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Early to rise: How to vote early in Minnesota in 2022

(This public service announcement is brought to you by Vinny, photographed in 2020 and still thriving in 2022!)

Here's how you can vote safely and early in the November 8 election in Minnesota, where early voting starts Friday, September 23. (See this guide for how to vote in every state.)

1. Request an absentee ballot now. Track your ballot status at MNVotes.org. Voters without email can print out and mail a paper application. Voters in special situations can have a previous acquaintance pick up and deliver a ballot. If you don't have Internet access, call (877) 600-8683 for help.

2. Register to vote now if you haven't. You can register online by Tuesday, October 18, or by mail if your form is received by that date. You can also register in person at your county elections office by Monday, November 7 (and vote early while you're there), or at your polling place on Election Day, Tuesday, November 8. Bring a photo ID and proof of current address to register in person, and any time you vote (in case you need to re-register).

3. Look up your sample ballot. Research the record, policies, and endorsements of the candidates for school board, U.S. congress, district court, state legislature, governor, sheriff, or anything else. Make your "cheat sheet" now for when your ballot arrives.

4. Check your mailbox for your absentee ballot starting Friday, September 23. When it arrives, keep it someplace dry. Don't mark it until you show it to your witness, a Minnesota voter or notary from any state, whose signature is required for your absentee vote to be counted.

5. Vote absentee with your witness present. Before you begin, show your witness that your ballot is blank. Find the three smaller envelopes in the same ballot package, one brownish and two white. Have these ready, along with your "cheat sheet" and your Minnesota state ID or driver's license or social security number, if you have one.

Mark your ballot in private. You can also have an assistant mark it according to your directions. When done, put your ballot in the brownish "Ballot Envelope." Then, before your witness, put the "Ballot Envelope" in the white "Signature Envelope" and seal it. Complete and sign the "Signature Envelope" and have your witness do the same. If the witness is a notary, have them affix a notarization stamp.

6. Mail your ballot using the mail-in envelope. To be counted, your absentee ballot must reach officials by Election Day, Tuesday, November 8. I recommend mailing it Tuesday, October 25. Remember, no added postage is necessary: All Minnesota return envelopes for ballots come prepaid, with an election barcode putting it ahead of other first-class mail.

There are good reasons for confidence in this system: Despite changes slowing the mail in 2020, the U.S. Postal Service successfully delivered the general election that year, and Minnesota allows you to track your ballot online, and cancel it anytime before 5 p.m. on Tuesday, November 1, something you might consider if it's delayed (or if you wish to change your vote).

Even if your ballot is delayed and you miss the November 1 deadline to cancel, you can vote early again in person at your county elections office, or on Election Day at your polling place, just to make sure your vote is counted, because there's no way to accidentally vote twice in Minnesota. For example, if your mail-in ballot were processed while you were standing in line to vote, the system would recognize it, and reject the second ballot.

7. Or, if you prefer, drop off your sealed absentee ballot at any county or city elections office. You can do this between Friday, September 23, and 5 p.m. on Monday, November 7. Again, voters in special situations can have a previous acquaintance pick up and deliver a ballot instead.

Another possibility: Drop off your sealed and witnessed ballot at an outdoor walk-up or drive-through voting station. City elections offices in Duluth and Minneapolis have provided this service before, and may run such stations again, weather and staff permitting, from Friday, November 4, to Monday, November 7.

You can also drop off your sealed and witnessed absentee ballot before 3 p.m. on Election Day, Tuesday, November 8, but be sure to deliver it to the office that sent it to you, not to your polling place, where (if you make this mistake, or even if you don't) you can still vote in person if you're in line before 8 p.m.

8. Track your ballot online to make sure it's been received and counted.

9. If all else fails, vote in person on Tuesday, November 8. Remember that your polling location may have changed from past years. Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Consider wearing a mask to reduce spread of COVID-19.

10. Celebrate! Democracy means participation, liberty, equality, and majority rule. Just by participating, you made your community more democratic. That's reason enough to stay up with popcorn!

[petescholtes-blog-blog]

Early to rise: How to vote early in Minnesota

(This public service announcement is brought to you by Vinny, our coronacat, photographed July 26, 2020.)

Here's how you can vote early and safely in the November 3 election in Minnesota, where early voting starts September 18. (See this guide for how to vote in every state.)

1. Request an absentee ballot now. Voters without Internet access can call (877) 600-8683 to get one. Track your ballot status at MNVotes.org.

2. Register to vote if you haven't. Register online by Tuesday, October 13, or at your county elections office by Monday, November 2, or at your polling place on Election Day, Tuesday, November 3.

3. Look up your sample ballot. Research the record, policies, and endorsements of all the candidates for school board, district court, state senate, or anything else. Make your cheat sheet now for when your ballot arrives.

4. Check your mailbox for your ballot starting Friday, September 18, when early voting begins. Keep it someplace dry. If you get it after Tuesday, October 6, consider skipping Step 5.

5. Mail your ballot. While the mail delivery delays are real, they seem to be under control here. Plus, you can track your ballot online and cancel your ballot before 5 p.m. Tuesday, October 20, if it seems to have gotten lost — in other words, if it's taking longer than seven days to arrive, which is well outside the normal first-class timeframe of two-to-five days.

Remember: No added postage is necessary. All Minnesota ballots come ready with first-class postage, plus an election mail barcode that may put it ahead of other first-class mail. For mail-in ballots to be counted, they must be postmarked by November 3 and reach your county by November 10. But the USPS is advising mailing your ballot by Monday, October 19. I'm advising you mail it by Tuesday, October 6.

6. If you prefer, drop off your completed and sealed absentee ballot at any county or city elections office starting Friday, September 18, up until 5 p.m. on Monday, November 2. There are also other options for early in-person voting — Hennepin County has 40-plus locations. Someone can drop off your ballot for you if they don't mind completing some paperwork at the counter. Have them bring their own pen.

7. Or, if you prefer, drop off your completed and sealed absentee ballot at an outdoor voting station, whether walk-up or drive-through. Cities such as Duluth and Minneapolis have offices for elections services that offer these stations if weather permits. Though they haven't announced such stations yet, if they do, it would likely be from Friday, October 30, through Monday, November 2. Again, someone can drop off your ballot for you, but they'll have to complete some paperwork at the station.

8. Track your ballot online to make sure it's been received and counted.

9. If all else fails, vote in person on Tuesday, November 3. Remember that your polling location may have changed from past years to allow for more social distancing.

10. Wait for the election results. They should come in by January 20, 2021.

[petescholtes-blog-blog]

You send me: Why Minneapolis elected Ilhan Omar for this moment

(Mural by Mohammed "Aerosol" Ali in Birmingham, England, July 2019, painted in "solidarity" with her; photographed by the artist for BBC News.)

Why is my freshman congresswoman being "primaried" in the August 11 election, by a political newcomer who raised six times as much money between April and June, including half a million dollars from big donors favoring conservative policies toward Israel?

You probably already answered that question as near to your satisfaction as you can, if you live in the Fifth District of Minnesota and can vote, or mailed your ballot in anticipation of alleged presidentially-induced delays at the post office.

But if the suspicions raised by this race about either leading candidate remain, like piles of un-recycled mailers, I have a theory as to why: A politics based on the presumption of guilt came to town. It lost, or won, but affected us either way. Because suspicion poisons everything. Without the ability to really test the null hypothesis — the default truth that what you see is a coincidence — belief can be a light out of the darkness, a north star into a black hole, or the sparkle in the eye of a face at the bottom of a well.

So let's talk about what we know. As Rachel Cohen reports in Jewish Currents, the contest here for the Democratic-Farmer-Labor nomination for Congress doesn't seem to be about actual policy differences between the candidates regarding Israel or the Palestinians. Omar and her lead challenger, Antone Melton-Meaux, have the same position on the Boycott Divest Sanctions (BDS) movement, for example, which is really more of a BD movement at this point. Both candidates defend the right to boycott, as Omar did last year with a resolution co-sponsored by John Lewis, a right most federal courts have also upheld, overturning recent anti-BDS laws in three states (though not Minnesota, where Omar argued against the law that passed). Both candidates also oppose BDS strategies, reasoning that they're counterproductive to encouraging negotiations toward a two-state solution. To the same end, they join most Americans in opposing Israel's plan to annex much of the West Bank, though Omar would condition aid against it, and Melton-Meaux would not.

Beyond that consensus, Omar has expressed approval of BDS itself, via a single text message from a campaign aid to the website Muslim Girl in 2018, stating that Omar "supports" the "movement." That message, along with her refusal (on expressly articulated principle) to join the House in condemning BDS, gave reporters license to call her and Lewis's resolution "pro-BDS," and Omar the "face of the movement." On the same narrow basis, Melton-Meaux claimed in April that the congresswoman "supports sanctions on Israel."

People are what they do, and I'm not here to attack Melton-Meaux, who seems to have done good things before writing that astoundingly disingenuous op-ed. But his campaign is about Omar, not him, or rather about someone who isn't really Omar at all, which is the problem. Omar never called for sanctions against Israel or any other country. To the contrary, she has consistently and vocally opposed sanctions, sometimes to a political fault: Her "present" vote on the Armenian genocide was a stand against sanctions on Turkey. Her argument in every case is that sanctions harm people, not governments — which appears to be right, to take the example of Iran. Even her bill to sanction Brunei, for stoning people to death for being LGBTQ, targets the travel and assets of officials, not civilians.

Whatever you think of that position, it's integral with Omar's opposition to arbitrary force or punitive retribution of any kind. She's called for an end to the "cycle of violence" everywhere, whether from undeclared war, terrorism, riots, repression, or criminal justice that metes out more harm, as she sees it. Nine months after being smeared as a coddler of terrorists for writing a judge to ask for leniency in the sentencing of a young man who had not yet taken up arms with Isis, Omar did the same for the middle-aged man convicted of threatening her life. In both cases she asked for a "restorative" approach that would help the person repair himself, not just the community.

With similar trueness, after she and Lewis introduced their "right to participate in boycotts" resolution, Omar spoke of "support" only for "efforts to end the [Israeli] occupation and achieve [a] two-state solution," and argued against condemning BDS on the grounds that "if we are going to condemn violent means of resisting the occupation, we cannot also condemn nonviolent means."

A Somali-born refugee and the first Muslim to wear an hijab in Congress, Omar may recognize better than most how essentialist judgments can thwart a person's autonomy. That she became the media "face" of BDS, while her identically-voting white colleagues of Christian or Jewish heritage did not, is one of many such ironies not lost on her, I imagine. But acting as if some double standards are too contemptible to dignify with an answer, or even an acknowledgment, seems to be part of her armor against them.

(Hugging John Lewis in 2018, in an uncredited photograph posted by the congresswoman this year on his 80th birthday.)

Of all the falsehoods sent sailing like stones at Omar, none bothers me more than the idea that the personal attacks against her didn't happen — that a massive, dangerous smear campaign was just "Twitter fights" with the president, or criticism of her "record." The torrent of Omar fictions began in August of 2018, a week after her primary win, and by July 2019 reached a crescendo of six fake stories per month debunked by Snopes. In the first month of her term, she was accused of defending Isis, based on that letter to a judge, a claim pandering to "sharia" conspiracists like her would-be assassin. In February came unfounded and increasingly dishonest charges of antisemitism, based on Omar's seemingly unwitting use of two antisemitic tropes (hypnotism and money), for which she apologized unequivocally, followed by a third one (dual loyalty), for which she did not, by that point apparently not wishing to enable those seizing on her words to keep changing the subject from what she'd been talking about: the Palestinians, and how any discussion of their treatment is policed out of existence. This time, the charges against her pandered to Christian evangelicals, with the apparent hopeful side-goal of alienating some Jewish voters from her or her party's base. But the criticism of her words was roundly picked up by Democrats, whom Omar joined in the House to vote for a resolution condemning antisemitic language. Only Republicans voted against it.

Then came the video in April shared by the president of the United States, a montage of Omar and 9/11 that aimed far beyond the earlier audiences, this time to falsely link the congresswoman with the worst attack on U.S. soil in history. If the videographer thought Democrats wouldn't defend her, they were wrong. But death threats against Omar increased. April also brought a disinformation campaign about Omar and U.S. and Somali casualties in the Battle of Mogadishu, this time aimed at veterans, whose benefits the congresswoman has consistently voted to keep and expand.

In July came the apotheosis: the president's serial fabrications about Omar on camera and at rallies. He riffed on much of the above, but added the lie that she had expressed "love" for al-Qaeda, that she said al-Qaeda made her "proud," an appalling implicit incitement to violence that Republican leaders mostly played along with. It was, I wrote at the time, "the break with reality that a more fundamental break with humanity requires," in a month of detention center atrocity stories in the news, and with growing numbers of young Jewish activists arrested in front of ICE offices across the country chanting "Never again is now," including here. Trumpists were plugging their ears and going "na-na-na-na-na-na-na" to all this. Which was scary, because a reality war could go anywhere — and that's exactly what it did. The president’s tweet of a video with a September 13 timestamp claiming to show Omar celebrating 9/11 was the same basic impulse that would kill 150,000 Americans in a viral pandemic due to denial, inaction, and corruption.

The warning of a year ago also came after the Poway synagogue shooting in April, which brought home, as Omar and Illinois Representative Jan Schakowsky were early to note, how much antisemitism and Islamophobia had merged on the extremist right. Muslims and Jews had already been grappling with their entangled oppressions for years, partnering on issues like gun violence, as a local group of women did here starting in 2016. Particularly in the wake of the El Paso shooting, the ongoing lying about Omar's immigrant community had a uniting effect outside the president's cult.

(Volunteers sweeping and painting names at the George Floyd memorial in Minneapolis, June 12, 2020; photographed by me with the subjects' permission.)

None of those lies will wash here, where the George Floyd street memorial is a garden of flowers and art six miles north from the Bloomington mosque that was bombed three years ago, in the neighboring Congressional Third District. Contrary to Islamophobic fantasy, the Fifth is 63% white, with an active Jewish left and center, of which many are also on record in support of Omar, including Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Given the math of her 2018 landslide, Omar could have won her seat without a single Somali American vote. Her current campaign's internal polling shows an approval rating of 74%.

To supporters I know across demographic categories, Omar is someone there for everyone — and a threat exactly because she challenges leaders who aren't. Like the largest protest movement in American history, which began in her district on May 25 — she puts the moral dilemma of American exclusion, of all exclusion, at the center of politics. Her "radical love" is the inverse of John Lewis's "good trouble," because left humanists have a parent's love of country, not a child's. They hold the world to something better. A month ago, Omar called on reporters to ask state and U.S. senators who were blocking meaningful police reform these questions: "How come you are not listening to the cries of the mothers and the fathers in our communities? How come you are not listening to the people who are telling you that we don't feel like our lives matter equally in this country?'"

I have never seen a U.S. representative host so many town hall meetings on issues important to her poorest and least powerful constituents — two events per month, from one spring to the next. At one, on Black mental health, I watched an audience member literally seek help for herself and her family from the experts onstage. Observing such events, New Hope city councilman Cedrick Frazier wrote that at every meeting with Omar he saw, she "stayed long after the event ended to talk with and answer questions from the people in attendance."

She has also consistently shown up at important protests, not necessarily to speak, but just to be there, as when she went unrecognized in her mask and headscarf at the first, overwhelmingly nonviolent George Floyd protests. She meets regularly with important local activist groups, like MN350 and MIRAC, whose memberships spiked last summer. That increase, beyond our physical proximity to Floyd's life and death, suggests why the movement and unrest happened here as it did. Fifth District residents who took to the streets in response to his killing — (again) overwhelmingly with nonviolence, often numbering in the tens of thousands, and protesting every weekend day for six weeks after the last fires from three nights of riots were out — built on already record-high levels of left activism and organization before the pandemic: for immigrant rights, the climate, and Black lives. It was protesters — medics but also ordinary participants — who used their bodies to shield and rescue all but two souls in the uprising.

This outcome reflected a culture as well as an infrastructure, and it touches everyone. Omar's teenage daughter, Isra Hirsi, helped lead the U.S. chapter and St. Paul march of the global Youth Climate Strike on September 20 — one of the largest international protests before the Floyd marches. Young MN350 volunteers poured into presidential primary campaigns, especially for Omar's friend Bernie Sanders, whose local appeal to voters was headquartered out of her own campaign office. MIRAC's Mari Mansfield painted the long list of names on the street at the George Floyd memorial on 38th and Chicago, of unarmed people of color killed by police. "It's all civil disobedience now," she said, when I lamented missing a MIRAC training on it before the pandemic. The Black Lives Matter protests in every corner of Minnesota will have similar ripple effects going forward.

Omar herself turned her office into a food distribution center after the unrest, and raised hundred of thousands of dollars for local organizations seeking to transform policing. “I saw Ilhan in the streets nearly every single day," wrote Minneapolis city council vice president Andrea Jenkins. “Unbeknown to most of us at the time, Ilhan’s father was in the hospital with COVID-19.” Nur Omar Mohamed’s death was announced on June 16.

(”Close the camps” protesters blocking traffic outside the ICE office at Fort Snelling on July 30, 2019; Youth climate strikers in St. Paul, September 20, 2019; both photographed by me.)

My point is not that Omar is a leader for this moment, but that this moment already elected her two years ago. The congresswoman speaks to both left and humanist values because both of those things are resurgent in mirror opposition to Trump. Like so many of her constituents, but also American leftists more generally, she draws no distinction between appealing to the best in everyone and defending like a sister those left out of that "everyone." "We need to jettison the zero-sum idea that one person's gain is another's loss," she wrote in the Washington Post earlier last month. "I want your gain to be my gain; your loss to be mine, too."

At her police reform press conference, with the Minnesota Legislature's People of Color and Indigenous Caucus, Omar set off another extremist conservative firestorm when she announced that, "We are not merely fighting to tear down the systems of oppression in the criminal justice system. We are fighting to tear down systems of oppression that exist in housing, in education, in healthcare, in employment, in the air we breathe." But that statement is threatening only if you believe, as some Americans apparently do, that "systems of oppression" benefit you.

In her first 19 months in the 116th U.S. Congress, Omar introduced 39 bills, four of which have passed, all amendments. She also succeeded in getting her MEALS Act — providing kids school lunches regardless of whether schools are open in the pandemic — included as part of the CARES Act. You can read the other 34 bills and judge for yourself if there's a wasted effort among them. (She's made a case for each, which is for you to weigh.) But there's something self-fulfilling about claiming a lawmaker doesn't get anything done when you're blocking or ignoring their legislation. Much as the burden of proof is always on the accuser — because you can't prove a negative — I'll leave it to Omar's opponents to make the argument that any of these laws would be bad for the United States: that, no, we should not eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, keep corporations convicted of fraud out of politics, cancel student debt, award grants to zero-waste projects, stop stigmatizing kids unable to pay for school meals, make school lunches free, cut off military aid to human rights abusers, or join the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Similarly, in a pandemic, I'll let them explain why we should not aid small businesses, cancel rent and mortgages, cancel school lunch debt, or move food stamps fully online.

Omar co-sponsored 601 other pieces of legislation, 72 of which passed the House, nine the Senate, and seven into law by the grace of the president's signature. Those dramatically dwindling numbers suggest a political problem that is not Ilhan Omar. She has addressed that problem, whether you agree or disagree with her, by endorsing progressive candidates nationwide, including here in her own district, where she campaigned for Richfield mayor Maria Regan Gonzalez and Crystal city councilperson Brendan Banks. She's also built her Democratic coalition. After the censure from Democrats and the president's attacks on her last year, she made a public show of unity with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has now endorsed her.

Omar is not the Mother of Dragons some imagine. She's just been through the worst fires of war and politics, and has come out the other side a congresswoman from Minneapolis. Most likely, that's what she'll remain next term.

[petescholtes-blog-blog]

Want to shape your political party? Go caucus on Tuesday. Here's how.

In Minnesota, the primary election is Tuesday, March 3, 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.—Super Tuesday. That's when you can vote to choose a party nominee for president. (You can also vote early, up to the day before.)

But your local precinct caucus is a week earlier, Tuesday, February 25, 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., with doors open at 6 p.m. Why go to the caucus if there's a primary a week later? Because the caucus is where you can help write the party platform. You can also volunteer to become a precinct delegate, and more.

What follows is a basic how-to for Tuesday caucus night, regardless of the party you're influencing. I mostly cribbed this from the Northstar Chapter of the Sierra Club. Party links and resolutions are below.

Find your caucus:

Caucusfinder.sos.state.mn.us

Goals for caucus night:

Volunteer to become a delegate.

Introduce a resolution, or more than one of them.

Becoming a delegate gives you another voice and vote on your resolution later, at the organizing unit convention. From there, you can approve resolutions and elect delegates for the district, state, and national conventions to be held over the next five months. Caucuses are the first step to representing your state at that convention this summer. In parallel, you can become a delegate for your county, to endorse county-level candidates.

Before the caucus:

1. Prepare your resolution. Between now and Tuesday, print out one or more of the resolutions linked below. Use this as a model, or just introduce it as your own. Follow this format:

"Whereas...

"Whereas...

"Whereas...

"Be it resolved that the ____ party supports ________."

Practice reading it, and think about your personal reasons for endorsing it. Also come up with questions for local candidates about the issue.

2. Amplify your impact. Post on social media about your caucusing ahead of time using hashtags for your cause—e.g. #CaucusForClimate. Wear buttons. For the climate issue, you can pick up buttons Monday at TakeAction Minnesota, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., 705 Raymond Ave. #100, St. Paul, MN 55114. Invite 10 people to caucus.

3. Get there early on Tuesday. Eat beforehand and leave travel and parking time. Introduce yourself to the caucus chair and mingle. Get to know some of your neighbors who are politically involved. These are your potential allies for passing your resolution.

Caucus schedule:

6 p.m. door

7 p.m. start

Party business and rules

Candidate pitches

Electing delegates

Introducing resolutions

Candidate pitches: 

These can happen at any time. Candidates come in, participants drop everything and listen. Ask direct questions about your issue or resolution.

Become a delegate:

Check your availability. The organizing unit convention is usually on a whole weekend day. Volunteer only if you can make it. Open your calendar and be ready.

Raise your hand.

Share why you want to be a delegate. Keep it concise. Be real. If you haven't been one before, say so. "I'd be a great delegate because I represent the voice of..."

Get your name on the list. Make sure your name is on the list at the end, because that's what's handed by the chair to the convention.

You can also be an alternate.

Introduce your resolution.

Raise your hand.

Read your resolution. Bring it on paper to read it. Stand up by your chair, or go to the front.

Listen. The room will offer up to 3 statements in support or against.

If you get a question, remember: You don't need to have all the answers. Say why your values align with the issue.

Hand in your resolution.

Vote with ayes and nays. Either the resolution passes or doesn't.

FAQ:

How many resolutions can we introduce? As many as you want. But if everyone comes with a stack of resolutions, the chair may just let you introduce one.

How can we track the progress of resolutions beyond the precinct level? I'm still working on getting an answer to this.

Can we caucus at any political party we choose? Yes, if you affirm that you align with the party's values.

Can we caucus for more than one party in the same night? No, you need to choose one party to caucus.

Can I participate without attending? Yes. Emailed absentee forms were due Saturday, but you can drop off, or have someone drop off, an absentee form and resolutions in person—see links below.

Party caucus links:

https://www.dfl.org/caucuses-conventions/precinct-caucus/

https://mngop.com/caucus2020/

https://www.sos.state.mn.us/elections-voting/how-elections-work/political-parties/

DFL non-attendee form: https://www.dfl.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Precinct-Caucus-Non-Attendee-Form-2019-09-24_Call_FINAL_Rev_A_adopted_21_September_2_003_1-1.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2EF03ZI25pHIUnxbSC_Wj42txrt-Y56hl90xaGpG3rUwbgNoSn2e5suY8

Resolutions to introduce, whatever party you're caucusing for:

Ranked-choice voting: https://www.fairvotemn.org/event/rcv-precinct-caucuses

MN350 Green New Deal resolution: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tqbOzBfT1kOGdbZdikIUq3Fjd5Y5V8-k1-4i2s2h8WY/edit?usp=sharing

DFL Environmental Caucus resolutions: https://www.dflec.org/resolutions

Education Minnesota resolutions: https://educationminnesota.org/EDMN/media/edmn-files/advocacy/election%202020/2020-Precinct-Caucus-Guide.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1MFdrenl1ajS4WGypjIc_AMwmLQB9RuedVuIHiOv9_umYGkGwdHqvrtTs

100% clean energy: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jzsn0Akj7_xBt7dbJcdCSNIfazlN34YhrJVzIFCnt7w/edit?usp=sharing

Clean transportation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v_CRU9ik_iD6gjYeYEQd8WkGUwejmF2XTOAkFEKbcKw/edit?usp=sharing

Stop Line 3: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iP31-HX-GQIoaNlM1Nc9df0tF5WKqNkr4GUfcVxcmUk/edit?usp=sharing

Various Minnesota Voice democracy platform resolutions: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByQpX2PKmtozZjNpdHNlMFlkMlE/view?usp=sharing

Single-use plastic: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YwwcGx97fSYNT0aqrEEvISvqs_YmZtGiAyC7BGoWJ7E/edit?usp=sharing

MN350 video about caucusing: https://vidmails.com/v/Pgqs2Pit8D

Video on fully funding Minnesota schools (in Education Minnesota resolutions above): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPyAtuXdgB0

For the Stop Line 3 resolution, you can add the following:

According to the Minnesota Department of Commerce, the proposed Line 3 expansion doubles the old oil pipeline's capacity and triples its carbon pollution.

That's because the new Line 3 would (a) make heavy tar sands crude oil massively more available to the global market and (b) reroute the current light crude oil running through it to other lines.

As a result, the added greenhouse gas impact from the Line 3 expansion would be more than the entire state of Minnesota emitted in 2016, and five times what our state expects to emit in 2050.

For details, see this report released by a coalition of 13 groups: https://mn350.org/giant-step-backward/

Early voting regardless of the caucus:

https://www.sos.state.mn.us/elections-voting/other-ways-to-vote/

Election day voting regardless of the caucus:

https://www.sos.state.mn.us/elections-voting/election-day-voting/

[petescholtes-blog-blog]

Things I learned from our kitten, Alex.

Get up right away.

Get up when your people get up.

Sleep more later if you need to.

Play every morning, afternoon, and evening.

Play when you get up and before you go to bed.

Play until you are out of breath.

Chase your people when they’re up for it.

Ask your people to play.

Catch air.

Wiggle your butt as you stalk and prepare to pounce.

Shoot yourself through tunnels.

Test your strength.

Drag things many times your size.

Hide things in your people’s shoes.

Remember your family, but love the people you’re with.

Look at the people you love.

Look at them for no reason other than to look at them.

Close your eyes when you’re happy.

Show the people you love that you love them.

Do this first thing every morning and last thing every night.

Connect physically with your people.

Give them a nose kiss.

Put your hand on them meaningfully.

Lick their hand.

Sit on them.

Hug them.

Rub your scent on your territory.

Relax when you have company by flopping on the floor.

Make every surface your bed.

Find the highest point in any room and look down on everything.

Jump even when it’s difficult. You may be stronger now.

Find dark, closed-in spaces and crawl into them.

Go to these spaces when you need them for comfort.

Look out the window at the yard.

Look for your animal friend outside.

Go outside for fresh air every morning, afternoon, and evening.

Go outside before meals and before bed.

Smell the air.

Smell where others have been.

Look around and listen.

Talk to your people.

When you need something, ask.

Explore a new frontier every day.

Learn to do new things every day.

Find new ways to play with your things.

Try the new thing your person wants to try.

Ask your person to try new things they hadn’t thought of.

Smell the flowers.

Eat the flowers.

Throw up when you need to.

Throw up in threes.

Accept gifts with excitement.

Sleep on your gifts.

Listen to guidance.

Don’t listen to guidance.

Bite for fun, but gently.

Lick the hand you bite.

Be a fierce beast, but remember it’s just play.

Trot out when your people come home.

Flop in the arms of your visiting friend.

Celebrate every meal by rubbing up against the cook and spinning around in a circle.

Watch and lick your lips as your people make you your meal.

Eat your food and then wash your hands.

Give people space but check in on them.

Comfort your people when they are down.

When enough is enough, separate your people from their computer.

Ask to be brushed.

Purr loudly when you are brushed.

Cuddle.

Bathe before bed.

Play with water.

Sleep with your people.

Sleep near them.

Check in with your people before you sleep somewhere else.

Touch hands before you go to sleep.

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Here’s to life

At 90, Jazz Legend Irv Williams Is on a Roll

By Peter S. Scholtes (from Metro Magazine, 2010; photo from WBSS)

On his first night in Minneapolis, in 1942, Irv Williams walked from the train station to the Nicollet Motel, where he was told there were no more rooms. He tried the Andrews Hotel, where they wouldn't let him in. Noting his Navy uniform, a stranger offered to help, vouching for him at the nearby YMCA. Williams checked his small case, and went for a walk, looking for other black folks. It was Saturday night in August, and he had not seen a one.

Eventually, he met a black couple, who told him about a nice club, the Elks Rendezvous, near Lyndale and Sixth Avenue North. Williams caught a cab, which arrived in the cul-de-sac of an old mansion on a hill. Inside was a big dance floor with a few people dancing, and a band playing on a bandstand. "You a musician?" asked the trumpet player, Rook Ganz, seeing the insignia on Williams's shoulder. "Where's your horn?"

