Prepare yourself.
Thousands of readers opened the “Confessions of a Teacher in a No-Excuses Charter School.”
Many were horrified. Some couldn’t believe what she wrote.
Some said that there are certain kinds of students who come from dysfunctional homes and need this sort of structure.
She sent me this video, which is a demonstration of robotic responses in “Whole Brain Teaching.”
What do you think of this as education?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sit! Speak!! Roll over! Good dogs.
This is bizarre and disturbing. Teaching is supposed to be about more than training children to be obedient.
Somehow I doubt this how they teach at Sidwell Friends, the Chicago Lab School, or Lakeside.
Concerned Citizen: you are gently making a point that eviscerates this sort of charterite/privatizer pedagogy increasingly mandated for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN.
I want every shill and troll who infests this blog to go to the following websites and point to Whole Brain Teaching in practice where the leaders of the “new civil rights movement of our time” have sent or are now sending THEIR OWN CHILDREN.
Link: http://www.sidwell.edu [Barack Obama]
Link: http://www.lakesideschool.org [Bill Gates]
Link: http://www.harpethhall.org [Michelle Rhee]
Link: http://www.delbarton.org [Chris Christie]
Link: http://www.spenceschool.org [Michael Bloomberg]
Link: http://www.ucls.uchicago.edu [Rahm Emaneul]
And while they’re at it, point to a radical shift in time, attention and resources to Common Core and high-stakes standardized testing at these institutions.
This is not like a standardized test with its “misleads/decoys/distractors.” No evasion. No double standards. No fuming and fussing meant to detour the discussion onto irrelevant topics. And last but not least, absolutely no use of your favorite teflon defense: ad hominem attacks.
Your silence [that includes use of the above] will be consent to the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the charterite/privatizer movement.
Or will you continue to stick, hard and fast, to your most sacred Marxist principles:
“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
¿?
Groucho. There’s another more famous?
😎
My mouth remains agape as I write this. Is this really real? Absolutely horrifying. I feel sick.
This is chilling. It feels very much like every totalitarian system I’ve read about.
It is a mindset of elitsm unfortunately espoused by many liberals. I witnessed the same thing in an organization called BRIDGE International Academies that is building low cost private schools in Africa and India. The model here is that they train high school graduates from the low income communities who didn’t make the cut to enter public universities. These high school graduates are given highly scripted lessons written by Harvard grads who are just ever so smart. These robotic teachers teach their robotic low income kids in their crowded classrooms. They are bypassing government schools and other private schools in slums using their own metrics and some local metrics. So the argument is, something is better than nothing right? These people can’t think for themselves so we the loving and kindhearted liberals will come in and save them and think for them. Same thinking by the Moskowitzes and Camis and Kopps of the world. We the mostly white Ivy League educated elite will save the poor inner city blacks and browns from themselves.
I have to say that as a TFA alumnus of color I am utterly ashamed that I was hoodwinked as an idealistic 21 year old into believing this rhetoric. I hope to continue speaking out and telling people that this thinking only serves to perpetuate and deepen the class and economic divisions in our society and in the world. Really, I can’t think of any benefit that comes from this sort of education.
“espoused by many liberals”? Maybe neoliberals. But no progressive I know would tout drek like this and call it education.
I think you’re confusing naive idealism with liberalism.
agreed. faux liberals I guess, but people who identify themselves as liberals on the political spectrum. Michelle Rhee and Cory Booker identify as liberals but their practice and beliefs certainly don’t make them liberals.
Indeed not. Rhee is to liberal as Paul Ryan is to intellectual.
Horrible horrible! It reminds me of Sgt. Carter on Gomer Pyle. Of course, elite schools treat their children with respect as individuals. Their parents would NEVER put up with this method.
I was watching this just now and my boyfriend asked: “WHAT IS THAT?” I explained, and he said, “That is ridiculous.” He’s a Wharton MBA graduate in entrepreneurial studies, and has a logical computer database engineer brain. I am a writer and teach writing (as well as being a parent and a recovered Wall Streeter) and I was similarly appalled. We have two people with very different strengths, both public school educated, and successful in their own right, watching this and shaking their heads, wondering how this is supposed to benefit our country in the 21st C global economy, which prizes creativity, flexibility, the ability to synthesize information from various disciplines to create something new?
That’s one of the many, many things that gets me so angry about billionaires dictating public education policy. The rhetoric is that it is for “national security” and the future economic wellbeing of our nation, but in reality this kind of militaristic rote thinking will achieve the exact opposite.
I lasted 53 seconds before I had to stop it. What a moron. And he’s SELLING this tripe.
More like half-assed teaching. Good for “those” kinds of children, of course.
53 seconds is about all I lasted too when I saw Chris Biffle speak at a week-long conference at Penn State York in June 2012. Parroting his responses was indeed moronic, the noise was deafening, and I was disgusted by his insistence that this was “whole brain” and “power” teaching. More like no brain and disempowered teaching, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
The behavior routines are obviously over the top, but the other issues are not a surprise, where teachers are second guessed constantly to keep them in the same condition as the students. If this is a new teacher, she may have been a little idealistic. Things like this are in all of the schools as they all are hiring “staff developers” for many of these “games” and are in the “best” schools. Every teacher is watching his/her back.
When I was a teacher, we all wanted to be in the best schools in the district. After NCLB there were no longer best schools.
We’re confusing teaching and training. This is an extremely effective training technique.
For critical thinking and higher level learning, not so much.
Sent from my iPad, which likes to change my words and spelling.
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Agreed
This looks just like Army training, call and repeat. I wonder if that isn’t where this idea came from?
This is not “teaching”, this is “indoctrination”. It is “conditioning” like that used to train circus animals. In this case, it is designed to “break the will” of a child by not allowing them to use their own imagination or think for themselves. These children will actually be “brainwashed” as in the Stockholm Syndrome.
This method called Schwarze Pädagogik was used for training children in Germany for generations leading up to WWII. This guy, Chris Billfe, looks more like a prison guard at
Abu Ghraib than a “teacher”. What legitimate educator would actually buy into a program like “Whole Brain Learning”?
There is something very SINISTER about this method, as well as the Common Core reform movement in general. Any program that is designed to “break” children should be immediately recognized and banned.
What has happened to cause parents and educators to become so passive and docile that they would not recognize this as abuse, and would allow children to be mistreated in this way? Is it because they are products of this abusive authoritarian society that we have become?
Reading the “Whole Brain” teacher article by the former teacher was quite shocking to me. I actually incorporate some of the management procedures listed, but they are my decisions to make. This method of teaching assumes the teacher is not educated and can’t make any intelligent decisions about education and what will help her students. I’ve been really upset and horrified about the assault on public education and the funding crises in the School District of Philadelphia. When I go to school on Monday, I am going to thank my principal for trusting and believing in me. He knows I will help my students succeed and, although I follow our district’s curriculum, I can make my own decisions how to best serve my first grade students and help build the foundation for their future.
Your support in children and public education is so appreciated by all teachers.
This is a brainwashing technique that espouses compliance above all else. Very very disturbing. Just as disturbing, though, is that the program is put into practice. ..Idealism in education embraces the myriad teaching strategies that cultivate inquiry and engender wonder and curiosity.Any teacher knows that. How is it, then, that these teachers embrace and implement such a counterintuitive pedagogy…though, true, this is not pedagogy. Training, as mentioned above. Think of how this method actually places the children at risk;when one’s capability of thinking for themself is methodically extinguished, the level of vulnerability increases.
