by John Jensen, PhD

The debate over high-stakes testing pits the need for assessing student progress  against the negative effects of doing so. Three recent articles offer a glance into it.

In a guest post for Education Week (“Monty Neill: Building a Successful Test Reform Movement”, May 14, 2013), Monty Neill proposes halting or reducing state-level testing, citing as reasons teaching to the test, cost, school climate, time from teaching, narrowing the curriculum, and increased juvenile incarceration.

In the same issue, Michael Petrilli (“Am I Part of the Cure … or the Disease?”, May 14, 2013)  maintains that not testing but student achievement is the point, but that even small gains in test-verified reading and math enhance life trajectories, and teaching quality is what limits better instruction.  Acknowledging that testing can generate temptations of cheating, a culture of fear, and narrowing of the curriculum, he would retain it nonetheless but suggests a goal of improving mediocre schools even a little, and teaching systematically the skills making the most difference.

Deborah Meier (“Problem vs. Solution: A Response”, Education Week, May 16, 2013) regards the testing issue as a distraction from more fundamental problems such as a public polarized by a growing gap between rich and poor, and that the wealthy steer resources to the schools their own children attend.  She holds that a competitive education marketplace produces outcomes woefully wrong for children, that public education should address problems one at a time in light of the entire spectrum of needs.

So apart from altering the nation’s political makeup, we face two immediate problems–one improving education and the other finding out how well we do it. Both matter. Though a school’s quality may be low, how we test may depress even that.

There are many dogs in the fight about testing.  Picture a  round table discussion of stakeholders. At the table are a parent, teacher, district administrator, state legislator, and federal official. Each asserts, “I need to know X, and here’s why.”  They are arguing over competing priorities when one of them points her thumb over her shoulder.

Seated against a wall is a student.  Everyone falls silent as they realize he heard everything they said.  Someone addresses him.

“So what do you want?”

“I just want to learn something,” he answers quietly.

The stakeholders try to resume their discussion but find no traction. Their urgency evaporates as they realize how superficial are their demands compared to the substance of the student’s need. The student is the elephant in the room. They look at each other and wonder, “How can we even begin to find a way to resolve this?”

By way of answer, consider a different analogy.  Imagine you are on a research team investigating gases rising from the earth in a remote location.  Your helicopter malfunctions and sets you down unexpectedly close to the emissions, and disembarking, your team realizes that it is in danger.  Everyone must rapidly grab something and move away quickly.  Before you are three canisters, one labeled AIR, another WATER, and a third  FOOD.

Which do you seize? Your life may depend on your choice, and you recall the rule of three, that in general humans can live 3 minutes without air, 3 days without water, and 3 weeks without food.  Knowing that in the toxic air of your  surroundings you could be dead in three minutes, you grab the AIR canister first.  Only after you have air under control do you pick up anything else.  You secure your prime value before even considering a secondary one.

Back in the classroom, we search among the canisters concerned with testing to find the one labeled AIR.  What is the most essential factor, the one we wish to establish with certainty, the one we refuse to sell off for the sake of a lesser value, the one to which we add others only if they do not detract from the first?

Finding an answer everyone can accept is, I believe, a direction that eventually resolves the dispute over testing. We first agree on our criterion value.  I would like to nominate one on the basis of two axioms:

Axiom 1.  Students progress through their own effort.  Instruction works as it enables students to focus attention and apply effort on tasks that generate learning.  The essence of instruction is directing students’ attention and effort.

Axiom 2.  Effort is propelled by motivation.  Aside from the sheer time available for their effort (jeopardized by countless intrusions including test-associated tasks), how students apply themselves arises directly from their interest, enthusiasm, ownership, sense of progress, and so on–signals of their motivational state directly preceding effort. If kids are bored and distracted and you want to teach them something, you either alter their motivation or forget about accomplishing anything.         If in a psychological sense all behavior originates from a state that makes the behavior possible, we settle on students’ inner motivation as the key condition we must enhance.

A common complaint about testing, however, is exactly its effect on motivation.  For teachers to appreciate this better, I would like them to experience an activity I often presented in training workshops in the 1970s.  It goes like this.  I’ll trust your imagination to figure out the lesson involved:

‘“We’re going to start off by giving you a spelling test for college freshmen,” the consultant announces to start off a morning. ”We’ll assign you to activities later based on the scores you get. Please take out a blank sheet of paper.”

People groan but cooperate.  In a serious tone the consultant then reads the words while people write them:

asinine, braggadocio, accommodate, diarrhea, chauffeur, desiccate, impostor, inoculate, hors d’oeuvres, liquefy, mayonnaise, moccasin, obbligato, narcissistically, rococo, benefited, rarefy, resuscitate, sacrilegious, supersede, titillate, and paraphernalia.

“Please exchange papers,”  the consultant says crisply, and then spells each word on the board.  Checkers mark off wrong answers on the paper they have, and hand it back to its owner.

“How many got none wrong?” the consultant asks, writing a zero on the board.  I’ve never seen zero wrong, but if people miss none, their number is jotted beside the zero.  Under it the consultant lists numbers 1-20.

“How many got  (number) wrong?” he or she says, going down the column. Everyone raises their hand at some point to acknowledge their number of mistakes.  Most scores tend to fall around half wrong with some missing as many as 17 of 20.

People laugh, moan, and remember emotionally how it felt to be measured by their mistakes. The exercise concludes with a discussion of its implication for instruction–how discouraged they remembered feeling when they were in school, how they may have refused to try, how they preferred to be graded down than be humiliated by trying and failing, how disheartened they were at being labeled poor at anything, and so on.

If we wish both to teach and assess in a way that enhances motivation, how can we?

Competency-based  instruction offers a clue. You declare it acceptable for students to have different competencies to practice even if they do much work together. You identify a discrete skill or chunk of knowledge you want them to know, tell them exactly the work needed and the signal marking its completion, and check it off when it’s done.  Developed this way, their record shows unbroken success.  Wherever they are on the continuum, they just work steadily at the next step.

This approach frees students from a peculiar psychic burden. If I have five units of knowledge to acquire and accomplish that, my working memory tells me “I got five.” My score matches my effort.  I own the five and take pride in it.

This changes if  I am told, “We expected you to get ten but you only got five.”

Only? My success becomes failure for a reason beyond my control, and my effort is devalued. I feel like a failure solely because someone measures me against a standard that does not serve me personally.

Think about yourself.  Intuitively, do you mark your knowledge by  knowing something or by not-knowing something else?  Surely the former.  Not-knowing measures are inherently antithetical to students’ natural motivation.  While they spontaneously compare themselves to peers, they regard this measure of their not-knowing as fair. They are constituted to emulate standards demonstrated by peers,  but for this they only need objective information.

For schoolwork, a wall chart serves adequately by counting up cumulatively the contents of each one’s growing bank of knowledge. They can use the differences between them if they wish, but no one drives them to feel bad. (And check me if I’m wrong about this, but do not some teachers still believe that imposing bad feelings on students is their bottom-line motivator?  I infer this from observing students who actively fear their teacher.)

Once acknowledging positive motivation as our preferred long-term resource,  we don’t even hint to a student that his effort is of secondary importance. We are clear that if we organize his effort so it’s effective, recognize the effort, and count up its outcome objectively, he is more likely to repeat it. The objective count of  his progress on the specified tasks reveal exactly what he has learned. If his motivation and effort-driven success remain our primary values, we have no need to confine him under someone else’s web of meaning.

