Area I: Instructional Design
*There's no learning without retention.  What we learn must endure or it is of no consequence.

*To make learning rewarding, reward learning.  No one is born loving mathematics, art, languages, sports, healthy lifestyles and all that is a flourishing existence. We come into the world with the potential to live a good life.
                

                                                                        Education's goal is joyful competency.

*The only way to raise education's standards is to improve instruction. Student performance reflects what was taught, not what was required.

*Effective reward system make a subject matter or new skill rewarding. This is not a fast or simple process. It requires embedding rewards into the subject matter and teaching skills that are sustained in other contexts. The hazard is using rewards that are unrelated to the material taught and given long after the task is completed. These problems run the risk of:
       *Training students to pursue entertainment, not the subject matter.
       *Establishing the subject matter as a cue signaling the start of a rewardless (and therefore punitive) period of study--hardly the way to make students like a subject matter.
       *Prompting students to work carelessly to "get it over with" so the rewards can start.
Effective reward systems avoid all these problems, but it is a rare teacher training program that effectively addresses them.

*Students are not sent to school to teach--or to be taught by--other students. If teachers instruct no better than students, then it follows that the students should be paid and the number of teachers cut.

*Good teachers can answer these questions on a moment's notice:
    (1) What objectives were taught?
    (2) How were the objectives taught?
    (3) Do data indicate the procedure is working?
It is the school administration's job to ensure that teachers can answer these questions.

                                                                      A 6-issue short course in instructional design
      Issue #1. Prerequisites to nowhere will take students there. Knowledge is cumulative, a curriculum that isn't is a million dead end roads.
      Issue #2. Not all curricula are created equal. The best sequence of objectives is not arbitrary, a matter of opinion, or something that can be left up to students, school boards, parents, or government agencies. It must be researched.
      Issue #3. Practice begins when the student can do the task. Students learn many skills, practice few of them, and retain almost none. Teach less, teach it better, and over time you'll teach more.
      Issue #4. Fluency is the only criterion that matters. Fluency is 100% accuracy at high rates. Percentage correct does not reflect fluency and here the research is very clear: Only skills learned to fluency will endure, merge with other skills to create still more complex skills, be easily applied, and make learning fun by making students competent in the long run. Temporary competency is called forgetting.
      Issue #5. Measure relevant skills. Standardized tests do not indicate what children have learned or what to teach them next. Also, such tests do not, nor have the ever, measured a "learning process", "personality", "interest", or any other such mentalism--only individual behaviors can be measured--the rest are statistical inventions.
    Issue #6. Use proven techniques.  Avoid:
                                                               *The latest (i.e., unproven) technology.
                                                               *Cutting edge (i.e., unreplicated) research.
                                                               *Endorsements by panels of Ph.Ds who haven't taught for decades if ever.
                                                               *Procedures strongly advocated by teachers or administrators who just attended a workshop.
                                                               *Individuals with something to gain by simply being at the forefront of change.

*Homework is for practicing well-learned skills, not for acquiring new skills. Parents typically lack the training, interest, and time to teach new skills. And even if they are willing, they're shooting in the dark because they are not privy to the lesson's place in the curriculum, the methodology used at school, and the criteria for an adequate performance. Besides, parents are not equally capable of teaching, and this puts some children at a distinct disadvantage when they return to class. It is the school's job to establish the core academic skills.

*There is no learning without retention. Educationally relevant learning begins when retention is ensured--and typically it is not.

*Practice and review are as important as learning new skills. New skills are built from well-established prerequisites. Skills that are not retained and generalized cannot advance a student's learning.

*Teach your students to distinguish between success and greatness.

*Train students to feel slighted if they don't know something. Incompetence should be felt as emptiness. Educational failure is when arrogant ignorance becomes a status symbol.

*The most consistently effective methods are grounded in research on basic learning processes. The best studies comparing teaching methods repeatedly show that the most effective instruction is:
                       *Based on learning principles.
                       *Intensively studied in typical classrooms.
                       *Are some of the least expensive.
                       *Are typically the least used.

*Students should regularly address enduring questions such as:
              (1) What is a good life?
              (2) For what would I sacrifice the things I enjoy?
              (3) How can I express altruism?
              (4) What are the 5-6 key principles I live by? What have I done in the last month to demonstrate that I live by them? Are
                    these the best principles I can meet?
Such questions were once addressed in stories told generation upon generation. We should discover the importance of these questions at the beginnings of our lives, not the end, and pop culture should not be allowed to muddle or replace responsible adult guidance on these issues.

*Academics should be practiced like music and sports. Coaches and music teachers require that a skill be practiced until it:
           (1) Is done correctly and repeatedly at a proper tempo (rate is critical)
           (2) Can serve as a solid foundation for more complex skills (every skill is a prerequisite)
           (3) Can be done fluently in a wide range of situations (generalized)
There's a reason students forget facts and principles yet memorize volumes of rock and roll.

*In the 1950s and 1960s, modern life meant a TV in every home and modern education meant a TV in every classroom. Today, modern life means a computer in every home and modern education meant a computer in every classroom. We have yet to learn that TVs and computers are only as good as their programming and instructional design, which are still almost completely ignored.  Technology can help us teach, but more often it merely gives the appearance of teaching.

