which is presumably a constant neurological condition, go away? Just wondering.  Needless to say, almost no other program uses this technique which is just one of dozens of "little efficiencies" incorporated into DI.  This exercise uses the see-say channel combination.  The sounds are on the board and the students say the sounds.

    The next exercise requires the students to hear words and then say them.  Surely, you say to yourself, this is unnecessary.  It isn’t, because every skill a student requires must be firm and sometimes even the "simplest" skill must be taught.

    The next exercise is identifying the middle sound of short words.  This is another way of getting the students to discriminate among the sounds in a word.  If you know a word by sight, you can say a word.  If you know the sounds and blends of a language you can say all the words.   

    The next exercise is saying sounds and blending them into words.  Same rationale as above.

    When the lesson switches to written work, the student is asked to write sounds and words, identify and match sounds and words and eventually read simple sentences and answer comprehension questions.  The sentences are constructed of low probability word groups such as, "The rat was sick, so he drank some milk." to reduce the probability of successful guessing.  Words, sentences and stories are not accompanied by pictures so that the students can guess from the pictures.  Writing words by sound is not the complete answer to spelling because English is somewhat irregular.  It is, however, far superior to what passes for spelling instruction in most schools where simple words are given first and more complex words as the student grows older.  The problems with this approach are the usual ones.  The program is not field-tested and the complexity of the words is not based on any rationale but on what "looks" complex.  Yes, dear reader, this is another example of structure triumphing over function.  The DI group has a spelling program which uses the regularities in English, called morphographs, to create new words and teaches irregular words as special cases.

    The fluency exercises associated with these lessons consist of see-say and hear-write timing exercises.  In the see-say exercise, the student has a sheet of cumulative sounds and words introduced by the program.  The point of the exercise is to say the words and sounds on the sheet for a minute and to better the previous record.  The students work in pairs and the teacher provides the timing, starting with "Please begin" and ending with "Thank you".  Many of the students will ask for extra timings because they want to beat their record.  Correct and incorrect are recorded by the partner and plotted on the student’s behavior chart before the students switch roles.  The teacher circulates and notices who is having problems and praises effort and accomplishment.  At the end of the fluency building period, the class applaud those who improved.  The teacher makes note of those who need extra practice.

    Another fluency-building exercise is the free-operant, hear-write exercise in which the teacher dictates words and sounds at a fixed and high rate and the students write as many as they can in a minute.  Traditional educators look askance at such an exercise, which is far removed from their experience, but the results are that students become increasingly fluent in spelling words and writing sounds.  Students who go through these exercises quickly become superior to those who do not.  The results of the fluency building exercises tell the teacher how the teaching is progressing and if extra practice is needed.  In Power Teaching, there are no student errors.  As Skinner says, the word error does not describe behavior, it passes judgment on it.  If the student is getting answers "wrong", the teaching must be changed.  These exercises tell the teacher where the teaching is every day.  We test our students once and our teaching continuously.  Remember, doing something fluently is not one of the ways to measure mastery of a subject, it is mastery of a subject.

    Notice that all the techniques work together to produce an integrated system.  In most schools, for example, there is no relationship between the teaching of reading, writing and spelling although one would think there should be.

    Teachers and Teaching

    It is fashionable to blame teachers for the failure of any educational enterprise.  If the structure of an organization is wrong, however, its members cannot function efficiently.  Teachers must be able to teach properly, but they also must be shown how to do it and supervised to ensure they do.

    One of the reasons that teaching reforms fail is that teachers are sometimes trained to be able to do the new kinds of activities that teaching entails, but their behavior is not maintained after the initial rush of enthusiasm.  This ensures that their teaching will simply drift back to what it was before.  In laissez-faire, teacher empowerment theories, teachers will automatically know best based on their experience, but this will never work.  Teaching, like all social service work which is done properly, is very technical and teachers cannot be expected to maintain the technical part of their classroom activities without support and supervision.  In the sample lesson we have just seen there are dozens of technical details and curriculum sequences that are beyond the reach of practitioners, however determined they might be.  Current educational systems suffer from the same problems as all bureaucracies.  The behavior of the members of a bureaucracy is directed toward maintaining and improving one’s place rather than producing results.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

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

     We spend a lot of time on basic skills so that, as the curriculum materials become more complex, we can add new components quickly to the solid foundation we have created.  Teaching becomes easier as the subject material becomes more complex.

     We do not expect some students to perform better than others because of differential ability, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, or any of the other labels education uses to excuse failure.  Our criteria for all students are the same.  We are teaching students, not comparing them.  We are creating good readers, not selecting them.  The diagnoses of student problems and abilities become irrelevant.  We do not cater to different "learning styles" because this is an irrelevant consideration coming from education’s great store of myths and fads.

     The materials are presented in many different ways: The students are asked to see and say, see and choose, hear and write, hear and say, see and match, hear and match, put sounds into words, analyse words into sounds, and so on.  We do not assume transfer of skills, we specifically train them.  We are teaching behavior, not knowledge, so we know that ability in one area of reading does not automatically mean ability in another.

