Reading comprehension and knowledge and something else

I was finally reading Michael Goldstein's terrific blog when I came across this post:

E.D. Hirsch

If you teach English, or you're a school leader — and I'm particularly looking at you, friends in No Excuses charter schools, with our collective student gains in math that are 4x higher than those in English — I think a bare minimum threshold is that you can:

a. Explain E.D. Hirsch's arguments

b. Describe the degree to which your class/school adheres to or rejects his view

c. Justify why

I got turned onto re-reading Hirsch through Robert Pondiscio, who until recently worked for Hirsch's Core Knowledge Foundation as a blogger.

To the best of my knowledge, students at Morningside Academy make the same gains in reading they do in math: two years' progress in one year's time. That is the guarantee Morningside makes to parents. Their child will make two years' progress in one year's time or tuition is refunded.

More specifically, Morningside guarantees that each child will make two years' progress in one year's time in the child's most difficult subject. Since many of students there have diagnoses of dyslexia, presumably the worst subject is reading, often as not. Morningside's students are middle and upper-middle class, but Kent Johnson and his group have worked with disadvantaged populations, too. As far as I know, two-years-in-one applies to low-income students, too.

For (remedial) reading comprehension, Morningside uses Robert Dixon's Reading Success. Dixon's approach to teaching "main idea" is sui generis: his program teaches students to identify anaphora first. Dixon's definition of anaphora: "a pronoun or other words used to refer to some other word or name." (And here's a simple example of anaphora)

Morningside students become fluent at identifying anaphora and their referents in the text. As I recall, they then identify the main idea by counting the anaphora. The main idea has the most. (Still haven't read my Dixon handout...if I'm wrong about that, I'll correct.)

Once students have completed Dixon's curriculum, they continue to improve their reading within the subject areas.

We've talked about this before, so this is a repeat: the idea that you would teach reading comprehension by focusing very specifically on anaphora was a revelation to me. I've been teaching anaphora to my students ever since.

My experience at Morningside makes me skeptical of the claim that lack of background knowledge is the only meaningful explanation for the decline in reading comprehension in the U.S., or for the failure of the good charter schools to make much headway improving reading comprehension.

I was mulling this over, trying to think how one might separate background knowledge from some kind of 'textual knowledge' students also lack, when I remembered the fact that my students can have difficulty understanding fables.

One of my best students -- a bright, capable young woman -- did not understand this fable, which she had read out loud to the class:

A dispute arose between the North Wind and the Sun, each claiming that he was stronger than the other. At last they agreed to try their powers upon a traveller, to see which could soonest strip him of his cloak.

The North Wind had the first try; and, gathering up all his force for the attack, he came whirling furiously down upon the man, and caught up his cloak as though he would wrest it from him by one single effort: but the harder he blew, the more closely the man wrapped it round himself.

Then came the turn of the Sun. At first he beamed gently upon the traveller, who soon unclasped his cloak and walked on with it hanging loosely about his shoulders: then he shone forth in his full strength, and the man, before he had gone many steps, was glad to throw his cloak right off and complete his journey more lightly clad.

Moral: Persuasion is better than force.

When one of my students has trouble understanding a fable, the problem isn't background knowledge.

I'm not sure what the problem is, but the fact that Morningside Academy achieves such amazing results using a reading comprehension curriculum that teaches anaphora leads me to believe that, at a minimum, cohesion devices should be directly and explicitly taught in English class.

On that subject, here's Sally Hampton: The Importance of Writing Structures, Coherence, and Cohesion to Writing and Reading.

Hainish suggests a 'negg' (and how to write a 4 that doesn't look like a 9)

After I mentioned how impossible I'm finding the project of creating a thesis statement 'algorithm,' Hainish suggested using my mistake as an example of how not to create a thesis statement.

That is essentially the solution Ed came up with today.

Which brings me to something I never got around to mentioning after my time at Morningside Academy's Summer School Institute.