*Special interests should be barred from influencing educational curricula. Every special interest group believes that their constituency's position should be represented in teacher training and public school curricula. For example, in a city where the tire industry is strong, students were taught about polymers--the large, strong molecules that make tires durable--in grades K-12. Yes, kindergartners were taught about polymers. In a state where the dairy industry was powerful, teachers must still be educated about dairy cooperatives--something not seen for over 30 years. Hunting groups advocated that children learn about deer ticks, a curriculum item that must be taught even to inner-city students who should be addressing other health needs that are no where mandated.
                                               Curricula should include skills for life in the culture--not lobbyist's agendas.

*The only relevant test is whether skills reliably occur in their proper contexts.

*Computers are typically instructional materials without instructional design. Flexible computer programs that can be adjusted to specific student needs usually require more time to set up than teachers have to prepare for class.

*No one can describe a good teaching procedure in the spaces provided by teachers' lesson plan books:

Not only can't a lesson be written here, neither can tactics for assessing that lesson., modifications for specific students, etc. Teachers need to write programs with clearly delineated objectives, tactics for teaching them, data collection procedures, generalization training, retention, assessment, a clear linkage to related objectives recently taught, and the next set of objectives to be taught.

*Suzuki music teachers, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America, building trades, and the medical profession ensure the quality of their training in the same way: Experts who have proven skills identify goals, train students in small steps that are completely mastered in sequence and then merged with larger related skills. Competency tests are then given over those larger integrated skills and the student is certified to move onto other, more complex, skills. The current "constructivist" educational philosophy requires exactly the opposite. They would have students "discover" how to play violin, start campfires, build homes, and practice medicine (imaging a dentist "discovering" how to do a root canal). When the stakes are high, we rely on professionals whose skills are carefully trained and assessed. Lets teach children so they can rely on the skills we teach them.

*Creativity and insight can be taught. Here's a few tactics for doing so: (for more see Robert Epstein's (1992) article "Generativity Theory in Education" in Educational Technology, October, 1993, pp 40 to 45):
        (1) Broadening: Learn a totally unfamiliar skill. For example, if you study a great deal of science, study a musical instrument and vice versa.
        (2) Capturing: Keep notes on ideas that you have during the day. Categorize and summarize them into position papers or longer works.
        (3) Challenging: Solve problems in a atypical ways. By disallowing typical solutions, weak but often creative behavior occurs and insightful relationships are found.
The Epstein article is very accessible and has many useful references.

*Education occurs in the interaction between students and teachers. Yet educational systems barely reflect this. Instead they are like an archery target with the bull's eye being "student-teacher interactions". But the next ring outward is assistant principals, curriculum and instruction coordinators, consulting teachers, etc. Principals are the next ring encircled by at least three more that include assistant superintendents, superintendents, and boards of education. Each ring outward from the center provides less and less to what matters--the interactions between students and teachers. Instead of a bull's eye system, we need a wagon wheel with "student-teacher interaction" in the hub and each supporting spoke directed toward and affecting the quality of those interactions.

*Silent reading cannot be monitored so it should be used only after oral reading is clearly--overtly--demonstrated to be well established. Silent reading cannot be used to train reading. Learning requires differential feedback, and that isn't possible when a student's academic behavior is hidden.

*Altruism can be taught. We can teach people to enjoy doing good acts for others. What stands in our way of doing this is the belief that some people are "naturally just good" or learned. Child rearing leads people to be kind to each other, not physiology.

*Students learn not by doing but by affirmations and corrections of what they do. Immediate, effective feedback is the driving force in learning--not the act. Repetitive acts without feedback or other consequences result in weakened or poorly developed skills.

*"Teaching style" is no justification for being ineffective.  Rejecting effective procedures because they are not the teacher's style is educational malpractice.

*When students aren't looking at you, they probably aren't listening. Develop a cueing system that secures students' attention and indicates when they should respond.

*Teachers should reach down to pull students up, students should reach up to be advanced. Teachers and students should not meet eye-to-eye because they are not peers. Teachers and parents must train skills that students will find useful at a much later time and in ways students can't appreciate while being taught. To accomplish this, teachers and parents must train children to be peers, not as peers.

*As teachers do more tasks simultaneously, their effectiveness with each decreases. That's why attempting to simultaneously teach children with very different needs doesn't work; it's like carrying on 5 phone conversations at the same time.

*Children go to school to be taught, not to teach other children. "Peer tutoring" is poor way to overcome the shortcomings of heterogeneous grouping and high student-teacher ratios.

*This is a serious statement made by Whole Language developer Goodman "A word is easier to read than a letter, a sentence easier to read than a word, and a page is easier to read than a paragraph". With fundamentals such as this it is no wonder that so many school districts and even entire states saw their reading achievement fall and, in the case of California, to the lowest scores in the country.

Author Alfie Kohn reports that external reinforcement systems destroy intrinsic motivation yet he earns huge amounts of money for appearances on Oprah, book deals, and lecture circuit tours. Lets try an experiment: Stop rewarding Kohn with attention and money and see how long he continues. For thoughtful and devastating critiques of Kohn's work, see Eisenberg and Cameron in the American Psychologist and Reitman, D. (1998) in the Behavior Analyst.

*Teaching and learning shouldn't be exhausting. Teacher's exhaustion typically results from:
            (1) Lack of planning time.
            (2) Teaching too many areas simultaneously.
            (3) Extraneous school-based demands unrelated to instruction.
            (4) Classroom behavior management problems.
Note that (1)-(3) are systemic--not academic--problems we can solve with better administrators.