I used to be impressed with this idea and I guess in limited attention getting techniques it can be useful to get a group of students to focus on you for a minute. However it does seem very “nazi-like” with the automaton responses. Kind of like those mindless state tests? Automated responses are the “soup d’jour” these days. Hmmm
Does Chris Biffle have anything to do with an actual school or is this just something his company posted on you tube? According to this article (http://www.ohio.com/news/local-news/teachers-learn-ways-to-keep-students-attention-but-are-brain-claims-valid-1.319731) the company “receives speaking fees for seminars, but otherwise offers videos, e-books and other materials to teachers for free.”
You’ll see the same techniques here, at a graduate school that produces teachers for “no excuses” charter chains.
It’s the same approach:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/is-filling-the-pail-any-way-to-train-teachers/2012/07/04/gJQADViVOW_blog.html
It would be interesting to see if actual schools use the approach to education advocated in the video of the post.
It is interesting how sensibilities change. The writer of the Post article was horrified to,see that student grades were posted for all to see. At one time that was accepted procedure at many institutions. It still is, in affect, at some classes at my local high school where the top exam score is announced and the grade scale is constructed based on that score (students have a very good sense of who gets the top scores on the exams)
Posting students’ grades in public is a violation of FERPA. If you are an educator you should know that. If your high school is indeed practicing this, they need to be reported:
Call 1-800-USA-LEARN or http://www2.ed.gov/policy/ferpa
My point was that in the pre Ferpa days it was a fairly common practice.
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), PL 93-380, aka the Buckley Amendment, was first enacted in 1974, so you are talking about 40 years ago –which is not exactly yesterday for most people here. How many can readily recall education under President Ford? Here’s a hint: The following year, Congress enacted PL 94-142…
In the original article the teacher from the charter school explained that she was mandated in using this technique because it is used in all the chain’s charter schools. Several commenters agreed that this technique is also used in their charter schools so, yes, it is used in actual “schools” where non-experienced teachers are employed and where compliance is valued above all other things in children.
Robotic and horrific!!!
The trouble with half-baked half-brain so-called innovative ideas…they are exactly THAT!
Children in Poverty have always been used as guinea pigs for Non-Educators to try their quick fixes for Poverty Programs. Many of these children were unlucky and picked the wrong parents at birth, resulting in a life of crime, drugs and abuse. These No-good-DoGooders then decide these children need structure. Sound familiar? Structure interpreted as punishment, boot amps, yelling, no excuses, no breaks, no smiles, sit down & shut up strategies. What?
Structure is very affective when administered quietly, predictably, supportively, kindly, and caringly. Try it, it will also lower everybody’s blood pressure and save their hearing.
This video goes to show you…some people will follow almost anything and our children are the victims. Why didn’t the teacher teach American Sign Language. Would be much more applicable and productive.
What a Joke! I bet Arne & Gates loved it.
Non-Educators love seeing Black and Brown children dance, sing and shout.
Stupid!! Another group of vulnerable kids with a wasted education.
As far as I can tell, the person in this video does not teach any actual students. He and his company try to persuade teachers to use these methods by giving seminars and class material.
Well, if he doesn’t actually teach any students why the hell would I listen to his crap?
You would have to ask Dr. Ravitch why it was posted. There are any number of youtube videos that claim to have revolutionary ways to do anything. Run a search for hair restoration formula in youtube and see what you get.
te, your close reading was flawed here. Diane explained that the source for this video was a previous posting by an ex-charter school teacher who left due to this abusive approach to “teaching”.
Funny how teachingeconomist uses single examples, as he did recently, about 1 math student whose teacher refused to teach him calculus, as an exemplar of what is wrong with math education and public schools in general.
Or examples from his children’s local schools. Yet when Diane or another commenter provides a clearly popular and widely used exemplar he claims that it is just one technique among many and is, therefore, meaningless. Nice how the deck always stacks in your favor, eh te?
I use examples rather than general claims to be concrete. That is why I don’t talk about charter schools, but a charter school. If folks make general claims, they should apply to every example. If not, a more nuanced claim is called for.
Amazing! I wonder what those kids are realing thinking! My great-niece would probably get up and tell him some choice words, which I don’t endorse. However, in this case, I might.
Amazing! I wonder what those kids are really thinking! My great-niece would probably get up and tell him some choice words, which I don’t endorse. However, in this case, I might.
I don’t know why everyone ignores the words ed reformers use.
“Replicable” and “scaleable” mean something. The idea is to come up with a process that “works” and apply it everywhere.
It’s interesting to watch it come full-circle, become standardized, but did the people who were insisting it was about “small schools” and “creativity” and “choice” not know this was where they would end up?
It can’t go any other way when you start with the goals of “replicable” and “scaleable”.
You can’t have a national chain of schools all doing different things, and these are national chains.
“At the Relay Graduate School of Education (RGSE), teacher education that balances research, theory and practice has been replaced by ‘filling the pail’ training. Designed to serve the needs of three charter school chains — KIPP, Achievement First and Uncommon Schools— RGSE has no university affiliation, yet awards masters degrees in New York State.
I invite readers to watch the Relay Graduate School of Education video entitled “Rigorous Classroom Discussion,” which you can find here. Go to the link and look for the title. In the video, the teacher barks commands and questions, often with the affect and speed of a drill sergeant. ”
“I do not fault the teacher in the video for her style. She is performing as taught by a system that, in my opinion, better prepares students for the dutiful obedience of the military than for the intellectual challenges they will encounter in college. In schools taught by RGSE teachers, the Common Core State Standards will be, I fear, merely heavier rocks in the pail.”
You’ll see the same techniques in the video.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/is-filling-the-pail-any-way-to-train-teachers/2012/07/04/gJQADViVOW_blog.html
I think charter schools probably end up as a “big four” of authorizers creating the same kind of “no excuses” schools in every or any location. I also think that was inevitable, given the language they use and the goals they have. They want to replicate and scale up. That means standardize. It can’t end any other way.
National Chain Schools are definitely where we are headed. It can be this training video or another but in the end, the mentality is all the same. The described behavior of the adult team is quite familiar and I am sorry that our newbie had to endure it without the benefit of perspective and resistance from a war horse who would not tolerate the subversion via silence. But that professional has been run off the premises by the robots running this rag-tag pacification program. Creative, critical thinking democracy erased by a series of finger prompts goes way past “disturbing”.
I would dearly love to see one of these “teachers” go into a corporate training meeting or a college class and start their barking seal “lesson” just to see how less-vulnerable adults (as opposed to completely-vulnerable children) would react to this abuse.
You mean like in military academies, boot camp, or the football practice field?
No, once again you ignore my actual statement and try to straw man me, te.
Boot camps, football practice, and military academies are NOT the same thing as a corporate training meeting or a college class.
Why do you purposely seek to confuse and obfuscate? Is that inherent in the study of economics or just a particular school of though in economics?
Chris, I was focused on the “less-vulnerable adults” section of your comment. Was that not the most important part?
No, because beginning soldiers, football players, and military academy students (my nephew was one) are NOT the same thing as autonomous adults. They are still in vulnerable positions where questioning or disagreeing will result in immediate negative consequences.
Why am I not surprised that you are supportive of bullying military leaders and coaches? The national scandal of high-level college and professional coaches and players being called to account and fired over bullying and the never-ending military bullying and sexual assault scandals might give a clue that this is not a healthy or safe way to run a circus even if it’s the way we’ve always done it and it didn’t hurt you.