Williams had been transferred as part of the Navy band, and his tenor saxophone, like his sleeping bag, was still in transit. "Wait a minute," said the trumpeter. Then the sax player, Howard Walker—they called him Rail—came over and asked Williams to sit in. "Man, I don't have any diseases," he said, "but I got an extra mouthpiece that I very seldom use."

The reed was soft, much softer than Williams was used to. But he played. And everybody thought it was... "wow."

"So I was inducted into the Twin City black community my first night," says Williams, telling the story now. "They showed me a good time. I met some ladies."

The bass player, Oscar Pettiford, befriended Williams before going on soon after to play with Woody Herman and Duke Ellington. Williams and some of the other Navy musicians made the Elks Rendezvous their occasional hangout, heading over with their horns on Saturday nights after playing the USO Club above the State Theatre. Once they got off, they had liberty until Monday morning, and some of the guys didn't make it back.

____

Sixty-eight years later, Williams is playing happy hour at the Dakota on Nicollet, where a drink, Mr. Smooth (Crown Royal, sour, griottine cherries) has been named for him. His breathy tone is as easy as thought, his improvisation as lyrical as something he's been waiting to say all his life.

His hand shakes a little when he changes his reed during a solo by his partner, piano player Peter Schimke. The song is "In a Sentimental Mood," and Williams, sitting in a brown turtleneck and jacket, white-haired and round glasses, taps his foot straight through.

Williams celebrated his 90th birthday last year at the Dakota and the Artists' Quarter, surrounded by friends, family, and the jazz community that reveres him. After the war, he rounded up his old Navy seven-piece and returned with them to Minneapolis and the Elks Rendezvous. His kind of jazz, what the Pettiford family had played, was a smaller world here than in St. Louis, where he had heard Charlie Parker at the Comet Theatre and played in Dewey Jackson's band, jamming in nearby Brooklyn, Illinois—the all-black meatpacking town—with Clark Terry and Miles Davis. ("Shorty," Davis said to Williams when they ran into each other in Harlem in the '50s, "you were one of my heroes.")

But Williams made his home in Minnesota, returning after tours with Ella Fitzgerald and Horace Henderson, and after recording with Dinah Washington. He married twice and had nine children, with 17 grandchildren, their pictures adorning the walls of his Lowertown apartment in St. Paul, along with plaques for community service in music education.

When Williams plays, there's no shaking. His Dakota gig is weekly: Like Kico Rangel and Cornbread Harris, two other local musicians at it since the '50s, Williams keeps working. But playing can be a strain. He has glaucoma and prostate cancer. One afternoon, he lifts the miniature Schnauzer he walks four times a day, Ditto, off his lap to go find a piece of paper, and comes back with a blood test listing his cancer stage as "final."

He repeats the word and laughs. Williams called his last album, in 2007, Finality, announcing in the liner notes that it would be his final recording. But I'd heard this from Williams before, after 2001's Stop Look and Listen, his first release to feature one of his original compositions. Williams went on to make four more albums in four years, starting with 2004's aptly titled That's All? (issued, like all his CDs, on his own Ding-Dong Music label). The best among these might be 2006's Duo, which consists only of Williams and Schimke, and opens with the achingly emotional "Betsi's Song," which Williams wrote for one of his daughters.

The tone on that album is so intimate, you might miss the music's sophistication. "Irv is best known for his work playing from the Great American Songbook," says Schimke. "But even in a traditional setting, he has this uncanny ability to navigate in and out of the harmony."

And, sure enough, Williams is at work on a new album, rewriting some charts before bringing them to longtime bassist Billy Peterson for rehearsal. There are originals among them, and, for the first time, he plans to sing a few. "Too Early for Memories," is about Alzheimer's, he says, singing the opening line: "Grandma doesn't know me anymore." When I ask Williams if he has known anyone who went down that path, he answers, "Have I ever."

Williams says his style hasn't changed much over the decades. "Technically I've tried to get better," he says, "but I don't want to lose the central part of my playing by getting too technical."

When he finishes a song at the Dakota, he'll typically add a little blat or two at the end, sort of an announcement of, "I'm done." "It's just for fun," he says, laughing. "Everybody thinks it's funny. And nobody else can do it on the saxophone." Williams doesn't take endings too seriously.

[original end note] Irv Williams performs Fridays at the Dakota Jazz Club & Restaurant from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.

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Best movies of the Trump era

Following up on my Top 30 TV shows of the past year and a half, here's my Top 20 films of the same period. Considerably less informed, but, given what I've seen from the top of box-office or critics' lists, that may be a mercy.

Moonlight All of us raise all our children. (2016)

A Man Called Ove The politics of not giving up. (2015)

I Am Not Your Negro Lends the power of editing to James Baldwin's insight that displaced shame generates racism, and vice versa—one measure of the man being that he delivered this prophesy with sadness. (2016)

Let's Get the Rhythm Girls' handclapping games as the secret of life. (short documentary)

Jane War, dreams, and cooperation among mammals.

Get Out As pulpy, pessimistic, and inelegant as so much horror. But the sinking-into-dark scene brings an old feeling to the screen for the first time, and for all time.

Trolls First emotional antidote to Trumpism. (2016)

Barry Tackling the same subject as Get Out, but with a disappointed optimism embodied by the New York that made hip hop.

Spider-Man: Homecoming Refreshing humor and affection for young people.

I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore Cathartic prosocial comedy.

The Post Businesses need consciences too.

Allied Caring for each other as anti-fascist thriller. (2016)

The Zookeeper's Wife Caring for animals as anti-fascist thriller.

Gifted Family is whom you love.

Wonder Cool teachers help.

Thor: Ragnarok Doctor Strange Marvel movies get less strenuous, more lovely. (Doctor Strange from 2016)

The Big Sick American hospital waiting room humor and romance, just this side of cynical.

The Incredible Jessica James If sex-positivity, learning to teach, and making good use of Chris O'Dowd is the new formula, I'll take it.

The Lego Batman Movie Best Batman, and the only sign of life from DC.

Easy to lose your bearings in this era (honorable mentions): The Little Prince (2015) (You've got to want to be moved, but James Franco’s fox is for the ages.) Murder on the Orient Express (As inconsequential as a fine mustache.) Our Souls at Night (Grandparent romance.) Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Rebuke of the essentialism that swallowed a franchise.) Logan (See above.) Snatched (Because Amy Schumer.) Winter River (Snowy, anti-corporate rez whodunnit at least has atmosphere.) Brawl in Cell Block 99, Shot Caller, Logan Lucky (Prison and heist thrillers as class destiny—the third one less gory, and with a good soundtrack.) The Polka King (Optimism as a con—but sides with the con anyway.) Viceroy's House (History was even worse, but any anti-partition movie is welcome.) Me Before You (2016), The Leisure Seeker (Wish these expressions of love did not endorse suicide over care.)

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Best TV of the Trump Era

My Top 30 television shows of the past year and a half:

Halt and Catch Fire Family is the love you have when dreams die, and where new ones grow.

Game of Thrones The belief that people can change pitted against the end of the story.

Stranger Things 2 Like every '80s sleepover movie ever melded into one primer on how to be a person—friend, babysitter, parent, pet owner.

GLOW Pro wrestling "let's put on a show" as feminist revolution, with Marc Maron finding his perfect Judy Garland in Alison Brie, who plays like Shelley Long fronting a punk band.

Schitt's Creek Where to begin to understand young people.

The Handmaid's Tale Dystopia as a way of clarifying where things are going.

Better Call Saul Visual storytelling from a stranded past.

The Night Of... Dread leavened by a love of sound design, human connection, and the Bill of Rights.

Conan (Conan in Haiti, Conan in Israel specials) I Love You, America (With Sarah Silverman) Love is funnier and more subversive than derision.

Star Trek: Discovery Madam Secretary The Tick Heroes for our times.

Black Mirror Dystopia as a way of clarifying where things are.

The Deuce American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson History told in the close-up of relationships.

Veep Curb Your Enthusiasm The smallness of Seinfeld made radical, humane, vulgar, and sex-positive.

For the People Surprisingly witty, sexy, and principled district court procedural, deeper than its powdered surface.

The Walking Dead Get busy living. (Would be higher if not for losing its conviction at the end of Season 7.)

Orange Is the New Black TV's racial awakening keeps getting deeper.

The Looming Tower Evil is made, not born.

Breaking the News on KARE 11 For once, an actual liberal media, but one that gives breathing space to viewer disagreement.

Maria Bamford: Old Baby Maron Lifelong learners.

Victoria The frivolity you expect with the significance you don't.

Love You More Master of None Love Insecure Romantic comedy living down its past.

Easy to lose your bearings in this era (honorable mentions): Westworld (Dystopia as a way of clarifying how we got here.) The Crossing (The present as utopia compared to a preventable future.) Barry (Empathy for narcissism as sweet as Bill Hader’s voice.) Lady Dynamite (Drop-off in second season as hard to explain as the brilliance of the first.) Mindhunter (Psychologists and researchers as heroes. If only it were about something other than serial killers!) The Joel McHale Show (A shattered nation longs to care about stupid bullshit again.) Young Sheldon (Probably a sign of progress. For watching with my mother-in-law.) The Opposition with Jordan Klepper (Know your enemy as well as love them.) Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (Doesn’t quite have the visuals to match its songs, or the tunes to match its lyrics, but what lyrics!) Difficult People (Lots of laughs, not quite a rhythm, but the surreal political nightmare that kept peaking through was classic.) Portlandia Saturday Night Live (Great satire of Trump, or anything else, would require not sharing his extrinsic values—obsession with looks, success, intelligence, popularity, competition, etc.—which SNL increasingly has since David S. Pumpkins, while remaining as forward-looking on race and sexuality.) Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (See above.) The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (See above.) Sherlock Bojack Horseman (Lost me when it went underwater.) The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Deeper and less explicable drop-off than Lady Dynamite.) Daredevil (First season.) Luke Cage (Early episodes.)

Comfort in reruns (or just memories and recommendations): The IT Crowd In Treatment (John Mahoney R.I.P.) Show Me a Hero Inside Amy Schumer Moone Boy Friday Night Lights Last Tango in Halifax The Sopranos Parenthood The Muppets Girls Homeland w/ Bob and David Arrested Development Hell on Wheels Death in Paradise The Wire

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10 Elements of Active Learning (a poster)

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Notes on Jones's 3rd Edition and cooperative learning.

As I hope is clear from my Fred Jones essay, not all "group work" is cooperative learning. Even CL with the crucial elements of positive interdependence and individual accountability can be misused, and each strategy has its own learning curve, often with skills that require coaching. The same principle applies to any other unconventional teaching method, including project-based learning (PBL). It only stands to reason that the less traditional a technique is, the longer it will take for best practices to spread. More important, CL and PBL are only as good as the discipline structure and incentive system you have in place to support them.

So it's distressing to find Jones not acknowledging any of this in the third (electronic) edition of Tools for Teaching (2014), where he dismisses cooperative learning with a single paragraph in Chapter 1, writing that it "results in a lot of chit-chat without anyone working too hard--except for the high achiever of the group who does the assignment for everyone else." At the risk of stating the obvious, this is an example of a badly taught cooperative group lesson. (At least Jones hasn't excised all references to cooperative groups from the 2007 second edition.)

Cooperative learning has been around for decades. Couldn't Jones have taken a minute to study how "natural" cooperative learning teachers use it? Many of these teachers already apply his techniques of motivation and discipline to CL--for instance, using preferred activity time for groups when all members show mastery. Teachers who simply hand out worksheets, let students "work with partners," and hope for the best are probably the same ones who would be less adept at motivation and discipline anyway. Isn't this problem at least part of the story behind the relative success or failure of seemingly more "democratic" and "autonomous" methods? 

So comparing cooperative learning to (say) direct instruction is inherently misleading. I imagine cooperative learning could be more widely abused because the hazardous, watered-down version of CL is easier to apply. But if you decide to ride a bicycle, the way to get there safely is to wear a helmet and learn to use the brakes, not conclude that walking is always better. It's a sign of the charged and remote state of thinking on teaching that the best known advocate for cooperative learning (Alfie Kohn) rejects incentives, the best known defender of teachers unions (Diane Ravitch) thinks discipline is a cultural problem, and the best known teacher of positive discipline (Jones) now rejects cooperative learning.

In his third edition, Jones rightly sees John Hattie's landmark book Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement as a justification of sorts for the approach he recommends to "say, see, do" teaching, but goes on to frame Hattie's findings as a rejection of cooperative learning and other more peer-driven methods. [*Note from 2019: Since writing this five years ago, I have read this 2018 critique of Hattie by Robert Slavin, the great education researcher, who calls into question the basic math behind Hattie’s theory. I still think Hattie seems like an excellent teacher himself, with a compelling explanation of why students learn better with teachers. But he may have built his house on sand.] I'd be skeptical of this meta-meta-analysis even if Jones represented Hattie's findings fairly: For one thing, any study, as Jones suggests, necessarily accounts for students who go "backwards" amid the misuse of strategies (those who fall off the bike without a helmet). All you have to do is watch a great teacher use cooperative groups to see all students, including outliers, increase achievement when it's done well.

But Jones invents his own categories of "Large," "Medium," "Small," and "No improvement" to summarize Hattie's findings as follows (I've omitted some approaches for space), when it comes to the "effect size" of different teaching methods on student improvement:

Large. Teaching approaches that show "large" "significant improvement" include (to paraphrase Jones quoting the book):

Frequent feedback between teacher and student.

Spaced practice as opposed to massed practice.

Formative evaluation.

(and in the more innovative realm...)

Reciprocal teaching (summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting possible outcomes as a means of solving problems).

Comprehensive interventions for learning disabled students.

Medium. Those that show "medium" improvement include:

Meta-cognitive strategies.

Self-verbalization.

(and in the less traditional realm...)

The teaching of systematic problem solving.

Small. Those that show "small" improvement include:

Study skills.

Concept mapping.

Worked examples.

Peer tutoring.

(and in the online realm...)

Direct instruction on video.

No improvement. Those that show no improvement include:

Frequent testing.

Matching style of learning.

(and in the less traditional realm)

Cooperative learning.

Computer assisted instruction.

Inquiry based teaching.

Net loss. Those that show a "net loss" of improvement include:

Individualized instruction.

Teaching test taking skills.

Mentoring by older students.

Increased homework.

Competitive learning.

(and on the innovative side)

Student control over learning.

Problem based learning.

Distance learning.

Team teaching.

Home-school programs.

Web-based learning.

Bizarrely, Jones moves Hattie's goal posts to create those tiers--admitting that "Due to the way findings fall into clusters, I will stretch Dr. Hattie's cut point" for significant improvement from a deviation of 0.40 to 0.45--which has the effect of bumping cooperative learning (in its lowest effect size, 0.41, when compared to heterogeneous classes) out of Hattie's "zone of desired effects" and even out of Jones's own made-up "small" category and into his own made-up "no improvement" category (Hattie, p. 212). Did Jones think no one would notice? And can he be unaware that Hattie is a proponent of cooperative learning?

To clarify, Hattie's own categories put anything above a deviation of 0.40 as "above average" and "desired," which would include cooperative versus heterogeneous learning (0.41) (Hattie, p. 17). For Hattie, anything above a deviation of 0.60 is "excellent" which nearly includes cooperative versus competitive learning (0.54) and cooperative versus individualistic learning (0.59, the same effect size as direct instruction, by the way) (Visible Learning, p. 17), 212). Both of the latter effect sizes would put cooperative learning in Jones's own "small" range--if he included them. (For reference, the Johnsons found an effect size of 0.64 in a 2002 meta-analysis comparing cooperative to individualistic learning.) As Hattie writes, "There seems a universal agreement that cooperative learning is effective, especially when contrasted with competitive and individualistic learning" (Hattie, p. 212). 

Jones also misreads Hattie to claim that an improvement of 0.40 is "roughly what you might expect from a typical kid sitting in a typical classroom for a year." To the contrary, as Hattie writes, "0.40 does not mean that this is the typical effect of teaching or teachers," because "In most studies summarized in this book, there is a deliberate attempt to change, improve, plan, modify, and innovate" (Hattie, p. 17). (In 2006's Reading Educational Research, Gerald W. Bracey writes that "generally, effect sizes between +0.20 and +0.30 are where most people think an ES has practical ramifications. For example, if we could find an instructional treatment that produced an effect size of +0.30 in achievement for African Americans three years in a row versus some more traditional instructional treatment, we would come very close to wiping out the black-white achievement gap"; Bracey, p. 73.)

Jones is right to cite the hidden opportunity costs of using one just-okay strategy to displace a better strategy, and the effect size of cooperative learning does seem small next to, say, frequent feedback. But this may be a measure of feedback's comparatively smaller bicycle helmet problem. And feedback with monitoring is an essential feature of effective cooperative learning! Even project-based learning can be effective when highly mediated by teachers and peers--as in Hattie's example of teaching cliff rescues, which sounds a lot like the best PBL (Hattie, p. 25).

As Robert J. Marzanno points out, the wrinkle of these broad categories of strategy is they include a range of use from good to bad. An "examination of the research on feedback," Marzanno writes, "indicates that even this 'very high yield strategy' doesn't always work to enhance student achievement," as Kluger and DeNisi found in 1996, showing that 30% of 607 studies on feedback showed a "negative effect." For me, seeing online learning, older-student mentoring, and something as vague as "student control over learning" near the bottom of Hattie's scale just reminds me that these strategies are in their infancy. The bottom line should be "what works when done right," not "what works most commonly." This is inevitably a judgment, and, as Gerald W. Bracey writes, "There is no escape from using judgment" (Reading Educational Research, 2006, p. 72).

Of course, there's nothing rash in telling beginning teachers that some methods can be misused: Jones takes care to do the same with his own strategies. But it's hasty to lump cooperative learning in with results that, according to him, "show that minimal guidance doesn't work" or "that students construct meaning much more efficiently when the teacher plays an active rather than a passive role in structuring the learning experience and providing feedback." Why can't a teacher be active while students are also active with each other?

Guidance in learning is hardly a zero sum game, as Jones himself demonstrates. In his fine new passages on the neuroscience of practice, drawing on Daniel Coyle's The Talent Code in the new Chapter 20 for Tools for Teaching, Jones vividly describes the "attentive repetition" required to learn a new skill, which "only comes from wanting something badly." He cites role models, a culture of achievement, and extensive play as fuel for this jet in young learners--but the play element may be the most crucial. At a certain point, Jones writes of Brazilian soccer, "the coach is no longer teaching the game. The game is teaching the game," with "instant feedback provided by the game itself." Having drilled certain skills and knowledge to perfection, the coach can sit back. He "plays a relatively passive role. It could not be otherwise because of the speed of play."

Jones may not know it, but he's describing cooperative learning--and I'd argue that the Brazilian coach isn't as passive as he seems. When students are applying already-mastered knowledge in ways that are inherently open-ended or complex, increased interaction with peers is the stuff of real, higher-order learning, and is always subtly guided. The impression Jones might have of alternatives to direct instruction is a teacher hiding behind his desk. But the reality of effective CL and PBL is always a teacher closely monitoring the proceedings and frequently intervening.

I don't wish to pursue CL or PBL as dogma any more than I want to denigrate direct instruction, which can also be hugely effective (and can also be misused, as I've seen first-hand). But can considerations of discipline and general teacher effectiveness ever be separated from findings such as Project Follow Through's ten-year study (cited by Jones citing Hattie) showing that direct instruction works best for "disadvantaged students"? Jones would be more persuasive if he at least acknowledged that the spectrum of effective teaching isn't a spectrum at all, something that implies one dimension, but instead a multi-dimensional, interconnected system. As I've learned from Jones, teaching is more like a game: complex, interlocking, and always involving interaction in a group.

Posts and essays in this series:

How to keep school from Dumbing Us Down.

Why classrooms aren't communities.

What, me motivate? Part I

School and the Law of the Jungle

Teaching or violence?

Lesson plan template (January, 2014)

What, me motivate? Part II

What, me motivate? Part III

Authority and freedom revisited: John Locke and A.S. Neill

Notes on Jones's 3rd Edition and cooperative learning

[petescholtes-blog-blog]

Giving or taking over?

One: The law of death or glory. I don't know you, but I'm guessing your oppression was not overturned last night. You may have a good idea of what ending that oppression would feel like, whether it's a revolution, passing a new law, or getting a new job. For most people, I imagine, that thing didn't happen. For radicals, a revolution would involve some kind of "structural change" in the world, though they disagree about what this means. Maybe it comes down to the whole world getting a new job. But that it didn't happen, either.

Or did it? Writing last month about teaching and violence, I proposed an idea so unusual, and yet so inescapable, that I'm still wrapping my head around it: that movements to change the world, short of outright military campaigns, are, and always have always been, about teaching rather than fighting. The idea applies to revolutions themselves, which aren't just about power changing hands, but hands changing power. To the extent that movements involve confrontation, these confrontations always teach, and hold out the possibility for reconciliation. Without this element, all battles are war, suicide, or both: the logic of Kaiser Soze killing his family to win (in 1995's The Usual Suspects, where the villain showed "these men of will what will really was").

I followed this idea to its logical, more bewildering conclusion: that there are parallels between movements confronting uncooperative power and teachers confronting uncooperative students. The connection goes unseen because the skills of effective teaching--"say, see, do" lessons, giving incentives, cooperative groups, and "meaning business"--are obscure. Most people still think you can punish children into learning. We see authority as something taken, not given. And the very idea of giving is distorted where metaphors of competition, battle, commerce, and retribution dominate. This vocabulary is all some of us have. But we diminish ourselves by thinking we win affection, fight for good, pay it forward, teach somebody a lesson, and are rewarded for our efforts. Language insists we don't give anything, including a crap.

This blindness, I've argued, stems from an oppression that comes from within, a false and corrupting ideology that has no common name, so I call it the Law of the Jungle (Kipling's original idea narrowed to its crude common usage). Here is a toxin that poisons even the ideas of movements that would end oppression, benefitting all illegitimate authority. So the new left of 1962, taking shape at the Port Huron convention of Students for a Democratic Society, began as a community "both 'fraternal and competitive,'" according to participant Paul Potter, quoted by Sara Evans in Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left (1980, p. 113). But "As SDS grew, community suffered and competition heightened" (p. 113). As ruthless arrogance grew thick, the movement marginalized women and damaged men, who "felt inadequate and 'put down'" (p. 154).

In the sexual revolution that followed, men and women could embrace what David Thomson calls "the modern itch, the movie urge" to have everyone, like any moviegoer, "less inclined to fix upon the means of choice in love and marriage than yield to the parade of dreams that are more likely to become glamorous and sexual" (The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, 2004, p. 217-218). A generation raised on movies attached itself "to a medium which in its deepest being urges detachment," Thomson writes, or danced to songs of love at first sight (p. 218). Starting out as the narcissists they revealed in song and unlearning the Law to become better people was part of the drama and evolution of the Beatles.

The Law is obsessed with winning, fighting, having, or dying--"death or glory," as the Clash sang in 1979. It has little use for compromise, real controversy, cooperation among differing views, or admitting weakness. Which is why many radicals favor consensus over pluralism--at best synthesizing opposing perspectives, at worst cutting away opposition--while equating revolution with cathartic violence. "Are you taking orders, or are you taking over?" the Clash sang two years earlier, in empathy with riot--the moment when a third option between taking orders and taking over seems impossible, before the realization that you're doing neither sets in. But the drama and evolution of the Clash was their half-conscious realization that revolutionary romanticism is another Hollywood cowboy or soldier story. Even the supposed arrival of the left counterculture to the big screen in the 1970s was really the Law blended with wary irony, where The Godfather (1972) and its sequel (1974) bound the audience to Michael Corleone's cool view of enemies, his calculation that Cuban rebels are admirable because they fight to the death, and so they can win. Michael punishes underlings, family, and government to death because that's the only card he has. 

The better teacher was McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), the class clown as instinctive Yippie (or early Sex Pistol). But even there, Jack Nicholson's willfulness was meant only for death or glory (or escape), not change. As a middle-school kid in the early '80s, I drew and published a cartoon of a rebellious student who turned into a jungle-cat superhero and attacked his teacher--a likeness of my own teacher at the time. To be honest, I didn't know what I was doing. I instinctively sided with kids sent to the office for disruption because the teacher made discipline a public spectacle (the old "names on the board" technique), so in the moment I didn't care if the boys were bullies. Only after I was marched in to apologize by another teacher did I begin to see my target as a person, obviously hurt by what I did, and only now do I see him as just another struggling teacher, one who hadn't yet learned the skills of classroom management.

Two: The authority of giving. People carry these figures of authority in their heads throughout their lives, and some make eternal war on them. This sense of fighting intensifies the more you feel that you have somehow cooperated with the oppressor, as George Orwell or Malcolm X felt they had done. So when some radicals realize they can't punish the world into changing, an odd defeatism settles over them, a kind of revolutionary all-or-nothing-ism: the syllogism neatly dividing the world into oppressed and oppressor, McMurphy and Nurse Ratchet, justifying the (perpetually) coming conflict to make solidarity along these severely drawn lines--often with a kick of self-loathing privilege. Reality for these revolutionaries is Cuba in 1959, with the guerrillas about to sweep through. It becomes very easy to believe that all is lost, in this mindset, because in fantasy, it usually is. And there are so many Hollywood versions of this story, often involving a sci-fi hero who presses the right button to reveal all, and make power crumble.

I don't mean to disparage militants doing good work, movies processing these feelings, inevitable revolutions, or even dreams and utopias. How else can you teach something good that's not already there? My worry comes when dreams defeat the dreamers, the psychic toll taken by the Law on those who see humanity as losing. This frightened pessimism is the mentality that envies Kaiser Soze, and limits what we see as revolutionary even before totalitarianism takes hold (which it always does in the Law), because we don't notice how revolutions are underway all around us--how we train for the job before getting it.

To take a mundane and blessedly middle-class example, last week my neighbors gave me tools and advice to help me fix our snow blower--the kind of problem I used to daydream about as a renter. As the machine came to life, I felt something more than gratitude: It was power and, for lack of a better word, faith. Power because I'd learned to fix something that had seemed unfathomable. Faith because I found that a neighborhood--a network sometimes viewed with suspicion or competition, like school or work--might also contain a community. I wish this feeling was what Star Wars (George Lucas's 1977 Vietnam parable) had talked about instead of the aptly named Force. (After my Grandma died, I learned that she took my brother and me to Star Wars all those countless times in the '70s without ever liking it. That was real faith.)

Many come by this insight of giving every day, and change the world in small ways without acknowledgment. Others teach large numbers of people using the same strategy. But as I cleared the sidewalks for neighbors the other night, this pride and optimism mingled with news, art, and internet noise reminding me (as any corporate employee knows) that oppression hasn't ended, that the Empire stands. There was first the entirely fictional "suppressed" Grammy speech by Lorde, circulated in social media, where the singer (an imagined reader of Naomi Klein) urged fans to send "the psychopaths that currently run the world to the planet's prisons," and added, "Peace cannot happen with reconciliation. That was Nelson Mandela's mistake."

There was also The Lego Movie (2014), a kind of Star Wars remake that called for just this reconciliation--telling "President Business" that maybe he didn't have to be the bad guy after all--and attacked by Fox Business at the same level of inanity on which hoaxes operate, with one guest echoing Hoover's FBI to cite It's a Wonderful Life (1946) as evidence of Hollywood's anti-capitalist bias. (George Bailey was a banker too, guys.) And there was The Daily Show's Jason Jones hugging a Russian gay-rights protester, a grandmother who quoted TV's Angel to say that if "nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do." In the Minneapolis Jones mentioned, there were also free Art Shanties, a screening of 1977's Eraserhead (showing the Law's dread of human need--pictured above with the Olympics bear mascot), and an amazing piece of music and dance by an artist I know, about his loneliness in the network that saved him after he appealed for a kidney donor through Facebook (Antarctica, which was like a live Eraserhead, pictured at the top under a photo from the recent Ukraine protests).

You have your own news, and I'm sure it was more significant. But if it involved changing the world, take a moment to reckon with this month's cover essay by Adolph Reed Jr., in Harper's, boldly titled "Nothing Left: The long, slow surrender of American liberals" (his battle metaphor right up front). Then watch what I've come to think of as its unwitting answer and negation: a real speech, and a moving one, by actor Ellen Page, coming out as gay before an audience of actual youth workers, advocates, and young people on Valentine's Day in Las Vegas (embedded above, transcript here).

That last moment blots out the rest, which says something about how change works. But start with Reed, subscribing to Harper's if necessary (it's great), and take my word that the author can be brilliant, even here. He sings the old song that cultural politics can't challenge real "power" because they're not based in a majoritarian movement for economic justice. He would have us reforge the "labor-left alliance" of the It's a Wonderful Life era, a familiar old line he sees and raises on the symbolism of an African American president "sold, even within the left, as a hybrid of Martin Luther King Jr. and Neo from The Matrix."

For Reed, there's been no progress since the '80s, only "defeat and marginalization"--and why? Because the left "lacks focus and stability," drawing "its inspiration, hopefulness, and confidence from outside its own ranks"--"from this oppressed group" or that (students, Zapatistas, "the black/Latino/LGBT 'community'")--rather than doing "long-term organizing" around populist goals such as "single-payer health care, universally free public higher education and public transportation," and "federal guarantees of housing and income security."

But, to quote Ellen Willis 15 years ago, "I'd suggest a different explanation for the [economic] majoritarians' failure: their conception of how movements work and their view of the left as a zero-sum game--we can do class or culture, but not both--are simply wrong" (Don't Think, Smile!, 1999, p. x). As Willis writes, "People's working lives, their sexual and domestic lives, their moral values are intertwined... If [Americans] do not feel entitled to demand freedom and equality in their personal and social relations, they will not fight for freedom and equality in their economic relations" (p. x-xi). Predatory power in one arena feeds predatory power in another.