*No one can teach or learn well when upset. This obvious point hasn't been translated into practice: ___% of student-teacher interactions are aversive (Wyatt/Hawkins data)

*Children should be taught:
    (a) To write so well they will not simply be read, but rather learned by heart.
    (b) To define abstractions with concrete examples.
    (c) To translate statements into questions.
Note: (a) helps students discover what they have to say, (b) clarifies statements, and (c) requires students to question everything

*Teaching should begin with the student's current academic skills. Asking for less than students can do is poor instruction; asking for more is demanding the impossible, and asking for what's in the curriculum because it's in the curriculum, is presenting material, not teaching it.

*Bilingual education that does not quickly transition children into the culture's primary language is neither bilingual nor education.

*Students do more of what is rewarded, but not necessarily less of what is reprimanded. Rewards and punishers typically do not produce opposite effects. Punishment seldom eliminates a response--it simply suppresses it in the presence of the person who punished it. For example, most people speed (getting somewhere fast is often rewarding) and slow down only when they see a police car (the punisher--police--suppresses speeding but only as long as they are within view). Speeding tickets (punishers) don't eliminate speeding--they train speeders slow down in the presence of police.

Punishment in classrooms is usually the same situation: Students briefly stop offending after a reprimand, and then resume the bad behavior when the threat of punishment is gone. Teachers function like police cars and students like deceptive speeders. Students learn how to avoid punishment, not how to behave effectively.

*Children do not genetically dislike school, they learn to dislike it. Most children look forward to school and by 3rd grade their interest wanes and by 12th grade many schools graduate seniors early because they cannot control the disruptions they would wrought on the school. This incredible drop in motivation and respect is so common it is seen as "natural". But there's nothing "natural" about it--it's an embarrassment.

*Chronic school failure is child abuse. Requiring children to attempt what they cannot do and then punishing them with failure is abusive. The worst form of this abuse is to blame the child for the failure.

*The goal of education is to transmit a culture's art, science, language, and customs so individuals can function independently.  This implies:
     (a) Flexibility to learn and move between cultures.
     (b) Helping individuals become independent--not punishing them for a lack of skills the culture is responsible for training.

*Punishment does not produce long-term, generalized compliance.

*Most student testing is an artifact of poor instruction. Most testing—from teacher made weekly tests to state and federally mandated standardized tests, graduation tests to university entrance testing—are done because teachers do not know each student’s current skills. If that were known and recorded on a daily basis, which with current techniques is completely within reach and not time consuming, testing as we know it would almost completely disappear.

*Education marches in a circle. Failed trends and fads are typically repackaged into the next generation of failed trends and fads.

*Scholarship is the antidote for trends and fads. Scholarship:
     (a) Rejects repackaging of old theories and methods and the needless layering of vocabulary that results.
     (b) Requires clear advancement of theory and techniques.
     (c) Requires solid research that must be replicated across students, settings, researchers, and behaviors. This takes longer than the lifespan of most trends and fads.
     (d) Identifies the influence of corporate interests in "initiatives" and requires mote than profit motive to advance a theory and method.
                                                                        Ignorance is fertilizer for trends and fads.

*Political solutions for educational problems is the "Educational Consultant's Full-employment Act."  Because government policy drives educational practices, the constantly changing political demands create a constant need for consultants. For example, when California mandated whole language, educational consultants gave workshops, oversaw program design, etc. with the typically result: An educational disaster. Even advocates of approaches that benefit secretly know that government intervention in instructional design seldom improves educational practices.

*Most quality education occurs in the lulls between educational initiatives. During initiatives teachers don't need to be sensitive to whether the program is working because such data make little difference. They have to run the program no matter what. But when the initiative ends and the next one isn't yet organized, then teachers are freer to choose procedures, monitor their effectiveness, and make adjustments accordingly.
                                                                   Trends and fads suffocate good teachers.

*Politics are for advancing a field, not politicians.  Confusing the two makes personalities, not principles, the central issue. Typically administrators initiate trends and, more often than not, their motivation is self-interest (e.g., advancement and public relations).   This common observation is well-supported by research.

*Most trends and fads address neither student nor teacher needs.  This is well-supported point is a common, though seldom voiced, complaint among teachers.

*Trends and fads (AKA educational initiatives) are not cost effective and teachers, especially experienced teachers, recognize this. Data clearly support this generally held view.

*Trends and fads add little to what teachers already know. Repackaging and repeating programs doesn't improve the program or teachers' skills.

*Trends and fads are usually replaced in 5-7 years whether or not they are effective. Data clearly support this.

*Teachers forced to use trends and fads often feel like para-professionals because they are removed from fundamental decisions about instruction. Besides demoralizing teachers, this can lead them to perceive research as having nothing to offer and even result in teachers confusing educational research for trends and fads.

*Experienced educators can recognize a school's latest initiative--based on recent research--as a new name for old tactics. :

*Skillful teaching should never be confused with following trends and fads. Good data collection would quickly dispel this confusion.

*The life cycle of educational trends and fads:

Step #1. An administrator (often a principal, Curriculum and Instruction Director or Assistant Superintendent) is swayed to an orientation for any of a number of reasons (e.g., a workshop, politics, available grant money, etc).

Step #2. Teachers' undergo in-service training that is fast, incomplete, and lacks follow-up. No human subjects committee review board at any university I am aware of would allow the kind of ill-conceived, wide-spread experimentation that taxpayers regularly fund in their schools.

Step #3. Teacher evaluations are modified so that compliance with the initiative is necessary for retention, tenure, promotion, and merit pay.