In my next article, I will show how to arrange effort for optimal motivation while accounting for its results in a way that fulfills stakeholders’ needs for information.

John Jensen is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of the three-volume Practice Makes Permanent series (Rowman and Littlefield). He will send a proof copy of the volumes to anyone on request: jjensen@gci.net

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by John Jensen, PhD

In his article “Solving the ‘Boy Crisis’ in Schools,” (Huffington Post, May 1, 2013), Michael Kimmel notes statistics indicating boys’ worse achievement in school than girls. He suggests boys’ perceptions of masculinity as the determining variable; what, in boys’ eyes, is respectable as “real work.”

While boys and girls may indeed view classroom work alternately, a different elephant stands in the room. Its nature became clear to me in 1992 while watching my son play soccer in a light rain with his middle-school friends.  They were motivated, by all visible measures, dashing about and encouraged constantly to the effort of the moment by their equally motivated coach (“Nicely Done, Nicely Done!).  Standing on the sidelines I reflected on what I knew about the boys—across the board mediocre students, but here, “motivated.”

The reason for the difference between the boys’ behavior from playground to classroom struck me. It wasn’t the boys, it was the conditions!  They were not unmotivated individuals.  Instead they were subjected to unmotivating conditions! On the playfield they experienced practice, growth in competence, teamwork, clear direction, accurate accounting of their progress, and public recognition for it. In the design of soccer, effort gets you somewhere. But change places, focus on a different task, and their motivation changes instantly.

The point is critical: they instantly absorb every difference in glance, tone, concept, task, and relationship they perceive directed at them, and instantly adapt to it.

The point underlies teachers’ common experience of being required to try out some new approach the district buys. They know the first day whether it is reaching the kids.  Maybe a couple weeks are used to tell for sure, but surely no more than that. In two weeks, any new teaching method reveals its portents. If it doesn’t work in two weeks, it probably won’t work at all.

Wondering how to generate the same enthusiasm in the classroom as on the soccer field set me on a twenty-year voyage of observation, development, testing, and application — of methods that generate in students the same energy they experience on the playfield.

A central stream unites factors coherently, not as isolated characteristics forced into an aggregation. Around a common channel of energy, different emphases draw it onward. Follow the thread:

Players practice together in order to become more individually and collectively competent, enabling them to perform skillfully to peers and significant others.  Objective scoring enables them to plot their advancing skill with tangible evidence of progress they can take pride in.  Because each one’s success contributes to the whole, they give good feelings to each other and communicate effectively about the issues involved with displaying their competence.

Note the intrinsic harmony of this picture that is reproduced in one sport and activity after another: practice, competence, performance, scoring, pride, good feelings, and communication. In view of the bizarre events displayed on TV that draw eager participants and crowds of spectators, we might guess that any activity that reproduces these conditions generates enthusiasm!

If climbing a slide flowing with whipped cream can generate enthusiasm, why not classroom learning?  Really, it’s simple.  All we need is a better understanding of a few things mainstream education misunderstands.

1.  Practice is calling up and demonstrating an internal model of an activity.  For learning, this just means calling up the knowledge that went in before, and making it understandable to someone else. Two features are integral to the practice of learning: memory and sense-making. You have to call up factual parts with sheer retention, but then you integrate them so they make sense to someone else.  And what do we call this two-step process? We call it explaining.  Students need to explain every part of every course back to its beginning, and do so often and thoroughly enough that by the end of the course a “final exam” is superfluous. Everyone knows that everyone else knows it back to the start of the course. This is the “real work” boys can respect.

2. Competence.  Competence is achieved only by practice.  There is no shortcut.  The hints and aids and review questions and test-taking methods and scaffolds serve mainly to suggest to students that there is a defensible alternative to actually knowing the material. Competent with the material, you can start thinking about it from any angle and work your way into everything else.  You can explain it to anyone of any age or sophistication. This is “real work” boys can appreciate.

3.  Perform.  Barely a few minutes a day can flavor a whole day’s work.  Performing is the moment of demonstrating what was practiced and revealing the competence achieved. All a teacher need do is keep track of every question learned by the class as a whole, write it on a slip of paper, and drop it in a bag that eventually incorporates everything taught for the entire term.  At the end of each day, save five minutes to draw a slip, draw a student’s name, read the question, and let the student rise and answer (competently, again, because all the questions were already practiced peer to peer).  The teacher leads the class in applause.  To stimulate everyone’s investment in everyone else’s performance, reward the class based on the performance of individuals.

4.  Objective scoring. To score all learning objectively, notice the step of advance that occurs on the basis of student effort. In what you teach, where does effort go, and how do you identify an increment of progress? That’s the part to score unit by unit: more vocabulary words, key terms, rules of grammar, parts of speech, steps of a process, factors in a formula, meaning of technical terms.  Ask yourself “If this were on a final exam and they got it wrong, what score would I mark off?” but then give them that positive score for knowing it instead of focusing on the mistake. Ask yourself “How many distinct pieces of knowledge would I expect from this question when it is performed?” Allot those distinctions as the score for a given process.  Post a wall chart with everyone’s names, and a column for every section of a course treated.  Add numbers steadily to each column identifying the cumulative, objective count of what each student continues to know.

5.  Communications and good feelings.  The same principles hold for teaching these two skill areas quickly and effectively.  Part can be learned thoroughly as academic knowledge—about friendship, managing feelings, mutual problem-solving, personal goal-setting, grasping values, and so on.  Other parts are learned readily by practice–getting an idea, applying it, and giving oneself and others a tally in recognition of having done so.  The process is not complicated.

To return to our initial concern of boys not doing well, how does the analysis above tweak the picture?

It suggests going straight to the conditions that we know galvanize boys’ energy and notice that they motivate girls as well.  Let them all practice to become competent.  Let them perform what they know, be applauded for it, and receive objective scoring of what their effort achieves, and let them practice (and be recognized for) good communications and generating good feelings. Take two weeks to prove out this approach and you’ll discover that worries you had about your students evaporate.  You will be able to see the knowledge being reproduced hour by hour and day by day, leaving you no doubt about the depth and breadth students achieve.

John Jensen is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of the three-volume Practice Makes Permanent series (Rowman and Littlefield). He will send a proof copy of the volumes to anyone on request: jjensen@gci.net

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As a school consultant tasked with drawing individual students from their classroom for a specific purpose, I soon recognized when this was unwelcome.  Glancing inside the door, I could see that all were concentrating, heads angled toward their desks, bobbing up and down rhythmically. If the activity was presentation, all eyes would be directed toward the teacher.  Clearly in evidence was focus.

Walking in and saying to the teacher “I’d like to pull out Jeremy for a few minutes” could break everyone’s concentration and deprive Jeremy of the current high-value time.  Particularly for teachers who fiercely guarded these delicious periods of concentration, scheduling pull-outs carefully (or not doing them at all with that teacher) was required.

The value of such concentrated activity was the focus of a recent Carnegie Mellon University study advanced by Bob Sullivan and Hugh Thompson (“Brain, Interrupted,” New York Times, May 3, 2013).