I think it is possible that different teaching approaches can benefit different students, given the wide variety of students in the United States. Some students go to military schools, which are much more authoritarian than progressive schools. Should those military schools be closed? Sports coaching is the last area of public schools where it is permitted, and often encouraged, that students are physically challenged or abused, depending on your perspective. Should high school sports be reformed or banned?
Was ready to shut the video off after about 30 seconds of the actual “training” but told myself, “you’ve got to watch the whole thing”. Couldn’t do it, last another minute and a half and had to stop.
If I were a student I’d be doing those gestures with my middle finger sticking prominently out, when sitting with the hands on desk I’d be wagging my middle finger all the while thinking thoughts like “Go F yourself, ES&D you bastard, why did I get stuck in this sh!thole of a class. How can I get back at this a$$wipe.”
The unspoken curriculum and what students take out of the experiences are not usually what the teacher wants.
If you were at a KIPP school or the like, Duane, you would then be forced to turn your shirt inside out (the scarlet A), sit alone at lunch, cause your “teammates” to be punished (peer pressure manipulation), earned an extra hour of mind control at the end of the already too-long day, etc. etc.
All in service of making poor brown children “successful” through passivity, middle class white cultural norms, and unquestioning obedience to their usually white superiors.
You will comply or you will be dismissed. Now that would be a lucky break, eh?
If there is a high school sports program at Duane’s high school, I have little doubt he could see some form of group punishment every week.
“Should high school sports be reformed or banned?”
Yup.
Before we all jump to conclusions and call this Nazi-like and sinister, let’s consider the context. He’s not conducting a lesson plan. He’s setting up ground rules for the semester. The kids like it. Look at their faces. They are engaged and paying attention. They have an opportunity to teach another. I think it’s great. I had low level high school students who were high, tried to sleep in class, tried to text constantly, who could have benefitted from this tremendously. He has five rules for behavior. That’s not a lot. However, I will say that number five, keep your teacher happy, would not have been allowed in my school, unfortunately. This is 60s style, and with technology and instant access to information, the learning curve for students has actually declined since the 60s. Let’s not be so hasty to judge.
I think you would have found that those “low level, high” high school students would not have done this for you. They would have taken offense — I certainly would have. I wouldn’t do this now — ever, anywhere. If kids don’t have mental problems or engagement problems, they don’t need this. If they do have mental problems or engagement problems, this won’t fix them.
Also, the point of the video is you set this up as the way class will be conducted over the year / semester.
Finally, I don’t know what you mean by ’60s style — I was in middle school in the late ’60s and high school early ’70s and I NEVER saw or heard tell of anything whatsoever like this.
Every year I hear from teachers like you that my very poor 1st grade kids of color and ELL’s, who are “like that” can’t possibly be trusted to work independently. They can’t possibly be trusted to use materials wisely and take care of them. They can’t possibly be given choices in what and how they do things. They will quickly spin out of control and chaos will reign.
And every year I tell these teachers they are wrong. Come to my classroom and see. Within 6 weeks my kids read independently for 20 minutes. They care for pencils, glue sticks, sticky notes, crayons, markers, scissors, and art supplies with care and respect and they last the whole year. Subs tell me that the class runs itself, when they have the courage to let the kids work as I tell them too in my lesson plans. They are amazed.
How did I do this? Not with behavioral trickery or barking lessons or military drills but with care, trust, lots of practice, and discussion. The kids police each other and when someone acts out, and they do, the other kids tell them to stop interfering with their learning because I taught them to do that.
I’ve often found in my 20 years of teaching that teachers who have contempt for their students and who have lots of problems with classroom management like to blame the kids rather than examining their own practices and procedures. I was like that as a new, young teacher but I spent years seeking out a better way.
Some resources I recommend for treating kids respectfully and with trust and care:
Conscious Discpline with Dr. Becky Bailey
https://consciousdiscipline.com
Effective Teaching with Harry and Rosemary Wong
https://www.effectiveteaching.com
The Responsive Classroom
https://www.responsiveclassroom.org
These are just 3 of the many outstanding resources that actually work with kids because they expect the adult (the teacher) to create a warm, safe, productive learning atmosphere by teaching and leading the children rather than by coercing them to be compliant through fear.
I take the most difficult kids every single year and these systems work for me. My class is not perfect but it is not out of control either. My kids work quietly, independently, and with choices throughout the day while I work with individuals and small groups.
This, of course, is not acceptable to the reformers, so I will take these techniques and experiences with me when I leave the profession at the end of next year.
I’d recommend Alfie Kohn’s BEYOND DISCIPLINE.
This is the charter school bill that is moving thru the US Congress:
“As a refresher, the Miller-Kline charter bill from 2011 would have allowed states to tap federal funds to replicate charter school models that have a track record of success. It also sought to help charters gain access to high-quality facilities and encouraged states to work with charters to help them serve special populations, such as students in special education.
The major difference this time around, sources say, could be a greater emphasis on ensuring that federal funding goes to Charter Management Organizations (such as KIPP, or Aspire). That’s something U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has supported, and it’s a piece of a bipartisan charter school bill written by Reps. Jared Polis, D-Col., and Tom Petri, R-Wis.”
REPLICATE models that have a “track record” of success and give federal funding to charter management organizations to REPLICATE that process and formula.
This isn’t going to end up “small, local and creative”. They know they can’t control quality and repeat results that way, nationally.
It is going to end up with charter schools that all use the KIPP and Aspire model. Indeed, that is the INTENDED RESULT. Replicable and scaleable. If the money all goes to CMO’s like KIPP and Aspire, the schools will all look like KIPP and Aspire schools.
I think the challenge will be to keep local public schools local, ie: NOT modeled on charter chains, because obviously our lawmakers have found their favorite approach and it is KIPP and Aspire. But just for poor, working and middle class kids, of course.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2014/03/house_education_leaders_workin.html
This is the one of the most ridiculous and disturbing videos I have ever seen. What is even more disturbing is that schools are spending money and wasting time on something so profoundly disturbing. How do parents allow this type of indoctrination to be initiated upon their children especially with the availability of videos showing it in action? How do parents give permission to allow their children to be put in a video of this type? Very very disturbing.
The “no excuses” in urban areas and not in suburban areas is something that ed reformers should address.
Someone posted a Harvard study here the other day to “prove” that Boston charter schools score higher on standardized tests, but that isn’t all the study said.
The study said that urban charters that use that model score higher on standardized tests. It also said that suburban charters that DON’T use that model fare worse than ordinary public schools.
So it’s not “charter schools”, it’s a specific chain of charter schools with a specific method.
What I always go back to in ed reform is none of these people went to schools like this, and yet here they are, smart enough to “transform” every public school in the country into their narrow view of what public schools should be.
How did they reach these great lobbying and punditry heights without waggling their fingers and responding in unison to prompts in school?
They don’t do this stuff at Maumee Valley Country Day, where Michelle Rhee went to school. She seems to be career-ready.
Arne Duncan @arneduncan 21h
Preschool’s bipartisan expansion continues! Congrats to Indiana on the Hoosier State’s first-ever funding of PreK http://indy.st/1ft7gcZ
Deliberately deceptive.
Pence took 10 million from existing programs for poor children and families and is using it to fund a preschool pilot.
He’s robbing Peter to pay Paul, which Duncan must know.