Every day of the two weeks I spent at Morningside brought new revelations, but the two that completely upended my perception of reality were Morningside's focus on anaphora as the critical component of reading comprehension and Kent's explanation of what to do when a student writes 4s that look like 9s and 9s that look like 4s.

So, pop quiz: if you had a student writing 4s that look like 9s and 9s that look like 4s, what would you do?

What I would do -- what I would have done before attending the Institute -- would be to have my student practice writing 4s and 9s.

But no!

That's that wrong answer.

The right answer is to have your student practice seeing 9s and 4s.

More specifically, have the kids practice telling 4s and 9s apart. Give them a worksheet filled with 4s and 9s, and have them "discriminate" 4s and 9s until they can do so fluently.

After that, the kids can write 4s and 9s.

I was gobsmacked.

So Kent explained.

All performance, he said, requires internal inspection. You don't just perform a skill, you watch yourself performing a skill. You inspect your performance as you perform.

And the inspector has to be trained.

The reason students write 4s that look like 9s and 9s that look like 4s isn't that they can't physically write 4s and 9s  They can. They can write other numbers; they can write letters. A child who can write other numbers and letters can write 4s and 9s.

The reason students write 4s that look like 9s and 9s that look like 4s is that they aren't seeing the difference. They aren't discriminating.

Kent said you could make a case all learning is discrimination.

More on this later, but for now: at Morningside, people use Tiemann and Markle's work on curriculum design. To teach a concept, they teach "EGGS" and "NEGGS."

EGGS are examples (thesis statements, in this case), NEGGS are non-examples (non-thesis statements).

More importantly, they give students close-in non-examples.

Make It Stick says pretty much the same thing.

More in a bit.

Kent Johnson's new book is out!

Response to Intervention and Precision Teaching: Creating Synergy in the Classroom by Kent Johnson, Ph.D. and Elizabeth Street, Ed.D.

Very exciting!

Speaking of precision teaching, my friend Robyne and I are visiting Ben Bronz Academy next Thursday.

Magister Green on how the Greeks and Romans taught

Magister Green on the question of whether you can "pick up" the grammar of writing through reading:

Going back to ancient times, the Greeks and Romans taught their children not rules of traditional grammar but rather the works of the great poets and thinkers who had come before. In particular, emphasis was placed on memorizing and modeling one's own schoolwork on the works of past masters. If we accept that students can learn grammatical rules through exposure as opposed to explicit instruction (which I do accept), the fact that schools in general (public and private) refuse to teach, much less acknowledge, the works of "masters" would go a long way towards explaining why students today know so little of the rules of traditional grammar.

I've been only vaguely aware of the 'copy work' practices of the ancients (and of the Well-Trained Mind people), but I've come to be a fan.

I think Magister Green is right.

One reason students don't write (or punctuate) grammatically today is that they aren't spending enough time reading, studying, and 'mastering' important works under the direct guidance of their teachers.

I think there's probably something missing in terms of fluency training in the early grades, too: possibly just basic fluency practice in writing and punctuating simple Subject+Verb+Object and Subject+Verb+Complement sentences. But I don't know.

I speculate that 'basic fluency training' is missing because C. was reading important works under the direct guidance of teachers in high school (though not before then), yet his writing still had lots of comma splices. I asked him how he finally got rid of them, and he said he thinks his dad just corrected so many of them that he finally started to see them himself.

Which reminds me: I need to get a post up on Morningside and "discrimination training."

Morningside does not seem to teach "grammar" at all, really. They teach writing via sentence combining, and they don't teach sentence parsing or sentence diagramming. Kent Johnson told me he teaches grammar terminology after students have learned to write, and he teaches the terminology at that point because students have to know it for state tests.

I don't know how I feel about that. I gainsay nothing Morningside does; I've seen the results with my own eyes (and in a writing class, too). But the idea of 'withholding' or avoiding the vocabulary of grammar bothers me nevertheless. I wish somebody had taught me how to diagram a sentence back in the day!