Step #4. Teachers find the initiative isn't working

Step #5. Innovation supporters leave for new jobs or other responsibilities.

Step #6. Personnel lack training and enthusiasm.

Step #7. Funds run out.

Step #8. Inadequate supervision further fractionates the program.

Step #9. The administration loses interest or others less committed are put in charge.

Step #10. Those with responsibility assume a "take-it-or-leave-it" posture where teachers are free to use or not use the technique.

Step #11. Teachers leave it.

Step #12. The trend vacuum is filled again (see step #1).

Comment: The extensive data on this process covers decades, many educational settings, and various research procedures. The pattern is real.

*A Russian saying goes "A man on thin ice must move quickly." And so it is with promoters of trends and fads who quickly move from one to another before their approach's thin proof and public relations no longer supports them.

*Any fad or trend can be repackaged to seem plausible to those not trained trained in learning theory and instructional design.
          Comment #1: Consider this first of two examples where teachers enthusiastically used fads independent of background in learning theory and instructional design. A child diagnosed with "ocular control difficulties" (he didn't maintain eye contact) was trained in 15 minutes to look at me and follow me through 180 degree turns. I used simple applications of learning theory (shaping and fading). Ecstatic, I notified his teachers who were very pleased because as they said, the child's trunk muscle training had finally paid off! They attributed this change to lying him stomach down on a beachball and rolling him back and forth. I explained what I did to reach their goals and was thrown out of the program for doing the beach ball therapy.

         Comment #2: Consider this second of two examples of teachers enthusiastically using fads independent of background in learning theory and instructional design.

I was introduced to a 5 year old autistic girl as she laid on a platform with wheels and used her hands to paddle down a hallway. I was told that she was in a Doman-Delacotto program. This approach states that each person's development mirrors the evolution of the human species. For example, we start as one-celled organisms floating in a sea, just as the first forms of life, then move onto multicelluar forms, etc. to amphibians, primates, and then the human stage. I was told that the little girl on the platform was at the amphibian stage and needed opportunities to act like an alligator because to do this, they said, would help her advance to the mammalian, then primate stages, etc. when language training could start.

In less than 30 hours of teaching with a wide range of learning-theory based approaches, she was working for 45 minute periods (initially she was said to have a 30 second attention span), read and created 3-to-4 word sentences and followed the commands in those sentences (we communicated easily through word cards used in that training.) Despite these successes, more had been done in years of work under other approaches, the failed program was reinstated by the school staff after I left. Six years later I inadvertently found the girl: Her language was gone and she was smearing feces on herself and the walls of a timeout room made from 4 sheets of rough plywood. Three years later she was institutionalized where she remains as of this writing. I could multiply such examples a hundred times and so could most others in the field.

Fads can ruin lives.

*Rousseau in the 16th century wrote extensively on how, if we only leave children alone, they will blossom into the person that exists within them, like a seed becomes a flower. Such philosophy underlies many current educational techniques. Interestingly, Rousseau put his own child into an orphanage and wrote about a fictitious individual, Emile, whose story--not research--became a central metaphor in educational and developmental psychology.

*A nation's most expensive outlay is a large-scale educational initiative that doesn't work. Not only does the school district lose, the children must be retrained or face the consequences of being less well educated--which becomes financially expensive to society and personally expensive to individuals. It is a failure that continues to fail long after it ends.

*Wisdom and effectiveness are in proven educational procedures; money and fame are in untried educational initiatives.  Research has repeatedly proven that the most widely used education initiatives are the least effective and most expensive.

*The educational trend-maker machinery typically destroys whatever efficacy an educational initiative may have had. When schools ride the trends and fads bandwagon, the need for apparent change outstrips the need for actual effectiveness. And a key to maintaining the appearance of "being on the cutting edge" is to change programs so fast that a given initiative can't be fully evaluated, improved, and most importantly, compared to previously used procedures.

*Area: Research Essentials

*Teachers and students deserve an institution like the Food and Drug Administration that would require solid research demonstrating a technique's effectiveness before it is used with children.  Meat receives closer inspection than teaching procedures.

*Tenure for teachers and professors should provide security to tell the truth--to stop the games that stand between teachers and effective instruction. Tenure is a professional coming-of-age where teachers and professors can look beyond requirements for demonstrating their competency within the system and to begin the more important task of shaping that system.

*Great leaders know the difference between controlling and inspiring.  To control requires power; to inspire requires living by admirable principles such that others do the same. Controlling leaders get what they want; inspirational leaders transmit greatness.

*The advancement of teachers and administrators should be linked to student progress. Fads, trends, public relations, and advanced degrees can advance teachers and administrators but have done virtually nothing for children. The guiding principle must be altruism: What teachers and administrators do must be measured against how it affects students.

*A school's organizational structure is secondary to the goodwill between people in that structure. Goodwill between employees creates elastic job descriptions that automatically adjust to meet needs and create a seamless process. This is prerequisite to quality instruction.

*You know you're an experienced teacher when you become skilled in "Behindology": The art of identifying the real reasons behind a district's actions.

*Children should be given Educational Insurance--financial compensation for going to school and not being taught effectively. Schools, like hospitals, should be liable for malpractice--such as using unproven (experimental) procedures and definitely for using practices known to be ineffective.

*Education's political, economic. and philosophical context, not its research, too often determines instructional practices.  Instructional design's effectiveness is not a political, economic, or philosophical question: It is a research question. Educators must learn to match questions with methodologies that can answer them.