Duncan is a purely political animal. It’s all marketing and spin.
I would guess that he’s being advised by Jeb Bush. That’s exactly what Bush did with Florida lottery money — see, the lottery added X million dollars to schools! while he quietly subtracted the same amount from the general fund used to pay for schools.
Or like Christie Todd Whitman did when she magically “fixed” the state’s obligation deficit for the pension funds by accounting trickery and not paying anything into the fund. Now, decades later, the fund is around $50 billion short so Chris Christie retroactively changed the state’s pension obligation and is underfunding it again.
It’s amazing what these political criminals get away with, isn’t it? While poor and working folks face years in prison for making simple mistakes or one bad choice.
So — the goal, right ? is to prepare kids for college or the workforce. We want kids to engage in critical thinking and problem solving and be able to communicate with each other and to “think outside the box”. This isn’t going to cut it — or teach them anything. This is so bad.
And, now I understand — when I attended a Smarter Balanced conference at West Ed in SFCA, the lady started our sessions with something like this. I was one of a small group of people that met her “when I say ______, you say ________” with stony silence. The teachers who did respond in this way must have seen this before — I hadn’t. I was offended — I cannot imagine being treated this way, period. All of your outside the box thinkers will be completely alienated by this approach.
A great test for is something OK: “Would the private schools that people pay to go to (not charters) do it ?” If not, then it’s not OK. This sort of thing wouldn’t pass that test.
Being positive: kids need to learn the rules “only one person talking at once”, etc. AND they need to learn them in the usual, human interaction way, not THIS way.
Notice the economic class makeup of the students in the classroom. Bill Gates and the rest of that gang would never tolerate this for their children.
These students are being prepared for the military or prison.
Does Chris Biffle actually have any students?
Watch the video. They’re all using the same method, and this is the video the Relay school uses to promote the school. It’s their promotion video:
“I invite readers to watch the Relay Graduate School of Education video entitled “Rigorous Classroom Discussion,” which you can find here. Go to the link and look for the title. In the video, the teacher barks commands and questions, often with the affect and speed of a drill sergeant. The questions concern the concept of a “character trait” but are low-level, often in a ‘fill in the blank’ format. The teacher cuts the student off as he attempts to answer the question. Students engage in the bizarre behavior of wiggling their fingers to send ‘energy’ to a young man, Omari, put on the spot by the teacher. Students’ fingers point to their temple and they wiggle hands in the air to send signals. Hands shoot up before the question is asked, and think time is never given to formulate thoughtful answers. When Omari confuses the word ‘ambition’ with ‘anxious’ (an error that is repeated by a classmate), you know that is how he is feeling at the moment. As the video closes with the command, “hands down, star position, continue reading” there is not the warmth of a teacher smile, nor the utterance of ‘please’. The original question is forgotten and you are left to wonder if anyone understands what a character trait is. The pail was filled with ‘something’ and the teacher moves on.
I do not fault the teacher in the video for her style. She is performing as taught by a system that, in my opinion, better prepares students for the dutiful obedience of the military than for the intellectual challenges they will encounter in college. In schools taught by RGSE teachers, the Common Core State Standards will be, I fear, merely heavier rocks in the pail.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/is-filling-the-pail-any-way-to-train-teachers/2012/07/04/gJQADViVOW_blog.html
I certainly agree that it would make more sense to look at the teaching techniques suggested by a school than ones posted by a company on youtube.
te, you are determined, for some reason, to imply that these are not techniques that are actually in use in real schools. They are quite common and used in many, many charter chains, because they hire young, inexperienced teachers and TFA volunteers who have no classroom management skills.
This methodology has been repeatedly confirmed to be in use in charters by many commenters here.
Why do you persist in ignoring that?
Chris,
I have no doubt there are a huge variety of teaching techniques used in charter schools, but that is irrelevant to the orthodox position here that ALL charter schools be closed, no matter what approach to teaching us used by the school. KIPP and Walton Rural Center alike.
I must say, te, your spinning and obfuscation skills are magnificent! You can make the clearest, easiest, most factually correct point as murky as pond water. You are a true economist, sir! I salute you!
A moment of silence for TE.
I gave up a long time ago. Pointless never ending drivel.
Linda and Susan are right about TE, who now provides anecdotes and cites the very few exceptions to the rule that exist, in order to continue to promote his beloved charters. That’s like overlooking the behavior of Germans during World War II because not everyone in the country belonged to the Nazi party. No, the entire nation had to be brought down, not just the Nazis. (As a Jew, I reserve the right to draw such analogies anywhere in a conversation, so forget about pulling the Godwin’s law card, TE.)
Ignore TE and anyone else who is willing to sacrifice public education to privatizers just because there might be a very small handful of outliers.
i like magnet schools as well, and always speak about choice schools. I have taken a variety of opinions on a variety of issues. I try to speak about concrete examples, rather than making blanket claims.
The problem with making blanket statements is that they claim to cover everything. In a thread not long ago, rural charter schools were condemned. I had read about the Walton, Kansas charter school, a rural school by anyones reckoning (the town has fewer than 400 residents) and asked if that school should be shut down. If the answer is yes, so be it. If the answer is no, the argument must distinguish between rural charters that are to be shut down and rural charters that are not to be shut down.
What is right and good for student learning should be able to be done within the school system, not left to privatizers that siphon funds from public schools.
All done here. Not going to have this conversation with you again for the umpteenth time.
What is right and good differs from student to student. I hope each student is able to find their own path.
The approach used in the video on this page, which was described on this blog earlier this week by a former charter school teacher, treats all children as if they are ONE student. This method is often implemented in military-style no-excuses charters schools and it is as much about requiring student obedience 100% of the time as it is about making teachers compliant, but you discounted the concerns about this that have been raised by people here. Get off the charter soap box and learn something from the genuine K-12 teachers here, who know much more than you about child development, respecting students and addressing individual differences.
I am not on the charter soap box, but I am on the choice soap box. This is a fairly commonly held position: almost everyone believes high school students should be given choices in courses. I would just allow them to routinely choose courses outside the school door. Allowing students to choose whole schools will free schools from attempting to be all things to all students, an impossible task.
You think we don’t see the pattern? You repeatedly cite and advocate for charters that you happen to like. Despite the many examples of deleterious outcomes from charters siphoning funds and resources from districts, including kids pushed out of their neighborhood schools and buildings turned over to privatizers, to make way for charter expansion, you are willing to sacrifice public schools for the “choice” of a two (or three) tiered system of education, where kids are cherry-picked by privatizers –the real ones getting the choices– and neighborhood schools are left as dumping grounds for kids that no one else wants.
I am an advocate for student choice in and between schools first and foremost. Many of the criticisms of charter schools are also criticisms of magnet schools, especially your concerns about “cherry picking” students, but also funding issues, space issues, etc. I have argued many times that the practice of using street addresses to assign students to schools forces local school boards to impose a uniformity across schools in a district so that the arbitrary nature of the admission system is somewhat defendable.
I am comfortable with a well regulated system of charter schools as a way that choices can be provided. I do think that the smaller scale of charter schools along with family choice can reduce the number of regulations that apply to charter schools compared to a traditional public system where the school administrators run the largest single employer in a city, town, or county and the students are arbitrarily assigned to a school.
I have also taken a variety of positions on other issues that have come up on this blog over the years. For example, I think a good system of peer evaluation of teachers is probably the best way to go in evaluating teacher performance, I think that defined contribution pension systems can solve some of the problems with teacher pensions that are discussed here, and I think teacher training needs to be improved.