What's more, "It's not necessary, as many leftists imagine, to round up popular support before anything can be done; on the contrary, the actions of a relatively few troublemakers can lead to popular support" (p. xvi). This is how the radical "gesture" Reed denigrates can teach the country, as Willis experienced first-hand at the lonely start of the women's liberation movement.

The pattern Willis outlines is familiar to anyone involved in successful social movements such as LGBT equality. As "radical ideas gain currency beyond their original advocates, they mutate into multiple forms," she writes. "Groups representing different class, racial, ethnic, political, and cultural constituencies respond to the new movement with varying degrees of support or criticism and end up adapting its ideas to their own agendas" (p. xvi-xvii). With popularity, the culture-teachers bring "pressure on existing power relations. Liberal reformers then mediate the process of dilution, containment, and 'co-optation' whereby radical ideas that won't go away are incorporated into the system through new laws, policies, and court decisions" (p. xvii).

Willis calls this dynamic "a good cop/bad cop routine," where liberals eventually "dismiss the radicals as impractical sectarian extremists, promote their own 'responsible' proposals as an alternative, and take the credit for whatever change results" (p. xvii). While this "process does bring about significant change," she worries that "denying the legitimacy of radicalism... misleads people about how change takes place," and leaves us "unprepared for the inevitable backlash" (p. xvii).

Here is where Willis, who died in 2006, joins Reed in warning that the political right takes the marginalization of radicals as an "opportunity to fight back. Conservatives in their turn become the insurgent minority," and "the liberal left keeps retreating" (in another metaphor of war)--so that "the entire debate shifts to the right" (p. xvii).

Three: The leap of faith. The same process applies to conservative ideas, I would add--some argue marriage is one of them. But contrary to the economic determinism of leftists and child-rearing determinism of conservatives, our "debate" is more changeable than we might think--as marriage equality shows. The "good cop/bad cop routine" could more accurately be described as a "good teacher routine" within any effective protest movement going back to civil rights: giving incentives and setting limits to get power moving. The goal is always to change minds--something you can either do badly or well. Because what's the alternative? Smashing heads?

People baffled that LGBT equality groups would donate money to Republican candidates who supported the cause, or that disability activists would let Bush Senior take credit for the Americans with Disabilities Act, miss how "raising costs" on bad policy only goes so far. Why not let President Business be the good guy? Great teachers connect, offer respect and humor, and give good reasons for cooperation, which is always a gift. They establish boundaries in ways that save those who would test them from embarrassment. In other words, they build authority--exactly the sticking point for the libertarian left of Willis.

In the anthology Anarchist Pedagogies (2012), edited by Robert H. Haworth, the word authority is mentioned 69 times, all but five with a negative connotation. To anti-authoritarians, authority usually means taking power away--through coercion, deception, commands, threats, terror, manipulation, surveillance, punishment, and bribery. But authority also involves giving power. The author in authority could as easily be the pull of art, the charisma of show, love of family, the weight of knowledge, the legitimacy of representation, duty of order, or the leap of faith. So the book's five positive references to authority tell how it can be shared or ceded between radical street medics, scientists, and (hey) Zapatistas. 

Of course, giving and taking can blur when different kinds of authority overlap, as in a democracy bought and paid for, or art that lies, or love made conditional through withholding (the disastrous advice of Dr. Phil and others). Unlike those examples, fully legitimate authority affirms an odd duality for those who are under it: You are good, and the rules matter. Every other approach to teaching or activism subtly undermines both ideas. The ultimate goal of all discipline, like all effective world-changing, is reconciliation. This was Mandela's grace. 

Willis writes that "every economic and social right that we've achieved since the nineteenth century has been hard-won by organized, militant, and often radical social movements: the labor movement; the socialist, communist, and anarchist movements; the new left student movement; the black and feminist and gay liberation movements; the ecology movement" (p. 190). She uses these examples to argue that "the idea that the state gives us these benefits is a mystification" (p. 190). But is it really? Rights are gifts from birth, something movements merely affirm. But government programs are a gift, too, because what else could they be? Payments? Bribes? Spoils of war? Our metaphors fail us because movements are taught, not fought.

For every new right we decide we have, we may need to imagine and launch creative, educational confrontations that persuade government to make laws allowing us to enjoy that right. This teaching exercise may need to be repeated everywhere, inevitably in tense personal interactions. But while this experience can feel like a "fight," and has faced unimaginable violence before, the good cop is as important as the bad cop. So much movement building involves the incentive side of teaching, the personal weight of connection.

At the Human Rights Campaign's Time to Thrive conference in Las Vegas, Ellen Page began her speech by expressing a feeling of collaboration in an oppression without a name. "I am, an actress, representing--at least in some sense--an industry that places crushing standards on all of us," she began. "Not just young people, but everyone. Standards of beauty. Of a good life. Of success. Standards that, I hate to admit, have affected me.

"You have ideas planted in your head," she continued, "thoughts you never had before, that tell you how you have to act, how you have to dress and who you have to be. I have been trying to push back, to be authentic, to follow my heart, but it can be hard."

To a room full of advocates for LGBT equality, she said, "all of you, all of us, can do so much more together than any one person can do alone." And then she added shakily, "I am here today because I am gay. And because maybe I can make a difference to help others have an easier and more hopeful time. Regardless, for me, I feel a personal obligation and a social responsibility. I also do it selfishly, because I’m tired of hiding. And I’m tired of lying by omission."

Page ended by expressing gratitude for the kind of power and faith I described above, except multiplied by the magnitude of fixing a machine inside yourself. "Thank you for giving me hope," she said, "and please keep changing the world for people like me. Happy Valentine's Day. I love you."

It was everything you could ask for from a State of the Union: an acknowledgement of despair, vulnerability in wrestling with perceived complicity, dramatic evidence of true empathy, and invigorating encouragement for real, life-changing work, already underway. Page's words were a sign that, for anyone still changing the world, the past 40 years haven't been a disappointment. Why not occupy foreclosed homes? Why not rally against climate change, or take on homophobia in Russia? Better to be lifted by choices than burdened by dreams. If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.

Viewing progress as an account receivable is a seductive idea for anyone staring into the abyss, but that's where it belongs, in the abyss. Reality is so much better. We're not losing. The psychopaths and men of will pretending to run the planet are just people. We can learn and spread the skills of teaching, and we can do more together than anyone can do alone.

[petescholtes-blog-blog]

Authority and freedom revisited: John Locke and A.S. Neill

Note: This week, after processing the classroom management system of Fred Jones, I found myself returning to this 2009 paper I wrote about A.S. Neill and John Locke, two fundamentally opposed thinkers whose ideas still ripple outward, wondering how my views on each have changed and what that change might teach me. Both writers, I now realize, seem unable to separate authority from coercion, which is where our problems begin. (In fact, as you'll see, my 2009 self was unable to separate them too.) In an afterward below, I explore how the idea of power they share winds up leaving good people without it. Enjoy!

Blank slates versus clean slates: John Locke versus A.S. Neill.

Does denying pleasure to children build their character? Does punishing them when they do wrong show that you love them? Does instilling good manners make children better people? These questions might be too broadly or vaguely put for many parents or teachers to answer without qualification: Even the strictest authoritarian can imagine instances where denial, punishment, and instilling-of-good-manners can go too far, and become abuse.

Yet I suspect that few of even the most progressive educators would answer these questions with a firm "no" today: A broad consensus exists valuing punitive adult authority over a wide range of child behaviors. Which is partly a measure of why A.S. Neill, who would likely answer "no" to all of the above questions, remains radical in educational thinking, while John Locke, a radical in his day (not least for the way he might have qualified his "yes"), is bedrock.

Scottish educator Alexander Sutherland Neill (1883-1973) founded Summerhill school in 1921, moving the institution to its to its present-day location in Suffolk, England, in 1927, where it became "the most widely known example of the free school" (Graubard, 1972, p. 11) by renouncing adult authority and correction. Though a tiny boarding school, Summerhill came to be viewed as a utopian model of age-egalitarianism and youthful liberty, where adults and children are equal, where everyone gets a vote, and where classes are optional--with students often staying away for years at a time to play.

Neill's democratic commitment extended to absenting himself if necessary: As a reviewer in The Nation noted in 1927, regarding Neill's book The Problem Child, "I should have liked to visit his German school when the Schulgeminde carried a motion that he be 'put out because he was useless'; when he had remained away three days the children voted to reinstate him" (Hourwich, 1927, p. 615).

Three centuries earlier, British philosopher, diplomat, economist, and scientist John Locke (1632-1704) "started us on our way to behavior modification" (Kessen, 1978, p. 44) by advocating absolute adult authority in the correction of the young, at least while they are still young. Where Neill would later consider it "impossible to educate the conscious mind of a child, and that only the unconscious can be permanently taught" (Hourwich, 1927, p. 615), Lock "rejects altogether the notion of a sub-conscious" (Locke, Woozley, 1964, p. 19). Where Neill spent much of his writing career arguing for the innate goodness of children, Lock argued strenuously that there are no innate ideas.

"A child knows not that three and four are equal to seven," he wrote in his best-known work, 1689's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, "till he comes to be able to count to seven, and has got the name and idea of equality" (Locke, Woozley, 1964, p. 73).

It's worth pointing out that while Locke is sometimes viewed as the father of authoritarianism in modern education, his notion of children as possessing no innate knowledge was actually an attack on the rule of received wisdom, and a credit to the learning intelligence of young people: Borrowing Gassendi's notion of the mind as a "tabula rasa" to state that human beings begin as "white paper void of all characters," Locke argued that eternal truths are only eternal because they are arrived at, time and again, by new and independent young minds (Locke, Woozley, 1964, p. 12, p. 395).

As Woozley points out, Locke's ideas about knowledge were "an acknowledgement and a justification" of the new freedoms staked out by science--in part why Locke was as controversial a figure with the church of his day as Neill would later become of his. "[T]here are few to be found who are not exposed by their ignorance, laziness, education, or precipitancy, to take [any given principle] upon trust," Locke wrote [italics in the original]. "Principles must be examined."

That said, it's not surprising to find that Locke's descriptive view of the human mind, as learning everything upon exposure to the world, is compatible with his prescriptive view seeking to control that exposure as much as possible. Written near the end of his life, 1699's Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Of the Conduct of the Understanding began as a series of letters to a friend, a father, offering child-rearing advice. Noting early on that "the minds of children are as easily turn’d this or that way, as water it self" (Locke, Elliot, 2001, Sec. 2), the book turns first to the body, with lengthy instructions on the importance and good habits of health, physical warmth, and ample sleep for children.

Turning next to the mind, Locke emphasizes what he considers the "foundation of all virtue": "that a man is able to deny himself his own desires, cross his own inclinations, and purely follow what reason directs as best, tho’ the appetite lean the other way" [italics in the original] (Locke, Elliot, 2001, Sec. 33).

Teaching reason and self-denial is the solemn duty of parents, according to Locke, and  "the less reason [children] have of their own, the more are they to be under the absolute power and restraint of those in whose hands they are" (Locke, Elliot, 2001, Sec. 39). Little children "should look upon their parents as their lords, their absolute governors, and as such stand in awe of them," he writes (Locke, Elliot, 2001, Sec. 41).

Too many parents resist teaching obedience when children are young out of a loving sense of indulgence, spoiling a child by allowing him to "have what he cries for, and do what he pleases" (Locke, Elliot, 2001, Sec. 34). Locke advises parents not to tax young memories with too many rules, and instead instill in them a kind of sense-memory for manners. With constant rehearsal, bowing or politely looking a person in the face "requires no thought, no reflection" (Locke, Elliot, 2001, Sec. 64). Though he admits young human beings are more willful than animals, and discourages corporal punishment, Locke also compares the teaching of children to the training of horses or dogs.

The contrast to A.S. Neill couldn't appear more stark. "The tragedy of man is that, like the dog, his character can be molded," Neill writes in his best known book, 1960's Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing. "You cannot mold the character of a cat, an animal superior to the dog... Yet most people prefer dogs because their obedience and their flattering tail-wagging afford visible proof of the master's superiority and worth" (Neill, 1960, p. 100).

Thus the vanity of adults produces "unfree" children who are "molded, conditioned, disciplined, repressed," resentful, and hopelessly insincere, Neill argues (Neill, 1960, p. 95). Such children might not even know whom they're trying to please anymore. Though it's partly the true story of an educational experiment, Summerhill becomes an extended polemic for zestful, loving freedom, and against the notion, embraced by Locke, that virtue is most sharply embodied in the denial of things you might want. 

"The time-table feeding advocates are basically anti-pleasure," Neill writes of baby-care advice of his day. "They want the child to be disciplined in feeding because non-timetable feeding suggests orgiastic pleasure at the breast. The nutriment argument is usually a rationalization; the deep motive is to mold the child into a disciplined creature who will put duty before pleasure" (Neill, 1960, p. 95). 

Neill goes beyond subscribing to the Cartesian common sense that Locke attacks to take human goodness as an almost theological given--and his faith has limits. His evidence-free rejection of homosexuality as pathology, not to mention his dated disdain for Elvis Presley, are particularly dispiriting. Yet the strict-Freudian Neill wouldn't be nearly so compelling if not for the hundreds of examples he provides from experience and observation--an empirical, if anecdotal, approach that Locke himself approaches only implicitly or indirectly. 

Experience also appears to bring, in Neill, the balance of common sense: "If a baby of three wants to walk over the dining table, you simply tell him he must not," he advises. "He must obey, that's true. But on the other hand, you must obey him when necessary. I get out of small children's rooms if they tell me to get out" (Neill, 1960, p. 95). Where children have zero rights in strict homes, and have "all the rights" in spoiling homes, "The proper home is one in which children and adults have equal rights," he writes. "And the same applies to schools" (Neill, 1960, p. 107).

The most persuasive point made by both philosophers might also be the one on which they both agree: Corporal punishment is worse than ineffective. Where Neill writes that "The whipped child, like the whipped puppy, grows into an obedient, inferior adult" (Neill, 1960, p. 100), Locke similarly warns that "Such a sort of slavish discipline makes a slavish temper" (Locke, Elliot, 2001, Sec. 50). For both thinkers, dodging the rod becomes its own sort of superficial, dishonest morality. For Neill, freedom from punishment is the answer: Left to themselves, children arriving at his school from strict backgrounds go through an acting-out period, but eventually settle once they realize they have no one to act out against.

Locke doesn't relinquish the solution of adult authority, but his preferred carrot and stick are "esteem and disgrace" (Locke, Elliot, 2001, Sec. 56). Lest parents or teachers take away from his instruction the idea that these prongs be used on all youthful foolishness, he allows that "For all their innocent folly, playing and childish actions, are to be left perfectly free and unrestrain’d" (Locke, Elliot, 2001, Sec. 56). On that point as well, he and Neill would entirely agree.

Afterward: Free to give.

One: Adults teach social skills. How can a classroom teacher today reckon with Locke and Neill? Five years after writing the above, it's clear I chose these two because they looked beyond the immediate requirements of school to examine the power relations underlying it. But that still leaves teachers with the practical dilemma of getting 30 kids to cooperate when cooperation is not necessarily their first choice. Does Neill have anything to say to this situation besides goodbye? 

Our responses to liberty's problems may contain the political spectrum. The unhappy divide I see forming is between 1.) teachers who would throw Neill in the recycling bin and side with Locke, dismissing freedom for children as a naive dream, and 2.) those who would side with Neill and throw teaching itself in the recycling bin, either immediately or after burning out, dismissing school as an unnatural situation and themselves as not up to it.

As I suggest in my Jones essay, this binary is both wrongheaded and not really a binary at all: By rejecting her own power, the anti-authoritarian quickly turns into the nag and punisher she fears becoming. By not giving students power, the authoritarian loses her own power, and becomes the same thing. I think teachers misunderstand authority when they see it as something that's taken, not given. Should we worry that a similar mutual blind spot links Locke and Neill? 

Think of the playground--that's where I left off in my paper above. For both Lock and Neill, playing was the natural state of childhood. It may be what Neill is thinking of when he uses the word freedom: voluntary, creative fun where everything is inherently interesting. Play is what life should be. It's what school and work should be. Which is why Jones calls classroom discipline an indoor sport--not to trivialize the emotions involved, but to remind us that life's a game, so just play. The only kind of discipline Neill admires is team spirit, whether in sports, orchestral music, or school (Summerhill, p. 156-157).

But adults teach the values of play in thousands of ways that Neill elides. Even in the fantasy life children have--the kind that "requires no skill, little competition, and hardly any teamwork"--play draws on adult ideas and rules (Summerhill, p. 63, 62). Anyone who contributes to play--friends or adults--gains more authority by doing so. So children regulate each other, and adults stay nearby. Neill may take as much comfort in what adults don't do with play. They don't usually order, judge, rank, lecture, yell, shame, or punish during play. They don't necessarily lead, or even appear to influence anything. For Neill, who "used the strap" as a young teacher and senses the strap in every exertion of influence, play might be a kind of peace (Summerhill, p. 160, 256).

The problem, as any student who dreads recess knows, isn't adults, but other children. And here's where the respective godfathers of "natural rights" and "free schools" pass along their blind spot. By emphasizing the adult-child relationship, Neill and Locke gloss relationships between peers. But those relationships, and how adults facilitate them, are what teach us about real authority.

Take the fighting shown in the ethnographic documentary Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited (2009), which looks at one preschool in each of three countries, in 1985 and 2005. Watching today, I'm struck by the close teaching of social skills in the Japanese school (goodbye songs at day's end, rock-paper-scissors to decide who goes first) combined with the relatively hands-off approach to conflicts among kids. In one scene, a boy steps on another boy's hand to warn him off. The victim runs to friends, not the teacher, and these girls comfort him and counsel him to not play with that boy, because he always does that.

Children, the teachers tell us, learn from experiencing such "social complexity" first-hand, and develop the skills to handle tensions away from the scrutiny and mediation of adults. In another example, girls fight over a teddy bear, where the girls around the struggle seem to have very definite ideas about sharing, even as the one whose bear has been taken away gets very upset, to the point of fighting back with punches. The teacher keeps an eye on the conflict, as with the other incident, but doesn't intervene. In the end, the girl who took the bear reconciles with the girl who did the punching, to agree that they will be friends who don't hog the bear, who share or take turns. "Fighting is not a problem," say educators at the school (Komatsudani Preschool in Kyoto). If there were no fighting, that would be the problem.

But, amazing as the footage is, there is so much going on off camera. The girls doing the counseling and reconciling obviously arrived at their ethics and methods through some kind of learning--whether with peers, siblings, parents, or teachers. The group of children that decides sharing is the rule could as easily have concluded that might makes right or majority rules--or both. In fact, the drama we see between the boys, with girls consoling the victim afterward, will result in a kind of social ostracism for the boy who was violent. This kind of group coercion arises without the bullying Neill ascribes to starved egos or repression (Summerhill, p. 274, 271). At what point, I wonder, will the teacher intervene to help the kid learn that there are other ways of dealing? Where did the boy learn violence in the first place? And will anyone help him connect to the group?

Adults permitting or encouraging fights so often reflect Law of the Jungle values that my radar went up at these scenes. But the film also shows how the school lets older children help out in the baby and toddler room--perhaps a parallel to the more informal mixed-age interactions of Summerhill--a program that teachers say develops empathy. With a falling birthrate in Japan, the school institutionalizes mixed-age interactions ostensibly to salvage the cultural tradition of omoiyari: the ability and willingness to understand and respond to the needs of others. I imagine that this curriculum also gives the young caregivers (such as the boy shown helping a younger one learn to use a urinal) an experience of real power--the power to give to others. Would the kids who were violent benefit from this feeling?

Two: The authority of Summerhill. Neill is known in Japan, and he would be pleased to see teachers in the documentary not yelling or punishing. But they're also teaching, giving gifts of fun, and subtly establishing the boundaries that children test. Power, as I argue in my essay on Jones, can only be given with the power you have. And the more power you have, the more power you can give. Nobody other than caring adults could create a situation in which older children learn to care for toddlers. Only school can teach cooperative learning between strangers. You can't homeschool social power.

So Neill's legacy, outside the room-and-board free schools fully applying his ideas, is contradictory and unsatisfying. Even in the Summerhill he describes, he resolutely ignores the authority he exerts without seeming to. When a rebellious child asks him to come back to the school assembly after a democratic experiment in "chaos," Neill chalks it up the therapy of freedom, not his own moral standing or emotional pull (p. 314). He resorts to the semantic fudge of authoritarians from Locke onward by using "suppression" synonymously with "punishment" (p. 275). But suppression only means getting someone to not do something. At one point, Neill teaches a teenager to stop beating a dog by going up in front of the young man and gently petting the animal, calling the pet by his name. "Apparently, I made John conscious that he had been venting his hatred of his rival brother on the poor dog," Neill writes (Summerhill, p. 269). Neill makes it clear that teachers at Summerhill have the role of clinicians. He just pretends this role has no power.

Mystifying power wreaks havoc on Neill's good instincts. He honors the school's sometimes punitive democracy with the mixed happiness of a parent watching a child take off on a bicycle for the first time. Yet he lamely offers no alternative to integrate the bullies "disliked and criticized" by the group (Summerhill, p. 50, 54). Such a program would require power. But Neill is reluctant to lead. He's also reluctant to teach. He'd likely consider omoiyari an imposition of adult will. At his school, "the younger ones don't need to be looked after," he writes. "They are too busy on their own important affairs" (Summerhill, p. 352). But this is a loss to the older kids.

In the forward to Summerhill, Erich Fromm constrasts the "anonymous" authority of progressive educators, who use freedom as a cover for the "psychic manipulation" of shame and peer pressure, to Neill, who never wields the "withdrawal of love" as a threat (Summerhill, p. ix, x, xiv). But like Neill himself, Fromm sees power only as a negative. What power could a teacher possibly possess besides the ability to take good things away? Fromm--who fled Nazi Germany for Geneva, New York, and Mexico City--shows the cumulative toll taken by totalitarianism and authoritarianism by 1960. Freedom schools were still four years away and cooperative learning still a dream. No wonder the author of The Art of Loving can't see how teachers gain power by giving freedom, love, and power to others.

Instead, Fromm imagines authority as a job interview (which many college professors still do). Writing a few years earlier, he called rational authority a "critical evaluation of competencies," as "When a student recognizes the teacher's authority to know more than him" ("The Authoritarian Personality," 1957). But the experience of Summerhill shows otherwise. The process of authority is both entirely conscious and less than entirely rational, grudging in oppressive schools and workplaces (which is why cynicism runs so deep there), but just as often a leap of faith (Summerhill, p. xi). Democracy means using exactly the "persuasion" Fromm warns against--the only power that minority voices have (Summerhill, p. xi, 47). Just as we give authority every day to authors we love, bands we dance to, or any pilot flying our plane, leaders gain power by giving--sometimes appealing to reason, sometimes not--and using relationships to establish rules.

Neill illustrates this dynamic without recognizing it. Writing of the Little Commonwealth school for delinquent children, he remembers a story told by superintendent Homer Lane about catching a boy who ran away: Instead of cuffing him, Lane gave the kid money to take the train home rather than walk. "The boy returned to the Commonwealth that night," Neill writes (Summerhill, p. 275). This is the story of every great teacher ever. Like all incentives, giving "love and respect" (to use Neill's words) offers children something they need while teaching them lessons about life (Summerhill, p. 275). (Of course you can mold the character of a cat with love, as any loving cat owner knows.) Love also establishes the basis for setting limits. Neill would bristle at those phrases, but the "social values" of the Commonwealth didn't materialize out of nowhere, or come without rules. As Neill points out, "children simply do not build schools" (Summerhill, p. 275, p. 61).

This is real authority, a word Neill does contortions to avoid, like anarchists arguing that there's no teaching--only conveying information, modeling, and letting students learn by doing (Jones's "say, see, do" method in a nutshell). After describing obedience between adults and children at Summerhill as a mutual "give and take," Neill changes his mind to assert that the school "runs along without any authority or obedience" (Summerhill, p. 155). After writing, "Under self-regulation, there is no authority in the home," he reverses himself again to add that "In actual practice there is, of course, authority": the kind of "protection, care, adult responsibility" that "sometimes demands obedience but at other times gives obedience" (Summerhill, p. 155-156). (True to temperament, his examples are all commands and nagging declarations: "You can't bring that mud and water into our parlor"--from a parent; "Get out of my room, Daddy. I don't want you here now"--from a child; Summerhill, p. 156.)

Arguing that obedience "must come from within--not be imposed from without," Neill recalls "my friend Wilhelm Reich in Maine" telling his son Peter not to "go near the water," an instruction Peter obeyed because he's "had no hateful training and therefore" trusts his parents (Summerhill, p. 156, 159). Yet instead of seeing this as the perfect illustration of legitimate authority, Neill uses it as an example of a house with no authority.

Three: Without authority, there is only battle. Why does this semantic distinction matter? Neill was a great educator and his school stands today: Who cares if his words don't entirely tell us why? But that's just the problem: So much of teaching is invisible that we can examine models forever without knowing how to get there. And for a particular vein of post-Freudian, left libertarian thought, the example of Summerhill was always proof that freedom could exist without authority. This idea shaped the culture that new teachers join (whether they are conservative or liberal), and plants the seeds of its own abandonment and backlash. Not examining how power works leads only to unexamined power and conscientious powerlessness. This is the disaster of leadership in general, and teaching in particular.

You can find, for instance, in Neill's chapter on rewards and punishments, an anticipation of Alfie Kohn's insightful but strident critique of incentives. Much as Neill equates all suppression with punishment, Kohn seems to equate all incentives with rewards. But, as I explore in Part II of my Jones essay, the best incentives are always gifts, not payments, ones that empower rather than take power away--fun, responsibility, choices, and relationships. By dismissing all but intrinsic motivation for a task, Kohn would have new teachers reject a key strategy that could save them: the incentive of choices over how to use time (including preferred activities after a lesson).

For Kohn, the best way to get a chaotic class under control is through authentic, active lessons taught with respect and democracy. And what could the failure of this approach prove except the inadequacy of the teacher? This is where the Law of the Jungle begins to take root in anti-authoritarianism, starting with the despair that schools aren't Summerhill, and feeding the desperation that turns to rewards and punishment in a pinch. To believe Neill, the selfishness of youth is natural anyway. He makes no distinction between the "self-interest" of a kid helping him weed the garden just "because she wants to be with me" and one helping him weed to ask him for his pocketknife (Summerhill, p. 163). All rewards are the same.

You have to read Jones for any hint that your relationship with students carries weight, or that giving now will allow you to more fruitfully ask for help later. Jones would agree with Neill that when it comes to pocket money, "Parents should give without seeking anything in return," and of course, parents should pay children for heavy manual labor (Summerhill, p. 162, 164). But I suspect that parents who give love, time, and allowance money to children only put a price on cooperation when they also pay for routine chores.

Most incentives aren't rewards or payment, just as most suppression isn't punishment. In fact, wordlessly setting limits without embarrassing students--the body language of meaning business described in Part III of my Jones essay--has the opposite effect: It phases out punishment. After completing that essay recently, I had the opportunity to test these strategies all day as a substitute teacher, where the only lesson was to take kids to a book fair and have them read silently afterward then work with partners--no teaching, all discipline. I gave incentives (making the class laugh, giving students jobs, offering them choices, and giving a couple minutes of free time at the end). Then I set limits on goofing off with warmth and consistency, never resorting to public scolding, and giving only two private warnings. Of course suppression requires the authority students give you in response to your performance. But the fact that I could achieve this shows how quickly legitimacy can be established.

The only real alternative is a battle of wills, the kind of confrontation that teaches nobody. Wary of setting limits, the beginning teacher waits until student behavior gets so bad that nagging turns to punishing anyway--and so the anti-authoritarian becoming the oppressor. What worries me about this cycle is that it finds so many parallels in the world. Government becomes a bad teacher to the powerless. The powerless become bad teachers to power. We nag, punish, and bribe rather than give incentives and set limits. If you believe in freedom without authority, what's the point of building support for your movement? Why not just use force? This is the Law of the Jungle in anarchist clothing--the street fighter with everything to prove and nothing to teach.

I've also been brought back to Neill and Locke by reading Ellen Willis's brilliant Don't Think, Smile! (1999), which so eloquently challenges the right libertarian view that all illegitimate authority lies with the state--always with the adults, in other words, not with the other kids on the playground. She describes the relationship between liberals and radicals in progressive movements as a "good cop bad cop" relationship toward power, with protesters giving leverage to the wheeler-dealers. But anyone who wants to change the world needs to teach the people and the power, to seek reconciliation, as when the hero of the new The Lego Movie (2014) offers the villain a chance to not be the bad guy. This is the story of every successful movement ever. Jones offers a model for something Neill or Locke never could: a way for children to teach adults. 

Paper references:

(anonymous), A.S. Neill Wikipedia page. Retrieved 9/19/09 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._S._Neill.

(anonymous), "Introduction to Summerhill." Retrieved 9/19/09 from http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/

(anonymous), Summerhill School Wikipedia page. Retrieved 9/19/09 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School

Graubard, Alan (1972). Free the Children: Radical Reform and the Free School Movement. New York, NY. Pantheon.

Hourwich, Rebecca (1927). "The Free Child." The Nation, June 1, 1927. Retrieved 9/19/09  from TheNation.com

Johnson, J.A., Musial, D., Hall, G.E., Gollnick, D.M., Dupuis, V. L. (2008). Foundations of American Education; Perspectives on Education in a Changing World. Boston. Pearson and AB.