*Stress inhibits learning and typically is caused by doing distasteful tasks to avoid punishment. Learning, and most importantly a love of learning, cannot be advanced when students do what they dislike to avoid something worse. Replacing negative control with positive techniques is a major challenges.

*Too much money is spent on changing programs and too little on refining the ones we have. Large-scale programmatic change should be the option of last resort, but typically is done whether or not current programs are effective or could be improved.

*Often the appearance of effective education is more important than being effective. The observation that education is a carousel going round and round but never forward stems from a very serious problem: The incentives for spearheading educational initiatives are greater than incentives for producing effective students.

*Educational progress is an illusion created by making programmatic changes just before most teachers and parents realize that the last initiative isn't working. In 1982, education administrator Michael Fullan wrote: "There are too many case-study examples which indicate that one of the main consequences of introducing innovations is career advancement for the sponsor and subsequent failed implementation for the innovation." (pp 15-16)

Ten years later, Fullan & Miles (1992) indicated that little had changed since 1982:

"The mere appearance of innovation is sometimes sufficient for achieving political success". (746)

Careers, not effective education are at stake.

*It is not disloyal to question your school's instructional design.

*It is not disloyal to ask for data to support claims for quality instruction.

*It is not disloyal to challenge the opinions of school administrators. The public deserves proof of their school's effectiveness; the public owes their children vigilance over schools to ensure quality education.

*Using technology well furthers education; effectively showcasing technology furthers the appearance of furthering education.

*Measuring public relations has replaced measuring instructional effectiveness.

*School children should not be used in large-scale evaluations of unproven teaching techniques carried out by teachers who were barely taught to use them. The scale on which techniques and materials are adopted should be proportional to the amount and quality of data demonstrating its efficacy. This is done in medicine and for good reasons--the same reasons education should follow this policy.

*Teachers should not be required to use techniques when data from their classrooms indicate they are not working. Teacher trainers know numerous cases where teachers "bootleg" effective procedures in their classroom while giving the appearance of using the school-sanctioned tactics that aren't working. This is unnecessary and immoral.

*Texts, like medicines, should be proven effective before they are sold. Students have a right to protection from ineffective materials and practices. Textbook publication and school district selection of texts typically occur independent of in-depth comparative research that assesses effectiveness.

*Teachers should be given the option of (and college credit for) staying under contract all or part of their summer to develop instructional materials and teaching tactics. Teachers typically have 1 planning period per day (about 50 minutes) where they plan 6 lessons. Therefore they must produce 1 lesson every 8 minutes and 40 seconds--a laughably inadequate time to do quality work.

*A good administrator understands teaching and a good teacher understands administration. Specialization is not necessarily a virtue in education. Teaching requires a coordinated system that responds to a child's learning like an organism adapting to its environment. An assembly-line model won't work because learning is fluid and changing--not like a car being constructed piece-by-piece.

*Districts don't necessarily want competent teachers. Consider these cases:
          #1. Jaime Escalantes was a math teacher in the barrios of East LA. His students' typical profile described a convict in the making. Yet Escalante's students were not only successful, they won math competitions across the country. The district's response: Fire him because students spent too much time on math in a school for the performing arts.

         #2. A district I know struggled with choosing between a Ph.D. who wanted to return to the classroom and a football coach with a winning record.

        #3. Superintendents and principals often tell me that the ideal teacher is someone who can quickly adapt to the most current initiative (trend or fad). Bandwagoning gets teachers hired and retained. Since data clearly indicate that the quality of most initiatives is poor, a new teacher who is sensitive to an initiative's ineffectiveness could quickly become an impediment to his/her employers.

*Grade inflation trivializes the work of effective students and teachers. The skills represented by a grade are nearly impossible to identify. And grade inflation only exacerbates this problem. Forget grades and report the skills students acquire--not the skills they brought to class and not a teacher's impression of what students learned. Report skills learned and grade inflation disappears.

*Grade inflation results in part from countercontrol exerted by student and parent assessments of teachers. Students and parents don't look a high-grades gift horse in the mouth, even though high grades need as much justifying as low grades. Data consistently show that one of the surest ways to increase a professor's student evaluations is to commit grade inflation.

*Public relations campaigns have replaced meaningful evaluations of students, teachers, and professors. Why risk a negative evaluation when custom-tailored public opinion can be manufactured?

*Most standardized tests:

     (a) Compare (1) measures of behaviors that were established in unknown ways with (2) stagnant norms taken from a constantly changing population.

    (b) Report test scores in units that don't identify the specific skills tested, what teachers should teach next, or how to teach effectively.

    (c) Report scores couched in misleading terms like "grade equivalents" that in reality have nothing to do with a student's grade level performance.

   (d) Renorm without readministering the test (this is done in a computer).

   (e) Fail to include special education students in the "representative" norms.

Comment: Item (a) precludes meaningful communication about results, (b) precludes curriculum development for classroom use, (c) precludes meaningful communication of such measures to non-specialists, (d) precludes meaningful rankings of students (the primary goal of standardized tests), and (e) skews norms toward the high end of the normal distribution thus making a school district look better than it is.

*Why does the expression "team pride" evoke sports images instead of academic performance? Could we get parents to attend and newspapers to report on academically-oriented events with the same regularity and enthusiasm that they attend sports events?

*Student learning should not plateau in high school. The more we learn the more we can learn, so by high school the curve should rise exponentially, not level out. Student performance may level out in high school but:
    (1) This is not a "natural" state of affairs--leveling out may occur but that is no reason to expect that it should..