So there it is folks, susannunes was right. TE really is a Libertarian at bottom.
Whether he says so or not, he supports right-wing ideologies and doctrines, since he thinks that instead of providing a public good, as well as democratic representation in education, neighborhood schools are basically a monopoly.
He continues to proffer the unsubstantiated claim that neighborhood schools must all be uniform, despite the numerous examples of choices within districts people have repeatedly described to him.
He is also on board with privatization, which removes democracy from education, and he supports having different rules for different folks –which already exists under current charter school laws regardless of scale.
And he wants to gut teacher’s pension plans, despite the fact that teachers already pay into them their fair share.
FoxNews is alive right here.
Reteach,
“Public good” has a specific meaning in economics. It is a good or service that is not rival, you and someone else can consume it at the same time without interfering with each other, and is not excludable, that is you can not be prevented from consuming the good or using the service if you have not paid for it.
In that sense, education is not a public good at all. It is certainly excludable as school districts restrict students from attending particular schools all the time and often seek out and occasionally jail parents for sending their children to unauthorized schools. As many here point out, classes become rival as they become crowded, so we want to limit class, and perhaps school size so the congestion is not as bad. Schools, traditional public, private, or charter are what is usually called a club good.
Once again, I have championed choice in all its forms, charter or magnet. I have argued in favor of magnet schools and against traditional zoned schools. The major outcome of using geographically based admission systems in uniformity within districts and increasing uniformity across districts. This uniformity is forcefully opposed in threads about the common core, enthusiastically embraced in threads about traditional zoned schools.
Many who post here are concerned that a large number of teachers will retire before being vested in a pension fund. Many here are concerned that there is an incentive to fire teachers just before the are fully qualified for a pension fund. Many here are stuck in districts they do not like because they will lose their pension funds. Many here are concerned that the politicians will not keep their future promises about paying pensions. All these concerns can be addressed by a change to a defined contribution system. You might want to think about it. Ask Dr. Ravitch how she and her fellow professors at NYU feel about their defined contribution pension system.
You left out my arguing in favor of a peer evaluation system.
If we wanted the Libertarian recap, we’d turn on FoxNews.
Neather I nor Fox News takes a libertarian point of view. I see too much gain from cooperating together and too many circumstances where the decentralized process of a market fails and Fox News takes too socially conservative a line to be thought of as libertarian.
I saw an interesting legal question regarding “opt out” on an “opt out” site.
A charter parent asked if “opting out” would violate the “parent agreement” she signed that is a condition of attending the charter school.
Good question! I think it does.
I think the contract with the privately-run charter trumps state law, and if she violates the contract they can boot her kid, because charters are not public schools according to numerous legal opinions, including the NLRB.
Can charter parents opt out without violating these contracts they signed?
If you mean opting out of standardized testing in charter schools, the parent should have been given a copy of the contract that she signed and she should review it to see if it specifically stipulated that she was agreeing to have her child included in all testing. If she doesn’t have a copy of the contract, she should ask the school for one.
This method of “conditioning” children with authoritarian fear and intimidation is “abusive”. It is the same as “bullying”. It’s purpose is to “break” children. Adults who use and teach this method obviously grew up in a dysfunctional environment of “bullying”, so it is “normal” for them, but it is NOT normal by society’s standards.
In Marine Boot Camp it is effective for training adults to be “killers”, but with young children it will condition them to become obedient and loyal to abusive authority. It will
condition children to become “slaves” or robots.
When young children are trapped in an environment of authoritarian fear and intimidation, they can be trained to do anything that the ‘master” demands. They can be “conditioned” to memorize facts to pass test, or clap their hands in unison, or become sex slaves.
Since “conditioning” is on a spectrum, the damage is determined by the amount of “control”. If children have this authoritarian method used both at home and at school, the psychological damage will be severe.
Another name for this method is “dominance” or the slave/master style of conditioning. Children will become “self-punishing” or masochistic. Many New York psychologists have started calling this “self punishing” behavior in children the “Common Core Syndrome”.
When these “broken” children become adults, they will have a “fragmented self”. They will not have their own identity or a strong sense of self, since they were forced as children to model after their abusers. Their identity will be codependent with their abusers. Their behaviors would most likely become in adulthood the psychiatric disorders of Borderline, Narcissistic, or DID.
This harsh authoritarian management style for training children is like a psychological plague that has become increasingly pervasive in schools for three decades. We can now see the products of this poisonous pedagogy in our adult society.
People who are in charge of children and are insecure with themselves (have paranoia and fear the children will get out of control), will have an obsessive need for control. This is the hallmark of a bully. It has caused our teachers and administrators to be more like gestapo than empathic humans. Unless we learn to recognize “bullying”, and call it what it is, we will allow this paranoia of “managing” and “training” children to bring on
“totalitarianism”.
A book that describes this method of”scapegoating’ children is called CHILDISM, by the Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth young-Bruehl. I strongly recommend everyone read it.
Thank you so much for validating what I have known for years! I have taken a lot of heat and developed a reputation as “that teacher” for questioning these abusive approaches to classroom management and working with children.
Alice Miller also wrote about this “search for identity” in her excellent book “The Drama of the Gifted Child”.
Unfortunately, kind and compassionate teachers like you are often “scapegoated” by the “bullying” teachers, especially in today’s schools where the administrators tend to be “bullies” themselves, and model that behavior for the subservient employees.
It reminds me of the old newsreels of Hitler Youth indoctrination. Baldur von Schirach would be proud.
This is a great interim program for inexperienced teachers. As soon as they build the robots who can stand to do this without feeling like dog trainers they’ll be able to replace all the teachers just like they did in most of our rapidly disappearing manufacturing plants. Think of how much money will be saved… no salaries, no pensions, no healthcare just a couple of IT guys keeping the machines running.
This Biffle guy is probably really popular with the many administrators who left the scary classroom so they could tell everyone else how to teach.
I agree! This abuse is shameful and disgusting! Children are not Dogs and should not be treated like Dogs!
Who would treat their dog that badly?
This is ridiculous. It’s developmentally inappropriate for Your average Middle school student. This is a Kindergarten routine. I’d like to see them try this in the south Bronx. This guy wouldn’t make it to his car after he gets done. Trust they would slash his tires if he did make it out of the building.
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teachingeconomist
March 29, 2014 at 10:34 am
I certainly agree that it would make more sense to look at the teaching techniques suggested by a school than ones posted by a company on youtube.
But these are the celebrated charters! They use these exact methods. The Gold Standard that we’re all told about constantly. We’re told public schools have to adopt these methods.
How do you reconcile the oft-stated goal of ed reformers to “scale up” and “replicate” with what they sold to the public which is “choice” and “creativity” and “local”?
The whole point of this “movement” was to use charters as a lab for public schools. This isn’t a “lab”, it’s a factory. The US House is endorsing this model with federal subsidies. They want a few big authorizers to charter schools.
The entire ed reform “movement” is rife with these contradictory goals. The thing doesn’t hang together, on any level.
I am going to disagree about your view that charter schools will become anywhere as near standardized as current public schools. I think you can look at private schools to learn about the economics of a school. While there are certainly economies of scale (many students in my state suffer from opportunity on too small a scale, as the median high school has fewer than 250 students), there are also diseconomies of scale.