Kessen, William (1978). "The Child's Mind I: A Historical View: Our Disconnected Child." Harper's Magazine, April 1978. Retrieved 9/19/2009 from http://harpers.org/archive/1978/04/page/0042

Locke, John; edited by A.D. Woozley (1964). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. New York, NY.

Locke, John; edited by Charles W. Elliot (2001). Harvard Classics, Vol. 37, Part 1: Some Thoughts Concerning Education [and Of the Conduct of the Understanding]. New York, NY. Bartleby.com. Retrieved 9/19/09 from http://www.bartleby.com/37/1/

Neill, A.S. (1960). Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing. New York, NY. Hart.

Posts and essays in this series:

How to keep school from Dumbing Us Down.

Why classrooms aren't communities.

What, me motivate? Part I

School and the Law of the Jungle

Teaching or violence?

Lesson plan template (January, 2014)

What, me motivate? Part II

What, me motivate? Part III

Authority and freedom revisited: John Locke and A.S. Neill.

Notes on Jones's 3rd Edition and cooperative learning.

[petescholtes-blog-blog]

What, me motivate? Jones Re-Re-Intro and Part III

Note: Here's the final third of my essay on the classroom management system of Fred Jones, Part III: "Discipline" (following Part I on "Instruction," and Part II on "Motivation"). Again, it's long and goes off on political tangents. At this point, would you expect any different? Enjoy!

Fred Jones: Smile on the First Day (A Re-Re-Introduction) 

One: Meaning business is invisible. Picture two classrooms. In one, the teacher is relaxed and the students are learning--there's a buzz of happy excitement in the air. In the other, the teacher is yelling and the students are goofing off, indifferent, or helpless--in fact, the teacher himself or herself is helpless. Having started with a defense of teacher authority, we now come full circle: Active lessons ensuring success and incentive systems encouraging diligence are essential, but what good are they if you can't control the class?

This was where Fred Jones began Tools for Teaching, with the mystery of the "natural" teachers: how one instructor could have students literally jumping off the coat closet while another could have the same students walk in and get to work (p. 4). In the warmth and ease of the latter teacher, Jones saw that "discipline management did not have to be humorless or stressful," he writes. "You certainly do not have to wait until December to smile" (p. 4). In effect, he offers a book-length breakdown of the only advice the "naturals" seemed able offer--"You have to mean business"--a skill set with the distinct disadvantage of being both invisible and impossible for its practitioners to describe.

Here, too, is where many frazzled teachers begin with Jones, opening the book to its halfway point partway through the year, after their education and training have dead-ended into the challenges of classroom management. Not coincidentally, it's also where many egalitarians become uncomfortable. Recognizing anyone's authority, no matter how giving or legitimate that authority might be, inevitably means submitting to it: giving cooperation when cooperation is not one's first choice. Without this arrangement, small classroom disruptions become big ones. "If you are not in charge," as Jones writes, "no one is" (p. 183).

Yet requiring a public submission is also a "lose-lose," as Jones writes. "If you embarrass students in front of their peer group, they will embarrass you" (p. 221). Teacher education deemphasizes compliance altogether, as a result, discouraging any battle of wills. But pretending wills aren't in conflict insults students. In fact, we submit to the will of our loved ones every day when we set aside our own priorities for theirs, usually because their wishes are important to us. Deference is only emotionally fraught when authority is based on a social function, when our mutual hierarchy of priorities is determined by roles. Because when are those roles ever fully legitimate? Parents, teachers, and managers are only the person filling the job. Submission, despite its heavy connotations, merely says, "I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt. I'm recognizing your role, for now." 

Two: Meaning business means caring. Children withhold cooperation all the time to learn about their power and our role, as Jones explores with the example of asking your four-year-old daughter to pick up all her blocks. If she only picks up some, and you ask again, she may still leave a few behind, because, in her mind, this proves "she didn't have to" (p. 210). By waiting until all the blocks are picked up, you teach her that when "you ask her to do a job, you expect it to be done right" (p. 210). This establishes a boundary of reality, the kind that all children test to learn about the world. If "the boundaries never change," Jones writes, the "testing extinguishes" (p. 191).

Jones calls this gift of cooperation a submission, but that's hardly all it is. By holding firm on the blocks, you teach many things at once. Besides setting a limit and making a boundary real, you establish a rule, and rules give power because they apply to everyone. (You can explain later that parents aren't allowed to leave stuff on the floor either.) You also define your role as a teacher of expectations. (Your daughter will have expectations of her own, of course, but it's important to save that discussion for later: In the moment, rational self-advocacy isn't the most likely motive.) Finally, your persistence gives both your role and the rule legitimacy. You wouldn't take the time if you didn't care, weren't conscientious, or the rule didn't matter.

"But if you want your child to be a fusser and whiner, all you have to do is crack once or twice," Jones writes. "Be a weenie. Turn a blind eye to a job half-finished" (p. 210). This is the condition of many families, Jones argues. But I think the effect of bending runs deeper than simply reinforcing whining or highlighting a boundary that needs testing. Giving in says the rules aren't real. It establishes the arbitrariness of your authority. Instead of making your personal power a non-issue, you make it the only issue. Suddenly your daughter knows that the rules are not the house's, but yours, which means they're also subject to in-the-moment negotiation and challenge. This is a kind of betrayal, which leaves you open to suspicions of unfairness. Much as adults who reject their own power put a price on love, those who wield it yieldingly put a price on power itself. 

This is how the anti-authoritarian becomes a tyrant, an evolution that only seems paradoxical because we've been thinking about authority all wrong--as I have for most of my life. Real authority (it bears repeating) can only be given, never taken or bought. The only people who can give you authority are those who are under your authority. And your authority is always based on you giving those same people power. Forget external legal authority--it won't help. Real authority is like a circulatory system running through a heart of legitimacy.

As a substitute teacher, you can see first-hand how this system springs to life or crashes in minutes. If you make the class laugh and feel good, act like you know what you're doing, offer an incentive, give them an active lesson, and show them you're willing to set limits, they'll pick up all the blocks. If you make the class feel bad, yell, offer no incentive, give them a lecture, and let disruption spread, good luck calling on your external authority. The "act like you know" and "set limits" elements are crucial because the more power you have, the more power you can give. What anti-authoritarians ignore is that you can't give power without having it in the first place, which means convincing other people you have it. Being firm with your authority actually gives people more power, not less, by enhancing your legitimacy, which increases your ability to give.

Three: Meaning business inspires faith. The spiritual dimensions of teaching tell us something new about goodness in the world. Giving anyone their authority requires a real leap of faith--like a stage dive at a concert, or a class doing work for a substitute. This faith should be admired, not viewed with contempt. When adults say "good kid" to mean "obedient" (as in "good dog"), they ignore the generosity required to give people the benefit of the doubt, including people with power. Good kids are good people in a real sense, because faith requires strength.

Where faith goes wrong is exactly where it shatters: In expecting a return on payment, in putting a price on itself. Religious believers often agree, building the emotional muscles required to give to others by giving to a higher power and asking for nothing in return. Many religions call this a submission, and view the world as a gift from God. But the Law of the Jungle can poison even this beautiful idea by telling people we're bound for rewards or punishments based on our behavior. Do people raised by bad teachers believe God is one too?

Anyone who loses faith in other people will find a version of the Law to replace it, including the pessimism that views humanity as ready to jump off the coat closet. Power and fun are the only antibodies for defeatism. Which is why anti-authoritarians who want to change the world by abolishing authority either kid or defeat themselves. As I suggested in Part II, and in my essay on violence, you can really only do two things to change the world: You can teach people or you can force people. There's no third option, emotionally. (Payment and competition mirror what's already there.) 

Force just shows your helplessness. Teaching requires power. We need to understand that any mere battle of wills, like battles in general, starve everyone of real power. The only confrontations that teach are those that make it clear that our gifts are not conditional, that the rules are real, and that both are there for a good reason. The civil rights movement got it right: The ultimately goal of discipline management is reconciliation.

The Tools for Teaching system (continued).

Part III. Discipline (for self-discipline)

Nourish good behavior with positive discipline. Create a safe and self-disciplined learning environment using the classroom management skills of calm, consistency, and meaning business. Use these to discourage disruption, diffuse backtalk, and deal with the unexpected, while turning oppositional students around in omission training. Finally, use the school's backup system minimally and wisely to deliver warnings and consequences to students who need them (Tools for Teaching, p. 161 to 333). 

To create a program of positive discipline,

1. Consider why positive consequences work. Use positive consequences to support a schools' discipline code, but realize that by doing so you're turning the logic of that code upside-down. As Jones writes, any school backup system--the official hierarchy of consequences for noncompliance--runs on the centuries-old wisdom "that the punishment must fit the crime," and "The bigger the crime, the bigger the punishment" (p. 328). But one problem with this system is it takes rebellious students out of class and out of school--exactly where they want to go (p. 165).

So Jones flips the hierarchy. "The smaller the disruption, the more negative or suppressive is our response," he writes (p. 329). As a teacher, you start managing discipline by "working the crowd" to set limits on goofing off, as shown in Part I. Then you use the body language of meaning business described below to set limits on students who would test the rules (p. 329). "However, the more provocative the student, the more positive is our response," Jones writes (p. 329). So we move through the use of bonus PAT for responsibility training (from Part II) to the "omission training" program described below for rebellious students--which is all bonuses. "Consequently, with the most angry and oppositional students... the management program has no penalty component whatsoever" (p. 329).

Why did Jones stack things this way? "I would like say that I designed the management system in this fashion from the outset to help angry and alienated young people," he writes (p. 329). Instead, he just saw what worked. "To understand why, consider the home that Larry comes from," Jones writes--"Larry" is Jones's prototypical oppositional student, a name I love because almost no one is named Larry anymore. "The 'Larrys' of the world are angry and alienated for a reason. They have been raised with the 'yell, slap, and hit' school of childrearing.

"Over the years Larry has learned to play power and control 'games' for high stakes," Jones continues. "He will test you, his teacher, because he must take stock of your power--your power to coerce. Coercion is the only form of power from an authority figure that Larry understands... And when push finally comes to shove in the classroom... What do you have to threaten him with? Will you... Send him out of class? Send him home? Larry's [father] takes a belt to him. What form of power can you employ that Larry would 'respect'?" (p. 329).

In the end, writes Jones, all you really have is giving. Positive consequences are "the only game in town," he writes. "Larry is at war with adult authority. If we do not have a program that is sophisticated enough to train Larry to cooperate in lieu of a public submission to adult authority, we will be faced with an endless war of wills" (p. 329).

2. Consider why punishments don't work. Bear in mind the psychology of punishing, and why basing classroom management around it ultimately fails. "Most teachers will spend much of their energy trying to remediate typical classroom disruptions while losing valuable learning time," Jones writes. "Discipline as remediation has a very different flavor from discipline as prevention": It focuses on consequences, or punishment (p. 162). Yet there's "nothing that can be done to Larry legally that every educator in the state hasn't known about for the past fifty years" (p. 167).

Punishments are processes meant to discourage behaviors, and they fall into two categories: presentation punishments (which present unpleasant stimuli, such as after-school detention--using work as a disincentive) and removal punishments (which remove pleasant stimuli, such as students working together) (to paraphrase Anita Woolfolk in Educational Psychology, p. 203-204). Though not the same thing as negative reinforcement--the removal of a reinforcer--punishments are negative by definition: They are the taking away of joy. They say, in effect, "You deserve to be hurt for what you did."

Jones barely mentions punishments before exploring "the backup system" described below, and with good reason: They "don't work" (p. 150). Punishments don't train new behavior, don't teach empathy, don't end bootleg reinforcement from peers, don't improve relationships, and don't save time--in fact, they consume vast amounts of time (and derail the time-saving aspects of PAT, as described in Part II). 

Punishments fail to teach, I think, for the simple reason that remembering their lessons means remembering pain. Fortunately, our memory is selective. As a sub, I can always tell classes built around punishment because "Students learn to 'be good' when the teacher is in the room," as Anita Woolfolk writes, "but when the teacher leaves or there is a substitute teacher, the system might fall apart" (Educational Psychology, p. 213). If you tell people they're bad often enough, they come to believe it.

If nagging is "nothing more than a fight-flight reflex with dialogue" as Jones writes, punishment is, I think, the same thing but slowed down further, combining both the fight and the flight into a single determined act, reified as a philosophy with cultural status (Tools for Teaching, p. 175). Punishment rationalizes aggression by deciding that joy is the problem, not the solution. And feeling joy can only be the problem if a person is bad. As I suggested in my essay on violence, the categorization required to identify an enemy isn't so different from the one involved in identifying a bad child. Both, as you'd expect, are a moral version of the Law of the Jungle. 

Restitution is a natural consequence if a student does something that causes damage. (For example, having a student scrub a wall because she wrote on it.) But making something right through work or payment, or cooling off in the penalty box, isn't the same thing as experiencing pain. Corporal punishment multiplies the mistake of teaching-by-punishing because it excuses our most garden-variety aggression: the helplessness adults feel before children they don't know how to teach (see "Larry" above).

The impulse to hurt is just above laying in on a car horn for its nihilism, and the fact that it's celebrated as a kind of wisdom when it comes to children shows how obscure the skills of teaching really are. Class is also a factor, as I've suggested: For parents without time for giving, punishing at least shows caring. It also prevails where the Law holds sway. But using punishment teaches children to punish others.

So why keep punishments at all? The answer is that even the most positive teachers need a backup system of negative consequences to show some students willing to push through them that "you mean what you say, and that no means no," as Jones writes (p. 319). Punishment doesn't teach students about themselves, but it teaches them about you. Are the limits you set real? Almost all I ever need to do with a backup system when subbing is show students I'm willing to use it--and even then, I almost never actually need to do so. Consequences, Jones writes, work mostly for the "good kids" (p. 329).

Many "punishments" in good schools are a positive anyway: a chance to reflect or reconcile, unwillingly at first, but ultimately with a sense of gratitude, often coming up with solutions to problems in collaboration with the teacher or the dean of students. I'll examine Jones's advice for using the backup system well below. Mostly he recommends making warnings clear and predictable, using consequences to bolster the credibility of warnings, and using both to bolster the credibility of meaning business.

3. Use the many skills of meaning business. Use the necessary combination of "calm, commitment, and utter consistency" required to convey with words and body language that "no" always means "no" and consequences will always be delivered (p. 20). "Once this understanding is established," Jones writes, you can "signal the students to 'cool it' using progressively smaller cues until a word, a look, a pause, or ultimately" just being in the room can effectively set limits on behavior (p. 20).

As Jones writes, meaning business "self-eliminates" with consistency, an idea that applies to online learning, I suspect, because even typing is behavior, and you never know when the teacher is watching (p. 219). But developing authentic self-discipline, as I propose in my expansion on Jones in Part II, would allow meaning business to nourish habits of mind that carry over to when you're not in the room. Ultimately, I'd want students to be "good" for themselves in any setting, not just when I'm around.

Meaning business basically teaches students to "fold early" in a mental game of poker--by showing you are always willing to pay, "any time and anywhere," Jones writes (p. 219). As a result of this investment of time and energy up front, "the amount of work required on your part steadily decreases," Jones adds. "If Larry [our prototypical oppositional student] knows that he cannot win with any of his tricks, all he eventually needs to see is a sign that 'the inexorable process' has begun" (p. 219). How to win over students who still push through that process requires other strategies, including omission training below.

a. Think of working the crowd as the mobile, preventative version of meaning business. Remember that you carry your classroom expectations with you wherever you go. Eventually, your mere presence should be a reminder of them to students, which is one reason why the proximity of "working the crowd" described in Part I is powerful. A sweet example of this in my own teaching was when students at my high school would say loudly that they were being nice to each other, "but only because Pete's here" (teachers there used first names).

b. Master the skills of calm to mean business. Understand how calm is strength and upset is weakness, and learn to use the skills of relaxation to circumvent the fight-flight reflex, manage stress, and maintain your social power (p. 180). Also understand why provoking an aggressive response is destructive. To get inside the concept of calm,

i. Understand how students use provocations to gain power. Jones introduces meaning business with a theoretical blowup involving "Larry"--"the student who will cause you to question your career choice" (p. 165). Since the backup system of any school is designed to give Larry exactly what he wants--O-U-T of school--he'll soon figure out that he "can achieve his heart's desire" by abusing the faculty (p. 165, 310).

Beginning teachers, meanwhile, often have no clue how to deal with "a student who is way out of line," writes Jones (p. 168). "Almost every new teacher who enters the field has to 'wing it' when confronted. They have vague notions of what to do, but they have no idea of how the game is played" (p. 168). Larry, by contrast, "is not winging it. He knows exactly how to play the game" (p. 168).

The example Jones offers is a version of an exchange I've seen many times, sadly. "Let's imagine that you are a high school teacher who is unlucky enough to have Larry in third period," Jones writes. "Today Larry is in rare form. He is smirky and flippant, and he has continued talking to his buddy even after you have twice asked him to stop." You walk over, and he "looks up as though to say, 'Oh, you again.'" You tell Larry, "'I'm tired of this constant talking. I want you to turn around in your seat right now and get some work done.'

"Larry looks up and says, 'F____ you!'

"You see red!" writes Jones. "That's the last straw!... 'That's it, young man!'" you say. "'I will not tolerate such language in my class for one instant!" You tell him to go to the office. "Several of Larry's buddies let out with mock 'Oohs.' Larry stands slowly and defiantly, acknowledging their attention, and strolls toward the door" (p. 166).

This is a "fast game," Jones writes, one "lost on the basis of the teacher's immediate response to Larry's provocation. It's over in seconds" (p. 168).

And yet, the teacher in this example lost big. You may think by "laying down the law" and kicking a student out that "you are dictating the terms," but you're not (p. 166). Instead, Larry "picked the time," place, victim, language, and outcome (p. 166). He got to show off, "made you lose your cool," "got out of class," "made a defiant gesture as part of his exit," and "is now unsupervised in the hall," joining other friends "in the office to shoot the breeze for the next 20 minutes" (p. 166). He may well return the next day "cocky as a jaybird" (p. 166).

The first mistake of this example is emotional. Getting upset with a student for defiance gives the student the worst kind of power, the kind that empowers defiance. All of the pleasurable choices offered to Larry in that example were given in response to his "using the F-word. That is a lot of power wrapped up in a monosyllable," Jones writes. "You can't give Larry that much power and not expect him to use it" (p. 166).

Your aggressive response, I would add, also empowers aggression. Larry didn't get his freedom by being nice. In this case, the student actually punished you. By giving him the response he wanted, you teach the Law of the Jungle as surely as if you'd battled to the death and won.

This is a very tough lesson for teachers insecure about their mastery of the profession, which includes all of us at some point. We'd like to think we at least have the respect of the class, and it's traumatic to see it apparently vanish in moments. But respect, as I suggested in Part I, isn't an issue. Respect is what people feel for each other as equal human beings. Larry isn't interested in the teacher as a person, he's interested in the teacher's power: He wants some of it for himself. Over time, a calm response would help build relationships, but even with an incident like the one Jones describes, most students would still silently side with the teacher, and be grateful to see Larry gone (an ostracizing dynamic that omission training aims to reverse). Larry's own contempt doesn't run all that deep, either, I suspect. Another adult authority acting predictably is no big deal to Larry. 

Young teachers who love punk rock or rebellious rap music often don't see how students playing power games with them is part of the same larger cycle of oppression and rebellion that this music dramatizes, that the "war with adult authority" Jones describes is often a rational response to irrational situations--ranging from parents who've turned on their children to no parents at all. You can either contribute to that cycle or help end it. The larger goal of being calm should be to help students learn to end this cycle themselves.

ii. Understand the physiology of the fight-flight reflex and its human toll. Keep in mind the physiological processes that cause human beings to "take the bait" in provocations. As Jones writes, the fight-flight reflex is "our natural response to anything that surprises us or threatens us" (p. 172). It's also "the teacher's immediate and automatic response to goofing off," and nothing to be particularly ashamed of (p. 172). Not only do teachers make "more decisions in an hour than an air traffic controller," but these decisions often involve subtle confrontations, the kinds of human interaction that cause the most stress (p. 171).

As Jones describes, the fight-flight reflex has two phases that overlap: fast (muscular tension) and slow (adrenaline) (p. 172). During the fast phase, our muscles become tense, our eyes widen, we clench our teeth, flex our diaphragm, and our digestion stops as blood flows to our muscles. Meanwhile, our heart rate increases rapidly. "The fight-flight reflex is crucial to survival--at least, for an animal in a state of nature," Jones writes (p. 173). Animals can experience it several times a day without any damage done.

But human beings are in a crowded situation called civilization. "Within the classroom," Jones adds, "the fight-flight reflex is triggered not every few hours... but rather, every few minutes. In this environment, every aspect of the fight-flight reflex becomes a potential symptom of chronic hypertension" (p. 173).

The slow phase of the reflex is even more destructive. "Within tenths of a second our bodies begin to dump adrenaline into the bloodstream," Jones writes. This intensifies and maintains the same physiological response to ensure our alertness "will stay with us throughout the crisis" (p. 173). Adrenaline increases our metabolism, and takes "roughly 27 minutes... to clear the blood stream." As a result, "it takes only two 'squirrely' behaviors per class period to keep you 'wired' all day long for the remainder of your career" (p. 174).

This is no way to live. For one thing, you "build up an energy debt during the school day that must be paid back later," Jones writes (p 174). So teachers are "on" all day, then "on" for another half hour after school (as adrenaline leaves the bloodstream), then they crash. Boppers often have to keep working through the crash, and after it. "You can't be very good with your own family when you come home day after day with the tank empty," Jones adds. "I don't know what your pay package includes, but I doubt that anybody pays you enough to compensate for your physical well-being or your family's well-being or your own personal happiness" (p. 174).

Jones is describing the dilemma of modern work, I think. The attendant "stress eating," pain or sleep medication, substance abuse, and Law of the Jungle values are all part of the cycle we must end. Great teachers aren't the only workers who know that playtime with family is sacred. But what they do to preserve it may be worth emulating. For anyone who would like to make a career of teaching, these strategies are lifesaving in a poignantly literal way.

iii. Recognize what the fight-flight reflex looks like. Avoid nagging, pheasant posturing, and "snap and snarl" (p. 176). Understand how they're the physical and verbal expressions of the same physiological response described above. These habits let "provocations spin out of control, and small problems become big problems" (p. 168). Students also see them as signs of burnout or "bluffing" (p. 212). But "You cannot fool a child," Jones writes (p. 212). Students know "you will wear out before they do. Some students even seem to be entertained by watching it happen" (p. 11).

To maintain social power, avoid...

Nagging. Don't ask silly questions, state the obvious, loudly repeat what you know students already understand, complain, yell, or say anything else that begins with the phrases "there is no excuse" or "I'm sick and tired." Nagging is a kind of "bluffing," noise without consequences (p. 212). Examples of nagging include: "All right class, there is no excuse for all of this talking! When I look up, I expect to see people working!" (p. 175) Or, "Where are you going? Would please take your seat? I am sick and tired of looking up only to see you wandering aimlessly around the room!" (p. 175). My addition: Remember that shushing is also a mild form of nagging.

Pheasant posturing. Avoid "squawking and flapping that produces no damage." In classrooms, the squawking is nagging, but we "do the flapping... with our hands" (p. 175). Posturing is like a physical bluffing (p. 212). It takes the form of "the circular" signal for students to turn around, and the "vertical flap as we motion for students to sit down" (p. 175). "If you are sick and tired, your hands usually end up on your hips or folded across your chest," Jones writes, a sure sign of empty posing (p. 203).

"Snap and snarl." Avoid snapping your fingers at students or snapping at students verbally. Never raise your voice in anger. (For fans of British television's Doc Martin, my advice is simple: Don't do any of the things Louisa does with school children!)

iv. Understand why real social power is calming. Remember that being upset short-circuits long-term memory, like "blocking" on someone's name when you're a little nervous (p. 177). The effect is even worse when you lose your temper or become scared (p. 178). "When you are calm, you can bring all of your wisdom, experience, and social skills to bear in solving a problem," Jones writes. "When you become upset... none of that knowledge or wisdom is available to you" (p. 180).

Jones says becoming upset represents a shift of brain activity from the cortex to the brain stem, and this may be so. But you don't have to entirely buy the triune brain theory he cites (I don't) to see the truth in this duality. There are "two types of power," Jones writes: primitive and social (p. 179). Primitive power is needy and competitive, while social power is loving and generous. Primitive power is what we've "used since time began in order to [ensure] our physical survival," Jones writes. "It is a direct expression of the fight-flight reflex. In social situations primitive power is expressed as upset. It is aggressive" (p. 179). By contrast, social power "is not natural--it is learned. It is not instinctual--it is skillful. Rather than being simple, it is subtle and complex. It is nonadversarial" (p. 179). 

But this is only half right: People's responses to being upset can be wildly different. Some teachers command daunting recall and humor while masking panic. Aggression, meanwhile, can be as calmly delivered as dropping a bomb. But the effects of aggression are hardly calming, and that's the real point. Social power means calming others. It's "disarming" in every sense. "If you raise your voice to a student," by contrast, "they stay jumpy for a while," Jones writes. "If students are upset, they will not be able to concentrate. If they cannot concentrate... they will probably find something else to do"--goofing off, for instance (p. 181). Social power means putting people in a state of mind where they are more likely to give. Social power means giving power. 

v. Use calm to teach calm, manage stress, and mean business. Understand that "emotions are contagious" (p. 181). For this reason alone, mastering calm is the first step in teaching it. "You will never be able to control a classroom until you are first in control of yourself" (p. 180). Calm is also stress management for yourself, which can only be done proactively and in the moment. "You cannot allow yourself to be stressed all day long and then somehow undo it once you get home," writes Jones (p. 171). Finally, use calm as the first skill of meaning business, remembering that it "can only be mastered through practice" (p. 205).

To be calm in the face of student disruption,

1. Take a relaxing breath. Breath in slowly. During the few seconds it takes "for the concentration of adrenaline to build in your bloodstream," writes Jones, you have "a brief window of opportunity in which to 'put on the breaks'" (p. 180). To stop the fight-flight reflex, simply take a relaxing breath.

"A relaxing breath is slow and relatively shallow," Jones writes. "It is the way you would breath if you were watching television or reading a magazine. It lowers your heart rate and your blood pressure. Your muscles relax, and your face becomes calm and expressionless" (p. 181). With practice, this can become your "dominant response to student provocation" (p. 181).

2. Use other exercises, images, and affirmations as you breath (my addition). Besides what Jones recommends, try the muscle relaxation exercises, affirmations, and techniques of "changing your mental channel" taught by sports psychologist Saul L. Miller in Hockey Tough (and described in Part I). Pretty much everything Jones and Miller write also fits the sensible advice of Don't Sweat the Small Stuff by Richard Carlson. 

3. Slow down. Whenever you are forced to make the transition from instruction to discipline, slow down, whether you are with one student, working the crowd, or addressing the class. "A sudden change of speed is the first cue that students pick up signaling a change in your priorities," Jones writes (p. 198).

4. Stop and hit the "relax button." Come "to a dead stop. This clear discontinuity of motion signals a change of mind on your part," Jones writes (p. 199). Stop mid-sentence. If you are speaking to the class, this signals to students that "everything has changed. You are in 'discipline mode'" (p. 199). This "response to disruption will be the opposite of the fight-flight reflex," Jones writes. "Instead of revving up, you will shut down" (p. 199).

(Where I'd part ways with Jones is on using dead stops in the face of multiple disruptions while lecturing. Sometimes pausing to let students know you're aware of their behavior, and will deal with it later, then plowing ahead anyway with what you have to say--both to captivate everyone else and make the disruptors feel left out--is better than over-using "wait time." I've seen a teacher plow ahead well, winning over the disruptors without having to deal with them. Ultimately, as Jones suggests, group omission bonuses might be required to truly teach new behavior, as mentioned in Part II. Repeat disruptors are otherwise good candidates for the warnings and consequences of the backup system described below.)

5. Model common courtesy, turn away, and take another breath. Take a second relaxing breath to ward off the fight-flight reflex (p. 66). If you are "helping a well-behaved student, Robert, when you look up to see two students goofing off on the far side of the room," Jones writes, you don't need to dramatically switch to "discipline mode" (p. 199). But you do need to prepare yourself.

"Lean over and whisper, 'Excuse me, Robert,'" which teaches courtesy and gives you a moment to "refocus" (p. 199). "Then stay down and take another relaxing breath," as Jones writes. This helps you "turn away from the problem. Since the problem triggers the fight-flight reflex, getting the problem out of your field of vision eliminates the trigger. This helps you relax" (p. 199).

6. Take a third relaxing breath as you stand up. Take one more slow breath before you go anywhere, so that your lungs are full as you approach the disruption. This helps you "relax peripheral muscles while flexing the most centrally located voluntary muscle in your body" (p. 199). Remember that you are not filling your lungs to speak, but to breathe and relax.

7. Keep your hands down. Relax your upper body so that "your hands will be down at your side," writes Jones (p. 203). If this is uncomfortable, practice other relaxed-looking gestures that become "constant and predictable," such as hands behind your back or in your pockets (p. 203). "You need to have a plan, or those hands will be on the hips before you know it" (p. 203).

8. Keep your jaw relaxed. Leave your jaw loose, which signals relaxation to the student. "Nervous tension remains in the jaw muscles even after we think we have relaxed," Jones writes. "Unfortunately, the students can see this signal from the other side of the gymnasium" (p. 203).

