Re: students won't follow procedures in high school

Ryan

Posted on 1/17/12

More | Report Post

On 1/10/12, ja wrote:

Bracchus, you came on this chatboard to seek help. You recognize that
procedures are important in a classroom as you recognize when procedures are
needed for a fire drill. Your problem is having students learn the
procedures and several of us gave you pointers and techniques to help you.

Now ja comes to let you off the hook by telling you that procedures turn
students into robots. First she is wrong in bashing Harry Wong as he did not
invent procedures. Teachers have been using procedures since education began
thousands of years ago. Harry Wong is just reporting what teachers do in the
classroom, such as the music teacher that is shown in the above banner who
has her class tuning their instruments without being told to do so, but ja
would call this Skinnerian operant conditioning and she claims all of the
music students have become robots.

Skinner’s work was done with rats and pigeons in a box and his work has been
criticized by many as being inapplicable to humans. If ja does not believe
that procedures are important, tell that to the many who died and suffered
during the recent capsizing of the cruise ship off the coast of Italy. The
captain did not follow procedures. Ja’s analogy is faulty and irresponsible
and also not applicable to the classroom.

In Skinnerian operant conditioning there is a stimulus and a response and a
reward and a consequence. Procedures do not have a stimulus and response and
there are no rewards or consequences.

It is standard procedural practice used by thousands of teachers to have an
assignment (bellwork, do now..) posted for the students to begin working when
the students enter the classroom, just as workers are expected to show up to
work and begin working without anyone telling them what to do - because they
know work procedures. Procedures are used when pilots fly a plane, when
cooks make a hamburger at a fast food restaurant, and carpenters construct
the roof on a building. Procedures were used in building the pyramids,
flying across the Atlantic by Charles Lindberg, and performing a play in a
Greek theater.

We teach procedures in a classroom when we teach students how to take lecture
notes using the Cornell note-taking procedure, the steps in how to solve a
quadratic equation on the board, and how to structure a sentence to an ELL
student. We teach students how to say “thank you,” “excuse me,”
and “please.” We teach little kids the procedure of how to tie their shoe
laces.

But, ja says to chuck all of this because to teach someone the steps of how
to do something is akin to Skinner teaching rats and pigeons how to reward
themselves with food. Skinner was an ivory tower professor who built a box
and used it to train rats and pigeons to push the right buttons with a
stimulus and response conditioning to obtain food based on a reward or
consequence system.

Procedures do not have rewards or consequences. They are steps taught to
people so that they can be responsible for how they will run their own
lives. Procedures are how you set a foundation in a classroom so that you
can build relationships, have high-order thinking activities, and engage
students in fun activities. You cannot do these in a classroom with no
organization and structure that is operating every day in chaos.

Ja, please tell us how you would run a classroom without procedures that
organize your students so that the classroom is safe and productive? How
would you advise a teacher to take students on a field trip such as a band on
a bus, plane, hotel to the Rose Parade without procedures? How would you
tell the coach to run plays in a football game with a team that has no
procedures? How does your cohort of teachers meet in teams to discuss
student achievement without procedures that govern the meeting and how to
examine the achievement data? What would your school do if they took your
advice to run a school without procedures in the face of a forthcoming
hurricane? After school, you would consider students robots and trained rats
if they were told where to stand (safely) to wait for the bus or their ride,
correct?

Bracchus, you have a choice. Organize your classroom with procedures so the
students know what to do or take ja’s advice and chuck procedures out the
window. If you do the latter, my strong suggestion is that you take out a
large liability insurance policy to cover yourself in case of accidents.

> I have said before and I will say again that Harry Wong uses the
> behavioral science studies that BF Skinner wrote about in the 60's and
> 70's. However the methods make me very uncomfortable. Students are not
> lab rats running through a maze acting and reacting like robots. This
> might work for a while but I hope that we are not training robots.
>
> On 12/10/11, bracchus wrote:
>>
>>> Is that really what's getting you down? Having to say those few words
>>> every day?
>>
>> When I read all of these stories about how other teachers' students
>> just walk in and get to work, yes it does get me down.
>>
>> And I'd LOVE to see Harry Wong come to my class and rehearse with my
>> students how to sit down and get out their notebooks and texts

Posts on this thread, including this one