On the other hand, I may be looking at it the wrong way. The Morningside program doesn't avoid teaching the vocabulary of grammar so much as it delays formal instruction in grammar.

Maybe that's the right sequence. Reading and writing first, grammar second.

I'm going to come back to this later.

desperately seeking anaphora

At Morningside Academy I learned that many students have difficulty understanding anaphora, which I am (presently) defining as any expression in a text that:

• refers back to something earlier in the text (the antecedent)
• often possesses a meaning that can't be found out by looking the word or words up in a dictionary

e.g.:

But shortly afterwards both Androcles and the Lion were captured, and the slave was sentenced to be thrown to the Lion, after the latter had been kept without food for several days.
source: Tales of Wonder From Many Lands: A Reader for Composition by Howard Canaan and Joel N. Feimer

"Latter" refers to the Lion, and a dictionary can't tell you that.

Yesterday, in class, I found that most of my students were thrown by this passage. I assume the same has been true of students in all of my previous classes, but I never picked up on it. (aaarggh)

This sentence was a problem, too:

Some holidays are greatly overrated, Valentine's Day is one of them.
source: Hunter College Reading/Writing Center Grammar and Mechnics

Nearly all of the class thought this sentence was correctly punctuated, and not because they had no idea what a complete sentence (or clause) is. (I was pleasantly surprised on the 'what is a complete sentence?' front.)

My students easily pegged "Some holidays are greatly overrated" as a complete sentence, but they vehemently denied that "Valentine's Day is one of them" could be complete because it doesn't make sense on its own. I do mean vehement. I had the same reaction from the rising 8th grader I worked with last week.

From the get-go, two falls ago, when I returned to the classroom, I've been trying to teach my students how to write cohesive prose. Writing cohesive prose means connecting sentences to one another, and connecting sentences to one another means using anaphora.

But now I'm going to be paying close attention to anaphora in reading comprehension, too.

Meanwhile, turns out Erica M. has been dealing with this issue forever:

Catherine, that is EXACTLY the kind of sentence my students have trouble with. That's why I do so many "is it a sentence or not?" drills with my students. They can't tell. Even kids at $40,000/year Manhattan private schools (especially kids at $40,000/year Manhattan private schools!) just can't figure it out. They can't separate grammar from context. That's why they write endless comma splices. I have one student right now, a very bright rising senior at a notoriously progressive Manhattan private school, whom I recently spent an entire session just doing "is it a sentence or not?/punctuate the comma splices" with, and the next practice SAT she took, she still got loads of them wrong! I'm going to keep having to write her drills. I bet that in her entire education, no one has ever made her do this. What disturbs me, though, is that her teachers have apparently looked past the problem for years.

and see:
All good writing consists of good sentences properly joined.

Can you spell 'hegemony'?

from the Times:

Catholic schools have been bleeding enrollment and money for years, and many have been forced to close. But some, like St. Stephen of Hungary, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, have found a way to thrive — attracting a more affluent clientele by offering services and classes more commonly found in expensive private schools.

Selling points include small class sizes and extracurricular activities beginning in the youngest grades. And by often charging far less, these schools have been able to stabilize themselves and even grow.

“Our competition or our standard isn’t another good Catholic school,” said the Rev. Angelo Gambatese, the pastor at St. Stephen of Hungary church, which shares a building with the school. “It’s the best independent schools in Manhattan, and we intend to achieve the same level of performance that they do, academically, developmentally.”

[snip]

While 70 percent of the students are Catholic, a figure that has not changed, it has a more Franciscan focus on kindness and respect rather than papal edicts, which makes it more palatable to families not traditionally in the Catholic school market.

“I don’t feel like it’s holy rollers over there,” said Richard Sher, a parent of two at the school who is half Jewish, half Protestant.

Mass is every other week; the homily is more of a discussion than a lesson. When Father Gambatese talked in May to the youngest students at Mass about Adam, he wondered why Adam asked God for more humans. “He wanted people to talk to and play with,” Sabrina Vidal, 8, said. “Yes!” Father Gambatese said. “Don’t you get tired of hugging a lion?”