9. Don't smile. Don't give in to the impulse to smile while in "discipline mode." This is "greeting behavior" that "shows that we are friendly," Jones writes (p. 204). A student's "smiley face" "tends to trigger a mild inadvertent smile from us in response," he adds. "You may not feel this gentle smile. It is just a softening of the face around the mouth and eyes that says, 'I am your friend, and everything is okay'" (p. 204).

This is the last thing you want to communicate. "As students go through their little antics to get off the hook," Jones writes, "relax, wait, and give them your best Queen Victoria look that says, 'We are not amused'" (p. 205). Use all of these techniques as part of "the Turn" below.

c. Be consistent. Live by two rules of childrearing that Jones credits to his mom: "No means no," and "I am not going to stand here and listen to your yammering" (p. 185). As Jones writes, "You are either consistent, or you are inconsistent. There is nothing in between" (p. 186).

This idea doesn't preclude any of the democratic program I explored in Part II: Students' participating in making rules takes a different tone than students testing rules in the moment. As the example of the four-year-old shows, bending only proves your democracy is a sham. "The irony of consistency," Jones writes, "is that the closer you come to being consistent before you fail, the worse off you are. If the parent cracks easily, the child does not need to be a world-class yammerer in order to succeed. But, if the parent does not crack easily, the children must learn to play hardball" (p. 187).

i. Get your priorities straight: discipline before instruction. Stop what you're doing when you see a disruption and act to make your rules a reality (p. 187). "If you fail to act," writes Jones, "your rules are nothing but hot air" (p. 189).

If you are helping "Robert," for instance, and you don't stop to address "talking to neighbors" between two students (the example Jones keeps returning to), "The class just saw you make a choice," Jones writes (p. 187, 189). You might as well have announced to the class: "As you may have noticed, when I have to choose between discipline and instruction, I will choose instruction. I find discipline management to be... oh, how can I say this... inconvenient... I will turn a blind eye to goofing off as long as it is not too bothersome" (p. 189). Soon the disruptions will spread like wildfire.

ii. Use firmness and nurturance, rather than inconsistency and harshness. Combine "affection with firmness and consistency in order to create stable boundaries," Jones writes. For many new teachers focused on relationships, the idea that "boundaries cannot move... seems overly rigid" (p. 191). But your choice truly is between positive consistency and negative inconsistency. "If you are consistent," Jones writes, "you can use smaller and smaller consequences to govern misbehavior," which builds good feelings about your class. "But if you are inconsistent, you must use larger and larger consequences to govern misbehavior" (p. 191). This can lead to a classroom of confused and upset kids.

iii. Act, don't think. Develop and practice routines that help you respond to everyday disruptions such as talking to neighbors without thinking. "Thinking when you should be acting is fatal," Jones writes. "If the student has stepped over the line, you either do something about it or you 'pull your punch'" (p. 189).

If you're helping "Robert" when there's a disruption, questions such as "How big is the disruption?" and "How important is the assignment?" are irrelevant (p. 190). So are your feelings. Your lack of patience could be based on fatigue, mood, or other irrelevant factors (p. 190). Consult only the rules and ignore your viscera. Remember to "Never make a rule that you are not willing to enforce every time," as mentioned in Part I (p. 190).

d. Use body language to mean business. Set limits by telegraphing your thoughts, feelings, and intentions with body language and movement. Just as "talk is cheap," Jones writes, action "signals commitment" (p. 193). Express calm and consistency physically. 

i. Maintain signal clarity. Avoid "mixed messages at the very moment in which" you "need to be clear, unequivocal, and convincing" (p. 196). "When behavioral boundaries are unclear, children test to find out where the boundaries lie," Jones writes (p. 195). For example, when you turn toward disruptive students, make sure you turn all the way, not with "one foot in and one foot out" (p. 201). A "partial turn" signals "tentativeness" (p. 202). Also, once you make eye contact, avoid losing it too quickly, which would signal split attention (p. 203).

ii. Use "the Turn." When you stop and turn to look at a disruptive student, make it count. A "look" is cheaper than walking across the room (p. 198). "If the turn is utterly convincing," Jones writes, "the students will usually 'cool it' and save you the trip across the classroom" (p. 198). To do "the Turn" properly,

A. Stop and relax. Use all the relaxation skills and steps described above: Slow down, stop altogether, and hit the "relax button," shutting down (p. 199). You are now in "discipline mode" (p. 199). This is slow motion compared to your usual teaching pace. Keep your breathing relaxed and your movement gradual.

B. Turn in regal fashion. Take six seconds to turn:

1. Stay down and breathe in gently.

2. Begin to straighten up as you look toward the disruptive students, fixing your gaze on one of them, "preferably the instigator."

3. Finish straightening up.

4. Slowly rotate shoulders and waist toward the students.

5. Point one foot toward the students as you bring your hips around.

6. Then bring your other foot around to complete the turn as you "square up to the disruptive students" (p. 200, 213).

iii. Follow through. Take a relaxing breath and look at the "instigating" student. You've just used "the Turn" as a passive, relaxed performance showing "calm commitment" (p. 205). But if the disruption continues, it's "only the beginning of a conversation in body language" (p. 207). To proceed,

1. Predict noncompliance. If the disruption stops in response to your turn, look at the students' feet to predict whether it will start again. If their knees and feet are still pointing to each other, their compliance is "window dressing" (p. 208). Other kinds of "pseudo-compliance" include "smiley face," "book posing," "pencil posing," and "pseudo-scholarship," all of which are given away by students still looking up at you "as though to ask, 'Does this fulfill the requirements of formal education?'" (p. 209) 

2. If you see pseudo-compliance, go over to the students. With your mouth shut, "take two relaxing breaths, and move toward the disruptive students," Jones advises (p. 211). If they turn and face forward in their seats, you'll know what just happened: "The question for the students was, 'Do we have to?'...and you answered, 'Yes.'" And "they said, 'That's all I wanted to know. I'm not in this for high stakes'" (p. 211).

3. Don't go public if you can help it. Camouflage your response. Avoid saying names if you can, and adjust this approach for the student. Many students are fine hearing their name, but many others feel "called out." For an oppositional student, calling out has the effect of "turning discipline management into theater," Jones writes, creating a public showdown that makes the peer group the audience (p. 220). So modify your strategy for "Larry," moving in with camouflage as you work the crowd. Do the same steps as above, but use only eye contact and body language to communicate.

As you approach Larry, "stop casually and look at another student's work" (p. 220). After a pause, "turn and stroll toward Larry, maintaining eye contact with Larry for an extra split second as you move" (p. 221). What you're communicating--"I see you fooling around, and it is the main thing on my mind right now"--will be clearly understood (p. 221). Walk "a few steps more and casually interact with another student" and make slightly longer eye contact with Larry (p. 221).

"To get into trouble," at this point, Larry "would have to want to get into trouble," Jones writes (p. 221). This may well be the case, the scenario "omission training" addresses below. But "most students, even Larry, do not want a hassle. They just want to socialize instead of work" (p. 221). What's more, "Larry has played this game long enough to appreciate what you just did. Your skills and finesse allow you to teach him that 'no means no' while protecting him from embarrassment" (p. 221).

4. Say students' names, if appropriate. Students who aren't "Larry" are sometimes "so consumed with their conversation that they fail to notice you," Jones writes. "In this case, say their names. Use a flat tone of voice, neither sweet nor upset... Shrewd gamblers, however, keep an eye out for the teacher" (p. 212).

5. Stand over the instigator's desk. If the two students who have been talking to neighbors still have knees and feet pointed to each other, walk to the edge of the instigator's desk. "Stand relaxed but upright and take two relaxing breaths," Jones writes. "Check your jaw" for relaxation (p. 213). It is now the student's move.

6. Adjust your proximity for students who need more space. Remember that for some students, the previous step and those that follow "could be seen as an invasion of the student's personal space," adds Jones (p. 244). These students "go on 'alert' before you even reach their desks. Put any child with a history of physical abuse into this category" (p. 244). Look for body language from the student that is defensive, such as the "parry reflex," which includes clenched fists and flexing of the pectoral and shoulder muscles (p. 244-245).

For these situations, "You could stand a foot away from the student's desk as you take your relaxing breath," Jones writes. "You could even turn your body slightly to make the interaction less confrontational" (p. 245). Use your best judgment to make the call, which has a better chance of being right "if you are in your cortex" (p. 242). Effective "discipline management is dynamic," Jones emphasizes. It involves a "complex give-and-take" that's not unlike a sport or an art (p. 241). See "Deal with the unexpected" below for other suggested modifications.

7. If a student offers only partial compliance, go to "one palm" and give a visual prompt. "Lean over gently, resting your weight on one palm, and gesture with your other hand for" the student "to bring her chair around. Stay down, wait, maintain eye contact, and take a relaxing breath" (p. 214). Start with visual rather than verbal prompts. "The most predictable way of getting another person to speak to you," Jones writes, "is by speaking to them" (p. 214). Then it's the student's move again.

8. If a student still offers only partial compliance, give a verbal prompt. Use a "simple sentence in a kindly tone of voice" to prompt the student again if necessary: "Please bring your chair all of the way around" (p. 214).

Then, once again, it's the student's move. "Blatant noncompliance in this situation usually takes the form of backtalk," Jones writes (p. 214). For example: "I wasn't doing anything," "He was talking to me, "Hey, leave me alone" (p. 214)--see "Eliminate backtalk" below. "For now, it is enough to realize that most students... are penny-ante gamblers" and will fold at this point (p. 215). 

9. If the student complies, relax, "go to palms," and wait. Compliance would make it seem as if "the game is over," writes Jones. "Far from it, you have just arrived at a crucial juncture" (p. 215). Stay to look for signs that he or she is still "gaming you" (p. 215). Rest your weight on your palms, with your hands open and relaxed, locking "your elbows as though to say, 'I have all day'" (p. 215). "Take two relaxing breath as you watch, looking for a "stable pattern of work that represents a commitment to time-on-task," such as a few sentences or a full math problem (p. 215).

10. If a student keeps looking up, keep waiting. If the student is still doing "eyes up-eyes down," "hang in there," writes Jones. "The game is not over yet": When the student "finally gives up the game, she will focus on the work and quit worrying about you" (p. 215).

11. If the student looks up and holds your look, give an "eye prompt." Prompt a student staring back by looking back "down at the student's work" (p. 215). "The student typically follows your eyes down," writes Jones. "You have said, in effect, 'All I care about is the work'" (p. 215). Make this more convincing by repositioning yourself to read the work.

12. If the student gets to work, thank the student and stay down. Let "Your emotions go from neutral to warm as you thank the student so that your tone of voice is gentle": "Thank you for getting back to work" (p. 216). Then "stay down and take two relaxing breaths as your emotions again become neutral. Watch and wait until... she recommits to the task. Her behavior then says, 'Oh, I guess I had better keep working, huh?'" (p. 216). Avoid the "typical error" of leaving too quickly (p. 216).

13. Repeat the process with the second student. "Give both students equal time," Jones writes. "If you do not, the first student feels picked on, and the second student feels as though he or she has faked you out" (p. 216).

14. Move out slowly. "Stand after thanking the second student, and take two relaxing breaths," Jones writes. "If you get 'eyes up-eyes down,' take an extra relaxing breath and wait until it is clear that everyone is working... Before you become involved with another student.... turn fully and point your toes toward the two disruptors. Should they glance up, they will see a teacher quite willing to return" (p. 217). Keep them in your line of vision as you help the next student.

e. Eliminate backtalk. To manage backtalk in response to the above prompts, first, "Take two relaxing breaths, remain quiet, and deliver some withering boredom," Jones writes (p. 237). Then repeat the steps of "the Turn" and "following through" above by moving in again or increasing your proximity. In the silence, you may consider various long-term responses, including the ultimate goal of reconciliation (p. 232-239).

Backtalk, as the blowup with Larry showed, is a way for students to provoke teachers in order to avoid giving cooperation. It makes teachers feel vulnerable by turning meaning business into a public showdown, just what we hoped to avoid with camouflage. By challenging you, a student says, in effect, "Look over here! This teacher is trying to tell me what to do. I want you all to know that he can't because he isn't in control of this situation. I am!" (p. 223)

The fear that your authority has been exposed as weak can make replying with speech tempting. "When students confront you verbally, everything they are doing seems calculated to get you to speak," Jones writes (p. 224). But "Having the last word" is the Cardinal Error of responding to backtalk (p. 224). It's so cardinal that Jones offers three rules to counter it that are all basically the same:

"It takes one fool to backtalk. It takes two fools to make a conversation out of it" (p. 225).

"If students want to backtalk, at least make them do all of the work. Don't do half of it for them!" (p. 226).

"Open your mouth and slit your throat" (p. 225).

In other words: Say nothing. And remember, I would add, that the student is confusing authority with complete control of all time and space. Your power in the room is not diminished by backtalk. (And even if you slip up and make the mistake of engaging, as I've said, the sympathy of the class may still be with you.) But you can greatly enhance your power by diffusing backtalk using the following steps:

i. Respond in the short term with relaxed silence. When a student responds to your prompting to get back to work with denials, blaming the teacher, excusing you to leave, pushing back, giving you a compliment, insulting you, or swearing, simply reply by not replying, and do so in a way that communicates volumes. To do this,

1. Press the "relax" button and wait. "Take two relaxing breaths, check your jaw, clear your mind, and keep your mouth shut as you kill time," Jones writes. "When the backtalker runs out of gas, take two more relaxing breaths and then, if you need to, give a nonverbal prompt to get back to work" (p. 227-228). This often works. Follow the axiom: "When in doubt, do nothing" (p. 232). Respond to insults or profanity only with "withering boredom" (p. 237).

2. Move in again, or move in further. If "the student keeps talking in order to gain the upper hand or 'back you off,' you may wish to signal to him or her that this is a foolish strategy," Jones writes (p. 232). The easiest way to do this is by moving closer. If you're already at "palms" on a student's desk, "bend one elbow and gently move down so that your elbow is resting on the table... Take two relaxing breathes, keep your mouth shut, and wait" (p. 232). 

3. Separate the backtalker from accomplices by "camping out from behind." Use your body to physically isolate a student from allies joining in. "When whiney backtalk is failing," Jones adds, a student may say something like, "She was just asking me a question," and then turn to the other student, "right?" (p. 233) If the other student chimes in, "Stand slowly and walk slowly around the desks so that you are standing behind and between the two students. Then, slowly move down between them so that your elbow is on the table and you are facing the first student." (p. 233).

I have to admit, this strategy would test my comfort zone, but it's also rarely needed. As Jones writes, "Camping out from behind actually happens most often as a low-key interaction when you are working the crowd. If, for example, you were behind the disruptive students, you would probably just stroll over and stand between them" (p. 234). 

4. When a student complies, say thank you and stay down. End this series of unspoken communications the same way you would with "following through" above: Thank the student for getting back to work, then take two relaxing breaths as you stay "at palms" or "camping out" to ensure that she's actually committing to work. If another student contributed, "turn toward the second student and repeat the process," Jones writes. "Next, stand between them for two relaxing breaths before moving around to the front. From there, move out as usual" (p. 233).

5. For "last hurrahs" or "cheap shots," respond with more moving in. Repeat the entire process for students who end the exchange with a "last word" or a "cheap shot." Make both of these responses expensive for the student. When "the student does not want the 'incident' to be over," Jones writes, "your 'thank you' may trigger a 'snotty' comeback," such as: "Yeah, right," "You didn't help my any," "Just leave me alone," "Whatever," or a mocking version of your thank-you (p. 234). To answer these,

Respond to "last hurrahs" by staying down. Take two relaxing breaths and deliver still more "withering boredom as you wait." Let the fact sink in: "If the kid had kept quiet, you would be gone" (p. 234). As usual, "if backtalk fails to get a 'rise' out of the teacher, it backfires," Jones writes (p. 234). Again, thank the student, which in this case also says, "That is what I wanted," "You can relax now," "We will do it my way, won't we?" "As always finesse allows you to be gentle while being powerful," Jones writes (p. 234).

Respond to cheap shots the same way. "You will have to deal with the cheap shot, and you will have to invest enough time to convey that it is serious," Jones writes (p. 235). Make the same point: "Cheap shots are not cheap" (p. 235). But if you can't tell "from the voice who made the remark" between a couple students, "Finesse the situation by going to palms between the two students [to] camp out 'in the general vicinity'" (p. 235). Then offer a thank you more generally, saying, "I appreciate your getting back to work" (p. 235). "If one of them says, 'I didn't do it,' relax and give them a dose of withering boredom" (p. 235).

6. Respond to nasty backtalk in the short term with calm. In response to insults or profanity, "Take two relaxing breaths," Jones writes (by now I'm sure you're seeing a pattern). "When the sniggering dies down, the kid is still on the hook. If you are in your cortex, you can make a plan" (p. 236). By staying relaxed, silent, and delivering yet more withering boredom, "It tells the student... You have heard it all a thousand times" (p. 237). What's more, "If the student runs out of gas and takes refuge in getting back to work, you have 'finessed' the incident... Count your blessing, and consider getting on with the lesson. You can always talk to the student after class" (p. 237).

Don't worry about students thinking you didn't do anything about the profanity. "Give them some credit for social intelligence," Jones writes. "They just saw Larry try 'the big one' and fail. They saw you hand it like an old pro. And they learned that profanity is useless in this classroom as a tool for getting the best of the teacher" (p. 237). They'll know you don't take it "lightly when, on the way out of class, you say, 'Larry, I would like to speak with you for a moment'" (p. 237).

Respond to nasty backtalk in the long-term with a conversation aimed at reconciliation. "Your short-term response does not foreclose any management options," Jones writes. "It simply gives you time to think while avoiding the Cardinal Error... In the long-term, you can do whatever you think is appropriate." If you think "the student should be sent to the office or suspended, then do it. Just do it calmly... If you are calm, your actions come across with an air of cool professionalism. You are above the storm" (p. 237). Calm also "helps students accept responsibility for their own actions," Jones adds. It's "hard for students to blame someone else when they are the only ones acting badly" (p. 237).

But being "in your cortex" also enables "problem solving," starting with the simple clinical insight that when a student walks into your classroom upset, it's probably not about you (p. 238). Staying calm can allow you to initiate a conversation after class, which is an essential strategy for reconciliation. If the ugly verbal behavior was atypical, open with something like: "Vanessa, what you said in class today was not at all like you. Tell me, what is really going on?" (p. 238) Then take "two relaxing breaths and thwart the desire to say anything else. This is called 'wait time.' You do not know what will happen next. You can open the door, but you cannot make Vanessa walk through it. She might say, 'Nothing! I just want to leave!'

"But, before you go to 'consequences,' play for time," Jones continues. "Silence is truly golden since young people have a very low tolerance for it. If you wait calmly, the whole story will probably come spilling out" (p. 238). Have tissues handy, be ready to keep the next class out, have a pass to the nurse's office so that she can pull herself together before her next class, and "Make sure she knows that you will be available after school" (p. 238).

"Vanessa was upset," Jones writes. "But, she was also instinctively testing you to see if you were as uncaring as other adults in her life... Sometimes, healing is mediated by simply taking the time to ask and to listen. Without going that far out on a limb, you can answer the defining question in your relationship with the child, 'Do you even care?'" (p. 239). Heart-to-heart talks "on the heels of a crisis" are "some of the most precious moments between adult and child," Jones adds. "They teach important lessons within the context that says that being 'bad,' while it leads to real consequences, cannot threaten the bond of caring" (p. 239).

ii. Expect and prepare for a range of different kinds of backtalk. Learn to identify student backtalk tactics, including switching the agenda, whiny backtalk, and nasty backtalk. This reduces their surprise and makes them less upsetting, especially as you begin to appreciate and enjoy them as part of young people's real development, on their way to finding their own power. Respond to all of these categories with the above steps, but also with the strategic variations described below. To do this, first,

A. Identify "switching the agenda." Because backtalk is a response to discipline management, note that many shrewd students learn to switch the agenda to instruction or motivation, and thus "get off the hook with almost no risk of provoking the teacher" (p. 227). So anticipate and respond to...

Switching to instruction. If you approach a student talking to neighbors, and say to her, "I would like you to turn around and get to work," she may respond: "But, I don't understand how to do this problem" (p. 227). A naive teacher will answer, "What part don't you understand?" (p. 227). But this is another kind of "taking the bait." By saying this, as Jones writes, you may as well tell the class, "'Go ahead and talk to your neighbors... The worst thing that will ever happen to you in my class is that I will do part of your assignment for you'" (p. 227).

Instead, respond with silence and a visual prompt, as described above. This often works. But all a student has to do to up the ante is say, "But I really don't know how to do this!" The only way to prevent this ploy from working is to know for sure what students know. Do this through using the instructional strategies in Part I, including "say, see, do" teaching, VIPs, and adequate structured practice (p. 228).

Switching to motivation. Less common is the switch involved in saying, "I'm not doing this," "This is dumb," or "We did this last year" (p. 228). This is what Jones calls "a power move": You can't "make student work" or even "pick up a pencil," so "forcing unmotivated students to work is a dead issue. You cannot intimidate them. You can only flunk them, and they don't care. Not caring gives them power" (p. 228).

To respond this student, "Whisper privately... 'If you are not going to do your work, we can talk about that later. For right now, I will at least expect you to allow your neighbors to do their work.' Most students take this opportunity to cut their losses," Jones writes. "Escalating at this point represents a student who is looking for an altercation" (p. 229).

In the long run, give students positive reasons to do work, such as the incentives discussed in Part II. In the short run, "in lieu of incentives," the compromise above is a form of cutting your own losses, as Jones writes (p. 229). I would add that giving students a choice here is also powerful: Ask: "What can I do to help you be able to do this work? I can leave you alone for five minutes and check back. I can let you work in the hall on your own. Or I can leave you alone for the rest of class and you can do this as homework." Students will almost always choose one of these three options, and appreciate the choice. 

B. Identify other kinds of whiny, nonverbal, or nasty backtalk. Understand the full range of additional backtalk options, from innocent-seeming denial to aggressive profanity, and see how they all use an element of surprise and changing the question. Spot and respond to...

Denial. This is the kind of amusing backtalk that usually assumes you are blind. Examples include: "I wasn't doin' anything," "We weren't talking" (p. 229).

Blaming a neighbor. Most of this kind of backtalk can be paraphrased as, "Gee, teacher we weren't goofing off... We were operating a peer tutoring program" (p. 229). Examples include: "They started it," "He was just asking me a question" (p. 229).

Blaming the teacher. "The student always blames the teacher for the same shortcoming--professional incompetence," Jones writes. This accusation can make any beginning teacher "defensive," but consider again the absurdity of what ths student is saying: "[We] weren't goofing off... We were operating a peer tutoring program... to compensate for your methodological deficiencies" (p. 230). Examples include: "I had to ask him because you went over it so fast," or "I had to ask him because you didn't make it clear" (p. 230).

Excusing the teacher to leave. These are all lower-stakes versions of "take a hike, Teach":

Short form: "All right, I'll do it."

Long form: "All right, I'll do it if you just leave me alone."

Nasty form: "All right, I'll do it if you just get out of my face! I can't work with you standing over me like that!"

Emotionally handicapped form: "Geez, what are you, some kind of pervert? Leave me alone!" (p. 230)

In response, "As always, relax, be quiet, and wait," Jones advises. "Do not allow yourself to be suckered into the Cardinal Error. If you succeed in the short-term, you can do anything you want in the long-term" (p. 230).

Compliments. Flattery should get students nowhere: In this context, it's meant to divert attention from behavior as much as any insult. Respond as above. (In a different and sincere context, of course, thanking students and encouraging their kindness is appropriate.)

Crying. When students use tears as a get-out-of-work tactic, respond as above, though I'd add that this impulse is usually transparent--and not to be confused with real upset. "If you hang in there, blubbering students will eventually dry up," Jones writes. "If the tears are interminable, however, you can always cut your losses," and tell a student, "We can talk about your crying later. For right now, the least I will expect from you is that you get your work done" (p. 231). Come back when the student's head is up.

Pushing you aside. Physically pushing a teacher back is sometimes an involuntary reflex, and there's "No point making a mountain out of a molehill," Jones writes. But try "rubber arm," relaxing the arm that has been pushed aside, and staying down as above (p. 231). 

A kiss on the nose. The "nose kiss" example shared with Jones by one female teacher highlights "the power of doing nothing," as Jones writes (p. 231). The student who did this "obviously expected to get a 'rise' out of the teacher. All eyes were on him. It came as a surprise when nothing happened. It became embarrassing when nothing at all happened" (p 231).

Nasty backtalk. The main difference between nasty backtalk and whiny backtalk "is not so much the words, but rather, the fact that it is personal. The backtalker is probing for a nerve ending." So remember another important rule of backtalk: "Never take anything a student says personally" (p. 235). The behavior is about power, not the person. "Nasty backtalk definitely increases the price of playing poker," Jones writes. This is "high-rolling," where "The student is risking all in order to get control" (p. 235).

Nasty backtalk involves two overlapping variations: insults and swearing. This can include insulting the dress, grooming, and hygiene of the teacher: "Hey, Mrs. Phillips, your breath is worse than my dog's!" (p. 236). I would add that the perfect nasty backtalk combines swearing, insult, and some kind of demeaning or offensive slur. This, too, is usually an instinctive test, especially from students who want to be convinced that you don't care about them. The better the teacher, often, the worse they've heard.

I would add the importance of remembering compassion. Students may use nasty backtalk as a shortcut to power, but it actually shows how little real power they have. A teacher's goal should always be to give students real power--the power to give to themselves and others--even as they beg for the fake kind--the power to hurt others. When it comes down to it, "Power is not the goal of" your response, Jones writes. "Power is a means to an end. The goal is... reconciliation. Our calmness and skill allow us to say 'no' to backtalk while potentially strengthening the fabric of our relationship with the student rather than tearing it" (p. 239).

f. Use meaning business to deal with the unexpected. Adjust meaning business strategies to in the face of alarming, bizarre, or surprising behavior. For any instance of a student "acting out," consider the "why": "If a person is acting in a bizarre fashion," says psychologist Israel Goldiamond (quoted by Jones), "it is for a reason. What do they get for this behavior? Whatever it is, they must want it very badly. Find out what it is, and make sure that they can only get it by acting appropriately" (p. 242). Learn to expect such unexpected behaviors as... 

Extreme attention seeking. Students "who are socially deprived often seek attention and touch in ways that we might consider bizarre," writes Jones. As a result of neediness, "any interaction that you have with them will be reinforcing," regardless of your intent (p. 243). For these students, meaning business backfires: The omission training described below may have to substitute. 

Rude surprises. If you lean down to give a prompt, and a student yells, "Get out of my face!," respond the same as usual (p. 245). "As you relax and wait, the young man will give himself the extra space that he needs," Jones writes. Or he may bolt out of the room, in which case, initiate the school policy for students "leaving class without permission" while still taking "your relaxing breaths" (p. 245-246). Remember that bolting is a natural "primitive coping mechanism" (p. 246).

Multiple disruptions. As Jones suggests, if a disruption has a humorous tone and "the banter is good-natured, which it often is, you can afford to 'go with the flow'" and "try disrupting the disruption by talking over it," eventually wrestling "the attention away" from the student who started it by acknowledging the humor and redirecting it (p. 246).

Regal impassiveness is also powerful: I've also seen a great teacher, in responding to a loud passing of gas during a lecture on the first day of school, "shut down" and wait with a loose-jawed look on his face until the laughter and comments completely died off, letting students get quiet wondering what he was going to do, then continue talking as if nothing happened. The communication was loud and clear: Disruption is never cheap.

Heckling from behind. When you can't tell specifically who's joining in on backtalk, focus on responding to one area at a time, starting with the first student you're "moving in" on. "If the heckler returns to work, you can afford to simply cruise in that direction as part of working the crowd rather than 'moving in' to set limits" (p. 246-247).

Repeat disruptions. "When you have to set limits on a student again for the same behavior within a short period of time, a warning flag should go up in your brain," Jones writes. "When you see it for a third time, you have a pattern" (p.247). This means it's time to switch from meaning business to entering the backup system (further below), or offering the option of participating in omission training. 

3. Use omission training to turn problem students around. Employ the specialized incentive system of omission training for "alienated and oppositional students" (p. 21).The goal of this program is simple: encourage a student to stop an undesirable behavior. To do this, "reinforce someone for not doing something for a given length of time," as Jones writes. For instance, "reinforce a student for going ten minutes without interrupting," or an hour without interrupting (p. 285). Only turn to this strategy when all previously described programs of instruction, motivation, and discipline are "fully implemented" (p. 289). Chances are it will be rarely needed. 

Omission training is "especially powerful" when passing positive consequences on to the class, Jones writes (p. 285). This mobilizes the group "to help both the teacher and the student with special needs" (p. 285). For instance, give the group a minute of bonus PAT for every ten minutes "Larry" goes "without making an inappropriate remark" (p. 285). You could "also reinforce the entire class for omitting a behavior," as noted in Part II. But passing on Larry's bonuses invests the group in "ignoring his provocations," writes Jones, and "makes Larry a hero" (p. 285). This is particularly important for Larry, who "is often a bully" and "unpopular," as Jones writes (p. 283).

The program canbe applied to any chronic disruption, but particularly answers the dilemma of bonus PAT described in Part II, where one student can hold bonuses hostage "just to show that he or she can," as Jones writes (p. 281). "This whole thing is stupid," Larry might say. "PAT is student too! This sucks!" (p. 283) To handle this particular situation,

a. Respond to disruption with calm, and have a brief word about PAT. Go into discipline mode as you would with any backtalk. "Take a relaxing breath," Jones begins, familiarly enough. "Turn in a regal fashion. Take another relaxing breath. Give yourself a moment to think. Your demeanor signals to everyone that this is serious... Walk slowly to Larry, and wait for a moment before saying anything. Allow your own calm to help Larry relax" (p. 284).

