New Highly-Structured Teaching Systems: Direct Instruction, and CT3

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Brace yourselves.  New teaching methods are coming to a school near you.

In a recent post linked to from FaceBook, (Teacher Blasts Popular Classroom Training Program) a teacher describes her run-in with the No Nonsense Nurturer Program, a method for supposedly making teachers more effective.  Before you read the article, which is strongly critical of the coaching technique, you should give a little time for reflection on the problems —some of them perhaps unstated— that the method is designed to address.

I believe that part of the problem with grade school classrooms (and any sort of classroom) today is that students are not accustomed to classroom discipline.  This is just the basic behavior of being quiet and attentive in the classroom, respectful to the other kids, and respectful to the teacher.  Parents may pride themselves on their child being a lot less disruptive than some of the other children, but most people are not aware that kids are a lot worse behaved —in almost every school in the country— than they were a couple of decades ago.  A lot worse.  Some of the parents were probably themselves pretty badly behaved in class, and have probably forgotten what assholes they were as kids, and how much pleasure they got out of torturing particular teachers.  But trust me: modern classrooms are a lot worse.

Ignorant parents are quick to blame the teachers for this lack of classroom discipline.  The teacher is the first and easiest scapegoat anyone can find, and the school administration has also learned that blaming the teacher is a winning strategy from a lot of points of view.  Washington, too, has bought into the axiom that weak teachers should be removed from the classroom, and being unable to maintain discipline in the classroom is a major component of perceived “teacher weakness.”

Now, some people are brilliant at dominating a class, and keeping them on task, no matter how many unruly elements there may be in it.  Such teachers rejoice in the exercise of their charisma, and their ability to get students to do what the teacher wants them to do, and amazingly, students often love these sorts of teachers; it’s almost as though the students want to be given limits to how silly they’re allowed to get.  Much is made of this phenomenon, and a lot of classroom praxis revolves around this empirical observation.  But I think educationists over-emphasize how far this goes; the very best teachers do not dominate the class so utterly.  The older the students are, the less the Iron Lady method is appreciated, and the less it produces the desired results.

Though no one has come out and said this, the No-Nonsense Nurturer Program looks very like a sort of industrial approach to making every teacher a No-Nonsense teacher.  It is uncomfortable for the teacher at first, and the training phase is acutely awkward, as the article describes.  But given the fact that students do not learn a lot of discipline at home, the No-Nonsense teacher can quickly (and figuratively) slap the silliness out of his or her class, and get them on task, and keep them there, without pandering to their constant need for positive reinforcement that they seem to bring with them from pre-school.

Over thirty years, I too have been conditioned by my students to constantly give them little figurative gold stars for every little thing, which an undergraduate in Japan, for instance, would do as a matter of course.  American kids have grown up in an atmosphere of constant praise  —some of them; others, of course, live in a home environment of almost continual verbal abuse and demeaning, and both kinds of home background seem to result in the kids needing constant positive feedback from the classroom teacher— and sometimes they actively and explicitly elicit praise from their teacher, such as, “See how nicely I did my homework?  Look, there’s colored ink!!!”  Some teachers, such as the author of the article, are uncomfortable with being firm with a disruptive student.  From her description of how much she hated being firm with the kid, we see just how much of an elementary school environment has become the expected thing even in a middle- or a high-school classroom.  Can you think back to your own high school days, and recall an annoying kid who deserved to be squelched just so that the lesson could continue?  (Of course, some lessons are boring, and we’re rooting for the disruptive kid!  But, in hindsight, should a teacher be wasting her energy putting up with that sort of crap, or should she better spend her time doing what is expected of her?)

Well, even if we quarrel with the training program (and that’s the only way you can train a bright undergraduate into a drill sergeant), the fact remains that [1] once the training has been accomplished, that teacher is going to run a much more efficient classroom, and that classroom is going to achieve a lot more than they would otherwise, and [2] very quickly, the students will —if the empirical observation of the effectiveness of disciplining students is reliable— come to terms with the strict discipline, and learn to love it.  Or, at least, tolerate it pretty well.  Students will begin to learn that the firmness on the part of the teacher does not signal a deteriorating relationship, and that class time is precious, and there isn’t a lot of time for boosting the fragile egos of each and every kid in class.

Families are less and less capable of training kids to be realistic in their demands on interpersonal relationships with adults outside the home, and things will never improve.  Parents are just too busy being productive on behalf of their employers (who must have been trained in a similar No-Nonsense Nurturing Program for Bosses).  So classroom discipline will have a brief resurgence, until parents decide that it has to be jettisoned, because children are really too fragile for any sort of discipline!

Catholic Schools are much more effective at maintaining classroom discipline, because a nun can be firm with a child without being criticized, because of course, she has the authority of the Almighty behind her, unlike a teacher in a public school, who is, after all, just a poorly-paid flunkie of the school board.

The earphone sets, and the coaching team at the back of the classroom is probably a bit much, but it is just the sort of training scheme that you would expect from the industrial approach to all things that obtains in the latter 20th, and early 21st century.

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