St. Stephen offers the kind of extras found at far more expensive schools, like French for 3-year-olds, violin for fourth and fifth graders, and iPads for sixth to eighth graders. But some parents, Catholic and non-Catholic, said they were also drawn to the discipline and values-based approach at St. Stephen, elements that have fallen out of fashion at most nonreligious schools.

“We were looking for structure, and that’s what we got,” said Deirdre O’Connell, a parent who works in banking.

In Katherine Peck, the entrepreneurial 33-year-old at the heart of St. Stephen’s revitalization, the parents also got a principal schooled in progressive teaching. Classrooms are no longer teacher-focused, with students at desks, but student-centered, with children at tables. Students have publishing parties every month to showcase their writing, textbooks have been de-emphasized in favor of hands-on learning and every classroom has an interactive projection system.

Mrs. Peck, who is Catholic and attended Teachers College of Columbia University, said Catholic schools gave her more flexibility than the public schools where she had taught. (She also taught at the Epiphany School before coming to St. Stephen.) “Everything I was doing at Teachers College, I could do in the classroom,” she said, compared with the public school where she said everyone had to teach from the same page.

To Survive, a Catholic School Retools for a Wealthier MarketBy JENNY ANDERSON | New York Times | Published: August 19, 2012

I need to start a Catholic school. A real one. A real Catholic school, only with precision teaching.

Of course, I'm not Catholic. So I wouldn't be anyone's first choice to start a Catholic school. Also, the Catholic Church isn't starting new schools, not here in Westchester County anyway. The church is closing them.

Yesterday I taught my first class (freshman composition) in Victory Hall, a building that up until two or three years ago housed a Catholic girls high school. I love teaching in Victory Hall, and I was happy to be assigned a room there again. The place has an aura.

Jimmy's group home, originally built to serve as a convent, has an aura, too.

But when I arrived at Victory Hall, I discovered that I wasn't teaching in the building itself; I was teaching in one of the ancient modulars out back. I didn't even know the modulars were there, and now I'm teaching in one.

Catholic schools used to have so many students they had to buy trailers to expand the plant.

Now they're all going or gone.

Ed has often asked how much longer Chris's Jesuit high school can hold out. It's housed on the same campus with a major education school, and major education schools have no truck with the Jesuit tradition.

and see:
cultural hegemony

get the MESAG, part 2

Back from the Open, so summer is officially over, as opposed to emotionally over, which it was the instant Chris set foot inside his dorm.

Hate the empty nest! hate! hate! hate!

Anyway, getting back to my interrupted post on precision teaching, when you learn something to fluency, you "get the MESAG":

Maintenance	"You never forget how to ride a bicycle." When you learn content or skills to fluency, you remember them.
Endurance	This one surprised me. Fluency in content and skills means you can perform the content or skill for as long as you need to perform them. You have stamina.
Stability	Another surprise, rife with implications for our ADHD epidemic. Fluent knowledge and skills  are impervious to distraction. A noisy classroom has no effect on skills a child knows so well he can do them in his sleep. If he can do long division in his sleep, he can do long division inside Penn Station.
Application	Transferring semi-old knowledge to new contexts is hard. My favorite story re: transfer of knowledge is the little autistic boy whose parents and teachers spent months painstakingly teaching him to butter his bread. Finally he learned! Everyone was happy until, a few weeks later, they discovered that the little boy had no idea how to spread peanut butter on bread. Spreading butter on bread and spreading peanut butter on bread were two different things, and they had to start all over again. Fluency allows you to apply your bread-buttering skills to peanut-buttering bread. Autistic children, by the way, are rarely taught anything to fluency. "Discrete trial" teaching puts a ceiling on the number of repetitions a child can do in a minute. 80% correct does not equal fluency.
Generativity	Fluent knowledge and skill "repertoires" readily recombine to produce new skills that don't have to be directly taught.

Is fluency the magic that makes inflexible knowledge flexible?