If economies of scale where so important, we wouldn’t we expect to see Phillips Exeter campuses in most major cities? After all, they have been teaching students for well over 200 years and might have been expected to figure the scale thing out by now.
Even if a school did figure out a best approach (I doubt that would happen as there are likely to be many best approaches, which is why I think the centralization of the traditional public school system is an issue), the knowledge of the best approach is simply that, knowledge. The school will not be able to take significant advantage of that knowledge, because it is too easy for others to learn it.
Your argument is deeply flawed on several levels, the first being that if Philips Exeter were cloned then it would no longer be Philips Exeter. One of the main draws of school like that are the exclusivity and ensuring that your children are educated with the “right” peer group to ensure maintenance of their economic and social status.
The charter chains are the exact opposite and follow the model of WalMart in standardizing delivery of goods and services with a standardized methodology of management.
That is the ambition of many of the charter chain tycoons — the dream of beaching the multibillion dollar WalMart of charter schools that dominates the national and international educational landscape. Possible? Who knows?
Of course parents like you who are mostly concerned with what your own children have available may opt for more exclusive venues when you can afford them and they are available for the unwashed masses of the average citizen, an 8th grade level education is sufficient for the coming age of service industries for the 1% being the only jobs available. So said the World Bank and the IMF several years ago.
Susan O’hanian documented all of this quite some time ago. Read her and be educated.
Chris,
I am a little uncomfortable with the phrase “parents like me”. My children, like my spouse and myself, have all attended zoned public schools. If you are concerned with the SES makeup of the schools, the elementary school had about 60% free and reduced price lunch eligible students, junior high was different for my middle and youngest, ranging from 40% to 60% eligible (my youngest got a transfer into the 60% eligible school) and all three (my oldest is my foster son that came to live with us when he was in high school) went to the assigned zoned public high school with 25% eligible.
Is that insufficient contact with the unwashed masses?
te, the truth hurts sometimes. I could go back in the archives and quote your comments back at you but I have better things to do this afternoon. I’m attending a workshop on homeless and hungry children.
Perhaps you can figure a way out of your own discomfort with the truth. I hope so.
What truth Chris?
I am really, really sick of you and your libertarian hogwash. I wish other posters would just refuse to respond to anything you write.
Note to posters here: Do NOT respond to teachingeconomist anymore. The passive-aggressive act is a hallmark of trolls. I don’t know who employs this troll, but he or she is not interested in facts. Libertarians never are.
susannunes, I often disagree with teachingeconomist, but he never presents an argument without reasonably good evidence or rationale. Your personal attack here has lost you a lot of respect with me.
susannunes, You have my respect! I admire anyone who calls it like they see it and stands up to people who prefer economics over the best interests of children and under-represented groups, including those in poverty, and our democracy.
This method immediately eliminates large groups of special education students from class participation such as deaf, (who already depend upon manual sign language for communication of conversation and academic content), hard of hearing (who wear hearing aids that amplify all sound and depend on teacher and peer FM use as well as minimal distractions during focus on content), auditory processing deficits (who experience temporal delays in cognitive understanding of auditory information) … Before you say, SO WHAT, .realize that these 3 categories of special education students can and often do maintain grade level achievement in regular mainstream classrooms utilizing inclusion supports and instructional accommodations. Most of my hearing impaired students are top achievers in their regular classroom and do go on to qualify for school district select admission programs (high achievers) in middle and high school …and then on to higher education programs. This method would be disastrous for them. For deaf students…there is no way for a sign language interpreter to communicate using 2 competing manual communication systems at once while simultaneously conveying academic content in lessons…and students with auditory processing problems would never keep up the pace. This is not multisensory teaching because that works when all the senses are involved in CONTENT…not nonsense. This is teaching kids regimented rote verbal responses….not content. My suggestion : why not just teach the kids manual sign language, at least it enables the communication of intelligent curricular content. Just visit Gallaudet University to see high achieving students (most from public schools) using effective manual communication that is backed by 200 years of research and evidence. Where will these students of great potential go ….back to isolation in special schools?
JoJo, they just exclude those children from most charter schools or restrict how many they must have to be in minimal compliance.
I use ASL as one of the signals my class uses to communicate with each other in order to not disturb those who are concentrating.
In the past I have had blind and deaf students as well as many on the autism spectrum and ADHD spectrum who have worked amazingly week with my child-centered, respectful approach and achieved quite impressive academic gains.
Here in Florida, however, those days are quickly ending. The state is removing most supports, including stand-alone ESE classrooms and support personnel, making all ESE certified teachers get general ed certification, and requiring all general certified teachers to get ESE certification. The goal will be standardized classes where this approach is used to treat all students what they call “equally”. It is sickening.
This is also the state where a profoundly brain damaged child without speech faculties who was fed liquids through a tube was asked to describe the taste of a peach on the FCAT test.
We are ruled by stupid, evil people.
Amazingly “well”. Dratted spellcheck! LOL
It also excludes ELLs who are just learning English, and who would be lost in the rapid flow of speaking. They would probably be singled out to be reprimanded for not being quick enough, too. I would not want to be taught like this, so why would i do it to my students?
Let me guess Diane, you created these “Whole Brain Teaching” posts just to make the Finns jealous. Can you imagine the outrage Finnish parents will display once they see what we’re on to.
It would be helpful if Finland would organize and help establish mental health intervention for US schools. What we need is “rehab”!
Clever marketing that plays on the legacy of educating the “whole child.”
This is clearly indoctrination.
Interesting that the performance required 30 minutes of practice before it was considered “good enough” for the You Tube video.
Unspeakable. I have been looking in vain online for any evidence that Biffle (creator of Whole Brain Teaching) has any background in early childhood education. Can’t find a thing. He’s a philosophy teacher at a community college in California – and from the reviews on ratemyprofessor, it looks like he does the same stuff in his college classroom. Unbelievable.
Who decides, in a school district, to adopt classroom techniques? Do they not think to ask whether the technique has any basis in research or best practices?
This method is not exclusive to charter schools. The “conditioning” of the authoritarian rigid Common Core Environment is similar.
The problem is …they start with young children in kindergarten who are just beginning to express their own independence and sense of self. These children are then forced into this indoctrination early and they do not have the freedom of imagination and self discovery to form their own identity. They become obedient and emotionally desensitized, since they have to repress their own emotions and needs to obey the commands of the “authority” who has absolute control over them. They may develop normal intellect, but their emotional development will be stunted and their “identity” will become an extension of their Narcissistic authority figure. They will become codependent. This method of Whole Brain Teaching creates an environment much like that of the rigid authoritarian Common Core Environment. It is the same model as a “dysfunctional” (covert Narcissistic) family.
People who grew up in “dysfunctional” systems like this were “hard wired” in childhood, and cannot recognize it as NOT NORMAL Their denial and narcissistic behavior keeps them from recognizing it or listening to others who might try to point it out.
It takes persistence from those who recognize it as NOT NORMAL to try to get intervention and protect children from this abuse.
well said, Mimi!!!
I had to check the URL – I thought it came from The Onion! It’s comical and frightening at the same time!
That was my reaction, too! The turn to your partner and teach had me convinced it was tongue in cheek. How can a roomful of kids talking at each other be considered teaching? I find that a little back and forth that includes a listening component is usually necessary.
Many people believe that the family shapes “character”; however, that is no longer true.
The child’s “environment” shapes their behavior, and the behaviors that shape their identity are “hard wired” in childhood.