But "What you then say is not what Larry expected to hear: 'Larry, if you think PAT is stupid, we may as well forget it. I would not expect you to work for something that you did not want. I know I wouldn't.'" Larry was expecting worse, Jones continues. "Usually he signals relief by saying something inconsequential like, 'Right.'" Your "words simply acknowledge the realities of the situation. You cannot make students like PAT any more than you can force them to cooperate" (p. 284).

If Larry escalates, you can always use your backup system, as described below. But more likely, he'll calm down. Finessing rage against the incentive system creates the opportunity to have a "heart-to-heart" later, where you can introduce and implement omission training (p. 284).

b. Have the heart-to-heart talk with the disruptive student about omission training. "Find a quiet place where you will not be interrupted for the next twenty minutes," Jones writes. "Heart-to-heart talks usually require plenty of 'wait time'"--their dynamics in general are described further below. Jones gives a sketch of how the conversation leading to omission training might go:

1. Present omission training as an alternative to the backup system. First, frame omission training as a desirable alternative to the backup system: "Larry, that scene in front of the classroom this morning in which you told me that PAT was stupid--that is what we call in education 'unacceptable behavior.'... Right now, we are looking at the Backup System"--described below. "Between where we stand right now and the Backup System lies another option. It is a lot more enjoyable" (p. 285). If "you want to do it, we will. And, if you don't, we won't" (p. 285). 

2. Make sure the student understands what can be gained by getting more PAT. Remind the student that they "do not have to do what the rest of the group is doing during PAT. It is always possible to do your own thing as long as it is constructive.... So, let's sit down with a pad of paper and make a list of things that you would like to do during PAT." The only limitations are that PAT "must be something that you want, and it must be something that I can live with" (p. 286). This conversation marks a change of direction from "'enough is enough' to becoming a partner with Larry in seeking enjoyment" (p. 286). 

3. Estimate a time frame for omission training. Imagine the shortest time span you think the student can go without repeating the behavior you're phasing out. "When in doubt, shorten your estimate," Jones writes (p. 286). "You want Larry to succeed every day."

4. Explain the mechanics of omission training to the student. Frame the proposed arrangement as meeting each other halfway, saying, "I do want you to have PAT. But I also want to relax and enjoy teaching when I come to work. And that little 'altercation' we had this morning was hardly enjoyable." So just as you are giving PAT, "I want something in return. I want something that you have given me every day that you have been in my class since school began--even on days in which you got into trouble. I want you to give me half a class period of appropriate behavior. You don't have to do anything special. Just cool it for 25 minutes" (p. 286).

If you decide to pass on the resulting bonus to the group, rehearse your announcement to the class with Larry beforehand to avoid embarrassing him. "Typically with older students," Jones writes, "the less said the better" (p. 286-287). Then, "As soon as Larry earns his first bonus minute, announce... 'Class, let me have your attention. Larry and I have devised a program that we are implementing today, and Larry is doing a great job. As a result, Larry has just earned a bonus minute of PAT for the entire class. I will circle the tally... Think of this minute as a gift from Larry to all of you... Let's hear it for Larry!'... (You can always get a class to applaud if you try.)" (p. 287). Use a kitchen timer for the omission bonus so you don't have to watch the clock.

Also, make it clear to both the student and the class that Larry can no longer "lose time for the group" (p. 288). Tell him: "if you should get into trouble in class, you will deal with me personally. After you rejoin the group, I will reset the kitchen timer so that you can immediately begin earning bonus PAT. If the period should end before you have earned the next minute, I will carry over all of your time forward to the next day so that you will never lose time" (p. 288). In addition, make it clear he can't cost the class minutes for Automatic Bonuses, either, but he can add additional minutes. If "Larry is in his seat when the bell rings," you might say, "you will all get a second bonus minute" (p. 292). 

5. Fade the procedure. Let the program run for 6-8 weeks before considering elimination. "You need to allow time for healing to take place," Jones writes (p. 290). Signs of this would include the student being "integrated into the social fabric of the class" (p. 290). But "If you are in doubt, let it run a little longer" (p. 290). Then fade in three steps:

1. Eliminate time keeping and just announce the student's bonus at the end.

2. Eliminate the contingency element, announcing the bonus at the beginning of class.

3. Eliminate the program at the end of the semester by having "a simple ceremony in which both you and the class recognize Larry's achievement" (p. 291).

If the problem behavior reemerges ("You can't win them all" as Jones writes), "reverse the fading procedure" (p. 291). "If you have to reverse course," stick with it longer at the point of success before "going forward with the fading process again" (p. 291).

4. Use the backup system to give meaning business credibility. Use the hierarchy of consequences in your classroom and school only to "communicate that 'no means no' to students who exhibit severe or repetitive disruptive behaviors," Jones writes (p. 323). While the occasional obnoxious, aggressive, or "dangerous behavior may require the use of" this matrix of warnings and consequences sooner, often in an accelerated fashion, mostly this system exists to serve as a credible threat to students who repeatedly test the reality behind meaning business (p. 21, 312).

"When you conclude that you" have "a repeater," Jones writes, "it is time to go to the Backup System. There is no point in playing this game all year. Use whatever level of sanction is necessary" (p. 312). Once you "teach the 'repeater' that 'no means no,' you can probably fade your consequences back to" meaning business. "However, until you teach that lesson in no uncertain terms, repeaters assume that you are a 'weenie'" (p. 312).

Whatever the offense, indicate to student in question that they are now entering the "backup system." Tell students, in effect: "A word to the wise. Stop what you are doing now while it is still cheap. The price will only go up from here" (p. 312). As you deliver consequences, try to avoid sending students to the office. "For the vast majority of office referrals," Jones writes, "the only effective remedy is effective classroom management" (p. 21).

a. Use "small backup options" by giving discrete, private warnings. Use discrete, private, verbal and visual warnings before moving to the medium backup options of delivering public consequences in the classroom. These quiet warnings have two purposes: 1.) to "inform students they are entering the Backup System" (and "that you have had about enough of their foolishness"), and 2.) to "invite students to fold," "before you are forced to deliver consequences with real price tags attached" (p. 314).

i. Give a verbal first warning. Start with a "pre-warning," something like: "If I see any more of this behavior whatsoever, I am going to have to start planning what to do" (p. 315). "A pre-warning is frequently all you need," writes Jones. "It serves as a 'wake-up call' to students who are too busy 'goofing off' to realize that they are being inappropriate" (p. 315). Deliver this warning is "discipline mode," I would add, with all the gradual body language of "moving in" and "moving out."

ii. Give a nonverbal second warning: Pull the card or open the grade book. After having students fill out cards with their name and phone number on the first day of school, keep these card so you can pull them out to wordlessly communicate a second warning indicating that you will call home or mark down their behavior. "Look at Larry again with your best Queen Victoria face as you place the card file back on your desk," Jones writes. "Then return to what you were doing, giving Larry one final look" (p. 315). You can do the same with a grade book, a referral slip, or any other silent communication that clearly signals "strike two."

iii. Give a final verbal warning. Then deliver the official final warning, which "describes the consequence to the student if you 'see this behavior one more time,'" Jones writes (p. 315). "A warning is never a bluff," Jones adds (p. 315). The consequence can include anything from the "medium backup options" listed below, but start with either of these tactics, which cost you no after-school time:

Give a verbal warning about staying after class. Say something to the effect of: "This is the second time I have had to deal with this talking, and I want it to stop. If I see any more talking, we will have a little conversation of our own after class. For right now, all I really care about is you getting some of this work done" (p. 314).

Show the student a letter home. "Write a brief letter" to students' parents that says something to the effect of: "Dear ____, today in class I have had to deal with (briefly describe the problem behavior). I need your help. If we work together now, we can prevent this from becoming a 'real' problem. I will call you tomorrow at which time we can make a plan. Thank you for your cooperation and concern" (p. 317).

Sign it and address and envelope, then "Take the letter and a piece of tape to the student's desk. Lean over and tape the letter on the desk, and whisper to the student as privately as possible, 'This is a letter home to your parents describing exactly what I have had to put up with in here today. If I see no more of this behavior before the end of the [class/day/week], then, with my permission and in front of my eyes, you may tear up this letter and throw it away. 

"'If, however, I see any more of this behavior, I will send the letter home even if I have to hand-deliver it. Do I make myself clear? For now, all I really care about is getting some of this work done. Let's see if we can keep life simple'" (p. 317).

b. Use "medium backup options" to deliver public consequences in the classroom. Use heart-to-heart talks during or after class, time-out in the classroom, time-out in a colleague's classroom, or staying after school to deliver consequences to students who are either "repeat disruptors" or obnoxious one-offs requiring serious attention. "The key to success with a Backup System is not the size of the negative sanction," Jones emphasizes. It's "the person" using it (p. 319). If you're calm, clear, and consistent with your expectations, meaning business, and warnings, these public sanctions will carry more weight. If you jump straight to them, however, they will seem arbitrary or petty.

In the same way, being calm, clear, and consistent with the sanctions themselves gives more credibility to the "large backup options" described further below, should you need to turn to them after going through the rest of the process. To use your medium backup system wisely, use and understand the following options:

i. Heart-to-heart talks. "When a problem reoccurs in class," Jones writes, "have a talk with the student to find out what is going on"--much like the one preceding omission training described above. "Have the student do most of the talking," Jones adds. Examples of openers include: "Jennifer, tell me, what was going on in class today between you and Michelle?" and "What are we going to have to do to resolve this problem?" (p. 317).

Sometimes you can have this conversation privately during class, Jones writes. "But, usually it will be after" (p. 317). For heart-to-hearts, use your discussion-leading skills from Part I: open-ended prompts, wait time, and selective praising and prompting. Keep it simple, positive, and avoid the "rookie errors" of "talking too much" and "giving advice" (p. 333). Relax and let the student do most of the work, Jones writes, to let them "solve his or her own problem" (p. 333). "You can tell if you have coopted the expert role by taking note of who is doing the most talking" (p. 333).

When solving problems with students, your goal should be to help them:

Define the problem.

Generate solutions.

Evaluate solutions.

Choose the best solution.

Implement the solution.

Evaluate the outcome.

ii. Time-out in the classroom. All time-out "should have the following elements," Jones writes: 

Two time-out areas per classroom, "since problems often involve two students. These areas need to be visually isolated so that the students in time-out cannot entertain each other or the rest of the class" (p. 318).

Time-out should be delivered with the body language and "withering boredom" of meaning business (p. 318).

Time-out should be brief, not more than five minutes.

"Time-out should be boring" (p. 318).

iii. Time-out in a colleague's classroom. All time out in other teachers' classrooms should have the following elements: 

The colleague should "thoroughly understand the program, approve of it and feel free to reciprocate should he or she need to" (p. 318). 

"Time-out in a colleague's classroom should last for the remainder of the period or for at least 20 minutes" (p. 318). 

"The student should be delivered to the colleague's classroom with a folder of work," to work on the entire time, writes Jones. "Academic help from the teacher should be brief and matter-of-fact" (p. 318).

"The student cannot join in any classroom games or activities," writes Jones. "Usually he or she sits facing the wall so as not to be distracted or entertained" (p. 318).

The "student should be separated from his or her peer group by as many years as possible" (p. 318)

iv. Staying after school. "Keeping students after school can be difficult to implement due to bus schedules, to say nothing of your schedule," Jones writes. "But, where practical, it can be powerful" (p. 319). You can keep students "after school to complete their work," Jones writes, which would let them know working in class is a "pay me now, or pay me later" situation (p. 319).

The key procedural element is making sure a student is doing schoolwork rather than playing games or being the teacher's 'little helper,'" writes Jones. "It is not supposed to be reinforcing" (p. 319).

Because this option can be "costly to any teacher who has other obligations at the end of the school day," Jones writes, one "cheap solution is to keep the student for only five or ten minutes after dismissal. This provides time for some values clarification, while Larry's buddies go off and leave him behind" (p. 319).

c. Use "large backup options" to deliver official school consequences to those who need them, but reexamine your management methods when you do. A repeat disruptor or a "sudden crisis can take even the most effective teacher into large backup responses," writes Jones (p. 311). These consequences include "Sending a student to the office, assigning detention, or suspending a student" (p. 325). Using the school backup system is necessary "on occasion," writes Jones, but don't "go there very often" (p. 327, 328). In fact, abuse of the large backup system (discussed below) is now a source of national controversy.

That said, "large" responses may be required for students who do not otherwise believe that your classroom structure, meaning business prompts, "small-backup" warnings, omission training program, or "medium-backup" consequences represent real caring and real limits that you are willing to enforce every time. "For example, on the first day of school Larry may 'go for broke' in the discipline management poker game to see whether or not he is in control," Jones writes. "But, when confronted by a highly effective teacher, Larry soon learns 'not to throw good money after bad.' Instead of upping the ante, Larry learns to fold early in order to cut his losses" (p. 328).

This leverage must be real, I would add. Making referrals or incident reports overly cumbersome--or not allowing teachers to "send out" students at all--takes away power from teachers, particularly substitutes. (Students in these schools are fully aware of this.) Many repeat disruptors test substitutes right up to the edge of large backup responses. But if students know there's nothing beyond that edge, the result will be a breakdown of classroom discipline.

The opposite, more common danger lies in teachers becoming addicted to large backup options, jumping straight to "bouncing" students in order to reduce stress and make problems "disappear"--the "primitive discipline" described below (p. 311). "Frequent reliance upon large backup responses should serve as a signal that a teacher is in trouble," Jones writes. "We need to help that person reexamine his or her options using the management system as our guide" (p. 325).

To train yourself and others to use classroom management in a new way...

5. Combine and prioritize the strategies in Tools for Teaching. To integrate Jones's strategies for instruction, motivation, and discipline, imagine classroom management as handling "pairs of behavior," Jones writes. With every problem, "systematically strengthen the behaviors you want while weakening the behaviors" you don't (p. 326). To use Jones's metaphor, think of behavior management as a "ladder" with two sides: reinforcement (giving incentives) on one side and suppression (setting limits) on the other (p. 322, 328).

To solve any problem, then, "go up the Decision Ladder," as illustrated by the diagram below--climbing higher and higher, with greater costs and risks, the rungs divided into interpersonal skills near the bottom, incentive systems in the middle, and your far more precarious backup system at the top (p. 326). The entire ladder stands on instruction, because without success and clear rules, management will tip over and fall.

"Looking at the decision ladder this way," writes Jones, "you might characterize Tools for Teaching as 'everything you can possibly do to avoid the Backup System." The "larger the negative sanction becomes, the greater" the cost, risk of failure, and "likelihood of negative side effects like resentment. Not surprisingly, we send the 'Larrys' to the office over and over for as long as they are in school. The 'solution' to this dilemma has traditionally been the fact that these kids drop out" (p. 326-327). (It's a situation that won't stand, particularly as a "discipline gap" emerges between minorities and other students.)

In fact, teachers using "primitive discipline" try jumping up to higher rungs on the suppression side, and usually topple the ladder (p. 327). Effective teachers move one rung at a time to address a problem, constantly shifting between reinforcement and suppression (p. 328). If setting limits "isn't working," Jones writes, "rather than upping the ante on the negative side, cross over and try incentives" (p. 326).

"However, as your management system becomes established, you work your way down the decision ladder," Jones adds. "When you watch highly effective teachers, it becomes obvious that most of their discipline management is at the level of interpersonal skills" (p. 328).

The Decision Ladder shows how good instruction and positive discipline are inextricable--how they support each other or collapse on their own. "The entire first half of this book has as its primary objective prevention of the goofing off that requires" meaning business, Jones writes--from "working the crowd" ("eyes on the back of your head" for an active classroom) to "say, see, do" teaching (p. 218). But "Imagine, in contrast, a Bop 'til You Drop teacher who lectures for 25 minutes. During all of that time, half of the class is in the green zone with nothing to do... This teacher, when queried, will say, 'If I were to set limits every time a student is out of line, I would get nothing else done.'" (p. 218). The result is stressful chaos.

Teachers who value Jones only for his discipline program, meanwhile, ask students to show up for prison. It's a factor Jones ignores when unpacking the "whys" of "Larry": How many kids hate school because school is a hateful place? If the only choices you offer students are complicity or rebellion, some will inevitably choose rebellion. And, as every four-year-old knows, the tragedy of choice is that we always have one. Which makes cooperation with bad schooling a kind of trauma. This is why school initiatives that focus on discipline to the exclusion of active lessons and fun incentives are doomed.

What keeps the ladder from splitting in two is relationships, according to Jones. "You want teachers to relate to children positively," he writes, "and you want children to succeed in school so they will be self-confident. Behavior management is simply a means to that end" (p. 330). But the atmosphere you create with just one class period, using Jones's strategies, suggests that the individual teacher-student connection, as important as it is, may be secondary. Students remember the feeling of being in a positive class: of doing well, having fun, connecting with peers, and gaining trust--in themselves, others, and the world. This is the place learning should be.

Posts and essays in this series:

How to keep school from Dumbing Us Down.

Why classrooms aren't communities.

What, me motivate? Part I

School and the Law of the Jungle

Teaching or violence?

Lesson plan template (January, 2014)

What, me motivate? Part II

What, me motivate? Part III

Authority and freedom revisited: John Locke and A.S. Neill

Notes on Jones's 3rd Edition and cooperative learning.

[petescholtes-blog-blog]

What, me motivate? Jones Re-Intro and Part II

Note: Here's the second third of my essay on Fred Jones and Tools for Teaching. I know, twice as long! I wrote this for myself, after writing the Introduction and Part I for a blog I kept for classes last semester. I wanted to finish processing the book and try to articulate why I think it says something new about humanity. If you're bold enough to tackle reading this, enjoy! (Here's Part III.)

Dr. Jones vs. the Temple of Doom (A Re-Introduction)

One: Any teacher can become a great teacher. Before I began my teacher education program in 2009, I read an article that almost made me want to quit. It was a piece in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell, a name I wasn't yet familiar with. Argued with a dash of research at its back, "Most Likely to Succeed" said the problem with education is that great teachers, like great NFL quarterbacks, have certain qualities that don't become evident until you put the person to work in the field. Yet, like great quarterbacks, teachers make all the difference--in their case, between the success and failure of their students.

There were problems with this thesis, though I didn't notice them at the time. It was odd, for one thing, to describe teacher competencies in persuasive detail--the ability to give feedback, be flexible, and have "eyes on the back" of your head--while lamenting the challenge of hiring on these strengths because "no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like." Hadn't Gladwell just described what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like?

Still, the essay fit a line of thinking then taking shape. Bad teachers are the problem. Good teachers are the solution. School "funding levels, class size, and curriculum design" are unimportant. And teacher education won't help. "Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications--as much as they appear related to teaching prowess--turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans." Better to fire the bottom ten percent of teachers, as one researcher in the article suggested, and replace them with instructors of "average quality."

Gladwell was right about one thing, at least: Improving education starts in the classroom. Yet, having narrowed the issue to teacher quality, he treated the phenomenon as mysterious. He seemed to have no idea that teachers could be observed before being hired, or have any interest in real teacher training. The "training camp" he proposed--an "apprenticeship system" where schools would "have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher"--was really just a high-pressure winnowing system. (Gladwell, who has sometimes blurred his roles as corporate spokesman and journalist, used a financial advice firm as his model.) There was the strong implication throughout the article that teaching isn't a skill, but a talent. It's unsurprising, in retrospect, to learn that Gladwell is a booster of Teach for America, an organization that sends college students into secondary classrooms for up to two years after a mere five weeks of training.

The problem with believing that teachers can't be taught is that it feeds the same false ideology and black hole of empathy that once led educators to act as if many students can't be taught. It's a version of the Law of the Jungle, "the lie that the world belongs to the strong, the smart, the beautiful, the talented, the wealthy, and the independent," as I wrote in November; "that strength lies in aggression, intelligence is born, beauty is objective, and talent is fixed"; and that these qualities are inherently "hierarchical and competitive." There's nothing in Gladwell's New Yorker article to dispute any of that.

So my 2009 self wondered: Was Gladwell right? Did I have what it takes to be a teacher? How could I be an effective one when I lacked some of the skills he described? Every self-doubting teacher in the world believes, in her darkest hour, that her career choice was a gamble. Failure could be taken as proof that the gamble was a bad one.

It turned out, of course, that all of the skills Gladwell describes are teachable. We can teach them well or we can teach them badly; that's the real public policy choice. Teaching well, as I explored in Part I of this essay, means applying a version of the "Say, See, Do" teaching model Fred Jones entertainingly outlines in Tools for Teaching (now in its third edition, first electronic one). As with teaching students, teaching teachers means getting them "on their feet," coaching them through each step, and drilling practice in a safe and supportive environment--one of scaffolding and cooperation, not elimination rounds (p. 169). Even the unspoken psychological pantomime Jones calls "meaning business" can be taught. "It is not something you are born with," Jones writes. "It is just a matter of skill" (p. 169). 

Two: Jones challenges teaching as usual. I introduced Jones last time around with an egalitarian defense of teacher authority, which I hold to as I explore how to increase student authority below. Along the way, I set him up as the dialectical opposite of radical educators such as John Taylor Gatto, who argues that schools teach dependence and that students should be set free to pursue apprenticeship and independent study. Applying Jones to project-based learning, cooperative learning, and online learning was (to my mind) my favor to Jones, bridging the practical with the unconventional. (I address his minor but strident dismissal of cooperative learning in the third edition here.)

Since then, I've come to think I sold Jones short. Tools for Teaching isn't just a voice of old-fashioned teacher wisdom saving harried rookies from themselves. The practices Jones refutes have grown into a stifling false wisdom. In his light and empathetic way, Jones is as critical of schools as any radical. He reminds us that the only thing separating good teachers from bad is a skill set that can be learned and articulated. He insists that teaching and learning are an exchange of gifts, not payments to be earned. And he'll have none of the Law of the Jungle in any form, either Gladwell's awed yet severe view of teachers or the poisonous fear that some students are beyond help. "Stories of unmanageable kids are totally overrated," Jones tells Education World. "If you were listening to monologues on this and that, it would be difficult for you to stay focused."

Jones challenges the norm in three areas: instruction (for independence, Part I of this essay), motivation (for diligence--Part II below), and discipline (for self-disciplined classroom citizenship--Part III coming next). For each topic, he offers not just news for newbies but a paradigm shift. For instruction he recommends the "Say, See, Do" teaching cycles that allow students to hear (or read) how to do something, then see how to do something, then do it themselves--a common model in training cooks or athletes, but still rare in schools. Just as rare is coaching through structured practice (whether with individuals or cooperative groups), assessing during guided practice, having students check each other's work, and excusing them to projects or fun activities once they've "got it." (My new lesson-plan template accommodates all of these.) 

Instead, most education looks something like this: Lecturing for at least 10 minutes (usually longer), tutoring lost students through assignments, then grading after school. It's what Jones calls "Bop 'til You Drop Teaching," and it's not just a hothouse for teacher burnout and student behavior issue, but what Gatto may have had in mind when he accused schools of training confusion and passivity. "With Bop 'til you Drop," writes Jones, "you work hard presenting the lesson, and then, due to cognitive overload, you work even harder during Guided Practice as you tutor the helpless handraisers. Since you are too busy during Guided Practice to check work, paper grading will consume your evening." The next day, you "go over the assignment again in class... a process guaranteed to render most of the class comatose" (p. 124).

Bad instruction leads directly to the question of motivation, the moment when students ask themselves: "Why should I?" Yet even here, teachers rarely offer the preferred activities Jones recommends as an incentive for diligence, or the in-class accountability he encourages for mastery. Instead, most teaching creates unwitting incentives for dawdling, fast but sloppy work, or dependence on teacher attention. As a substitute teacher, I usually have to create my own incentives for students, because lesson plans almost never include them beyond candy, stickers, or other rewards that give incentives a bad name. The learning itself is rarely an incentive for every student.

In the section on motivation below, I defend incentive systems from their best critic, Alfie Kohn, while incorporating his insights into my own expansions on Jones, a program to increase cooperative learning, student authority, and project-based learning. Yet I worry that Kohn, who has a wider audience of non-teachers than Jones, would throw the baby out with the bathwater (to borrow Jones's phrase) in having teachers reject incentive systems altogether (p. 111). The disaster meeting many teachers as a result can only reinforce the Gladwellian notion that when it comes to teaching, you've either got it or you don't.

Poor instruction with no motivation leads to problems of discipline, the third and final portion of Tools for Teaching, and the subject of Part III of this essay. Jones makes spirited fun of the typical school behavior code before taking sympathetic aim at teachers who fall back on the "oldest myth in the management of severe classroom discipline problems," namely: "that someone down the hall can fix it" (p. 167). We've created a mechanism, Jones writes, where students who hate school are excused from learning as a reward for bad behavior.

Three: Great teaching can be described. Since writing the first third of this piece, I've come to see how uncommon and challenging Jones's ideas really are by applying them to an online learning module, a poster for online teaching (below), an educational app called Writer Blocks, and the classes I teach as a substitute. I've also connected "Say, See, Do" teaching to contstructionism (the basis of project-based learning) and examined how school teaches the Law of the Jungle by default. More recently, I've read this appalling Star Tribune article by Jeffrey Meitrodt about the warehousing of students removed from other Minneapolis schools for behavior problems. This is buck-passing as city policy.

What Jones challenges us to do is focus on what we can control. Teachers can't change students' home lives, attention spans, the attitudes they bring to school, or the "ills of society" (p. 104). We can control how we teach, and how we train teachers to teach. Teaching is a complex job, as Gladwell writes. But that doesn't make it unknowable or un-learnable. Somewhere between the defenses of teachers unions and the attacks of politicians lies a workforce willing to be re-trained if it helps us get our lives back.

Shifting the debate from blame to improvement would only make sense in education. One alternative incentive model: Send the best, most experienced instructors into the most challenging schools. (Our current model, of charter schools and Teach for America, sends the greenest of the green into the toughest of the tough.) Another reform idea: Switch out the basic skills tests that keep out many dedicated teachers of color and substitute performance-based assessment. 

We need to begin describing what great teaching looks like. We need movies that show us what it looks like. If I see another scene with a rapt audience of high-school kids hanging on every word of a teacher lecturing up to the bell, who shouts out a homework assignment after it rings ("read chapters three and four for tomorrow"), I'm going to throw up. (Is it coincidence, to take one counter-example, that a teacher named Dewey in School of Rock forms a student rock band with a drummer named Freddy Jones?)

We need to describe why bopping fails, and why rewards and punishments, the fallback and shortcut of struggling boppers, don't work. Reading Meitrodt's piece, I wonder what "the overuse of discipline" means in practical terms. I have a hunch, because for most people, as Jones writes, "common sense and common usage equate the word discipline with punishment" (p. 162). Last month I spoke to an African American parent who removed her kids from a Minneapolis charter school because, as she put it, the school was "all discipline." But as I wrote last time, "discipline is a deceptive thing. The closer you get to mastery, the more invisible it becomes." If you notice classroom management, it's probably not being done right.

So here's what a healthy system of motivation and discipline looks like according to Jones, drawing on decades of observing "natural" teachers. I've also included notes from experience and connections to cooperative learning, project-based learning, and online learning. Finally, I've used these innovations to reflect on how authority, once given to students with training, becomes another skill set to master rather than a stand-in for frustrations with adults. I've integrated Alfie Kohn's ideas about self-motivation here as well, while challenging Kohn on the question of how motivation can be learned.

By way of disclaimer, I hope it's obvious this essay is no substitute for reading the book itself. Even with supportive colleagues, there's a sense among teachers that we're on our own. For us, Tools for Teaching is a coach in a book: so well written and drawn (with family co-authors Patrick Jones and Jo Lynne Jones and illustrator Brian T. Jones, whose hilarious cartoons I've reproduced here and there) that you'll want to reread every page. Consider this outline (which references the 2007 second edition) an opinionated advance organizer.

The Tools for Teaching system (continued).

Part II. Motivation (for hard work)

Create incentives to nourish hard-working and conscientious learners. Use relationships, good instruction, and preferred activity time (PAT) to create incentives for diligence and responsibility (p. 103-129, 251-282, 295-308, 321-333). For any task, students ask, "Why should I?" Incentives are the answers to that question, according to Jones (Tools for Teaching, p. 21). To generate these incentives, 

A. Build relationships with students. Make personal connections every day, because all "other aspects of management rest upon the goodwill that teachers establish with their students," Jones writes (p. 324): It's "the basic human incentive system" (p. 322).

Start with icebreakers on the first day of school, and never let up until you're writing letters of recommendation for colleges and jobs. Use preferred activities because "fun builds relationships" (p. 331). Bonding isn't "just a matter of being nice," Jones writes. It's a "program" that "requires an investment of time and energy for both planning and implementation." (p. 324). To build relationships,

1. Remember that teaching is giving. Give attention, interest, humor, concern, and the "universal incentive in child rearing... love" every day to provide informal incentives (p. 106). When children give back to their parents, Jones writes, it's "based upon all the emotional 'money in the bank' that has been stored up over the years" (p. 107). Formal incentives are explicit and voluntary agreements made in advance of work. The two kinds of "incentives work together," Jones adds. "No matter what the formal incentive, we always try harder for someone we love and respect" (p. 107). 