Is Handwriting Causally Related to Learning to Write?

The contribution of handwriting to learning to write was examined in an experimental training study involving beginning writers with and without an identified disability. First-grade children experiencing handwriting and writing difficulties participated in 27 fifteen-min sessions designed to improve the accuracy and fluency of their handwriting. In comparison to their peers in a contact control condition receiving instruction in phonological awareness, students in the handwriting condition made greater gains in handwriting as well as compositional fluency immediately following instruction and 6 months later, The effects of instruction were similar for students with and without an identified disability. These findings indicate that handwriting is causally related to writing and that explicit and supplemental handwriting instruction is an important element in preventing writing difficulties in the primary grades.

Is handwriting causally related to learning to write? Treatment of handwriting problems in beginning writers.
Graham, Steve; Harris, Karen R.; Fink, Barbara
Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol 92(4), Dec 2000, 620-633

get the MESAG

Another dispatch from my two weeks at Morningside's Summer School Institute:

"Get the MESAG" is Morningside's acronym for the results of fluency: get the MESAG.

Maintenance
Endurance
Stability
Application
Generativity

More tomorrow ---

Common Core re-defines fluency

More from the Education Week article on Common Core assessments:

He pointed to one illustrative example in PARCC’s materials that tries to gauge students’ fluency in division and multiplication. It offers five equations, such as 54÷9=24÷6, and asks 3rd graders to specify whether each is true or false.

“I like that it does multiple assessments in one item,” he said. “It asks kids to work each of those problems easily and be comfortable with it, which is what fluency is.”
Published in Print: August 22, 2012
Consortia Provide Preview of Common Assessments
By Catherine Gewertz

Offhand, I don't see how a set of five equations like these can test fluency. Fluency isn't simply a matter of accuracy, ease, and comfort. Fluency includes speed, and to assess fluency you need fluency aims, or standardized rates of performance.

How fast should a third grade student be able to answer these 5 questions? That's what you would need to know to use these equations to assess fluency, and one set of 5 simple equations probably isn't enough to measure speed.

Beyond that, I'm skeptical this is a fluency test at all. Seems to me it's more an application-of-knowledge test than a test of fluency per se.

Here's the list of fluency aims Rick Kubina culled from the precision teaching literature.

Maybe I should send a copy to PARCC.

Morningside error correction procedure

From my notes from the Morningside Academy Summer School Institute, in this scenario students are reading words on the board out loud:

Common error patterns

• Guessing
• Attending to shape of word
• Attending to only part of the word

Error correction

• NAÏVE LEARNERS: Pre-correct by underlining part of word you predict will be an error
• NAÏVE LEARNERS: Focus & change only the error portion (“I heard something else”) - DON'T write a whole separate word beside the word that was misread
• Erase only part of word and write in what you heard
• Erase multiple times – go back & forth between the word written correctly & the word written incorrectly
• EXPERIENCED LEARNERS: Discrimination correction [see below]
• Rule of thumb: 5 correct practices for every error

To explain, with naïve learners," which I take to mean beginners, if the word on the board is "tree" and a student read "tray," you would erase the double-e and write in 'ay.' You would not write the word "tray" beside the word "tree."

With experienced learners, you do write the word "tray" beside the word "tree," and then have students go back and forth between the two, reading each correctly.

Unfortunately, I no longer recall the reason for this distinction between beginners and more advanced students. I think it had to do with making sure beginners focus on the exact part of the word they are misreading.

update 8/13/2012: Children with developmental disabilities who have been taught to read with sight words may not be able to learn well from either of these discrimination procedures.

Training versus education, or Why don't constructivists like phonics?

Why don't constructivists like phonics?

I had always assumed E.D. Hirsch's account explained it: constructivists are the philosophical descendants of Romantics, and Romantics believed that nature is a whole and should not be dissected, analyzed, broken down into component parts, etc. Wholeism, in other words. Romantics extended this belief to teaching and learning.