The people they are connected with “emotionally” are the ones they usually identify with; however, when children are in a harsh authoritarian environment and are desensitized emotionally, they cannot form healthy attachments, either to people or to learning. It requires “emotions” to be attached to other people, and it requires “emotions’ to be inspired to “love learning”. Teachers influence a child’s emotional development and identity now more than most people realize. Unfortunately, the harsh rigid unemotional environment in most schools is causing children to feel “empty” inside and burned out.
When children are “dominated” by teachers and cannot form healthy attachments, but are forced to identify with authority figures who disrespect and mistreat them, they will become self-punishing (masochistic), or aggressive toward others (bullies).
Most elementary school teachers are women, and this is the period in a child’s life when identify is formed. It is now believed that the increase in violence toward women and disrespect for women in society is a result of boys being dominated by narcissistic women teachers during their developmental years in elementary school.
Since most children spend more face time with teachers than parents, they often do not have emotional attachments with either, especially if both are authoritarian and invalidating. Many parents have been indoctrinated by school to use the same punitive focus on performance/reward/punishment at home that is used at school, and many parents are hurried and functioning in chronic themselves and do not have skills to validate their children emotionally.
It’s going to take a complete paradigm shift to stop the wheels that are in motion now in US education. A good model to use would be to examine the success of the people in Reggio Emilia, Italy, following WWII. They were able to develop elementary schools to nurture their traumatized children back to health. I think that is what we need to do in the US now. Our children are suffering signs of trauma. We need to help them rather than causing them more trauma with the Common Core Environment.
” It is now believed that the increase in violence toward women and disrespect for women in society is a result of boys being dominated by narcissistic women teachers during their developmental years in elementary school. ”
Let’s just say that some authorities theorize that… Few societies have ever accorded women equal status to men. I do not think I need to catalog the abuses to which women have been subjected that would be hard to blame on authoritarian women teachers. As a teacher, I definitely will not take the blame for abusive parenting styles. While I have seen some bad teaching and poor administration, I have not had to teach in one of these gulag schools yet that you seem to think are the current standard. If they did exist in the numbers that you contend, I would say it is time to destroy public education. I hope you got carried away by your own hyperbole.
When you do have to teach in one of those gulag schools….then you will understand.
I have to agree with 2old2teach about the hyperbole, because the characterization of female teachers as authoritarian was generalized to all schools and nothing was mentioned about different types of schools.
I have worked in many inner-city neighborhood public schools and based on my observations, what Cherie Foster described is the exception, not the rule in neighborhood schools, as well as in magnets.
However, in no-excuses charter schools, behaviorist, military-style, authoritarian tactics from drill sergeant teachers are the rule not the exception (regardless of gender). This is a very important distinction!
yes yes yes
So I guess that means the impact of teachers is greater than we have been claiming up to now. Isn’t our impact as teachers supposed to be some portion of the 30% of in-school factors as opposed to the 70% (rounded numbers) of out of school factors that influence students? We can’t have it both ways.
For those of you old enough to remember MASH I have linked a video of Frank Burns using Whole Brain Teaching. 🙂
Love it!
That’s just beyond the pale. I only had to see a couple of minutes of this to be totally disgusted. It ought to be called “NO brain” teaching.
It is demeaning to kids. It shouldn’t even be necessary by middle school to teach classroom rules. They should have long since internalize the three principles of classroom/school behavior: “be safe, be responsible, be respectful.” You shouldn’t even need a “points system” for these students.
Is Biffle even a teacher?
Words fail. Well, almost. Here’s a few: horrifying, abusive and mindboggling. What sort of parent sees something like this and decides it’s what they want for their pet, er, I mean, child?
Just watched several of these “power teaching” style videos set in kinder and first grades. A lot of the techniques seem cute and fun for little kids. But as is usually the case for these types of demo videos, they feature 10 or 15 minute increments of time. I think it’s easy enough to maintain that level of controlled focus for short periods, especially with video cameras aimed at the students. But how is it sustained throughout a 5 or 6 hour school day? I cannot imagine myself, as an adult, chanting, gesturing and singing continuously, hours on end and it seems patently impossible for 6 and 7 year olds. Furthermore, many of the videos seem to focus on the control techniques themselves, which are only a means to an end. What do these techniques look like when actual content or skills are imparted? Again, how are they sustained without the inevitable diminishing returns?
WBT has been around for quite awhile. I am no expert in it, but I have looked at it before. I’ve even tried it, for some things like memorizing the order of operations in math. My students really enjoyed the game, and learned the rule very quickly. It’s not a style I, personally, can maintain. And to be fair, Biffle offered all his information including “posters” free. He did ask that you share his page with other teachers.
The “make your dear teacher happy rule” was presented in a humorous manner and as kind of a catch all rule with the explanation that if something made the teacher unhappy it would not be good for the classroom.
I’m not always quick to pick up the implications of something, so I may have been completely oblivious to the whole indoctrination thing, but at the time it just seemed like a fun way present content. It also was a fun, quick way to focus the students with the “class – yes” routine. The students enjoyed thinking of new ways I could change my intonation.
This has been around long before Common Core and Charter Schools. As I said, it’s been years since I saw my first video, but I thought I remembered Biffle having a lot more fun with his techniques. Anyway, I still don’t think it has to be brainwashing, but could be one more trick in our bag, I agree insisting that a teacher perform like this would be wrong.
I use wbt techniques in my room and I feel it has a positive effect on my class. Like anything else, I use what works with my style of teaching and disregard what doesn’t. The students love many of the games. They love giving each other 5 finger woos when a student does something or says something correctly. Do I use it all day, everyday? No. It is just another kind of strategy , along with many other strategies that as a 16 year veteran teacher I have in my wheelhouse. It is a choice we all make with many different programs that we, as educators, are presented with. I think it’s a bit far fetched to villanize this program based on Common Core. I was using it years before common core materialized.
The problem today is with being handed a canned program and being instructed to follow it “with fidelity.” I found a reading program that I piloted in special ed to be quite useful, but it was necessary to make it my own. When the data gurus took over, “making it my own” was an alarm signal. Following a program “with fidelity” meant teaching like a programmed robot. We all have taken elements from different sources and molded them together into a product that fits our classes. I think that was one way we modified instruction before someone decided we needed to formalize “differentiation” into its own theory in which we needed to be trained, so it would be ten times harder to implement. Just wait until someone decides to make some money off of WBT, whatever that means.
Extremely disturbing…My teaching career began 38 years ago with students who were removed from home and district settings because they were identified as experiencing emotional and behavioral difficulties. Today these students would be targets of this crazy Whole Brained approach. I don’t even have words to express how horrified I am. Much of acting out behavior originates as a result of severe abuse. I had difficulty watching 7 minutes of this video. The thought of subjecting youngsters who have witnessed siblings being tortured and murdered, or themselves been abused and/or abandoned by families, to this cruel approach to is chilling. And to do it systematically for days, months, and years beggars belief. My experience is that students respond to a structured, nurturing environment. My job was to help students form trusting, respectful relationships with not just me, but peers as well. Relationship building requires two way communication, which is the antithesis of this approach. I taught long enough to see many former students grow into honorable, coping, wonderful human beings leading successful lives.
“Make my dear teacher happy?” seems a deliberate parody of North Korea, probably the most totalitarian of modern day states. The historical parallel would be the Hitler youth program. Is this deliberate, or are these people really so out of touch?