This might sound somewhat authoritarian or mercenary at first. Shouldn't students try harder for themselves? And isn't there a better metaphor for love than money? But Jones means money given, not money paid, a distinction that makes a difference worth exploring. In fact, he describes a spiritual dimension to teaching rarely noted by liberals suspicious of authority or conservatives suspicious of self-esteem. Our job may be an office (like the presidency or the county sheriff), but we fill it with emotions--and we do it from very the first day. Children walk in with the Law of the Jungle in their heads thinking they "can't" until we show them they can. They know the transactional language of "earning" grades and "owing" assignments, yet light up when we tell them we are simply going to give them something good--the gift of preferred activity time, as Jones recommends.

Teaching is giving, as Jones keeps insisting. Which rings true with our experience, because giving is what you remember. Everything good in life comes from it. Even our achievements are a gift to the world. Taking is what we associate with the bad things, if anything. Punishment doesn't teach good behavior because, contrary to the old saying, it literally gives you nothing to think about, a phenomenon I explore in detail under "Discipline."

You could argue that a third option, payment, builds character. It's the reason we work, after all. And who doesn't believe in an honest day's pay for an honest day's work? But I don't think it works that way, emotionally. A fair contract, almost by definition, is one that disappears from our mind the moment we start. It's an arrangement that makes it affordable to give. Where the Law of the Jungle takes hold is in the deeply harbored suspicion, nourished by conditional networks, that all gifts carry a price, that we are not worthy of being given to, and that anything we give is, in turn, a form of compensation. This is the ideology that transcends ideology, as I've recently explored when it comes to violence, the last resort of people with nothing to give. 

When schools ask teachers to offer their stomach lining, after-school energy, and weekends, they aren't teaching giving, they're teaching taking. Giving would involve offering teachers training and the time to get it. Activists for the 40-hour workweek understood that joyful work requires being able to enjoy the rest of your life, an idea that fits Jones's emphasis on cheap strategies, fun in the classroom, and going home happy. Education will always be a union issue because the needs of teachers, people who give for a living, are intimately entwined with the needs of learners. 

2. Remember that student cooperation is also a gift. For Jones, teachers "give in order to teach giving--the giving of cooperation" (p. 263). Students are required by law to be at school, never forget. But they don't have to cooperate, though we ask them to do just that hundreds of times a day. "If students do something as simple as showing up to your class on time, do not take it for granted," Jones writes. "They have cut short several pleasurable activities"--talking with friends, "saying goodbye to their boyfriends or girlfriends for the fourth time today"--to come to your class, "where you will put them to work. You should be grateful" (p. 253).

B. Make students feel smart and safe. Create learning experiences and a learning environment where students feel confident and comfortable enough to take risks and trust others. Teachers would like to think goodwill is based on respect or affection, but, more often, it comes down to how you make students feel in your class. Students often can't tell you why they like some teachers more than others, Jones writes. "They use vapid phrases like... 'He's cool'... But the kids know where they feel safe. They feel safe where they can relax with their peer group and feel smart without concern about being embarrassed or looking bad" (p. 331).

To make students feel smart and safe,

1. Create lessons that ensure student success every day. Make "all of the students, not just the 'smarties,'" feel smart with every lesson (p. 331). To do this, use these three methods explored in detail with Part I:

a. Say, See, Do Teaching. Package learning to let students "chew and swallow each bite." Replace "cognitive overload with self-assurance" by generating immediate experiences of success (p. 331). As Jones writes, "Feeling smart... is based on real success resulting from real mastery" (p. 331).

I would add that coaching students out of incorrect performance also lets them know that incorrect performance is a natural and acceptable part of learning. According to John Hattie, classrooms need to be "welcoming of errors" in order for students to fully engage (Visible Learning, 2009, p. 33).

b. Visual Instruction Plans. Use VIPs to "reduce the students' sense of vulnerability." Let students use this to avoid "forgetting, becoming confused, and feeling overwhelmed" (p. 331).

c. Praise, Prompt, and Leave. Use "Praise, Prompt, Leave" cues in giving feedback to praise students specifically for what they've done right so far and prompt them to the next step. Use these in place of "yes, but" compliments, which are damaging to students' self-concept. Praise, Prompt, Leave "protects students" by changing "the flavor of helping interactions from negative to positive" (p. 331).

2. Teach high-quality lessons. Make learning interesting and relevant (Jones, p. 120). Create great experiences, and connect these experiences to students' future learning, present-day lives, and past experiences.

In your feedback during class discussion, always connect learning back to students' lives, asking questions to generate involvement. If it "matters to students," adds Alfie Kohn, "the specific skills we care about can be taught naturally without sugarcoating, without games, and above all without offering kids little doggie biscuits for doing what we tell them." I would also add this: The more students care about you, the more connecting a topic to your own life will also make it come alive.

3. Keep motivation positive. Use the preferred activities described below to create joy in your classroom, abiding by the adage: "No joy, no work" (p. 331).

4. Keep discipline positive. Use the techniques of "meaning business" described in Part III to "set limits in a nonadversarial fashion without creating embarrassment," as Jones writes (p. 331). Also, protect students from each other, and turn oppositional students around through omission training and conversations geared toward reconciliation.

5. Use cooperative learning (CL), democracy, and project-based learning (PBL) (my addition). Use the methods of cooperative learning outlined below every day so students gain a sense of belonging and support. Increase student authority to help them gain a sense of their own power, and use project-based learning to help them explore their interests more freely (both are also explored in more detail below).

C. Create incentives for learning using preferred activity time (PAT). Let students engage in fun learning activities--"something to work for--something they want--something in the not too distant future"--after each lesson as an incentive to finish (p. 22). Excuse students to these more desirable pursuits once they show mastery of a learning goal. When a lesson is fun enough, extension can be the activity.

As a teacher, "to build a work ethic in your students, you must become a provider of preferred activities," Jones writes (p. 22). Like all simple incentive systems, Jones adds, these activities juxtapose two events: a task and a reinforcer (or an incentive delivered after work) (p. 108).Jones describes this as a version of what he calls "Grandma's Rule": "You have to finish your dinner before you get your dessert" (p. 108).

To beginning teachers, active lessons and good relationships might seem like enough. But they aren't. "For one thing," Jones writes, "the students don't know you, much less love you, on the first day of school" (p. 107). For another, many students "resent any adult authority who tries to tell them what to do" (p. 107). Remember that school is an artificial situation created by coercion. "It's my job to teach," goes one common teacher rationalization (quoted by Jones), "It's their job to learn" (p. 11)--but it's not their job to learn. Students aren't paid to be in school.

Yet you can't force cooperation, which Jones reminds us is also a "gift." Forcing cooperation is coercion, not cooperation. And yet we need cooperation "from every student" every day (p. 252). Choosing to cooperate "requires a decision to cooperate on the part of the student," Jones writes. "The management of cooperation in the classroom, therefore, focuses on supplying the students with a good reason to make that decision" (p. 253). To provide these reasons,

1. Learn why time is a powerful gift. Use formal incentives, the kind of explicit work-before-play agreements families use every day: "Dinner before dessert," "Homework before TV," "Chores before going out to play." In Jones's childhood bedtime routine, for instance, his mother would say at 8:30, "As soon as you are in bed, it will be story time. But, lights out at 9:00." This beautifully simple arrangement basically promised more time "for snuggles and stories" if he got ready for bed more quickly (p. 107).

Besides giving, the key element of that last example is time. Time is a powerful incentive because, like money, it offers a choice of how to use it. This idea clearly applies to adults at work. Paying a carpenter per table built, rather than by the hour, creates an incentive to finish quickly. Hourly wages, by contrast, create an incentive to slow down. The former offers two choices that give the worker more power: how to work, and how to spend the free time generated. The latter offers neither. Instead, you're "on the clock."

Time at school, like bedtime, can never be as free as work: Someone else is always in charge, and the law says you have to be there. But there are still parallels worth exploring. If students are "on the clock," without real choices about how to use their time, they have no reason to hurry. As a result, adults do all the managing.

Usually teachers resort to rewards and punishments, the kind of choices that demean choosing. When Alfie Kohn criticizes rewards, he singles out the loss of independence that comes with compensation, how paying robs the learner of voluntary agency and power. An atmosphere of rewards and penalties actually makes us more needy: We examine the fairness of every exchange because those exchanges always judge us--a trapdoor to the Law of the Jungle, as I've mentioned.

But time is different. Time gives power rather than taking it away. As a result of his bedtime routine, "My brother and I got into the habit of being ready before 8:30 so that we could have a full half-hour" of stories read by Mom, Jones writes. By offering a loving gift of reading every night--giving attention and fun rather than nagging, punishing, or paying--Jones's parents showed how giving really is teaching. "Understanding the nature of a simple choice made by children at bedtime teaches us one of the most important lessons about learning to be responsible: People will only take responsibility for things that they control" (p. 265).

2. Give preferred activities to your students. Give preferred activities and "give generously," but keep these activities cheap. Activities should be "readily available, easy to use," and "organized and ready to go before the lesson starts," because you won't have time to stop and get students started on them individually (p. 263, 114). For many of these endeavors, you'll need to teach the activity itself in "Say, See, Do" cycles before students can simply begin with a prompt.

a. Differentiate work and play for each student. Remember that work and play are different for everyone. One game might be a preferred activity for one student, and work for another. Whether an activity winds up being an incentive or disincentive is "a matter of cost and benefit," writes Jones (p. 106). Work is anything with a greater immediate cost. Play is anything with a greater immediate benefit. If work is fun enough, it becomes play. If play is boring or frustrating enough, it becomes work. Self-motivation involves working for long-term benefits, a concept I explore in more detail below.

b. Help students develop interests (my addition). Help students pursue the kind of work they're interested in during PAT (and PBL below) by encouraging interests, helping students discover them, and trying to guess what they might be with some guidance from them based on their preferences, temperament, and enthusiasms. Make all students feel that their work is important and build a lively atmosphere in your classroom.

c. Create a structure for PAT. Create a classroom structure for preferred activity time that's as clear, public, and practiced as the rules and procedures for the rest of your class in Part I. Rehearse transitions to PAT, and establish clear guidelines for how students choose activities, when and how you'll do all-class activities, and how expectations are established for either. Make it clear that "PAT is structured time, not free time," writes Jones. It's "structured for learning. Its objective is to make learning fun" (p. 264). 

To generate PAT activities,

d. Create a PAT bank of preferred activities for individuals or groups before the school year begins. Create fun activities that teach your standards. "If you teach economics," writes Jones, "you will repeatedly have to ask yourself, 'How do we have fun with economics?'" (p. 296). Remember, again, that just because an activity is a game doesn't mean students will like it: A lot of PAT is trial and error.

Preferred activities may also include projects you wish students to pursue as part of project-based learning (PBL), explored further below. But make sure such projects have reached a stage beyond the need for close supervision, and are indeed preferred to that day's work. Use the following ideas from Jones (there are many more at fredjones.com) and keep adding your own:

Art projects. Have students draw "maps with rivers and mountains... villages of thatched huts... igloos and log cabins" (p. 114). Or let students "decorate the room" for "upcoming holiday or back-to-school" nights (p. 114). Cover walls and bulletin boards with student art. 

Map projects (my addition). One of students' favorite projects in my civics class this year was creating a map and budget with a list of laws for a fictional city of the student's creation.

Music projects. "When the teacher does whole-group instruction, the class can have a whole-group preferred activity," Jones writes (p. 115). Besides games, music is a perfect all-class activity. Have students work on songs, record them, and make them about lessons in the unit. (With headphones, these can become individual PAT options as well.)

Video projects (my addition). Have students record videos of themselves and others to show mastery of different learning goals, and edit them on computers. (For one unit, I had students do political campaign commercials for their election project.) Flipgrid provides a handy online tool for this.

Learning projects. Find out students' special interests by asking them, "What do you want to know?" Have them create projects around these, whether the topic is "dwarf stars or racecars" (p. 115). "Preferred activities, therefore, provide the teacher with an avenue for teaching research skills on a topic that the student is motivated to explore." (p. 115-116). This is the heart of PBL explored further below, but remember that students can always be working on more than one project, and their PAT can be their most preferred at that moment.

Computer use. Access to computer time depends on having computers handy, but it's a powerful preferred activity if you're using the library or computer lab. This is also where a system of gaining greater autonomy, discussed with PBL, really pays off.

Learning games. "Almost anything in the curriculum can be taught in the form of a game," writes Jones (p. 116). Look up books of games and puzzles in your subject area, whether for individuals or teams. (See Part I and the fredjones.com message board for more ideas.) All-class PAT enables all-class games and competitions, described under "Team Competitions" below.

Reading and writing for pleasure. Reading library books and writing journals are a "time-honored preferred activity," Jones writes, while many "teachers have the students work on a class newspaper" (p. 116).

Helping the teacher. "Students who finish their work early are natural candidates for peer tutoring," Jones writes. "Training the class to use Praise, Prompt, and Leave gives students a valuable teaching skill" (p. 116). Many students also like to help with "work check, writing test questions... or even helping the teacher search for good preferred activity games and puzzles," while some students "will make beautiful VIPs for you before you teach the next lesson" (p. 116). Use this PAT as part of my suggested program for increasing student authority below.

Students teaching lessons. If the fourth graders described on p. 304 in Tools for Teaching can do this, so can middle-schoolers and high-schoolers. Students in one grade school built up PAT time so they could eventually use an entire day of PAT to teach other students about topics they researched, using "Say, See, Do" teaching to do it. "The geography group had everyone make maps of Great Britain," Jones writes. "The Games Group brought pancakes and skillets to reenact the famous Leeds Pancake Relay that celebrates Shrove Tuesday" (p. 304). Nothing helps students remember their own learning better than teaching it to other students. Incorporate this into the program I suggest for increased authority below.

Extra work. If students are excited by a particular lesson or idea, they can use their time for "more advanced assignments" or prepare "a special class presentation" (p. 116). Some students may also want to do homework during class. But don't count on it--never use more work as an incentive for completing work.

e. Create PAT games based on team competitions. Learn the basic rules of most games, and start building a game bank based on those rules. "The rules to baseball, football, basketball, hangman, and Jeopardy are all the same," Jones writes. "With a half-dozen sets of rules you can generate hundreds of PATs" (p. 297).

What makes the best team games is this: "time-on-task"--anything that doesn't leave students on the sidelines. To achieve this, change the rules of any game to incorporate "defense" (p. 297). That way, students are always playing. A good example is Academic Baseball below, which I quote at length because the details are crucial (p. 297-298):

Academic Baseball. "Lay out two diamonds on the floor with 3x3 cards... as bases. Have the students get out of their seats to 'run the bases.' They have fun strutting their stuff, and you don't have to keep track of who is on base.

"We will play the game with questions at four levels of difficulty"--singles, doubles, triples, and home runs. (Jones writes that "These questions usually come right off the top of your head," but this kind of recall is also a skill, and I would write out a long list of questions to draw on.) "If you want to simplify the game, make every question worth one run. 

"Divide the room into two teams. On the team that is 'up' first, pick a student and say, 'Batter up! Do you want a single, double, triple or home run?'... The student picks a level of difficulty, and you pitch a question. If the student gets a hit by answering the question correctly within ten second, he or she is on base. Of course, if some other student on the same team says the answer, the batter is out. Mild showing off as the student rounds the bases is usually greeted with hoots and cheers from teammates.

"If, however, the student misses the question, you turn to the other team and say, 'Fly ball!'... Repeat the question and then wait before calling on anyone."

If you play this game "open-book," "the team on the defense can start looking up the answer as soon as they hear the question. As a result, the team on defense frantically flips through books, lab manuals, and notes to find the answer while the student who is 'up' attempts to answer the question. There is actually peer pressure to look up the answer since dropping a fly ball means that a teammate was simply too lazy to look up the answer."

Wait "until the rustling of book pages dies down. Then call on a student. By calling on whomever you please, you can distribute questions more effectively while assuring that the weaker students get questions that they have a good chance of answering... If students on defense answer the questions correctly, they catch the fly ball and make an out on the other team. If, however, they miss the question and drop the fly ball, the batter is on base with an error, and all runners advance one base.

"Normally in baseball, the team with the most runs wins, but not in this game. In this game the final score for each team is calculated as runs minus outs. Catching a fly ball nullifies a run. In the final score it is the equivalent of hitting a solo home run. Defense is serious business."

You can also "alternate questions between teams," which "eliminates innings": "Rather, you have two games running side-by-side like a race... The generic name for a game format that alternates questions between teams is 'Ping-Ping'" (p. 298).

Academic Football. "To change baseball to football, draw two gridirons on the board, one for each team." Then have a student answer a question worth 10, 20, 30, or 40 yards. Again, questions "alternate between the teams as they move their footballs down their" field. If one team misses a question, "turn to the team on defense and say, 'Sack!'... If the student you call on answers the question correctly, he or she throws the other team for a ten-yard loss"--or gains ten yards at the expense of the other team (p. 299).

Academic Football - One Field. An alternative football structure is to pit teams against each other on a single field. "Start on the fifty-yard line," Jones writes. "Rather than using the Ping-Pong format, each team gets three downs to score. Three downs to score forces the students to use the long yardage questions.

"If a ten-yard question is missed, the teacher says, 'Sack!' as in previous example. A correct answer throws the offense for a ten-yard loss. If, however," a 20- to 40-yard "question is missed, the teacher says, 'Interception!' A correct answer gains possession of the ball at the line of scrimmage." Alter this format however you wish, as Jones suggests: "You could have extra point questions after a touchdown," a tough "'Hail Mary' question when more than 40 yards are desperately needed" (p. 299).

Basketball and Soccer variations. "Think of football as simply a 'path game' like the preschoolers' 'Candyland,'" Jones writes. "In such games the players move down the 'squares' of the path in order to reach a 'goal.'... Once you envision games played on courts or fields as path games, you can play basketball or soccer just as easily as you can football... Basketball is simply a path game that requires seven 'moves' in order to score, where football requires ten moves to score. In basketball, if the team with the ball misses the question and the team on defense answers it, they 'steal the ball.' The game then switches direction" (p. 299-300).

Hangman. Apply a Ping-Pong variation by using "two gallows on the board, and alternate the questions between the teams. Add fingers and toes to make enough body parts so that the game lasts longer."

Jeopardy and other TV game shows. I've used online game-generator software to create social studies review exercises using Jeopardy and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? You can apply Ping-Pong variations of both, asking different students to answer.

In fact, "All games from television make great PATS," Jones writes. "Games like Jeopardy, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and Trivial Pursuit can be used to review factual information. However, some older game shows such as What's My Line? and To Tell the Truth are great for history. Students love impersonating historical figures in order to fake each other out" (p. 300).

Test question creation. To generate questions for these games, you could write them yourself (which I've done, usually while writing a test). But having students do it instead doesn't just save you time, but provides review for the question writers, plus greater student ownership in the test itself if you also use these questions on the test. Tell students:

"'Take out four pieces of paper, and number them one through four, placing the number in the upper right-hand corner. Write a single, double, triple, and home run question corresponding to the number on the paper... As you write these questions, look through chapter 7 for those things that are most important. Imagine that you are a teacher writing test questions.

"'In fact, I will use some of your questions on the test. You may get to answer your own question on Thursday if you give me a good one. Don't make the singles too easy because the other team might get that question. And don't make the home runs too hard because [your team] might get that question.

"'Below the question, write the answer. I want a complete paragraph. Beneath the answer, write the page number where the information can be found... You have the rest of the period to write your questions and answers. I will be coming around to see how you are doing'" (p. 300-301).

Vocabulary Volleyball. "In volleyball, your team can only score when you have the serve," writes Jones. "When you have the serve, you can score point in succession. If, however, you miss, the service goes to the other team. Then they can score points in succession until they miss" (p. 301). Don't use volleyball for explanation answers. Instead, use it to practice vocabulary, to keep the answers coming "fast and furious" (p. 301).

Jones suggests using spelling to drive the vocabulary game. To do this, divide the room into two teams and say, "'I will begin by giving a word to one of the teams. Then, I will point to a person on that team. You will have one second to give me the first letter of the word. If you are correct, I will point to another person on that same team, and he or she will have one second to give me the next letter of the word.

"'If someone misses, the word will come over to the other team. I will point to someone on that team, and he or she must pick up where the other team left off. The second team will keep the word as long as they spell it correctly. If they miss a letter, the word comes back to the first team. The team that gives me the last letter of the word gets the point and the next word... Ready? Here we go! The first word is...'" (p. 301).

Family Feud, College Bowl, and other "speed games." "When you call on the first person who has his or her hand up, you have a speed game," Jones writes (p. 302). I've had students slap a table during Jeopardy or Millionaire, turning these competitions into speed games, with one student serving as the "judge" of who slapped first. The "College Bowl" Jones describes is something like the version of Jeopardy I've played: Two teams answer questions of 10 to 40 points in rounds of increasing difficulty. The first team is given a 10-point question. The team huddles, and then the captain announces the answer. If they get it right, they get the points. If they don't, the other team gets to answer the same question. The final question of the round (like my Jeopardy) is a "toss-up" question answered by whichever side hits the buzzer first.

As Jones writes, "This game format does not work well for large teams. Too many students become passive while the smarties dominate" (p. 303). However, it's perfect for cooperative groups, as Jones notes, especially base groups that are used to working together. Also, "Having stacks of questions prepared in advance makes this format easier to use. Since you cannot moderate several games simultaneously, have students moderate by simply pulling questions off of the appropriate stack" (p. 303).

Vocabulary Pictionary. Divide the class into teams, and have each team send a person to the board. Give one team a word from vocabulary. "They have to draw a picture of it while each team tries to guess the word" (Jones quoting Dale Crum, p. 304).

Tag Team. For this vocabulary or concept-lesson game, divide the class into four teams and line them up. Then, "name a category of information." With that, "the first member of each team races to the board to write down an example of that category. Then they race back to hand the chalk to the next person in line who races to the board. Each round of the game lasts one minute. The team with the most correct answers wins. Since repeats don't count, everybody pays close attention" (Jones quoting Annette Patterson, p. 305).

f. Brainstorm preferred activities with students (my addition). Come up with more activity ideas by having students brainstorm them in cooperative groups during the first week of school, and periodically throughout the year.

g. Have students create a "project box." If students seem able and willing, ask them to bring shoeboxes from home, and take a class period to let them put their names on the boxes and fill them with the materials needed for a project in class. Provide enough materials so they can each keep some in the box. Keep the boxes on a shelf so students can easily find them when finished with assignments. For posters larger than a shoebox, have them keep the flat pieces of paper on special shelves (p. 108, 114). This may seem young-ish for the 6-12 students I teach, but even there, many students take comfort in leaving items in class rather than in their locker. 

h. Learn how to use work contracts and more choices. Beyond daily "Grandma's Rule" juxtapositions, draw up contracts that allow even more preferred activities after "the completion of a series of tasks" over a period of days (p. 116). The arrangement Jones calls "Freaky Friday" could be applied to grades 6-12 if you spread it out over two other days (and I would switch the day to Thursday, leaving Friday free for more preferred activity time to use for "Bonus PAT" in "responsibility training"--more details on those below). 

On Tuesday, for example, explain that Thursday is the day all assignments are due, and to participate in Freaky Thursday, "you need to have your previous work turned in." Then say (in my paraphrase of Jones), "Today, I'll put seven tasks on the board, including tomorrow's mandatory reading. You may choose four of them, two for today and two for Thursday. When you've completed them to my satisfaction and handed them in, you may work on your projects for the rest of class on Thursday."

The idea is to give students a choice over what assignments to do. "Some teachers have two lists, column A and column B, with the core subjects in column A," writes Jones (p. 117). Students must choose two from each so they can't avoid the learning requirements. Giving students more choices is a guiding principle of my own expansion on Jones below. As he writes, "It is hard for adults to appreciate how sweet it is for young people to have control over their own destiny" (p. 117).

i. Create a staff "PAT bank" of preferred activity ideas. "Using preferred activities becomes much easier when the faculty members work together to gather" ideas in a PAT bank, Jones writes. "Discovering more and more ways of making learning fun is a hallmark of our professional growth as teachers" (p. 117).

j. In project-based learning (PBL), let students determine which projects are PAT and which are their main project (my addition). Students engaged in project-based learning need as much playful motivation as anyone else. So instead of simply having students pursue fun projects (they'll procrastinate even on these), have them pursue more than one project or activity at a time, and establish every day, or very period, which one is "dinner" and which is "dessert." Depending on their level of autonomy, let students set goals for mastery. When they meet them, excuse them to their fun activity of choice.

3. Use a criterion of mastery every day during guided practice. Frame your criterion of mastery as the checkpoint through which students must pass to reach preferred activities. When students meet your criterion for a particular learning goal, excuse them to their PAT. (In PowerPoint directions, I often use the key phrase "You are not done until:"______. See my new lesson plan template for details.) 

"The precondition of having high standards is the teacher's ability to check the student's work as it is being done," Jones writes (p. 110). By "accepting faulty work," you effectively say, "mediocre work is acceptable. After all, you accepted it" (p. 124). Without requiring mastery, preferred activities merely create an incentive for speed, resulting in fast but shoddy work.

Being able to "cruise and check" by circulating around the room during guided practice allows you to integrate assessment right into the learning process--a radical departure from "Bop 'til You Drop" (p. 129). As Jones writes, the "more the teacher monopolizes the learning process, the more work check and corrective feedback are separated from learning to be done by the teacher as a separate job"--usually after school and into the weekend (p. 129).

Jones compares grading at home to post-production "quality control" in manufacturing, a far more expensive option than building quality "into each step of the production process," a key principle of continuous improvement (p. 122). Paradoxically, supervising quality in guided practice helps students be more "independent of you as they learn" (p. 129). To ensure that students show mastery,

a. Have students reflect on and process how they balance working hard and working carefully. Help students recognize the "dynamic tension" between quantity and quality of work (p. 104). Quantity requires "working hard." Quality requires "working carefully." "We have all gone through a process of discovery in learning our own limits with various types of tasks," writes Jones. "We have gone too rapidly and made mistakes. And, we have gone too slowly and failed to finish" (p 105).

Every student will strike this balance by finding a different beginning pace. But to keep striving for excellence, students need incentives for both speed and accuracy. "By pushing ourselves, we learn that we can accomplish much more than we might have thought possible... But we must want to," Jones writes (p. 105).

Pairing a criterion of mastery with preferred activities creates the right combination of incentives for "students to work fast while being conscientious," Jones writes. (p.110). Relationships are also crucial. I would have students discuss and reflect on both in cooperative base groups. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by making this process a mystery to students.

b. Create the criterion. Decide how many correct performances in a row you require. Criteria of mastery are "typically stated in terms of consecutive correct performances," Jones writes. "How many times in a row do the students have to do correctly before you can relax and say, 'They've got it!'" (p. 109).

"Criteria of mastery for complex human learning typically range from five out of five to ten out of ten," Jones adds. "Notice, however, that criteria of mastery are not stated in the form of a percentage." Would you buy a car built to a criteria of 80 percent, asks Jones, "or would you call it a piece of junk?" (p. 109).

Using consecutive correct performances as a criterion raises the stakes for excellence as students go, building momentum in class. The "more problems a student completes correctly, the more they have to lose should they become sloppy," Jones adds. "As the student's total of correct problems grows, they gain a greater and greater vested interest in doing the next one carefully" (p. 110).

i. Create a "check master" instead of an answer key. Check masters show all the steps in a process, not just the answer. Many teachers' editions of math textbooks do this now. They're an ideal tool for "praise, prompt, leave" interactions, and can also form the basis of Visual Instruction Plans.

With a check master, you can praise what's right in a student's work and prompt beginning where it's wrong. "Work check then becomes a series or quick scans which note matches and mismatches," Jones writes (p. 126). Praise the matches, then prompt at the mismatch. An example for math: "You have multiplied your 5 and 8 correctly. Double check your 9 multiplication, and re-add. I'll be back in a minute" (p. 126).

c. Announce the transition to guided practice. Jones offers an example of what initiating guided practice might sound like in math: "Class, I would like you to open your books to page 127 and look at the practice set on the top of the page. As you can see, the problems are very familiar. We've done the first four of them together. We have twenty minutes until the bell. I will be coming around to check your work and to answer any questions. As soon as I mark five in a row correct, you may hand in your paper and work on your projects for the remainder of the period." (p. 110)

Come up with your own brief transition announcement. As with all instruction, remain a verbal minimalist.

d. Choose whether to check work yourself or have students check each other's work. Decidein advance of a lesson whether to use a check master yourself or have students check each other's work themselves as you read the check master or key. The more visually complex the work is, the more likely you'll need students to check it.

1)     Check work yourself using a check master. "Cruise and check" with the check master in hand and criterion of consecutive correct performances in your mind. "As the students do the assignment, the teacher works the crowd while checking the students' papers," Jones writes. "Students must meet the criterion of mastery before they can be excused to do their preferred activities" (p. 109).

Differentiate criteria for written work. "You carry the standards for written work in [your] head," Jones writes, "and you reserve the right to excuse students to do their preferred activities when they meet your standards. Furthermore, those standards can be quite individualized." (p. 113)

Because "you are mobile," you can prompt improvements on writing while that writing is still in progress by conferring "with a student several times" (p. 129). Outlines make good VIPs and check masters in these situations.

2)     Have students check the work. "If you feel defeated by either the volume or complexity of the work check, it is time to switch strategies," Jones writes. Checking "that would take one person thirty minutes might take thirty people one minute... But, you must train the students to check work carefully and honestly," and your guidelines themselves must be taught and practiced (p. 126).

To train student checking for guided practice,

A.) Use "Keep 'Em Honest."

Divide class into two teams.

Make sure that "Each person on Team A is paired with a person on Team B. Have these pairs place their desks side by side" (p. 127).