    (2) That plateau is not due to "raging hormones" and other folk psychology excuses.

    (3) This plateau doesn't occur in better schools or where well-researched teaching methods are used.

*Schools are more likely to take control than responsibility. School districts can organize referenda for buildings and sports, control public relations, and raise millions in taxes for unproven educational materials and techniques, and teachers can organize million-member unions that influence protectionist legislation at all levels. But when student academic performance comes up short everyone screams victimization:
     *Parents didn't support them.
     *TV and computer games create short attention spans.
     *Teachers in earlier grades were ineffective.
     *Social problems make education impossible.
If student achievement is really the goal of education, why don't educational organizations give this the same money and attention as protecting personal interests?

*Land values and property taxes are a poor yardstick for determining an educator's remuneration. Why should a teacher's value be linked to a tax base?

*Educational consultants use available techniques. That schools hire consultants instead of serving as consultants reflects the school's insensitivity to what we already know about quality instruction. That many common frustrations faced by teachers can be solved with long-standing theory and techniques reflects the insensitivity of teacher training programs to the needs of teachers and students.

*Consultants should guarantee their work. Guarantees separate sales skills from educational skills.

*Newspapers should be required to give academic progress and effective teaching the same space, enthusiasm, and support as sports coverage.

*Never opt for ignorance. Ignorance is not bliss. A well-educated person is different in virtually every way because the boundaries of a person's knowledge are the boundaries of what can be appreciated and thus by bring happiness.

*"Gray area children" need special education but are ineligible because their IQs are between 70 and 90. An IQ of 90 or more is needed to receive services in a learning disabilities program. An IQ oaf 70 or less is required to receive services in a cognitive disabilities. So a child whose IQ is between 70 and 90 and is not emotionally disturbed, receives no federally funded programming despite a clear need for it.

This excludes about 1/3 of all students with subaverage IQs (an IQ of 90 means that about 60% of all students scored higher and an IQ of 70 about 95% scored higher, therefore about 35% of the students with subaverage IQs were written out of our special education laws despite their obvious need for assistance).

*Typically, children that don't quite qualify for special education programs are periodically retested to determine whether they have deteriorated enough to receive help in funded programs. This practice is:
      *Immoral. Society supports schools to avoid backsliding, to work in children's best interests--not to wait for certain disaster and then act.
      *Bad instructional design. The longer academic and behavioral problems persist, the more difficult they are to change.
      *Uneconomical. It is far more cost effective to change small problems than big ones.
 

*Teacher and student exhaustion should be seen as a disease and treated accordingly.

*If medicine were as misrepresented as behavior analysis, techniques to stop epidemics would be ignored while ineffective treatments are used because they build careers and make money. Bad education is an epidemic and research-proven tactics are ignored for want of the scholarship needed to ignore rhetoric and follow the data.

*The best indicator of whether educational fads and initiatives will improve education is their dismal history.

*All causes are physical things; all effects are physical things and causes and effects must be measured separately to establish a cause-effect relationship. Consider these statements: "He reads poorly because of his learning disability" or "He is aggressive because of his emotional disturbance." Both statements are meaningless. The causes--learning disability and emotional disturbance--are not physical things that are separately measured. Terms like "learning disability" and "emotional disturbance" are descriptions of behavior, not causes of behavior.

Other descriptions of behavior that are often used as causes are terms like "personality", "temperament", "intelligence" (including "multiple intelligences"), "introversion", "extroversion", "aptitude" and many, many more. A similar problem occurs when behavior is observed and its cause is attributed to something not observed or a thing that is assumed to exist in a nonmaterial, mentalistic realm. Typically these statements involve references to emotional causes, cognitive processes, or hypothesized physiological events.
                                                  Causes and effects are directly measured physical events.

*Before you say something is a cause, be sure it exists.  Education is replete with meaningless statements such as, "Jake's learning disability makes it hard for him to read." What we observe is the reading, the hypothetical cause--learning disability--is never observed. And it is not observed because it does not exist. It is a what theorists call a "hypothetical construct"--a term that stands for whatever we want it to stand for. In education, "learning disability" means that a student scores within the normal range on an aptitude measure (like an IQ test) but poorly on achievement (e.g., reading or math) measures. It is not an entity with a separate existence and therefore cannot cause anything.

The same is true for all the other constructs in education's vocabulary (e.g., intelligence, personality, temperament, multiple intelligences, emotional disturbance, etc.) These terms describe classes of behavior (like learning disability describes test performance), not causes of behavior.

*Distinguish between statements based on theory-vs-data-vs-experience. Many times authors, professors, and others who should know better appear to give equal weight to statements derived from theory, those supported by data, and those for which they have only personal experience. Learn to separate speculation (theory) from supported statements (data) and one person's perhaps unrepresentative observation (personal experience).

*Be skeptical of teaching methods taught by people who have never done them. If someone is going to teach you to fly a plane (which is far simpler than teaching) you'd want to know whether that person has ever actually piloted one. We should apply at least the same standard in teacher training.

*Multicultural education that provides no effective techniques for resolving fundamental differences between cultures is impotent. Is vaginal circumcision child abuse or an acceptable cultural practice? Should a husband have the right to restrict his wife's movement and cover her face? Should parents be allowed to refuse proven medical treatment for their child's health problems? In a clash of fundamental differences, the winner will always be the culture making and enforcing laws. How is this "multicultural"? What else is workable?