Constructivists are Romantics, and Romantics are Whole-ists, so: whole child, whole language, whole math, histogeomegraph....

Here's Hirsch:

The romantic poet William Wordsworth said, “We murder to dissect”; the progressivist says that phonemics and place value should not be dissected in isolation from their natural use, nor imposed before the child is naturally ready. Instead of explicit, analytical instruction, the romantic wants implicit, natural instruction through projects and discovery. This explains the romantic preference for “integrated learning” and “developmental appropriateness.” Education that places subject matter in its natural setting and presents it in a natural way is superior to the artificial analysis and abstractions of language. Hands-on learning is superior to verbal learning. Real-world applications of mathematics provide a truer understanding of math than empty mastery of formal relationships.

Reading Matthew Hunter's article on constructivism in British schools, though, I saw the constructivist antipathy to phonics in a new light:

The much publicised debate over "phonics" versus "whole word" methods sounds arcane, but it is really quite simple. "Phonics" involves teaching pupils to match individual letters to sounds, so that they can combine these sounds to make words. The teaching of phonics requires an orderly, teacher-led classroom, and in its technical approach is often characterised as boring and off-putting for young children.

For that reason, "whole-word" methods have been promoted for the last half-century as a more child-centred alternative. Instead of didactically instilling an understanding of which letters make which sounds, whole-word teaching encourages pupils to "discover" how to read by first matching words with meanings, then slowly building an understanding of letter-sounds. This method promises that pupils, to a large degree, will teach themselves. As one whole-word apostle claimed, it will lead to the "withering away of the teacher".

The most important distinction between the two methods is that one works, and one does not. This has not stopped generations of "progressive educators" from eschewing the teaching of phonics, not because of any perceived ineffectiveness but because its didactic methods are repugnant to their ideology. As a result of these teachers indulging their romantic ideals, 11-year olds arrive at secondary school unable to read and write.
Child-Centered Learning Has Let My Pupils Down
MATTHEW HUNTER| June 2012

I'm slightly embarrassed to say that I had never thought of this.

During the Summer School Institute at Morningside Academy, Kent Johnson talked about the difference between training and education. Most of what he was teaching us was how to train students, not how to educate them. Training comes before education.

from my notes:

[The] test for training [is]: “I’m teaching them something I know & they don't know. I want them to be as smart as I am.”

That's training, and for Kent training is (generally) not about discovery, while education may be.

For some time now, I've been frustrated that schools aren't giving students the practice they need.

But now, reading Hunter in the wake of attending the Institute, I think it's probably more accurate to say students aren't getting the training they need.

The reason they aren't getting the training they need is likely to be the fact that the concept of training seems almost intrinsically to require, or at a minimum suggest, an "orderly, teacher-led classroom" and a "technical approach."

and see:
balanced literacy - the video
histogeomegraph: preventing the tragedy of content isolation

Terry

I heard a lot about Terry while I was at Morningside Academy's Summer School Institute.

Eric [Haugton, one of the creators of precision teaching] helped his wife Elizabeth plan for a kindergarten student named Terry Harris. Terry had cerebral palsy, and walked with crutches. Elizabeth was teaching him to write his name. It had taken from September to Christmas vacation to teach Terry how to write his first name. Elizabeth wondered if there wasn’t a better way to teach him to write his last name. Even though there were only four new letters to teach, it still seemed like a daunting task. Eric asked her if Terry could write 250 to 200 vertical stokes in a minute. Elizabeth mentioned that Terry was quadriplegic — Eric replied, “I didn’t ask what he looks like, Elizabeth — can he do 250 to 200 vertical strokes per minute or not?” Elizabeth admitted that she didn’t think so. “Can he do 140 to 120 zero’s in a minute?” Again Elizabeth said he probably could not. “Those are the elements that make up the compounds for every letter or number we write. If they are not fluent, then learning to write numbers and letters will fail.”