My deepest sympathy goes to teachers, particularly new ones to the profession, who are bullied into using this system. It’s a soul deadening, no win situation. The choice is to abandon students to true believers, or stay and perpetuate something you know to be inhumane and wrong in hopes of outlasting these nuts.
In terms of presidential legacy, I think the W. Bush and Obama administrations will have a lot to answer for, but that’s only if history is allowed to continue as an academic discipline.
I think the W. Bush and Obama administrations will have a lot to answer for, but that’s only if history is allowed to continue as an academic discipline.
LOL. That’s very well said!!!
Reblogged this on McBlog.
That’s boot camp. It works for conditioning Marines and other soldiers for places and times when authoritarian discipline is required. It’s a good introduction to warfare.
Education is not war.
Despite the problems of Stephen Ambrose’s scholarship, the lessons we should take from his description of D-Day are instructive on the differences between authoritarianism everywhere all the time, and people educated to think for themselves.
Authoritarianism failed completely at D-Day. For the U.S. troops, success was possible ONLY because soldiers on the front lines, pinned down by fire, were able to analyze the situation and figure out that the plans had all failed; and then make a judgment on whether to surrender or die, or fight on — and then, just how to fight on.
The U.S. forces won, but what they did was the opposite of what that video shows.
This video expresses the framework of the classroom. Everyone needs to take off your bias glasses. There is more going on there than you understand.
Take off your own “bias glasses.” You are talking to a lot of educators who already know that we don’t need to discount individual differences and treat all children as if they are a single student in order to manage our classrooms and teach.
Behaviorism might be effective for training animals and fostering compliant robots who will only operate within a prescribed box, but it is disrespectful of children, highly manipulative and bad pedagogy if we want a society populated by citizens who are lifelong learners that think outside the box and are skilled in critical thinking, creativity and problem-solving.
Oh, Kahio, it’s not just my vision that is biased, here. So is my gut. I watch this stuff and I want to vomit. If anyone did this with my child, I would call the police.
This has nothing to do with Common Core, which doesn’t say anything about how to teach and has more to do with Constructivism. You’ll see this so-called “progressive” teaching in private and public schools. The objective is to push students to be “active” learners because the assumption is that students don’t learn if they aren’t talking, moving, or teaching each other. Simply listening, reading, or thinking isn’t learning to the progressive constructivist, so whole brain teaching is what you get. Teachers can create a structured lesson using explicit or direct instruction without having to go to these militaristic extremes.
Responding only to teacher commands is not active learning or constructivism, nor is it progressive. It’s behaviorism, like training seals.
What?! What are you talking about? I am a constructivist and it is nothing like this! My children are active, engaged, independent, curious, and capable. They are allowed to observe, think, hypothesize, experiment, make conclusions, share and collaborate. The children in the video are robotic mimics. It is depressing…
I’ll join progressive constructivists everywhere in saying you have no idea what you are talking about. What this guy is doing to these kids is pretty much the exact opposite of constructivist teaching. And it sure ain’t progressive.
I regularly show the 1981 ABC After School Special, “The Wave,” to my students. It’s poor quality lends a bit of comic relief to the heavy nature of the story but my students always enjoy it and it is very effective in getting the point across about defending democracy and the dangers of totalitarianism and national socialism. There is also a more recent German version (2008?) that is actually better made and acted but a bit problematic for the classroom.
This is my set of classroom rules, for what it’s worth: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0Gnc_RqBLSPN1UtTFhaTGRVeXM/edit?usp=sharing
Like most ideas in education there can be some value taken away. There is some good to be found even here. Students, even middle school at risk students, like doing some things in unison. Teach your students to clap together for one another when they get an answer correct or have an insightful idea. Have students chant the timetables in unison to help cement that key retrievable information. This idea of whole brain teaching, does offer some value. Operating like this all day every day, however, could only be implemented by the insane.
Apparently, you are unaware of the kids who go through the motions only because it’s required and get nothing from the “learning experience” of group chanting. They tend to be those on both tails of the normal distribution, including the creative kids, as well as children who are dealing with a lot of stress in their lives.
I used to be one of those stressed out, creative kids. I played along only because I didn’t want to be singled out and reprimanded, but it was incredibly mechanical and boring, so I quickly zoned out and my mind was elsewhere. I had a lot going on in my life then, including living with a single mom who was struggling with poverty, depression and divorce, followed by the addition of a new abusive stepfather.
Consequently, my brain did not cement the semantic events of reciting in unison with “hippocampal hairspray,” as one of my doctoral neuropsychology professors creatively referred to the cognitive process of highlighting semantic and episodic events for storage in long term memory. However, I can readily recall the traumatic episodic events that occurred in my life then, as well as the day dreams of a better life, both of which my mind often wandered to when I zoned out during group chanting.
It’s tough enough to pay attention to good teaching with so much going on. I wish you and others did not have to deal with such pain, but I have a feeling that your experience has served you well as a teacher.
I think it is funny. And also I think it is good for the brain to be able to remember the instructions.
My professional opinion as a teacher and curriculum specialist for Gifted & Talented students for 30 years is that Chris Biffle is not a legitimate educational specialist. He obviously does not have expertise with child development or educational philosophy.
Apparently he is business man selling this Whole Brain Package to insecure administrators who think kids have to be “controlled” and “managed” like a livestock business, instead of having valid educational freedom to learn with their own imagination, curiosity, and original thoughts.
In this video, it is obvious that he is enjoying his powerful position over these children, like pulling the strings of puppets. My observation is that this Whole Brain approach of using Behaviorism to “train” children is the same that is used for “cults” and Marine Boot Camp. I think it is dangerous and should be banned. I question if there are any mental health professionals who would approve this program to be used for children. If there are, then let them speak up and be sanctioned by the medical profession.
I don’t think he is selling much of anything. Aside from a few speaking engagements, he appears to give everything away.
It makes me very sad to see so many silly negative comments based on one person’s misunderstanding of a positive, fun and effective approach. I hope people who read this will do a little more research before simply joining on the slam bandwagon. Watch some of the wonderful videos and see the kids having fun. I was looking for an article and inadvertently stumbled on these responses. Yikes.
This comes from a teacher with over 20 years experience in elementary school teaching who is certified as an Elementary School Teacher, Special Education Teacher, Reading Specialist and Educational Diagnostician. I expect someone will merely slam me as well, but my hope is that some of you may just be curious to learn a little more, rather than perpetuating such negativity based on misunderstanding, misinformation and misguided assumptions.
I use parts of whole brain teaching in my classroom and love it. Once I teach a concept I say class teach . They respond okay and explain the concept to each other in their own words. It enhances student engagement. I also play the good behavior game which helps with classroom management and promotes consistency with discipline. I have used the crazy professor game to review before a test and a reading strategy in which one student reads and the other acts out what is being read. I see wbt as a way to use different learning styles within a lesson-tactile, kin esthetic, visual,auditory.
If you have taught in a classroom at any SES level, you would know that students need to be engaged. I used WHT when I was in the classroom and saw great results. To think that a teacher wants to mind control a student is as bazar a thought as thinking that teachers have three months off and that their job ends when they walk out of the building. WBT is just another method to engage students in a society where most parts do not interact with their children but pop them in front of a TV or on some type of electronics. I agree with Angie in the promoting consistency in discipline. The actual experience of using the methods of WBT in the classroom setting should be the actual basis of evaluation rather than a training video.
I have been a teacher for nearly 50 years and I think this is a crazy idea to drill children to make them learn
crazy idea