*Cognitive terms such as personality, emotional disturbance, temperament, thought processes, dyslexia, creativity, and the thousands of other mentalistic inventions are meaningless until defined in terms of a student's:
     (a) Specific behaviors
     (b) Personal history that generated those specific behaviors.
To tell a teacher that a student "has" dyslexia, states nothing about (a) what the student does, (b) why the student does it, and (c) effective instructional procedures. Clarity and precision are well served by dropping mentalistic terms and moving directly to descriptions of students' behaviors, the histories that produce them, and techniques that deal with them.

*Mentalistic terms are an impediment to quality education.
       Comment #1: Mentalistic and cognitive terms suggest that inaccessible and non-physical causes inside the students (not unlike demonic possession and discredited disease models) produce academic and classroom management problems thus exonerating the school of responsibility. The focus becomes what the student is theorized as "having" (cognitive processing problems, learning disability, etc.) rather than the conditions producing the problems.

       Comment #2: Mentalistic and cognitive terms complicate meaningful assessment because observations of what children do are restated in terms of mental activity (e.g., poor math performance is described as dysfunctional cognitive processing). What is observed is not what's described.

       Comment #3: Mentalistic and cognitive terms retard the integration of educational practices and theory with research that does not use mentalistic vocabulary. Very effective teaching procedures that include no mentalistic terms led educators to incorrectly conclude that such procedures cannot address problematic behaviors that are not typically described in cognitive, mentalistic language. Vocabulary should not stand between students and effective teaching.

*To understand a child it to know his personal history so well that you realize he could not behave any other way. Our past creates our present. When that past is not understood, skills or deficits are attributed to hypothetical internal states like "emotional disturbance", "temperament", and similar mentalistic fictions. This is a tremendous great oversimplification--what could be easier than attributing aggressive behavior to "aggression"? Slow learning to "cognitive disabilities"? Stereotypic, perseverative behavior to "autism"? Such terms explain nothing and describe little.

*Teach children to separate the teacher from what is taught. A teacher is often the reason a person does or does not enjoy an area or even chooses a field. A better reason is subject matter, not the subject matter's messenger.

*Virtually all teachers can design a better teacher training program than the one they went through. Each year my beginning students design a teacher training program and each year virtually all of them design a program with components research indicates are best but absent from their program.

*Altruism is education's purpose and a culture's best tactic for perpetuating itself. Caring about our children's quality of life gives educators and the culture a meaningful goal.

*Because teachers in training lack preparation in their field's history and research methodology, any teaching procedure can be made to appear correct to them. Teacher training should begin with critical thinking skills taught in the context of their field.

*Many teachers are led to believe that all theories are about equally valid. Theories are not created equal and should not be given equal weight during instructional design. The generally held perception of theoretical equity suggests that teacher preparation should do more to help teachers understand and evaluate their field's fundamentals.

*Many teachers are led to believe that theories and research add little to what classroom experience teaches them.  Millions of teachers and hundreds of years of teaching never came close to identifying basic learning processes and the well-proven procedures that have been derived from them. Too few teachers appreciate the power of science applied to education, and that is the fault of teacher preparation programs.

*Many teachers are led to believe that they can integrate numerous theories into a personal theoretical system that contains the best of each orientation. This is impossible because:
    (1) Teacher texts do not provide sufficient depth for a complete evaluation of any single theory.
    (2) The skills needed to integrate theory are extremely complex and not taught in teacher preparation programs.|
    (3) An individual would need a hundred lifetimes to validate such a theory.
This simply isn't a task teachers can or should do and, perhaps worst of all, it trivializes the depth of good theories.

*Teachers are led to believe that they should seek out theories and orientations consistent with their existing beliefs about teaching and learning. Theories are valuable only if :
    (1) They go beyond common sense and existing beliefs to show us what we would not otherwise anticipate.
    (2) Are well supported.
Adopting a theory because it's consistent with existing beliefs entirely misses the point of adopting theory in the first place.

*The estrangement of teachers and research resulted in teachers relying on each other more than on professors, published data, and coursework. Decades of research demonstrating effective practices is not transferred to teachers, so they turn to the most accessible, and for many the most credible, source of information they have: Each other.

This means many teachers are using techniques in a theoretical and data-based vacuum. Despite this, they hold strong opinions regarding theory and data and they are free to use whatever research and orientation they please, or, more typically, none at all. Remember, they see no mandate from administrators to apply the literature. They are on their own. Individually, teachers are informational islands, but collectively merged by the field's literature, they can be more effective than any one practitioner alone.

*Well-researched theory helps teachers fit procedures to student needs. Theoretical underpinnings of a procedure indicate why it should work, why a technique may not be working, and how to make it maximally effective.

*Research describes the known limits of a technique's effectiveness. Research clarifies the conditions under which a procedure works best: The students most likely to be improved, the setting in which the procedure was used most successfully (e.g., school-vs-home), and the kinds of adjustments that make it maximally effective in special cases.

*Education lacks treatises--developed, consistent statements of a complete educational vision that includes historical and philosophical foundations, research methodology, and proven, effective practices that teachers can use. Sparse treatises result from the practice of publishing larger works piecemeal and often repeatedly for multiple audiences. This increases the total numbers of publications on authors' resumes but never states a complete vision.

*More than anyone else, educators need breadth and depth of knowledge in many areas. Consider some basic questions:
   1. Music:
       *What is syncopation?
       *What defines a minor chord?
    2. Mathematics:
       *What is the difference between isosceles and obtuse triangles?
       *How do you factor a quadratic equation?
       *How do you calculate compound interest?
3. Life Sciences:
      *What the relationship between Mendel's and Darwin's work?
      *Describe an example of symbiosis so that a grade school student can understand it.
      *What did Watson and Crick discover?
4. History:
      *What was Bismark's role in German and European history?
      *What role did the Lusitania play in American history?
5. Arts:
      *Relate the story of Pygmalion
      *What is the difference between a rhyme scheme and meter?
These questions are only a few taken from E.D Hirsch's What Your 6th Grader Needs to Know.

*Great teachers are sensitive to what works.  In one way or another, great teachers identify their students current skills, what was done to teach them, and whether the teaching was effective.

*State Departments of Public Instruction should be required to supply research that supports teacher training requirements.  States are not required to demonstrate that changes in teacher certification requirements will produce better teachers. Consequently, fads, politics, economics, lobbyists, and philosophical positions of powerful individuals direct the education of millions of children. And disasters happen. When California's State Superintendent promoted Whole Language training statewide (an unproven procedure), that state went from well above average readers to the worst in the nation. To his credit, the superintendent is now promoting more effective procedures and advising other states on how avoid California's errors.

*Teacher training should emphasize educational procedures. Wisconsin, a state known for rigorous teacher training, requires 36 credits in the sciences and math (12 each in math, biology, and physics). Yet teachers of handicapped children are certified after only 6 credits of coursework directly related to methods for the special education students (and could legally certify teachers with even fewer), plus a few methods courses not directly related to teaching handicapped children (e.g., art methods, science methods, a language methods and a reading course or two). Those trained in general education fair about the same but without the methods for teaching handicapped children, even though such students will definitely be in their classrooms. In short, of the approximately 150 credits needed to receive a teaching certificate (some colleges are approaching 160 credits), about 1 in 5 are directly related to educational assessment and teaching methodology (and typically assessment is one 3-credit course). Therefore students receive less than a year of training in teaching methods.

*Continuing education for teachers should continue their training to teach. In many states, teacher recertification requires taking 6 college credits or the equivalent every 3 to 5 years. Often these 6 credits can be in anything--pottery, sailing, even credits leading to a degree in an entirely different area. These credits need not in any demonstrable way complement a teacher's previous training or be linked to educational practice.

*Teachers should serve as apprentices to professors who have extensively proven their skills in designing and delivering instruction. Typically professors receive degrees based on their research--no one evaluates their teaching while they earn a doctorate. Similarly, teachers in training receive their degrees largely based on coursework. Typically no professor actively models and trains the teaching tactics in a real classroom.

*Improving teacher training does not serve the interests of a university's education program. If a teacher certification program unilaterally increased graduation or certification requirements, it wouldn't be marketable because students would enroll in other, less rigorous education programs. At a university, college students are a medium of exchange, like money. Student-rich programs can:

*Justify large faculties, and the larger a department's faculty, the more persons it can place on key committees thus increasing its power.

*Generate large tuition revenues thus affecting the university's bottom line. So improving teacher training, which we know how to do and is obviously in our children's interests, wouldn't serve an education department's interests. This puts children at odds with university programs whose mission is to serve them.

*Standardized tests used to assess teachers-in- training do not measure relevant skills. Most states require teachers in training to pass a standardized test either before entering an education program or as a requirement for receiving a teaching certificate from the State Department of Public Instruction. These assessment hurdles are paper and pencil tests that never require the student to prove that he/she taught anyone anything. For example:
     (1) Preprofessional Skills Test (PPST) measures high-school level competency in math, language, and reading (multiple choice).
     (2) The National Teacher's Exam (NTE) assesses whether the student covered what the test developers believe are relevant issues in educational history, philosophy, assessment, and teaching methods. Again, it is paper and pencil, and God help the college student whose professors' definition of "relevant" differs from the test developers' definition.

Like any teacher trainer, I can point to scores of college students that flawlessly complete these tests and are without question some of the worst teachers the program ever certified. Teacher assessment should assess teaching.

*Years ago, two-year teacher certification programs were run by what were called "Normal Schools". Now teacher certification programs are 4 years or more but of the about 150 credits needed for certification, only about 50 or so are in education, only a handful of these involve methodology, and usually none are directly taught via hands-on instruction in real classrooms. Teacher training takes longer and has lost academic ground, not gained. Many unnecessary requirements have been added to teacher training programs, this curricular deadwood continues to accumulate, and directly training teaching skills remains the exception.

*Enjoying children is not sufficient reason to become a teacher, nor will it make someone a good teacher. Enjoying music will not make one a good musician or a good music teacher; enjoying art will not make one a good artist or art teacher. Liking something, doing something, and teaching something are different.

*Far more is known about effective instruction than can be found in teacher training programs. It can be argued that we are wasting our time developing effective teaching techniques because schools of education are not set up to teach them.

*No technique can be chosen and used correctly without first understanding (a) the theory underlying it and (b) the data on how to use it effectively. Theory puts techniques into a meaningful context; research defines the known limits of its effectiveness.

*Most teacher training workshops yield little or no lasting change in teachers' performance.  Effective inservicing requires:
        -Follow-up, including in-class demonstrations.
        -Working directly with teachers who are compensated for their additional efforts.
        -Gathering data on the new procedures' effectiveness.
        -Creating a school system that supports the changes made.