Returning to school Elizabeth and Terry spent the next three weeks working on strokes and 00s. Terry went from about 50 vertical strokes to over 175, and from 25 zero’s to over 90. “But Terry and I were getting tired of this drill, and we were ready to try going back to writing his name.” So they did; how long did it take for Terry to learn to write Harris?

Terry learned it in five minutes.

LESSONS LEARNED: Eric Haughton and the importance of fluency
Wicked Local Hingham | January 22, 2012

Autistic children often spend years learning the same things over and over and over again in school.

What would happen if all of these students were moved from "discrete trial"/80% mastery criteria to precision teaching/fluency training?

money-back guarantee at Morningside Academy

Morningside Academy offers a money-back guarantee for progressing two years in one in the skill of greatest deficit. Summed across its 23 years, Morningside Academy has returned less than one percent of school-year tuition. (p. 7)

[snip]

The summer school program offers a money-back guarantee for progressing 1 year in the skill of greatest deficit. Summed over 23 years, Morningside Academy has returned less than two percent of summer school tuition. (p. 10)

The Morningside Model of Generative Instruction: What It Means to Leave No Child Behind by Kent Johnson & Elizabeth M. Street

money back

from my notes taken during the Summer School Institute at Morningside Academy:

We put our money where our mouth is. [In special education] every year you gain [just] 6 months & get farther and farther behind. Instead of gaining 6 months, we want you to gain 2 years for 1 year in the chair [i.e., one year in Morningside].

The kids gain two years. [They are] not lifers in special ed. We want them to gain a lot and grow a lot.

People say it’s impossible.

If we don’t [produce 2 years gain in 1 year], we give the parents the money back.

There are a couple of riders: students have to attend [school], and parents have to support the program. Parents have to be involved in daily report card.

········

Parents are required to attend one class a year on how to read and understand the daily support card. The parent has to interact with the Support Card or they lose the guarantee – [and] the parent can’t just give kids money for lots of [As]

[At Morningside, an equal sign on the Daily Support Card is the equivalent of an A.]

The parents do give tangible rewards: you pick dessert, you pick the video. Parents tie rewards to positive interactions in the family.

Or the family could just have a discussion with the child [if grades on the Daily Support Card are not what they should be].

The Support Card is a jumping-off point for parents. The parent can talk about each category, and the categories are very specific.

QUESTION: How do you know the parent has interacted with the Support Card?

If you see the child hasn’t been taking the Support Cards home – if that pattern shows up – or if the kid doesn’t care if he gets a point; that means the parent doesn’t care. Then [we] call the parent in for a conference, & at every conference we talk about 'How are you interacting with the Support Card?'

palisadesk explains the dead man's test

palisadesk writes:

Where I found the "Dead Man Test" useful was in goal-setting and problem solving. For instance at school support team meetings, we might be considering a 2nd grader who is always out of seat, interrupting others, fooling around. When we try to focus on specific plans of action, with measurable steps and goals, it is not unusual for for goals like "stops shouting out" to make the list.

Enter the Dead Man Test. I'm usually taking the notes, so I lead off with, What do you want to see Student X DO?

I may get another answer that describes what we DON'T want. Then I point out, '"Don't interrupt" fails the Dead Man Test. If a dead person can do it, it's not a behavior. " After some laughter we can refocus on what it will look like if the student behaves the way we want:

--stays on task for 3 minutes
--raises hand before speaking
--puts completed assignment in basket...

...and so forth. It's a matter of looking at things in terms of what you WANT to see (usually, in increments, so that you can develop the habits or skills) instead of what you DON'T WANT.

A maxim I remember from long ago is, You get more of what you pay attention to. The Morningside people make a great deal of observing and reinforcing the appropriate behaviors and study habits -- real behaviors, not "dead man" non-behaviors.

Marna on Morningside Academy

Marna writes:

My daughter is learning disabled from a stroke at birth. This is her 3rd VERY SUCCESSFUL summer at Morningside Academy. When she started, she had completed 5th grade and was testing at 2nd Grade 0 month for writing. This year at the end of 7th grade, she tested 6th grade 6th month on most of her writing EXCEPT on the essay portion, which she scored 9TH grade!!! When she started Morningside academy, she couldn't construct a paragraph, let alone an essay. This year she is in their Study Skills class and loving it. I have taken many of their ideas about fluency and applied them to my math tutoring and math class business (I teach homeschooling math classes at co-ops) with much success.

