NESI Conversation 4 Doynit on Learning Risks

Definition of Learning Risks: The chances of a learner failing to meet learning criterion in a lesson, including because of inadequate instruction.

This fourth conversation with Dr. W.E. Doynit extends a series of descriptions of how to accelerate learning dramatically by increasing learning efficiency rates with and without Tablet and other mobile PCs.

Topics: Learning risks, instructional failure, learning analysis frames

Tablet PC Education: Since we know each other from previous conversations, I’ll jump right into the first question.

Teachers, some with decades of experience, say your New Era School Initiative (NESI) is irresponsible hyperbole. It gives parents and community members false hope of what to expect from schools.

They’re also concerned that discussions of NESI makes even the best incumbent teachers appear less than adequate.

I’m sure you’ve heard these concerns before. With due respect, what do you say to these challenges? Should teachers, parents, and community members consider NESI hyperbole that makes incumbent teachers appear inadequate to their jobs?

Doynit: Yes, I’ve heard such concerns since the middle 1960s when many of the procedures we use were demonstrated publicly.

At NESI, we give priority to learners and learning. That means, we assemble procedures that empirical, experimental and clinical data indicate learners will most likely meet learning criteria promptly through every lesson by using only whatever we have in the learning venue. Tablet and other mobile PCs make learning more convenient and also serve as data collectors to analyze how lessons increase student learning.

Tablet PC Education: Translate that for me. What does assemble procedures mean? What data do you consider and why those data and not millions of other reports and interests about education?

Doynit: You’ve stated these questions in familiar ways. Let me pick up on word choices.

NESI teachers give priority to descriptions of learning. That is, what we can observe, what choices people make when they learn. We seldom talk about education.

Tablet PC Education: Please explain what you mean. How is learning different from education?

Doynit: This is a fundamental question often masked by enthusiastic promotion of teaching, schooling, and academic content. Through NESI, we pay particular attention to the prepositions of and about when discussing learning and education.

We give priority to descriptions of learning. That is, to databased descriptions that address the question, “What can we see hear, etc. learners do to learn?”

We use generic descriptions of what learners do as the initial step in planning a lesson. These descriptions appear generic once we set aside other ideas, such as chance, cognition, neurology, determinism, instinct, and divine insight.

Tablet PC Education: Let me interrupt again. Most people believe that cognition and neurology account for learning. Why do you set them aside along with other theories and beliefs about learning and its sources?

Doynit: We set them aside, because they do not tell us what to do to increase learning promptly and directly in our classrooms with whomever attends.

As teachers, we cannot see or hear cognition, neuropsycholinguistics, chance, and so forth. We cannot in other ways directly observe them during instruction.

In that sense, reports about cognition, neurology, etc. may inform us to refine our direct observations. They do not direct or frame our instruction or analyses of learning based on direct observations.

Tablet PC Education: Then, why do so many other educators rely on cognition and neurology to explain learning? Do you think they mislead themselves and others with that reliance?

Doynit: Educators follow a noble tradition. Together, we try to share what we know about the best thinkers and doers with those who do not know these things. For many reasons, we do not agree how best to share, so we discuss and test our theories and beliefs.

As theories and beliefs, they do what theories and beliefs do best in schooling: they provide codes for generalizing and rationalizing observations of learner behavior.

For applied behaviorists, codes of cognition, child development, etc. have too many operational definitions to explain precisely how to increase learning promptly and reliably in classrooms as well as to account for social changes that we observe.

They’re theories, because no one can see cognition, childhood, development, or instincts. We infer and categorize them from what we can see, hear, etc.

And, then we accept and some believe our inferences as reality instead of representations of interpretations of the reality we sense.

At the same time, we consider discussions about education as important as discussions about religion, family, economics, and polity as social institutions, part of the framework to account for human behavior.

Together, these institutions constitute fundamental social activities that make societies different from social chaos.

Through NESI, we accept that schooling gives priority to people learning as efficiently as possible through instruction of what the most informed people know and do.

From this view, we accept that the word education broadly relates to learning.

However, the word education also indicates, in part because of formal schooling, fundamental issues that enhance and frustrate learning.

These issues include social processes of assimilation, bureaucratization, financing, politics, relative values of instruction placed on personal vs. social development, social continuity and change, social organization development, socialization, scientific enlightenment, and unionization.

In these ways, we view learning and education as related, but different.

Tablet PC Education: Go back please. Pick up with what you want to say about how NESI planners “assemble procedures” that research studies indicate will likely increase learning. More specifically, what do you mean, assemble procedures?