Studies to date have found that multi-tasking causes all the tasks to suffer in effectiveness due apparently to the cost of the effort at switching focus. To take the research a step further, the Carnegie Mellon study examined first the effect on mental tasks of interruption compared to non-interruption.  Interruption made the brain 20% dumber.

Other variables were introduced. Research subjects were told to expect an interruption (which later occurred), and then were told to expect one but that did not occur. In the former, being able to expect the interruption improved mental efficiency from a 20% deficit to a 14% deficit.  The results of expecting an interruption but it not occurring, however, were startling. Mental efficiency improved 43%, exceeding even the control group.

From these findings, researchers concluded that an expectation of interruption and an intent to counteract it enabled participants to learn how to adapt to the distraction and sustain their concentration. We draw from these findings that 1) concentration is important for mental tasks and 2) people can learn how to stay focused.

To appreciate the significance of this for classroom instruction, we can add a couple other factors. To begin with, teachers know that distracted students are not learning, while focused students usually are, but what’s the difference instructionally between these two conditions?  Is it simply a matter of teacher discipline, pressing students to “pay attention?”

The difference lies deeper.  In order to concentrate, students’ attention must be removed from the teacher and shift instead to a mental field they themselves sustain.  Concentration and distraction each describe a relationship to a mental field, one attached to it and the other not.  Students don’t just concentrate.  They concentrate on something.

In distraction, the mind wanders off from a consistent focus, typically with attention directed outward  to stimuli of sound, word, activity, or physical environment that bear little relationship to academic content. The distracted state is not a total loss, however, because alertness to changing outer conditions fills a role in our physical and emotional survival.  Students allow themselves to be distracted by peers because it meets a perceived need.

In focus or concentration, however, the mind draws back from the outer stimuli to attend to internal stimuli it chooses consciously to invest in, internal stimuli it at least temporarily values more than the external stimuli. The presence of the teacher moves to the background, distractions from peers are fended off into a manageable periphery, and the mental field already carried within looms larger.

For the stimuli to be already accessible in the mind, they must have been placed there earlier—hence, dependent on memory and prioritization.  The contents of the mind exist only because the individual has previously determined them to be important enough to save and return to for later processing.  We might apply the word  “education” to this added processing of sensory data,  but it also incorporates the development of all the competences necessary for living.

The mental field is pivotal to education, however, because all consistent learning holds together as a field. To the extent that students perceive a given course they take as a random aggregation of data bits bound together only because they appear on the same test, and lack any intrinsic internal relationships, students can’t think about the information, passing their mind smoothly from one facet to another–feature to quality, event to concept, past to present, global to micro, system to detail.

A way to appreciate this point is to ask yourself “What am I good at?”   In place of an academic discipline, you might name “personal relationships” as your field of mastery.  But about whatever you choose, ask yourself then, “Can I think about this field with no further input right now?”  Your answer is “Of course,” and you set about to demonstrate.  Your mind picks any corner of the field, and zooms in on it. You draw up any experiences, actions, expectations, or questions, and dwell upon them.  This very flexibility and breadth of movement within the field distinguishes your mind from the mind of someone less skilled.  Your mastery means you can accomplish any task you wish within the field of attention you hold.

Now imagine that every school subject reached such a level of familiarity.  Students could enter it (choosing to concentrate and determined to resist distraction as we noted above), and then develop whatever tasks naturally at hand there. In academics, this would draw from prior input (retention) of an array of factual material, but then the development of it in the direction the course suggested—more nuanced judgments, better problem-solving, mastery of sequences and relationships, and so on.  All this would depend first on entry into the field and then development of the material that lay within.

The familiar activity that enables that development to occur is essentially explaining. Conducted for oneself it leads to increased understanding, and toward another it amounts to making sense.  Four implications are suggested for a teacher:

1.  Teachers need to deliver essential input by one means or another.

2.  Teachers need to create the conditions for students to learn concentration.

3.  Students need to sustain concentration on the mental field so that its intrinsic order binds it into a field of understanding.

4.  Students need to explain the field to each other so they learn to make sense of what they retain.

John Jensen is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of the three-volume Practice Makes Permanent series (Rowman and Littlefield). He will send a proof copy of the volumes to anyone on request: jjensen@gci.net

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by John Jensen, PhD

A tradeoff lies in how you use class time. Less of this, more of that, and you get different results. If you ever studied the piano, you’ll understand.

Let’s say your mother resolved to provide piano lessons for you and your brother, but from different teachers. Yours required an hour of practice a day and your mother had to sign off on it. Your brother’s teacher instead relied on “motivation.”  She believed that his interest was the key, and to encourage it she taught music appreciation, played music for your brother, told stories about musicians, gave background on musical forms, but never required him to practice anything.

After a year of lessons, which of you could play the piano better, you or your brother?

We know the answer from one simple measure. All we need to know is which of you practiced more. By some remote chance, maybe your brother was inspired to go to the piano on his own and begin to learn it.  Maybe the key spurring him to discipline himself through the difficulties of learning was exactly what his teacher supplied but it’s an unlikely outlier.

Probably instead, your daily hour of practice vaulted you far ahead of your brother.  Practice gave you confidence that you could learn. You noticed weekly improvement and that you were causing it by your practice. Progress built on itself.  As your repertoire expanded, you realized ever more keenly that you could do piano, a thought that never crossed your brother’s mind—yet, anyway.  Given comparable innate ability student to student,  the bottom line for learning the piano is that progress is directly proportionate to the quality and quantity of practice.

Here we have a standard insight about progress, applying across the entire spectrum of human skill. Practice determines eventual competence, and turning to knowledge with this principle in mind, we would like to discern how to translate it into classroom time-use. In the standard U.S educational environment, can we expect the principle that works everywhere else to apply also to academics? Will learning still correlate with the amount and quality of practice?

Let’s say you answer no.  If so, why?  How could you assert that?

Maybe you believe that your enthusiasm or assignments or classroom activities supply something beyond practice, that they replace it.

Actually such influences don’t. They are incentives for or means of practice but do not replace it. They set practice in motion, but do not substitute for it.  In fact we can assess every classroom activity for what we might call “the practice element,” a quality telling us that practice occurs. Something changes activity from a use of time about knowledge into the practice of knowledge.

To discern the difference, we examine the role of practice. As referred to here it is the repeated outward expression of an inward model.  The key realization is that practice begins after its inward model is robust enough to answer a teacher’s question about it. A teacher presents something and asks a question here and there to assure herself that she got across what she intended.  By then, students as yet have had no practice, but have barely installed in their mind the model of the knowledge they need to express, and the teacher has barely affirmed that she has handed the model over to them.  The input phase has occurred, but practice itself begins with the output phase by students.

Instead of this effective second step, what we see most commonly is teachers themselves continuing to practice the knowledge at hand. They explain and re-explain to all. They re-explain one to one to students who don’t get it.  They answer questions. They try to anticipate questions and answer them ahead of time. They practice their knowledge hourly but usually at students as their talk re-exposes student minds to the repeated input of knowledge.

Students themselves begin practice only when the arrow of action reverses. After ideas have come in, students then express them outgoing, needing four to five times as long talking as they formerly spent listening. If the teacher’s time is the first 10-15 minutes for  input, the remaining 40-50 minutes should be the students’ turn for practice. With teacher’s time, students grasp the new material initially. With their time, they internalize it.

The internalizing activity for any skill is typically performing the action thoughtfully. Knowledge has an activity of its own, which is explaining. The mind receives an approximate model of the knowledge and practice occurs by expressing, discussing, or writing it. The outward expression of knowledge already grasped I refer to here as “the practice element.”  Its significance is that the degree of the practice element in an activity determines its value for learning. Let’s list the practice element in common classroom activities and then consider each more deeply:

Teacher explains = zero practice element.

Students ask questions of the teacher = minimal practice element

Teacher assigns written questions = minimal practice element

Teacher asks scattered questions = medium practice element

Students write out their knowledge = medium to high practice element

Teacher gives pop quiz = high practice element

Students do Q and A practice with partner = high practice element

Students perform their learning = high practice element

Students run all their learning as mental movie = high practice element

Students explain the course back to the beginning = high practice element

While your personal approach to these activities may incorporate more practice than I note as the norm, the continuum between the first and last stages contains the key insight.

1.  Teacher explaining has zero practice element. Practice requires output of an inner model, but this experience is the opposite.  The teacher does all the output and students  receive it. This is particularly telling since teachers appear generally to do 2/3 to 4/5 of the talking in most classrooms. Students’ minds often go into triage, dismissing what the teacher has already said in order to listen to what she says now. From a long presentation, students may retain almost nothing.

The practice element lies in the effort to express the knowledge, so whoever exerts that effort  is the one practicing the knowledge. For this reason, teachers “learn a subject by teaching it.”  They do the input/output cycle over and over—week by week, year by year. And if the teacher uses 70% of classroom time to talk, 30% at best remains for students to divide up.  Do the math.  70% of a 50 minute period is 35 minutes for teacher time, leaving 15 minutes to apportion to students. With 15 students in the class, they would each have one minute or with 30 students a half minute if time were divided equally. In practice, the dominant ones hold the floor while those needing it most remain silent, and most of their comments anyway are short enough to deliver by Twitter.

This is not to discount teacher talk, which often is the most effective way to convey new material.  But once it’s delivered, further teacher talk pre-empts the time students need for practice. With inadequate practice time, their learning remains surface, dependent on the random movements of their attention..

2.  Students asking questions of the teacher offers minimal practice element. While an individual student may benefit by calling up assorted data pieces from within, the effect for the class overall is that of someone else explaining, adding details to the input phase. And because student questions rely on student initiative, the teacher cannot rely on them to deepen learning for all.  They typically clarify what the teacher has presented, and hence draw on information current in the classroom.

3.  Teacher assigns questions students answer in writing by referring to the Internet, a textbook, or a handout. Since they typically respond by transferring knowledge from one spot to another, they may draw little on their own retained knowledge, leaving this activity with a minimal practice element. They look up anything, cut and paste, and track ideas organized on a basis other than their own thought, often just plugging unassimilated data into an assignment structure.  Search-and-collect may help them form knowledge and so offers minimal practice, but they typically dismiss it just when they could actually use the written form for practice in depth.

4. Teacher asking scattered questions of students offers medium practice element.  When questions follow right after a teacher presentation, the goal is often just maintaining attention and checking understanding rather than an opportunity for in-depth practice of the content. Only one student answers the teacher at once, while everyone else listens. Deferring questions to the next day  may help, but teacher-questioning allows only a few students to answer on selected points while the remainder coast. The benefit of answering a question is not spread evenly among all students nor all ideas.

5.  Students write summaries, essays, notes, and syntheses of their learning. This has a medium to high practice element. Thorough note-taking during a presentation calls both on understanding what’s presented and processing it into a summary form—potentially at least a medium practice element.

The most challenging practice arises from students writing while drawing just on what they have already learned from all their sources. As the assignment asks less of them, it relies more on their skills in search-and-copy. As they merely string together what they collect, the practice element diminishes.  Since this tool can be used constantly with all kinds of learning, however, it remains an important option.

6.  Teacher gives a pop quiz. Expression is confined to the limits of the questions, but the quiz at least elicits prior learning so that practice is involved. Its value is minimized when  used only to assess students rather than help them deepen their knowledge. Because it challenges students’ retention, it has high practice element although perhaps of limited value because employed infrequently.

7.  Teacher breaks information into questions and answers and asks students to explain them to a partner until both know them. Here finally is clear-cut input and output.  Presentation has already occurred and knowledge gathered. The teacher has made the information understandable and arranged it in a form suitable for practice. Students explain it to each other.  They develop a mental model and then express it repeatedly to deepen and expand it.

Such practice also offers a logical end-point that encourages efficient time-use: “You’re done when you can explain it back anytime without looking.” In this high practice element activity, every minute spent at it deepens knowledge, and teachers can draw on it briefly or at length. It works with both new and familiar material, and deepens knowledge probably better than any other activity.

8.  Teacher utilizes knowledge learned for daily performances of learning.  A student name and a question are drawn randomly, and the student stands and answers impromptu.  This activity leverages the value students place on peer opinion and admiration, and generates zest and interest. It has a high practice element, works with knowledge at all levels of sophistication, offers much stimulation with little time spent, and motivates partner practice.

9.  Teacher conducts Mental Movie.  Students close their eyes and review the day’s learning minute by minute. In this high practice element activity, they “run the film” of their day, bringing to mind everything they can recall. They discover the power of their mind to record with increasing detail each activity of their day.

Teachers need not worry that children will waste time if their eyes are closed. They love to exert effort in socially valued ways. This one matters because it expands their ability to practice and perform their knowledge in front of peers, and helps especially with subjects containing visual structures such as math and science.  Observable forms, relationships, and sequences are absorbed as imagination paints them.

The more time teachers require in medium and high practice element activities, the more practice students obtain per hour, and the deeper they learn. The more they do this, the easier the teacher’s responsibility becomes. If we cease extinguishing knowledge, understand the power of steady accumulation, and use students’ time to arrange for them to practice properly, their learning cannot fail to take off.

John Jensen is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of the three-volume Practice Makes Permanent series (Rowman and Littlefield). He will send a proof copy of the volumes to anyone on request: jjensen@gci.net

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by John Jensen, PhD

In evaluating teachers, we want to know how much a teacher contributes to student learning. Is his or her contribution high, medium, low, or a threat?  If we could determine this, presumably we could hire and retain those on the optimal end of the scale.

One challenge is to separate the teacher’s influence from those originating in the student, the student’s parents, or alternate conditions.  A separate concern is whether we can even find out how much students learn.

Perhaps solving the last issue first might suggest how to gauge the teacher’s contribution.  So first off, how do we tell what children have learned?

I submit that a practical criterion available to any teacher has been almost universally ignored.  Just occasionally I hear of (or recall) a teacher for whom it was their aim. The criterion is retained (instead of temporary) knowledge.

In a sense, all tested knowledge is “retained” in order to be tested. Some, however, has been engraved in a child’s mind for a lifetime, and other will disappear in a few days.  A high school health teacher showed me a test he had just given without realizing he had administered it two weeks earlier.

“Not one student remembered that they had had the same test two weeks ago!” he told me in amazement.

However they studied in that class, the outcome was temporary rather than permanent knowledge.  So how can we separate deep, retained knowledge from temporary, surface, disappearing knowledge?  How do we find this out?  We do so with three conditions.

1.  Entire course mastery.  We make students continually responsible for the entire course back to the beginning of the year.

“But I do this already,” you may object.  You may or may not. The crux is whether your manner of instruction and testing back up your wish.  Two other conditions apply your intent.

2.  Make all tests impromptu.  Test any part of the entire course at random moments with no prior announcement. So that you do not unwittingly tip off students, make up a bag of cards, each containing the title of a section of the course, some brief and others more comprehensive. Randomly draw a day of the week for a test (that you do not tell students), and randomly the name of the section to be tested.  You don’t tell students “Tomorrow is your test on…” as you always have.  They find out instead as the period begins: “Put away your books.  Today we’re testing Chapter three, section ten, about…”. You make the entire curriculum subject to retest at any time.

3.  Keep the last grade. Whatever is the last grade a student receives for a given section goes into his or her transcript as that section’s grade of record. Sections again can be retested at random as they are drawn from the bag.

These three conditions substantially alter instructional focus. By replacing the grades granted for knowledge obtained by cramming, review questions, scaffolding, test construction, and teacher hints, the three conditions extract the learning practiced sufficiently to persist on its own—retained learning.

The difference is illustrated by an experience from my sophomore year in high school.  After we had worked our way through a 400 page world history text and with the  end of the school looming, a brave student asked the teacher one day, “What will be on our final exam?”

“Don’t worry,” he said, smiling benevolently . “Before the test we’ll go over some review questions.”

We all leaned back and grinned. Review questions!  I’d never heard of them, but their promise was that we could dismiss everything else we had studied! Because of such conditions that make testing easier, most scores can be regarded only as approximations of what students continue to know.

The conditions I suggest instead declare forcefully that the goal is permanent retention of as much knowledge as possible. Both teacher and students are recognized for the scores revealing it; scores both valid and reliable, and reflecting accurately the teacher’s ability to generate long-term learning.

A possible objection to this approach is that students already are tested too much, that testing is time taken away from actual learning and presents a distraction. Many would like to turn back the trend (cf. “Texas Considers Reversing Tough Testing and Graduation Requirements, “  New York Times, April 11, 2013).

The  answer is to use tests to stimulate the practice that deepens knowledge.  Not much class time is needed to achieve this. A ten-minute test twice a week may be enough by the means I suggest. Had such conditions been observed for the last couple decades, by now the issue of evaluating teachers would be moot. We would not be concerned about variances among them because all students would be learning simply by the standard focus on retained instead of temporary knowledge.

As the U.S. system gropes today for how to validate the substance of knowledge that might subsist behind a cloud of test scores, interest ranges in search of teacher qualities that make a difference. Anyone seeking this information should retrieve a landmark study by Arthur Combs and associates from the 1960s (“The Perceptual Organization of Effective Teachers,” Florida Studies in the Helping Professions, No. 37, in Arthur W. Combs et al., “Social Sciences”, Gainesville, University of Florida, 1969, cf. www.eric.ed.gov).

To summarize briefly, researchers sought to discover the difference between the best and worst teachers.  They obtained valid groups of each by asking freshmen entering Florida colleges to name their best and worst teachers, compiled those named consistently, and obtained two pools–those unanimously viewed as the best versus worst. They visited these teachers, inviting them to participate in a study, and administered one test after another to them but turned up no differences.

Resorting finally to classroom observation, they found that clear differences existed not in their behavior but in their belief system. The good ones held positive beliefs about students, about learning, and about the world on twenty independent scales, while the worst held down the negative end of those scales.  That these differences registered so powerfully with students year by year reveals that it really matters what teachers believe about what they do.

To separate other conditions from the teacher’s contribution, as we inquired at the start, ceases to be an issue when children learn well.  Whatever the teacher’s influence is, it hasn’t held students back. But when students aren’t learning, adults parse details mainly to find out who to blame. We solve all issues, in other words, if we simply design standard classroom activity so that the practice of learning results in long-term results for all.

In sum, the two angles outlined above suggest a design for evaluating teachers. First, measure retained learning by the three steps noted above. Whatever the results are, the teachers arranged for them.  Second, resurrect the tool that Combs and his team used to create their groups. Ask students past and present to name their best and worst teachers, and steadily winnow out the worst.

As the saying goes, this is not rocket science.  Just be brave enough to insist on long-term learning and measure it objectively, and brave enough to invite comprehensive feedback. You’ll have no doubt which teachers are high and low and the conclusions will be solid, reliable, and politically defensible.

John Jensen is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of the three-volume Practice Makes Permanent series (Rowman and Littlefield). He will send a proof copy of the volumes to anyone on request: jjensen@gci.net

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by John Jensen, PhD

In “How to Build a Progressive Education Movement,” (Edweek.org, April 2, 2013), David Bernstein scores the turn in recent years toward test-based education, and proposes that values embodied in the progressive movement of past years are urgently needed today.  The initial means he suggests appear unfortunately to be of a negative nature such as don’t oppose all testing, don’t bash business, don’t oppose all school choice, and don’t name it “progressive education.”

While many values of progressive education will always remain valid (in passing he notes educating the whole child, enhancing creativity, and a focus on development), he appears unaware that the influence of progressive education essentially marked the beginning of the decline of American education.

What happened was simply a well-intentioned mistake.  John Dewey, who practically embodied progressive education and whose thinking pervaded its design, wrote this in his influential 1916 book Democracy and Education:

“The development within the young of the attitudes and dispositions necessary to the continuous and progressive life of a society cannot take place by direct conveyance of beliefs, emotions, and knowledge. It takes place through the intermediary of the environment… The deeper and more intimate educative formation of disposition comes without conscious intent, as they gradually partake of the activities of the various groups to which they may belong.”

He builds on the impact of group norms by advocating communication, training, nurturing, cultivating, setting up conditions, direction and especially guidance.

Such a direction might have contributed to education’s transformation except for a crucial mistake.  Note where the element of effort lies in the paragraph cited above; adults are acting upon students, and students are “learning” by osmosis.  Dewey subverted the role of active personal effort. ”We never educate directly,” he wrote, “but indirectly by means of the environment” and specifically discounted “the piling up of knowledge.” The unfortunate effect of this was that it gave teachers permission not to require the effort that had been the key to students’ learning till then. Learning became familiarization in place of mastery.

The presence of progressive education remains enshrined in U.S. education in what I refer to as “the Learn and Lose System,” characterized by ten features.  Note how each one listed below essentially declares that familiarization is sufficient, instead of retained learning.  To transform education overnight, one need only reverse each of these features:

Courses begin and end by plan.

No expressed intent to retain a body of knowledge.

No complete hard copy kept permanently.

Teaching of small pieces not integrated.

Recognition-based tests.

Personal interest usually irrelevant.

Pretest reviews designed to  improve scores.

Scheduled tests encourage cramming.

“Final” exam declares an end-point to effort.

Both learning and non-learning equally dismissed.

I applaud Mr. Bernstein’s appreciation of the need for a national movement. Progressive education, under whatever name, could make many contributions. A solid starting point, however, would be recognition of the enormous damage it has done, and exerting the effort needed to reverse the conditions it has bequeathed upon us.  Effort properly directed is the coin of advancement—whether in system change or student learning.

John Jensen is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of the three-volume Practice Makes Permanent series (Rowman and Littlefield). He will send a proof copy of the volumes to anyone on request: jjensen@gci.net

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by John Jensen, PhD

In my prior article “Classroom Turnaround is Easy” I suggested three conditions for jumpstarting student motivation and learning. First was to make the instructional goal to be maintained rather than temporary knowledge, and arrange practice time so students could achieve that.  Second was to perform what everyone masters .  Third was to write out personally everything they master.

A reader responded  with an inquiry about the practicality of  this paragraph in my article:

Arrange for your students to continue to practice explaining what they wish both to master and to recall. Optimal time-use sees fifty to eighty percent of each period spent at this in partner pairs. From the first week, they easily explain everything back to the beginning of the term, and continuing to do this, by the end of the term they master the entire subject. But this occurs only if you turn over the bulk of class talking time to students so they can repeatedly practice putting the entire course into their own words and thought-forms.

The reader continued:

I understand and appreciate the purpose and value behind the paired review and the process of recalling, summarizing , and modifying the content as the school year progresses, but for the 50-80% time stipulation, I am interested to see how this would look in practice.  How would one go about responsibly putting this into action when the benefits are long-term but the initial thought suggests that time should be spent focusing on the current material? …I can see how this could be implemented at the classroom level but not how that would stretch to a larger-scale system.  Administrators I have interacted with simply do not seem to be inclined to buy into a bigger-picture plan such as this.

I’m accustomed to being on a different wavelength (sometimes even planet ) than many educators, and often find that words I assume to be plain and understandable are not received that way by others.  So here I guess at understanding the question adequately.

In the paragraph cited, the issue appears to be time-use. Basically I suggest that the proportion of classroom time spent in practicing needs to be vastly larger than it currently is coast to coast.  The problem is compounded by what I observe to be teachers’ unfamiliarity with what it means to practice (which I explain in depth in the books noted below).

The easiest way to understand the point is to think about common skills we obtain. Compare the amount of time spent getting a lead, or new idea, or coaching about it with the amount of time spent practicing its application. A ski instructor may take three minutes to suggest a change in a skier’s technique.  The skier does three ten minute runs to practice it.  A piano teacher gives a weekly lesson for an hour, and the student spends seven hours practicing the lesson during the week. For two minutes an English teacher makes suggestions to a student about a paper. The student applies them for an hour.

When I was in the military decades ago, I had a class for officers-in-training about designing training for recruits.  Our teacher told us that from long experience, the Army had found that to deliver a new skill to recruits, the optimal use of time was 5% used for explanation, 10% for demonstration, and 85% for practice.  A study I read long before the Internet was created (and that I cannot retrieve now) aimed to pin down the most effective use of time for student learning, assessing the common methods known then.  The study concluded that the optimal use of time was 40-80% of it spent in the effort to recall.  Various studies of expertise in adults reveal a direct correlation between their level of ability and the sheer time spent in practice of their skills, whether mental or physical.

As to how this would look in practice, I attempt to answer that question  by breaking time down minute by minute in chapter nine of the Effective Turnaround book (cf. below).

The change in purpose is the essential organizing principle.  The intent I propose is to align every minute of the period in service of long-term retention.  As we proceed with classroom activities as they are done now, we  tweak time-use toward that outcome.  So I suggest that the period begins with 5 minutes of review practice, calling up all prior material from memory.  Why?  We first want to solidify everything previously known, and restore students’ intent that they are learning for the long haul instead of for knowledge they will discard.

A presentation or other gathering of new knowledge follows, combined with writing it out.  Why?  Our aim is to carve off a piece we can immediately place on a conveyor belt toward permanence, so it needs to be the right size. Writing it down delineates it exactly and underscores that we are serious about specific knowledge mastered long-term.

Then they spend the larger time of the period in practicing it, telling it back and forth to each other.  Why?  I think teachers miss the obvious here, failing to notice that it is only calling up what we know approximately that enables us to know it completely.  We strengthen the neurons carrying this particular memory only by stressing the memory!  We do so by retrieving, remembering, and explaining it.  Remembering alone is important (anyone who has taken a test will vouch for that), but explaining it to a person adds a demand for sense-making.  When we face someone else, we configure our knowledge differently, conscious that we cannot fragment our thought processes if we expect to make them understandable to another.  So having students face each other and challenge their brain with this particular task over and over is the essential activity that gives them complete mastery of it.

About the reference to administrators, my own impression is that they are so preoccupied just with operating the system that they have little mental space left to be instructional leader.  Yet I would think that any teacher whose year-end scores showed a dramatic improvement would get their attention and cooperation.  A key feature of my approach is that it remains entirely under the control of the teacher and accommodates curricula of any content.  It amounts just to a more efficient way to reach year-end goals than what most are doing now.

John Jensen is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of the three-volume Practice Makes Permanent series (Rowman and Littlefield). He will send a proof copy of the volumes to anyone on request: jjensen@gci.net

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by John Jensen, PhD

I have a bone to pick with mainstream education—several in fact. This one concerns teaching students higher order thinking.

Let’s start back in the more basic. For years I’ve been pointing out a simple solution to heal much that ails education.  Teachers could jumpstart learning just by allotting more practice-time for students to explain their learning to each other. It has puzzled me why such an obvious tool is applied so little, but here is my guess.

A possible objection arises from a limited view of practice. Maybe you associate practice with rote repetition, or you may presume that we already do the basics adequately. Concerned over the widespread deficits in higher order thinking, you might even believe that we underrate children by drilling them on the basics. Shouldn’t we aim higher?  You may conclude that the glitch lies in how we transition to higher order.

If my guess is even close, your view misreads what is required for higher order thinking.

It begins with thinking. Hold off on the higher order for a bit. We first distinguish thinking from stimulus-response reactions to one’s environment. Practically minute by minute during the school day, students are stimulated toward a desired response and must struggle against this fundamental limitation of school design in order to think.

In thinking, we sustain a perspective deliberately. We can pose a thought, but if we turn aside from it, it persists sufficiently that we can return to it.  We can circle it, challenge it, modify it, and combine it with other thoughts, but doing so depends on our fundamental  ability to hold a given thought in mind.  How fruitful this becomes depends on the quality of the related thoughts we can network around the first one, on how much we know firmly that we can serve up mentally. Working with that array, we may develop novel ways to advance toward our purpose. That’s thinking.

As I define it, we cannot think competently about what we don’t know at least roughly. Data first gathers around a theme. We access information about the world and ideas, and the aggregation of thoughts that reliably stick together then comprise a mental field. Higher order thinking begins first with thought, and then with enough of it to form a mental field. Once in possession of the field, we can redirect it. Applying the field in our life, we intuitively draw on higher order skills that serve our need. Functions we use frequently become familiar and even habitual. We gather details in multiple ways and render them into flexible mental equipment we can assign to new tasks.

After we once possess the basic tools for thought, a second requirement for advanced thinking is time actually spent at it, inwardly moving these pieces about.  We are told that Albert Einstein’s work day was mainly sitting in a chair and thinking.  His tool kit of already-known mental resources was so well developed that he could draw on them at will without distraction.  In this second requirement we find a huge discrepancy with schools. Students typically do not develop a competent mental field (they got their grades by cramming and other surface-satisfying means), and even if they do, they have no time to think about it.  Pursuing mental competence for students, we at least should make it possible for them to learn the basics permanently and then have time to use them..

The relationship between such conceptual freedom on the one hand and first learning the basics on the other was illustrated in the life of the great early 20^th century mathematician Ramanujan.  When he was still quite young growing up in India, teachers recognized his extraordinary aptitude and gave him advanced math texts.  With no one to help him, and denied many opportunities for advancement often because he failed other subjects (he insisted on thinking about math), he nonetheless taught himself, developed practically the whole corpus of mathematics known in his time, and made many original contributions.  Still young when he was discovered by the mathematical community, he died in 1920 at age 32, probably due to malnutrition.

Those who knew him mourned at what he might have accomplished had he been able to learn quickly what was already known and could have applied his prodigious ability to the leading edge of unknowns.  The lesson he presents is that higher order thinking begins with grasping what others have discovered already: ”We reach beyond the giants by standing on their shoulders.”

Failing to deliver the basics solidly, we delay moving students to their own leading edge of reflective thought.  We want them to have the essential givens quickly in order to turn them loose to discover more. Suspecting a Ramanujan among them, we want to bring him or her along expeditiously this time.

Good teaching draws on a constant interplay between practice of what is known, and application to what is not.  Say a teacher wishes to increase students’ ability to analyze a situation.  He might pick an event from the day’s news, ask “How would you analyze this?”, and wing it with whatever they say. But he also may deliver tools.

“I’m going to read a brief incident to you,” he might say, “and I want you to analyze it in terms of four factors: perspective, ownership, motivation, and time.  How do these apply to the incident? “  He might discuss each of the four, relate it to their personal experience, answer questions about it, narrate the incident, and turn them loose to apply the factors.

Out of such a lesson, what do we imagine the teacher wants students to retain for life? He would probably regard the incident he narrates as easily replaced.  But twenty years later he would see them all able to call up the four factors and apply them to fresh situations with mature insight. He would have them practice the factors till permanent. Similarly with other higher order functions. First supply the information that will become the mental field to be treated. Then supply the perspectives you want students to learn, and then allow enough time for them to apply the second to the first.

Simple things learned thoroughly become a lifetime resource. If years before we want to make students competent with challenges later in life, we know how to do it: Identify what they are to learn that might be useful later, learn it, and practice it to permanence. That’s all. Each thing they learn deeply becomes a tool they can call on, but what they learn only to familiarization is time largely wasted—momentary interest that soon dissipates.

To enable students to gain flexible and expanding knowledge, have them practice the essential givens — higher order included — till they are learned perfectly and permanently. Spend the remaining time available applying them to practical conditions, and the higher order thoughts will render their appropriate service.

John Jensen is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of the three-volume Practice Makes Permanent series (Rowman and Littlefield). He will send a proof copy of the volumes to anyone on request: jjensen@gci.net

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by John Jensen, PhD

A classroom turnaround (or acceleration) in a couple weeks is barely thinkable, like condos on the back side of the moon.  And to call it easy beggars belief because so many have struggled for so long without achieving that. .

We can draw a lesson from noting hard to easy in other simple areas. If for example you want to use a crowbar to lift a heavy object, the key is where you place its tip to maximize the leverage you obtain from the crowbar’s length. Once you find that spot, the lift is easy. We can expect an easy classroom turnaround when we know what our crowbar is and find the optimal spot to place it. For classrooms, the crowbar is the set of prevailing conditions.

Everything depends on the conditions you present. You’ve often heard, “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.”  The saying applies to you and your students. To change their learning, you will have to change what you do. You need to grasp the impact of available conditions, and distinguish those that accelerate students from those leaving them in mediocre attainment.

Not all conditions are equal. The immediate ones matter most, that take hold in the present moment, for which you don’t wait five years for district-wide policies to filter down to student behavior.  Students respond instantly to what happens now. They act differently when a new person comes to your room, when an unexpected event occurs, when a new task is presented, and when you yourself feel differently.  Their actions print out the conditions you supply with every word and deed. Even the silent thought you think influences them. They are interested or bored due to conditions.  They retain their learning or not based on conditions.

School reform outcomes of late have so often been marginal and frustrating from a failure to think through conditions that are often far removed from student effort.  Instead we want conditions that can be applied minute by minute, that directly generate student effort, and that result in long-term learning. In sum, the crucial ones elicit the kind of effort that results in permanent learning. We are not content with generally positive conditions.. Certain types of student effort lead to retained learning, but only a few conditions generate that kind of effort. Three are particularly significant.

CONDITION ONE.  The first begins with a valid criterion for gains in learning. How do we identify a single step of learning in any subject for any student of any age?  The standard means is answering a question. Formalized, this is testing, but more generally it is just the ability to explain or demonstrate knowledge.  After input, then output.

A common impediment renders this measure less useful. As it is presently employed nationwide, the learning it captures may be valid only at the moment the question is answered.  The student may barely know it, and forget it before the day is out.  Others may know only a portion, and some may only barely know only a portion.  The result is a classroom-wide gradient of forgetting. Unless something else is done after the material is learned, it steadily decays. Students later may not even remember they had the subject.

Tweaking the criterion a little provides us a valid and reliable measure. We define mastery as the ability to answer a question and maintain it. Teaching to this standard alters our hourly objective. We aim at bringing as much learning as possible up to the “maintained” level for as much knowledge as we can, which depends completely on how we use class time. We arrange it so that everyone masters (maintains) essential knowledge, and  everyone has the means to expand what they maintain. We cease using time just to familiarize them. After everyone knows it approximately, we keep going until everyone knows it permanently.

Let’s say you teach a literature section with ten points to convey.  You arrange time so everyone masters (maintains) points one through six. If some also master and maintain points seven through ten, this is a bonus. The key is not how much you “cover” or how much they understand, but rather how much they themselves can continue to explain at any time in the future. We design instruction so that whatever they learn, they learn permanently. That’s where the reward, the turnaround, the acceleration lies. Those who learn only half the points but steadily maintain them will soon outpace those who learn everything but don’t maintain it. .

To pursue maintenance of knowledge, allocate time differently. Arrange for your students to continue to practice explaining what they wish both to master and to recall. Optimal time-use sees fifty to eighty percent of each period spent at this in partner pairs. From the first week, they easily explain everything back to the beginning of the term, and continuing to do this, by the end of the term they master the entire subject. But this occurs only if you turn over the bulk of class talking time to students so they can repeatedly practice putting the entire course into their own words and thought-forms.

Once students have learned and held onto material even briefly, maintaining (retaining) it permanently is achieved by spaced recall that is well-established in learning research and applied by steady partner practice in explaining.

CONDITION TWO.  The second condition converts the effort of the first into satisfying and significant social capital. What is mastered (maintained) is performed. Students intuitively value a competence they can demonstrate successfully to their peers, particularly when all face the challenge together. They instinctively want to rise to the competence they admire in others and toward which their own effort is aimed.

The teacher accomplishes this with a few minutes a day of performing learning. Game-like qualities add appeal so that objective conditions replace teacher judgment. First, the teacher steadily collects in a bin all the questions that comprise everything learned in the course so far. Everyone has learned, practiced, and maintained the questions placed in the bin, so that everyone can anticipate a success experience. The teacher writes each student’s name on a popsicle stick and places the sticks in a cup.

Daily for 3-5 minutes before dismissal, the teacher or a selected student draws a question from the bin and then a name. The designated student springs to his/her feet, answers the question, everyone applauds, and more questions and names are drawn for the time available. Foreseeing this cap to their day’s effort gives students a visible outcome that matters in their social niche.  Few conditions short of life and death affect them as deeply.

CONDITION THREE.  While the two conditions above generate a substantial stream of solid learning, a third solidifies their body of knowledge. It aids both of the prior conditions, and helps students personally claim what they know. As an analogy, think of purchasing a plot of land to build a house.  The first thing you do is identify what you have to work with. You obtain a deed to the dimensions of the lot.

Students are highly alert to determining what they regard as theirs and what belongs to someone else. Adults tell them constantly to adopt this or that behavior but often without providing the conditions making it likely.  A basic, standard means of obtaining knowledge for oneself is the physical act of writing it out.. Picture a teacher presenting a section, the class discussing it, and teacher and class together developing a concise summary that everyone copies  into their notebook.  The student readily thinks, “I am making this my own.  I am taking possession of this knowledge.  I am going to learn everything I write down.”  A single page of writing takes about six minutes, and contains an appropriate chunk size to be practiced and initially mastered in the remaining half-period.  From 180 school days with four such periods, one foresees 720 pages of selected material that can be comb-bound with covers, and given a proud place in the student’s room at home as “everything I learned this year.” By distinguishing what will be learned (maintained) perfectly, and personally gathering it word by word, the student has already exerted half the effort required to claim and maintain it permanently. Leaving their task vaguely boundaried, on the other hand, practically insures rapid forgetting.

Raising students’ learning quickly can be achieved by three conditions: a valid measure of mastery defined as what they retain ongoing, performing it to their peers, and pages they themselves produce that sum up what they will labor to learn.

John Jensen is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of the three-volume Practice Makes Permanent series (Rowman and Littlefield). He will send a proof copy of the volumes to anyone on request: jjensen@gci.net

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by John Jensen, PhD

The killing of schoolchildren and adults by Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, last week stimulated a national discussion.  Issues treated have been largely tangible, however, such as gun safety, gun control, school guards, training of school personnel, carry of concealed weapons, size of weapons and their magazines, access to firearms, and police visits.

An aspect we might regard as more fundamental is also less tangible. It lies in a cultural stance acceptant of alienation, marginalization, rejection,  and resentment.  Mass murderers—Klebold, Harris, McVey, Kazinski, Lanza and the like–have typically been disconnected  people who were, as best we can tell, unhappy and angry. Their typical state has not become a social concern, however, as society either dismisses them as “Crazies” or blames them as evil.

Hard for us even to grasp is our collective complicity in their condition.  A fundamental requirement for human existence is interdependence.  We have evolved to need other people, enough of them at least to constitute a tribe where everyone has a place.

But examine the relationship to society of Lanza and others. A universal social tendency is to gauge our relationship to others according to our similarity to them. Those we view as very different we classify as other, which carried out as social pattern becomes otherism.

We set others off at a greater emotional distance, trust them less, consider their needs less, and count them as less significant in our social computations.  Mainly we just want them to leave us alone, not injure us. If they do that much, we are usually content to dismiss them, to zero them out of the world we feel we must pay attention to. And since we can find differences with almost anyone, our tendency is to think “we” about a limited set of faces and assign everyone else in the world to an impersonal “other.”

With the disintegration of our natural tribes in mass society, otherism leaves a considerable number of people vulnerable to discard.  Most by luck and a little activity can find at least a few to claim as theirs, to whom they are not ‘other.’  But the pervasive application of otherism in family structure, zoning regulations, law, education, finance, political influence, and social status welcomes some under specified conditions and excludes others.

People have been discarded by their society for all of history, of course, but only recently have the few on the margins become so potent. As the lethality, portability, and availability of weapons has increased, individuals  can impact the public good more when set against it. Single individuals alienated from society can obtain the means to inflict great harm. And our instinct to protect our children by turning schools into fortresses does not neutralize the threat.  Next come amusement parks, sporting events, parades, shopping malls, buses, and subways. Gun control is not likely to solve the problem of alienation.

What has often prevented harm is also a natural human tendency. Other people use their eyes and ears to notice something out of place and act responsibly about it.  A relative seeks help, an onlooker notifies law enforcement. Though this may avert a specific danger, the Sandy Hook tragedy invites a broader remedy. Apart from choices to make about hardware, the design needs to incorporate a legitimate, satisfying place for all within a social bond, where inside a supportive atmosphere everyone is taken account of, and it matters to all that each prospers, experiences well-being.  We notice their needs long before they become “cases,” and we consciously counteract our tendency to otherism so that natural, protective, responsible, timely, caring actions occur.

Simply the capacity to be personal can open a crucial bridge. Some years ago, police stopped a motorist for a minor infraction.  Noticing a quantity of weapons and ammunition in the back seat, they brought him to the police station for questioning.  Shortly, he confessed that he had planned to go out that day and kill as many people as he could, but first he stopped at a diner for a cup of coffee. There, because the waitress smiled at him, he decided not to go on his killing spree.

A problem with schools is that they mirror the social tendency to otherism.  Society draws a circle around a set of people and declares,  “This is us,” while everyone outside the circle is “other.”  Schools in fact may present this separation more acutely by their symbolic weight.  People are drawn to symbols, like the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon. Schools represent growth, well-being, happiness, progress, hope, and optimism for the future.

But turn the symbol around as seen by one who is static, frozen, discouraged, and depressed.  It could easily be viewed as a rebuke — “See?  This isn’t you.”  It could remind them that their life is stalemated, that they do not know how to be happy, that they have been set apart, that they are alone on the outskirts of meaning in their community. We cannot question Adam Lanza now about his perceptions, but a school could represent an affront to an outsider, particularly if seen as the setting of a grievance or injustice.

But schools are an appropriate starting point.  It is not difficult to teach children essential life skills of supporting and drawing the best from each other, and becoming a team with a place for all.  We lead children through the practice of such skills, and provide an environment where their expression is welcome.  Those relegated to the margins of society have their best chance of prospering when incorporated into a group that is personal and connected.

As children peer out the windows of their school-fortress, think if this is the message we teachers telling them: “Out there are lots of people who can hurt you.  Stay away from everyone if your parents haven’t specifically told you they are okay.”  Or should they hear, “Everyone needs to be treated well, so we are going to practice how to be with each other even when we are unhappy or need something.  We want you to notice others, understand them, and know how to treat them safely and happily.”  Children need to learn how their actions affect others, and extend those lessons to the most marginal among them.

If we only teach children to avoid anyone who is “other” while ignoring their needs and feelings, we gradually fracture society.  And as we make destructive means available to all, eventually we discover them aimed at ourselves. Either we include others in our social world and take account of their needs when it is easy to do so, or we wait till they assault us and then apply ourselves to treating our own discomfort about what they have done.

John Jensen is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of the three-volume Practice Makes Permanent series (Rowman and Littlefield). He will send a proof copy of the volumes to anyone on request: jjensen@gci.net

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