I TOTALLY agree with Catherine. I wish our local schools would take a page from Morningside Academy. We are local;you would think they would, especially after the big flap in Seattle about the horrid math curriculum that parents did not like

It's the best.

No question.

the dead man's test

For years I have puzzled over the weirdness of diets and dieting.

When you're on a diet -- when I'm on a diet -- I'm trying to not do something. Not eat ice cream, or not eat potato chips, or not take 2nd, 3rd, or 4th helpings, or not consume any one of a gazillion different things a person would happily wolf down if calories were not an issue. Conceivably, the list of things I'm trying not to eat is infinite.

This has always confounded me. Infinite notness: does that even make sense? I mean, sure, the universe is infinite and all, but does infinite notness make sense as a plan?

Say you're a human being confronting a challenge or pursuing a goal: don't you usually make a plan to actually do something?

Take a concrete step or two?

Formulate a plan of action?

Assuming the answer is generally speaking 'yes,' where do diets fit in? With a diet, the basic idea is to spend 16 hours a day not doing something, so is not doing something the plan?

Not eating junk 16 hours a day every day from now on?

Is not doing something doing something?

I find the whole thing mystifying, and I always have.

The best answer I've come up with is that not doing something isn't doing something, not really. And, as a corollary, not doing something when it comes to food is harder than doing something.

My foray into quasi-veganism seems to support my hunch, but until yesterday I had no idea what research had to say on the subject if anything.

Turns out the precision teaching folk figured it out long ago:

The Dead Man Test

The dead man test was devised by Ogden Lindsley in 1965 as a rule of thumb for deciding if something is a behavior. The need for such a test stems from the importance of focusing on what an organism actually does when attempting to understand or modify its behavior. It serves as a guideline for the identification of whether the "behavior" of interest could be performed or measurably demonstrated by a "dead man."

The question posed by the dead man's test is this: Can a dead man do it? If the answer is yes, it doesn't pass the dead man's test and it isn't a fair pair -– for example "behave appropriately 80% of lunch hour" -– then it is not a well written goal. If the answer is no, you have a fair pair. For example:

Suppose that you wanted a fair pair target behavior for "swears at peers." Let's say that you came up with the target behavior "does not swear at peers." Does this pass the dead man's test? No. A dead man could refrain from swearing at peers. What would be better? How about "speaks to peers without swearing"? This passes the dead man's test because a dead man does not have the power to speak.

Don't eat ice cream is definitely something a dead man can do.

On the other hand, Stop eating ice cream is not something a dead man can do.

sigh

I'm going to eat an apple tomorrow.

here's something you won't see at a precision teaching school

The 100-Book Challenge.

Apparently, the 100 Book Challenge is yet another program that produces parent uprisings.

The people at Morningside say Robert Dixon's Reading Success is the best reading program on the market.

For writing, they use Anita Archer's Sentence Refinement. (Can't remember whether they use Archer's content reading programs for fluent readers -- I'm thinking they do.)

I'm back!

Wow.

That was intense. Eight-hour classes during the day, 3-hour reading assignments at night, tests each morning, no family, no dogs, no kitchen, AND a whole new group of classmates to get to know --- Working memory blowout!

By the end of the Week 2, I was having mini-blackouts in class. I would be sitting in my Learning Position, wearing my Learning Expression and Tracking the Speaker with my eyes, and....I would suddenly come to and have no idea how much time had passed since the last time I actually heard something the speaker said. It was like SAT reading, only for listening.

Plus try jumping rope 100 times inside a hotel room. (I hit 100 in June.)

All worth it.

I've just spent two weeks of my life witnessing what is probably the best teaching on earth.

Many notes to share.