Doynit: The term “assemble procedures” means that we collect and organize procedures that indicate what learners do to identify and adopt new behavior patterns of lessons.

We restrict our collection to procedures identified through empirical, experimental behavior research, mostly from applied behavior analysis research literature. Each procedure describes how a teacher can likely increase learning.

Then, we arrange procedures into packages or frames. These range from micro-lessons on a specific topic for one learner to curricula for the school.

That means, we arrange learning procedures by kinds of observable actions learners use. What they do see first, hear first, touch first, etc. We use conventional categories of learning behavior drawn from review of one of the most rigorous bodies of literature about human behavior.

We call the organizing package A Learning Efficiency Analysis Paradigm or so called ALEAP. This package represents what observers do when analyzing learning.

ALEAP consists of three dimensions of observable actions of learners with a finite number of sub-categories. We start and end with what learners do to adopt new behavior patterns. In between these two ends, we address how learners filter through ongoing classroom activities in order to demonstrate that adoption. This frame gives NESI – CS teachers a learner based advantage over conventional instruction.

NESI instructors use ALEAP to plan as close as they can a straight line between what learners see and hear in a lesson to how they demonstrate adoption of new behavior patterns. The straighter and shorter the line, the more efficient the learning.

That’s probably a sufficient explanation for now.

Tablet PC Education: Let me press you further with a question you probably don’t want to answer. Why do NESI teachers get different results from other teachers, even other teachers in your district? What would you ask other teachers to do to increase student learning?

Doynit: You’re right. I don’t want to tell other teachers what to do. However, I do consider the superintendent must exercise the role of master teacher in order to justify serving as a representative of school personnel to the board of education.

In that role of master teacher, I sometimes offer these reminders to all K12 teachers during our district meetings.

1. Know how many seconds, on average, you have for learners in each class to demonstrate that they have adopted academic content principles required to meet minimum state requirements for each of your classes.

2. Edit your instruction and assignments to approximate that average. We suggest that you try to reduce instructional time by 10 percent during each edit. In that way, you may increase student learning efficiency.

3. Plan each lesson as though a learning analyst will assess your instruction to calculate risks of failure your students encounter with your instruction.

4. Keep each lesson plan simple, starting with what you want students to see, hear, or touch in order to identify the main point of your lesson.

5. Present that point in the first seconds of the class and repeat it often during each lesson, including with redundant cues and choral responses when needed.

6. Consider that a learning analyst will track the relationship of everything else said and done in class to that point.

7. Then, the analyst will distinguish those relationships from common instructional hedging activities. That is, from words and actions that do not directly, promptly develop the main point of the lesson. Both Tablet PC based and human analysts count time and rhetorical tangents, unnecessary words, and other non-essential time users in order to calculate instructional failure. That is, to calculate the time fillers, hurdles and distractions you offer that reduce learning efficiency.

We have also started a NESI – CS TIPSheet series that we email to everyone in the district, including instructional, maintenance, and office staff. This series familiarizes everyone with rhetoric and logic we use to meet our core common duty to increase student learning rates.

Tablet PC Education: That term, instructional failure, sounds harsh and offensive. What do you mean by it? How do you want teachers to consider it a useful index of their instruction?

Doynit: We see the term instructional failure as a descriptor of a part of managing lesson planning and instruction.

Yes, the term instructional failure can appear ominous and onerous. We don’t mean it in those ways.

Learning analysts observe instruction in order to assess learning and to estimate risks or dangers of not meeting learning criteria that instruction and related material offer learners.

ALEAP frames these analyses into three dimensions for calculating overall learning efficiency. Detours from that efficiency we consider hazards or risks of failure to learn.

We call these risks instructional failures in so far as teachers could have known and removed or avoided these hazards during lesson planning.

Tablet PC Education: Thank you, Dr. Doynit, for describing more of NESI’s and NESI – CS’s foundations for accelerating learning by increasing learning efficiency. We look forward to talking with you again to learn more.

References:

Calculating Learning Efficiency at NESI

New Era School Initiative (NESI) Interim Report Summary 1

NESI TIPS Learning Centered Lesson Plans Checklist

Related Reading

Related Resources

Posted by The Tablet PC In Education Blog, April 09, 2009, 4:18 PM. (Retrieved April 14, 2010, 6:35PM.) http://www.robertheiny.com/2009/04/new-era-school-initiative-nesi.html