     Note how many different factors come into play before the curriculum is designed.  The usual way that curriculum material is evaluated is that it "looks good" to a consensus of "experts".  This criterion is probably the worst one.  The curriculum must be tested with the students it is designed to teach.  Looking "cute" or good is only a guarantee that the author will be interviewed by the media.  The present approach is in black/white contrast to the usual academic practice which depends on a few factors which are either weak or neutral.  In most lessons, the teacher "explains" the new concepts without student responding and then directs the students to poorly designed exercises to help them acquire the skills.  Some researchers have found that 45% of academic time in ordinary classrooms is taken up by teacher explanation without student responding.  No attention is paid to fluency with the consequence that new skills are not well learned and are soon forgotten, except by the lucky few who, presumably, do not have a "learning disability".  

     In Power Teaching, the presentations are designed to minimize student errors.  Careful curriculum design presents the new concepts as part of a smooth sequence which minimizes errors and, consequently, student frustration.  Most Direct Instruction curricula have gone through several revisions, based on student responding, before they are widely distributed and are revised in successive editions.  The Reading Mastery Series, for example, have been revised six times over 30 years.  The Whole Language equivalent to mathematics instruction is a type of "mathematical immersion" which tries to teach mathematics, of all things, from the top down without first teaching basic skills.  Imagine the damage that will do to learners.  They are asked to discover mathematical concepts which have developed by hundreds of mathematicians over centuries.  There is no evidence that "discovered" knowledge is any more useful than "taught" knowledge.  Odd, isn’t it.  It probably comes from the acknowledgement that most instructional systems don’t work very well.  Rather than find those which do work, mainstream education seems intent on formulating more and more curious attempts which, because they are not data-based, are pointed squarely at failure.

     The Power Teaching curriculum, which closely follows the DI curriculum, does not use a spiral curriculum, in which the student gets a little bit of instruction, waits several months (or years) and then gets a bit more.  In Power Teaching we use the learn once–remember always curriculum.  All skills are taught to fluency so that they will be remembered.  Drill (which is what detractors call the repetition necessary for automatic usage) is supposedly boring and stultifying.  Anyone who has ever seen a Power Teaching class which is filled with cheering, friendly helping, bustle, smiles and crackling energy would have trouble believing this because it’s not true.  Repetition is boring unless there are goals and reinforcers associated with it.

     Teaching is a social activity and we will use all the possibilities of a social situation.  The teacher will interact positively with the students and reinforce positive interactions among the students.  The students will do fluency exercises in teams of two.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

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

    The following lesson, which is based on Engelmann’s Corrective Reading, contains elements from all five techniques which make up Power Teaching.  It does not contain anything for the sake of "completeness" or "consensus".  Students must be taught and not be at the mercy of considerations which are not important to them.  Results don’t care about democratic representation from all points of view.  The data only centers on what works.  Our purpose is to teach students, not massage theories.  The approach is phonetic because phonics makes use of the fact that, even in a relatively irregular language such as English, the generative elements consist of 40 letter-sound relationships which can produce 500,000 words.  This is a multiplicative power of greater than 10,000 to one.  We are following the rule that we want to "…ensure the maximum amount of learning from the minimum amount of teaching." (Alessi–The Analysis of Verbal Behavior–1987).  A generative advantage occurs where less teaching produces more learning.  Another researcher has noted that the relationship between early reading success and phonic ability is one of the best established relationships in the social sciences.  Children who can see and say sounds for letters and letter combinations are far better readers than those who cannot.  Some approaches, which are spectacular failures in teaching, but widely used anyway, start with complex material and expect students to pick up component skills.  This top-down approach is the opposite of what works.

    You will notice that the materials presented in the lesson are not "extrinsically motivating".  In fact, taken by themselves, they are quite boring.  The motivation for students comes from three sources The teacher reinforces correct behavior.  The pace is fast.  The student can see his improvement, usually on a daily basis where a lot of fuss or reinforcement occurs when there is relative improvement.  In any class in which reinforcement techniques are used properly, student  motivation  is quite high.  Remember that motivation is the result of good programming, not  some mysterious  internal entity which is used as an explanation for the effectiveness of teaching.

     We know that, provided the practice is useful, the more students practice the more they learn, so we provide lots of opportunities for practice.  We do not expect the students to "discover" anything for themselves because this is inefficient teaching.  Therefore, the teaching of all new items is direct and is immediately followed by many probes to give practice and determine if the teacher has taught.  Remember, if the student hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.  Our initial presentation of the new facts, which most people call teaching, but is only a small part of teaching, will ensure that the students respond at least 10 times per minute unless corrections are required.  All our exercises are based on the expectation that students will be able to do the skill with high frequency because we know that, even if the responding is 100% accurate, a certain fluency of responding, speed with accuracy, is required if students are to remember and be able to apply the new skills to new words.  We will take the students far past accuracy to fluency.  Fluent behavior is "strong" behavior which is not forgotten and can be used in a wide variety of situations.  If we ensure that the student learns well the first time, there is no need for review.  Another reason for the fast pace of presentation is that we know that behavior problems will be at a minimum when the pace of presentation/responding is fast.  The Devil finds no work for idle hands when the pace is fast.  We also know that disruptive student behavior increases as teacher disapproval increases and decreases when teacher approval increases.  These are powerful behavior analytic techniques.

     The procedure for initial presentation is called model-lead-test.  The teacher models the behavior, responds with the children and then allows the children to respond alone to determine if the procedure has been effective.  If it hasn’t, the teacher goes through the cycle again.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson