Dr. John, Your Program Isn’t Credible

John Jensen, Ph.D.

3.12.10 - John Jensen, Ph.D. - A new principal with whom I’ve shared a number of ideas was shaking his head about several students in his small high school. “They sit there day after day and get nothing done,” he said. The school employs a computerized curriculum.

Dr. John, Your Program Isn’t Credible 

By John Jensen, Ph.D.

          A new principal with whom I’ve shared a number of ideas was shaking his head about several students in his small high school. 

          A fire drill intervened while I pondered what to say to him, since I had previously offered many ideas about motivating students and had given him a copy of my book.  He is an incisive thinker, accustomed to analyzing a problem and acting on it directly, and I’d felt much personal alignment between our ideas.

          Back in his office, I resumed the conversation, explaining that most students  progress if you just set up the conditions—make learning available, and encourage them to do it.  “But,” I said, “there are one or two out of ten who don’t take the opportunity, and for these, we need to draw on the motivational force of their peer group. In effect, we have to heal the entire class in order to heal the individual.”

          The start, I said, was in their perception of support from those around them, and I referred again to Appreciation Time. In that exercise, students offer each other feedback once a day on how others “gave them a good feeling” or were friendly or helpful to them.  This establishes a basic premise for good things to occur in the group--the perception that their peers are “for” them, that they are safe among friends, and can reveal genuine thoughts and feelings.

          It also helps greatly, I continued, to work steadily at improving their communication skills by self-checking those such as I’ve included in my book so that they continually become more competent at relationships and social situations.  With these factors for harmony developing, the ‘impromptu performance’ dynamic I outline has a powerful effect. Everyone wants to feel competent at something and be applauded for it by their peers, and young people are acutely in touch with this need.  It’s important, however, to link together student effort with the applause that comes. Knowing students love to be applauded, teachers will often arrange this for things that have little to do with students’ effort, or key it to the most minimal gestures.  To link it with genuine learning, I described to the principal how teachers could put into a bag the questions answered, and at the day’s conclusion draw a question and a student’s name.  The student stands, answers correctly, and is applauded.

          “I liked that idea when I read your book,” the principal responded, “but everyone here is working on different material.  With twenty-four students each on their own computer and into different units, it would be just impossible for a teacher to arrange.” 

          “The teacher doesn’t have to arrange it,” I said. “Students from middle school up can understand a simple guideline for identifying the main question and each have their own bag.  For instance, they could convert the title of the section they’re working on into a question, and retain the main points that answer it. That’s what we’re doing anyway day in and day out, and for the impromptu performance, we just bring together the pieces we want students to retain forever, and demonstrate them as Q and A at the end of the day.”  I noted the benefits of seeing a subject through the lens of the different questions students could ask about it.

          “You’re talking about kids here who have no idea what it means to take notes or think through ideas. When they’re asked to take notes, they go online and cut and paste.”

          “That just says you have a different starting point with them,“ I answered. “If they need a thorough unit on taking notes, you do that first. You teach them how to select the question and summarize an answer. “

          The exchange to this point startled me because amid all the issues he and I saw similarly, this was the first time I‘d heard a series of “buts“ from him. He was hinting that he'd given up attempting to influence these particular students. He pointed me to one student and said, “Let’s see if you can get even one question out of Roland there.”

          I drew up a chair beside Roland, looked at his screen, and asked him what he’d been working on.  “American history,” he said. About a dozen unit titles outlined the subject from the time of the Pilgrims through the Constitutional Convention. 

          “Could you go back to one of these you’ve done and let me look at it?”  I said. Each unit had a small red dot beside it indicating that it had been completed.

          “We can’t go back,” he said. “The software won’t let us.”  His answer came like a punch.  Here was a structural guarantee that his learning must be superficial. He could not even go back to and re-examine a section once completed! I thanked him and rejoined the principal who was observing.

          “I’ll bet Roland couldn’t think of a single question himself,” he said.

          “No doubt right now,” I said, “ but American history! The material is made to order for mastery.”

          Hearing the word mastery, the principal objected. He couldn’t connect it to anything they were doing or that I was proposing.

          “Wait a minute,” I said.  “What if we aim just at mastery of the most important material?  Think of one of those history units as taking the form of one essay question with five points of knowledge in it.  Would it be reasonable to expect that one could assimilate one question with five points in the answer in a single hour?  That if asked the question, a student should be able to tell the answer back at any time?“

          After some thought, he agreed that that was a reasonable expectation. 

          “Well then,“ I said, “that means 25 points in a day, 125 points in a week, 500 points in a month, and 4500 points in a school year--which represents an impressive education--and it’s at this minimal pace of five points of knowledge per hour.  If we aren’t achieving at least that, what are we doing with our time?” I pictured once more how students could collect their questions and answers into their own personal “bag” that eventually would contain all the questions they could answer that could be incorporated into impromptu performance.

          He reflected on the students lessons. “Some of them are so complex that turning them into a question and answer would be very hard,” he observed.

          “If students can’t even boil them down into a version that fits their own thinking, can we expect them to retain anything at all?  If not, does it make any sense to run them time and again through information they forget immediately?”  We discussed how little some of them exert time-on-task, and I listed an array of measures that could help bring that under conscious management (if the word “control” is presumptious).

          Our conversation was interrupted, but it caused me to ponder later about what I’ve proposed for years. The issue here wasn’t the quality of personnel.  If I were starting a school, the principal was someone I’d want to hire--an alert, intelligent, hard-working, caring, insightful individual--yet he had given up the idea of taking charge of a layer of influences that could affect the accomplishment of his students. In the face of a certain kind of student inertia, the levers he had been accustomed to calling upon didn’t work, and he was seemingly off-balance, baffled, and conceded power to existing student patterns that was unwarranted.  Students remain flooded by conditions around them. Since we are assigned to be masters of their environment for their productive weekday hours, we get to arrange influence to bring about the effects we want.

          My own approach is not the only way to do this, but I believe it has a certain belief in common with others that work.  As a group, we assert that there are points of leverage that accelerate learning.  We need to understand and draw on them, and not assume that the pace of learning can never be better than the lowest common denominator of students’ motivation.  If we can understand how to harness the power of fuel to reach Mars, we have the intelligence to understand how to harness students’ desire for a great life in the course of providing them knowledge.

          John Jensen is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of The Silver Bullet Easy Learning System: How to Change Classrooms Fast and Energize Students for Successu (Xlibris, 2008).  He welcomes comments sent to him directly at jjensen@gci.net, and will email an ebook version of his book without charge to anyone upon request.