Our methodology
Direct Instruction provides the opportunity for teachers and students to volley many times a minute with their questions and answers. Teachers praise and correct student responses until all children are accurate. The explicitness and careful progression of Direct Instruction lessons assures that students develop flawless skills very quickly. Over 100 Direct Instruction programs are currently published. All instruction is delivered using the “demonstrate,” “guide,” and “test” steps of direct instruction.
Precision Teaching
With Precision Teaching, students learn important goal setting, self-monitoring, self-management, organizational, and cooperative learning skills. Students also learn self-management and self-determination through freedom to take their own performance breaks and still meet their expected goals, skip lessons when they can demonstrate mastery, move through the curriculum at their own pace, select their own arrangement of tasks to accomplish in a class period, choose their own free time activities, and give themselves support card points.
Following successfully completed lessons, students practice their freshly learned skills until they become fluent or automatic, using Lindsley’s Precision Teaching method. Having fluent prerequisite skills makes learning subsequent, related skills faster and more successful. Students usually practice building skills to fluency in pairs, although sometimes they practice alone or in trios. During practice, students time themselves and each other until they can perform quickly, effortlessly, and accurately, like people who practice in sports or music do. Our classrooms are said to look like academic gymnasiums! Students practice with specially designed fluency materials until they can perform a certain amount-accurately, smoothly, and without hesitation-in a certain amount of time.
Students record their timed performance on specially designed charts, called Standard Celeration Charts. A specific minimum rate of improvement is indicated on these charts. As students practice, they plot their own improvements and compare their progress to the minimum rate lines. Their comparisons tell them whether they are making sufficient progress, or whether they need to call the teacher or another student for help. Practice is spaced and cumulative in order to maximize its effectiveness. The Precision Teaching practice method assures that students permanently retain the skills they are taught; can perform them for extended periods; can perform them in distracting circumstances; and can easily apply them, both to new learning requirements, and in the course of living life.
Generativity
Application and Adduction
Even with Direct Instruction and Precision Teaching, educators cannot possibly teach everything that needs to be learned to become an effective, independent person. Mastery and fluency of curriculum with DI plus PT would not do the trick. Learners must demonstrate generativity. They learn to engage in behavior they learned in the classroom context under a vastly wider variety of stimuli and contexts than those presented in the classroom. We call this kind of generativity application. They also engage in new, untaught blends and recombinations of behavior when new stimuli and contexts occur that were not previously presented in instruction that we call adduction. Such behavior illustrates maximum generativity. If students can engage in both application and adduction, their current relevant repertoires will survive under the constantly evolving novel natural circumstances that prevail in the real world.
Think-Aloud Problem-Solving
To promote generative behavior, we teach students to think, reason, problem solve, and generate questions. Whimbey and Lochhead’s Think-Aloud Problem-Solving (TAPS) method provides the evidence-based procedures ofthis instruction. Originally designed for college students, our principal has created a program called Learn to Reason with TAPS: a Talk Aloud Problem Solving Approach that is used with learners as young as those in elementary school. This generative method is the core learning-to-learn technology used in our program. To purchase instructional material to develop the TAPS repertoires please visit this site: www.talkaloudproblemsolving.com.