Write a problem "on the board, and give the students a time limit for doing" it (p. 127).

"When time runs out, go through the following check routine" (paraphrasing from Jones, p. 127):

"Time! Exchange your papers. The answer is ______. Grade them and return them. How many got it right on Team A? [students raise hands] How many on Team B? The score is now ___ to ___."

"The whole routine takes seconds, and each team keeps the other team honest," Jones writes. "The teacher tallies the number of correct answers for each team at the end of each problem and adds that number to each team's total score" (p. 127).

B.) Use "Double-Checking." Have "each of your cooperative learning groups be a team," Jones suggests, to participate in a game called double-checking (p. 127).

"Have team A and B exchange papers so that each individual on one team is responsible for scoring the work of an individual on the other team," writes Jones. "Provide a scoring protocol so that the students' grading will be up to your standards" (p. 127). Here are the scoring rules for Double Checking (paraphrased from Jones, p. 128):

Each correct answer is worth 1 point.

If you find an error while checking the work of the other team, that counts as 1 additional point for your team.

After you return papers for double-checking, any error in checking gives the team that was checked 2 additional points.

In the end, total team points = "correct answer" points (1 for each) + "checking" points (1 for each error) + "double-checking" points (2 for each checking error).

C.) Use quality control circles. Have cooperative groups check writing, particularly the copyediting aspects. Jones suggests assigning two partner pairs to form a "partner square," but I recommend pairs or trios--the best size for cooperative groups. For copyediting, "each student's paper would be checked by one member of the square and then, again, by another member of the square," Jones writes (p. 129). Or the trio could simply pass papers clockwise twice.

"Work check can by simplified," Jones writes, "by focusing on one aspect of writing," such as the use of quotation marks in dialogue. "More advanced students can be taught the hypercritical markings used by copy editors so that writing can be checked in a systematic fashion that is understood by all" (p. 129).

4. Create incentives for responsibility using "Bonus PAT." Offer still more weekly PAT (on top of daily PAT for diligence) to create an incentive system for the whole class to learn time management and good work habits (p. 251). "Bonus PAT" for responsibility training is what Jones calls a complex incentive system--one that spans longer than one class period and involves "bonuses" and "penalties"--to teach skills such as "hustling or showing up on time with books and pencils" (p. 107, p. 273). Though he includes this among chapters on discipline, it can fold directly into your use of PAT for motivation. (The only portion that I save for Part III is Jones's PAT program for oppositional students, which he calls "omission training.")

The practical aim of responsibility training is to create more learning time for all students, which requires "every student in the class being responsible all of the time," Jones writes (p. 252). "Simply improving the level of cooperation... is a hollow victory," because a few students can still waste everyone else's time to the same degree, often without malice. As Jones writes, "Some students are just forgetful" (p. 252, 274.) The deeper educational goal of Bonus PAT is to teach important "lessons about life" that "can be learned reasonably quickly and with a sense of joy": specifically, to be considerate for others in the use of power (p. 261).

"To say that children tend to be self-absorbed is something of an understatement," Jones writes. "For children to consider the needs of others, they must be taught to consider the needs of others" (p. 261). How you teach students to use power is give them power to use--another example of learning by doing. "Our job as teachers is first, to empower the student to make choices," Jones writes, "and then, to teach them to make good choices" (p. 265).

To use Bonus PAT for responsibility training,

a. Learn the social power of giving time as an incentive. Understand how giving PAT is as powerful for groups as for individuals, for both peer support and peer pressure--an idea useful for both the cooperative learning (CL) and project-based learning (PBL) I explore below. Think of the stories-before-bed example, which was an incentive not just for young siblings to hustle, but also to help each other hustle. The role of parents in group interactions presents a paradox that anti-authoritarians must face: A gift from a legitimate authority actually trains social cooperation and self-management.

Bedtime from a parent's point of view offers a simple example. Without the love and good times you give your children over the years, you have no authority. Without authority, you have no power to set bedtime. You could still offer stories at a certain time every night, and ask the kids for their cooperation in going to sleep. Many good parents ask anyway, because cooperation is always a gift. But when children do as you ask, it's another measure of your authority, whether you call it that or not. Real authority--contrary to the language of "taking" control, "earning" respect, or the implied submissive relationship and strict sequence of "leading" and "following"--involves giving. And real authority, like cooperation, can only be given. It can never be taken or bought.

As discussed below under "Increase student authority," this concept is very different from the aggressive power or legal license most kids associate with the word "authority." Societal authority--the kind that assigns legal responsibility to parents and teachers--is also gift, but it comes from a distant citizenry, from voters and policy makers. In schools, this official authority provides teachers with what Jones calls "the backup system," the hierarchy of consequences for non-compliance that ultimately leads to expulsion.

The existence of this system is important, and I discuss under "Discipline" how some students will test limits, including those of the backup system, to know that they're real. But the moment you call upon this outside authority--saying, for instance, "do as I say, because I'm the teacher and you're the student" (or "because I'm the parent and you're the child")--you're basically admitting you've lost your authority in the room. Immediate authority based on relationships is like a speeded up version of the legitimacy governments establish over the years. Governments give to meet needs, which is another way of saying they protect human rights. Teachers and parents give to meet needs too. 

But consider the dynamic you create by pretending you have no authority at home or at school, that it's not your role to set limits on bedtime or on classroom behavior. Your gift of reading stories out loud every night might be answered with cooperation, or it might not. Some egalitarians deny children the very agency they seek to protect by pretending there aren't fun options besides cooperation. If kids stay up all night, you could nag them, but that's still a punishment--a kind of verbal water torture. You could yell, the harsher version. You could try arguing, but fun is its own justification. Fed up, you could stop offering stories, turning your gift into a weapon. Or you could make stories contingent on cooperation, which would turn them into a payment or a bribe. By denying his or her authority, the strictest anarchist turns family into the crudest capitalist society.

Whether or not they're aware of it, adults who put a price on love inevitably make it into an object of negotiation, insecurity, and competition between kids. This is why "permissive" households and authoritarian ones wind up being so similar in effect. Contrary to the Law of the Jungle, emotional competition starves exactly what kids need to become adults: the capacity to give. So the children of parents who abjure genuine authority become more dependent on authority, not less, while the kids of parents who calmly set limits and offer gifts as incentives are more independent and mature. Giving requires emotional energy and time after work, which makes family a class and a union issue as well. Many parents turn to the authoritarian model not because they don't love their kids but because they don't have a choice: They lack the time or energy to build real authority. Yet negative parenting is also exhausting. Punishing or blaming parents only feeds the same cycle.

Giving, by contrast, teaches giving, while giving time creates more time, and the genuine authority and power required to do both builds more authority and power in others, which actually enhances the giver's authority--again, contrary to the logic of the Law. Real authority comes across as calm, a skill I explore in Part III. Contrast this with stressed-out teachers, increasingly less capable of giving. Traditional incentive systems for classroom behavior, Jones writes, "typically represent a lot of work for the teacher while accomplishing only limited goals" (p. 256). I'd go further to say they exhaust teachers to keep kids in their place. PAT for responsibility reduces your workload, makes class more fun, and gives kids more control.

Though cooperative learning and project-based learning advocates don't mention PAT, and Jones treats CL only tangentially and PBL not at all, it's my emerging belief that these three programs click together like a three-piece puzzle: Call it "Pat-clappable," or PAT-CL-PBL. Without authority and the gift of preferred activities, many students would never cooperate with each other at all or get started on their projects.

To understand why bonus PAT is so powerful,

i. Compare all-class bonus PAT to an allowance, which is both a gift and a lesson. Using bonus PAT to train responsibility treats preferred activities as an allowance for the class, a good example of learning by doing in the exercise of responsibility. "You can preach, you can teach, you can beg or cajole," Jones writes. But "Before young people will take it upon themselves to act responsibly, they must confront a reality that demands responsible behavior" (p. 258).

In families, a weekly allowance gives young people money they need for food or lunch, rather than lending cash in a series of "crises." This teaches kids to save and spend wisely, to "live within a budget" (p. 258). (Allowances make the class dimensions of parenting clarion.) In this way, incentives do two things at once, just like story time before bed: "The first is to supply the children with something that they need and which, in our opinion, they should have. The second is to teach a lesson" (p. 258).

ii. Remember that PAT isn't payment for cooperation. Jones advises against paying "for doing chores" at home (p. 260). Remembering his son, he writes, "I did not want to train him to think, 'What will you pay me?' every time I asked for a little help" (p. 260). Chores are a gift, just as an allowance is a gift.

In the same way, student cooperation is a gift, just as PAT and bonus PAT is a gift. As I explore more deeply below, to pay for cooperation cheapens it by taking away the element of choice, putting a price on behavior that must now be paid by the teacher.

iii. Understand why giving time saves time. Just as students must have money to learn to manage money, the "first thing that students must have in order to learn to manage time... is, of course, time" (p. 259). But all of this time is "found time" for learning, as Jones writes. "You will not relinquish one minute of time from your instructional program. Quite the contrary, if you do not give the class PAT in order to teach them time management, they will waste the time as usual," by...

Delaying start times--arriving "at the last minute rather than being in their seats when the bell rings."

Elevating the craft of pencil sharpening--"sharpening pencils during class time rather than... during the break."

Taking bathroom breaks--using "hall passes rather than going to the bathroom between classes."

Slowing transitions--by making "stretching a lesson transition into an art form" (p. 258-260).

Goofing off--which "kills more learning time and generates more teacher stress than all of the 'serious' disruptions that are the subject of the school discipline code," Jones writes (p. 7).

Time isn't just the most wasted resource in school, but one that "students have no vested interest in saving" (p. 259). Why would a kid "bring three sharpened pencils to class if it meant that he would no longer have an excuse to stretch his legs whenever he felt like it?" Jones asks (p. 255). 

Yet by giving time to students, you wind up saving much more than you spend, leaving you with even more to give. This is the paradoxical mirror opposite of the negative cycle of punishments I describe in Part III, or for that matter the punitive attitude toward teachers and parents described above. In education, "positive" and "negative" aren't just synonyms for "good" and "bad," but denote real phenomena with mathematical aspects. 

b. Give a starting weekly PAT and establish a time frame for it. For any PAT, you need just "enough time to do something worthwhile," Jones writes (p. 260). This initial weekly amount of "PAT does not change behavior," Jones adds. "Rather, it sets the stage for the use of bonus PAT. Think of PAT as a 'pump primer'" (p. 263). Addition: To give students more ownership in PAT, you could have them vote on whether to keep it.

i. Choose a time frame for all-class PAT: daily or weekly. For middle and high school students, you could schedule an all-class PAT at the end of a whole-group lesson (simultaneously with PAT for diligence). This would mean using about "5 to 10 minutes of PAT at the end of each class period," Jones writes, which usually involves playing "a learning game to review what was just taught" (p. 261). But it makes more intuitive sense to allow all-class PAT to accumulate every day and be used on Fridays--separately from daily PAT for diligence, which is often given individually at the end of each class--especially if you'd like to offer in-depth activities such as projects. This would leave most of the class period on Friday devoted to PAT. But this is hardly lost time from learning, as Jones writes, because "you can teach any lesson as a PAT--from skill drill to test review to vocabulary" (p. 260). See the PAT examples above and PBL below. 

ii. Explain the time frame to students. With either daily or weekly bonus PAT, "The time frame for the program runs from the beginning of one PAT to the beginning of the next PAT," Jones writes. "Consequently, the students are always on the program, even during PAT" (p. 260). For the weekly model, this means by the time all-class PAT starts on Friday, the group has earned all it can for that cycle. All PAT going forward goes to the next week's cycle.

c. Give bonus PAT. "Bonus PAT changes behavior while empowering students," Jones writes. It's "the heart of" responsibility training (p. 263).

i. Explain the two choices of bonus PAT. With bonus PAT, "Students learn to take responsibility for their actions by making choices about the use of time and then living with the consequences," Jones writes (p. 264). The choice is simple: They can either...

a)     Squander bonus PAT and be selfish: "Students can squander time by being out of their seats when the bell rings, by sharpening pencils during class, or by dawdling during lesson transitions," Jones writes. "These various forms of time-wasting constitute little vacations from work that students take at will." But they're "not shared by the class." (p. 264). Or they can...

b)     Save and share bonus PAT: "Members of the group can always choose to forego the selfishness that squanders class time, but they must have a reason to do so... What if the students got to keep the time that they usually squandered so the whole group could use it for something they enjoyed? This would create a vested interest in saving rather than squandering" (p. 264). This saved time is "bonus PAT."

ii. Become a timekeeper. "As part of time management, the teacher must keep track of time," Jones writes. "In all cases it will be real time--time that any student in the class could read off of the wall clock" (p. 264). This occasionally means carrying a stopwatch for activities where you're seated with a group, as described below.

iii. Give Hurry-Up Bonuses. "Hurry-up Bonuses achieve one of the most difficult objectives in all of behavior management--training kids to hustle," Jones writes. "If you think it is difficult to get the varsity to hustle during practice, try gym class... Try social studies" (p. 264-265).

Hurry-up bonuses use the power of peer pressure to ward off what Jones calls bootleg reinforcement--social encouragement for goofing off--much as all-class practice did in Part I. "Kids will do things for their peer group that they would never do for you," Jones writes. And using peer pressure sidesteps "the resentment that some students harbor toward adult authority" (p. 270). 

The time-loss component described below is crucial, because without it, students can't "enforce your classroom standards" without looking "like a bunch of 'goodie-two-shoes.' Enlightened self-interest is the ticket... A student does not have to be a 'suck-up' to say, 'Sit down! You're wasting our PAT'" (p. 270). However, be warned: This aspect of bonus PAT is easy to abuse, as detailed further down.

Use Hurry-Up Bonuses for...

Lesson transitions. Transitions take "about five minutes," during which "students move in a most unhurried fashion... Obviously, students like nice big, unhurried breaks with brief lessons sandwiched in between" (p. 265-266). And for good reason: As soon as transitioning ends, work begins.

Other whole-group tasks that require "hustle." Use hurry-up bonuses for any tasks that require speed and discipline: walks down the hall, coming back from trips, etc. 

To offer Hurry-Up Bonuses,

1. Calculate a Hurry-Up Bonus in advance. Give Hurry-Up Bonuses according to the following formulation:

1.) Estimate how long a task, such as a transition, would take if students hurried.

2.) "Round that number up to the next minute."

3.) "Double that number" (p. 267). For example, "If it would take 2 to 3 minutes to clean up after a project, round up to three minutes and then double it to six" (p. 267). "If you err, err in the direction of generosity" (p. 266).

 2. Announce the Hurry-Up Bonus. Jones offers the following example: "Class, before you get out of your seats, let me tell you what I want you to do during this lesson transition. First, hand in your papers by laying them on the corner of my desk. Then, if you need to sharpen your pencils, this is the time to do it... I want my clean-up committee to erase my boards and straighten up the books on the shelf. I want everybody to pick up any paper you see laying around the room and get your desks back on their marks.

"I will give you two minutes to get this done. But you know from past experience that you can get it done in half-a-minute. So, let's see how much time you can save. All of the time you save will be added to your PAT... Let's check the clock... Okay, let's begin" (p. 266)

3. Work the crowd. Move around the classroom during Hurry-Up Bonus transitions and tasks to discourage the "bootleg reinforcement" of socializing, always a desirable activity whatever the other incentives (p. 267). "One of the main characteristics of a reinforcer that determines its power is immediacy of delivery," Jones writes. "The bootleg incentive usually wins the competition because it is being delivered now, whereas PAT will not be delivered until much later" (p. 267).

4. Redirect students to hurrying. "The nemesis of working the crowd during a lesson transition is a student who says to you, 'May I ask you a question?'" writes Jones. "Your answer is always the same... 'As soon as we are back in our seats'" (p. 268).

5. Do a final check. If you see a piece of paper on the floor, announce it to the class. As you'd expect, the student near it will probably say, "It's not mine." As Jones advises, "Simply look at the student and shrug. After all, it is not your problem" (p. 268). As a result, classmates will probably urge the student to pick it up, or will just pick it up themselves. The form that peer pressure usually takes in responsibility training is "urgent whispers," Jones adds (p. 268).

6. Don't let students get overzealous with rule enforcement. Students usually won't get nasty with each other or "make any student into a scapegoat," as Jones writes, but discourage it anyway. Students usually look at students upset with bonus PAT loss and "say something like, 'Chill out'" (p. 270).

7. Wrap up the task. When the last student sits down, say, "Thank you class for doing such a good job of cleaning up and arranging your desks. Let's check the time." Then either... 

Add time: As Jones suggests, tell the class something like, "You saved one minute and seventeen seconds. Let's add that to our PAT" (p. 268). The role you take with responsibility training is usually that of a "benevolent parent," Jones writes. "You give time, you protect time, and you congratulate the group for saving time" (p. 269). Or...

Subtract time: You "can't win 'em all," as Jones writes. Some days the hurry-up bonus "bombs as the students run" overtime. When it's clear during the transition that you'll be subtracting time,

Announce the time loss before it's lost. In this case, "With fifteen second left in the allotted time," Jones writes, "head to the front of the classroom." Stand "calmly facing the students and look at the clock as the time runs out. Then, as you point to the clock, you say, 'Class, you're on your own time now'" (p. 269).

Write the time loss on the board. "Relax and wait for the last student to be seated," Jones writes. "Then say, 'Thank you, class, for straightening up the room and getting back in your seats.'... Then, after taking a second to look at the clock, walk to the board and record the time consumed under your PAT tally. The tally has two columns, one for the time gain and one for time loss" (p. 269). Usually, "When they gain, they gain in minutes" Jones adds, while "if they lose, they only lose in seconds." This rigs the system "so that the students come out ahead" (p. 269). 

Don't abuse time loss. Though Jones sandwiches responsibility training between chapters addressing discipline, be aware that PAT bonuses can be easily abused as a behavior tool, and that they are no substitute for the instructional strategies outlined in Part I, or for the "meaning business" skills explored in Part III. As Jones writes, "Can you imagine a colleague who is a bit negative or burned-out eventually saying to the class,... 'All right, class, it is only Wednesday, and you have already lost half of your PAT. If we continue like this, there will be no PAT this week!" (p. 270).

This is an example of using responsibility training "as a weapon," Jones writes (p. 270). Time loss should self-eliminate "in a matter of days or weeks so that thereafter it exists in the students' minds as a potentiality rather than as an actuality," he adds. "When time loss becomes excessive, students become resentful and cooperation ceases" (p. 271).

Abuse also reflects a typical assumption in education: that anything good about school is a privilege that can be revoked. But, again, Jones frames preferred activity time as a gift, not pay that can be docked. "In training students to be responsible," he writes, "the teacher is first and foremost a giver... If we give a little extra, no damage is done. But if we do not give enough"--or if we overzealously take too much away--"we can starve the program" (p. 263). Asking responsibility training to "bear the entire burden of discipline management" would cause it to "collapse under the weight of that burden," he adds (p. 273). 

iv. Give Automatic Bonuses. Use automatic bonuses "when you cannot measure the amount of time that the students have saved," Jones writes (p. 273). Use these bonuses as incentives for "right place, right time, right stuff" habitual performances such as students making sure they're in their "seats ready to go when the bell rings" and not wasting time "settling in" (p. 273). Use Automatic Bonuses at the start of class as an incentive for students to:

Bring materials to class.

Help other students to bring materials to class.

Lend each other pencils before the bell.

Have materials out when the bell rings.

Remember, as with all bonus PAT, that Automatic Bonuses can only work in combination with other instructional strategies. As described in Part I, greet students at the door to indicate today's "bell work" (or base group activity). You can also set limits on any goofing off (more under Part III). "Having laid the groundwork for the success of the incentive," Jones writes, "you are now in a position to congratulate the students at the beginning of class with the daily 'automatic bonus routine,'" which can go as follows during the Bell Work or cooperative base group meetings that kick off class: 

"Class, thank you for being in your seats. That is one minute. How about pencils? (The students hold up their pencils.) Good! That's two minutes. Let me see lab manuals. (The students hold them up.) Good! Three for three" (p. 273). Then add the three minutes to the "bonus column" of PAT on the board.

v. Give group omission bonuses. In an anticipation of omission training for individuals in Part III, use group omission bonuses to help reinforce the entire class "for not doing something for a given length of time," to borrow Jones's words (p. 285). For instance, give a minute of PAT for every ten minutes a class goes without talking during a movie.

The same general idea was used by Ron Clark (played by Matthew Perry) in a memorable scene in The Ron Clark Story (2006), where the teacher captivated a highly oppositional class by drinking a little carton of chocolate milk for every few minutes the students paid attention and didn't disrupt class--though it should be stressed that that PAT is academic time, where watching a teacher not throw up (it was close) was mostly a lesson to build relationships with the teacher. Still, I once adopted a similar strategy by offering to do "the worm" as an incentive for a class to take notes on a lecture. This kind of teacher self-sacrifice can be a slippery slope, however, and did the students remember anything but the dance?

vi. Create procedures to eliminate other time-wasting annoyances. Address the problems of pencil sharpening during class, abuse of hall passes, tattling, missing homework, and other perennial time-wasters that Automatic Bonuses and other PAT won't solve (p. 278-281). To take care of these issues, use the following rules and routines:

a. "If you break a pencil, take this stubby one." "If you buy nice new pencils, break them in half, sharpen both ends and break off the eraser," Jones writes. Then announce the rule as follows:

"If you break your pencil lead during class and have no other pencil, hold you pencil in the air so I can see it. I will nod to you at which time you may leave your seat to exchange pencils at my desk. Leave your pencil on my desk and take one out of the canister. You may get your own pencil back at the end of the class when you return mine to the canister" (p. 278). If students abuse this walk to your desk and a "heart-to-heart" doesn't work, put them on the stopwatch, and they'll "usually 'shape up' without you ever having to actually take time away" (p. 278).

b. "Go to the bathroom during the breaks provided." "The simplest way to eliminate the abuse of hall passes is to eliminate their use for going to the restroom," Jones writes. "Of course, any student with a note from a physician would be excepted" (p. 279).

I actually part ways with Jones on this one. His example of a three-year-old sleeping through the night doesn't account for the amount of water kids drink during the day, and classes exceeding 50 minutes, post-lunch classes, and any classes at schools where passing times is under 4 minutes seem to have an unusual number of sincere-appearing mid-class bathroom-goers. I've always been someone who, when I needed to go, appreciated just being able to leave the room. And the chronic abusers are obvious.

c. If you have a complaint against another student, write it out. Jones suggests creating a Tattle Box and saying something like, "Sammy, I want to hear all about what happened on the playground. Here is a pencil and a piece of paper. I want you to describe exactly what happened. Give me a full paragraph, and remember to put your name, the date and time of day at the top..." (p. 280). The point is to make pursuing frivolous claims prohibitively expensive, though "I assume you can tell the difference between a tattle and a child who needs immediate attention due to being hurt or severely upset" (p. 280-281).

d. Raffle tickets for homework assignments. Though homework is the management responsibility of parents, "you can produce a moderate level of improvement by instituting a raffle" (p. 281). Give each student who turns in homework a raffle ticket. "Don't buy raffle tickets," Jones writes. "Make a weird design on a piece of paper, make copies, and cut them into small pieces." Then hold your raffle on Friday. You could raffle a get-out-of-homework-free card, or anything else.

vii. Use a Extra Bonus System with some informal competition. Post the running weekly PAT of your classes somewhere public. Jones observed that competition between classes had a motivating effect as long as no classes dropped out. To keep classes earning more pat, use an Extra Bonus System like this one (p. 275):

45 minutes of PAT earn                   5 bonus minutes

42 minutes of PAT earn                   4 bonus minutes

39 minutes of PAT earn                   3 bonus minutes

36 minutes of PAT earn                   2 bonus minutes

33 minutes of PAT earn                   1 bonus minute

viii. Layer bonuses. Have "the class work for long-term goals" such as field trips, movies, or big projects "without giving up the power of short-term reinforcement by layering bonuses," Jones writes. "Simply keep two sets of books side by side," usually in a public place, such as on a separate whiteboard (p. 276). But only have bonus PAT minutes add to the big-trip total, so the long-term minutes take longer to add up. Economize on space to keep PAT from taking too much room on your whiteboards or blackboards.

ix. Use stopwatch loss as a threat only in small-group instruction. Use "a stopwatch to hold up as a warning cue" when you see a disruption while you remain seated during small-group instruction (p. 277). If the students get back to work, no time would be lost. "But, if the disruption continued, the teacher" would start "the watch and let it run until the students were back on task. Any time on the stopwatch" would be "deducted from PAT" (p. 277).

When used by teachers in observation, Jones writes, the amounts taken were small: 15 seconds in a week. "By the end of the third week, most of the stopwatches were in the drawer," Jones adds (p. 277). But seated instruction with small groups is the only situation where PAT loss could justifiably substitute for working the crowd. Again, beware of abusing time loss.

x. Have substitutes use only positive PAT. Give "substitute teachers a simplified, bonus-only version of the program," Jones writes. You could have the sub "give the students a 'cooperation score' of 0, 1, 2, or 3 at the end of each assignment" (p. 292-293). But with subs in general, I'd emphasize PAT for diligence at the end of class, with all-class PAT coming only if the entire class is good. Speaking as a sub, the "writing down names" method Jones mentions is both overly time-consuming and useless to subs, who won't know students names once a seating chart is disrupted (as it often is for cooperative groups).

xi. Use failsafe mechanisms for oppositional students. Use the omission training described in Part III for students who "might ruin bonuses for the group just to show that he or she can" (p. 281).

xii. Use "piggybacking" to incorporate other individualized programs into all-class bonus PAT. "You can make a kid a hero for everything," Jones writes (p. 293). For example, tell a student who never complete assignments, "For each math problem that you complete, I will announce to the class that you have earned a bonus minute of PAT for everyone" (p. 293)

D. Learn the controversy surrounding preferred activities. Jones uses the language of post-behaviorist psychology from a background in family therapy, and preferred activities do seem like a kind of reward, on the surface. So books on classroom management tend to place him "firmly in the behavioral camp," as he writes (p. 330). But this "leaves me less than satisfied," he adds (p. 330). With as much training in family relationships, he writes that he put together Tools for Teaching so that "building relationships with your students and protecting those relationships are combined in each procedure" (p. 330).

Yet I wonder if fashion hasn't stranded Jones. Though gratefully circulated among teachers, he's missing from all four of the main textbooks in the teacher-training program I completed a few years ago. According to Jones, educators went "hog wild" with behavioral incentive approaches during the '70s, giving "'rewards' for everything under the sun," and leaving subsequent generations of teachers to navigate the baggage and backlash (p. 111). "Some theorists," Jones writes, "wary of the overuse of points, tokens, treats, and meaningless 'awards,' decided that all incentives were bribery. They were to be eliminated" (p. 111). 

Jones begins his defense of incentive systems by distinguishing incentives from bribes, which are used "in the heat of the moment" in response to resistance, rather than arranged in advance of work (p. 111-112). The unintended effect of bribery is to reinforce the resistance, he writes. For example, if you ask a student to clean his desk, and he refuses, and then you offer him a new notebook for doing it, you've just given him an incentive to hold out for a new notebook next time. Bribes are "the definition of malpractice in incentive management," Jones writes (p. 112).

But this doesn't quite settle the argument about incentives, and Jones knows it. Alfie Kohn has drawn on research to make a convincing case against rewards--"attractive" objects or events offered to reinforce behavior (Educational Psychology, Anita Woolfolk, p. 378), also known as extrinsic incentives--which he condemns as a kind of sleeper disincentive, damaging to self-motivation in the long run.

One "of the most thoroughly researched findings in social psychology is that the more you reward someone for doing something, the less interest that person will tend to have [in doing it]," Kohn says. Nobody "enjoys having the very things we desire used as levers to control our behavior," he adds. As a result (as I've noted above), rewarding worthwhile activities such as learning or kindness cheapens them in every sense except one: setting a price on behavior that the teacher must now pay.

Kohn's point fits our everyday experience of how money corrupts relationships, obligation ruins fun, and approval grows addicting. I'll never forget the Minneapolis charter school where I subbed for a day and had to complete a half-page behavior evaluation for each of 25 children at the end of every hour--kind of the definition of institutional insanity. (Jones was "not impressed with the behavior modification revolution," he writes, because "The last thing in the world that a teacher will ever have is 'extra' time"--p. 5.)

There are two flaws in Kohn's argument, however. For one thing, not all rewards are the same. Time, as I've pointed out above, is different. When a janitor generates more free time by cleaning a building quickly and going home early, she's earned a reward in every sense. But something else happens psychologically if her employer offers merit pay for the cleanest building instead--a distracting, reductive judgment from authority. Many rewards are simply something to look forward to, or the little tricks we use to get ourselves to do unpleasant tasks--playing music while washing the dishes, for instance.

Learning shouldn't be like mopping floors or washing dishes, you might say, and you'd be right. But it always is for someone sometimes, and attending school is compulsory. Kohn, so brilliantly perceptive about students' inner lives when showing (for instance) how praise is often used as a weapon against kids ("I like the way Cecilia is sitting so nice and quiet and ready to work"), has surprisingly little feel for what students might want to do besides learn. Where Gatto seemed to believe laziness and incuriosity end at the school's front door on the way out, Kohn thinks they should disappear on the way in. His solutions are great--I draw on them for my program below to increase student authority. But never forget, "Goofing off is its own reward," as Jones writes. It's "always the easy, pleasurable alternative to being 'on the ball'" (p. 253).

The second flaw in Kohn's argument is that there's an incentive system in every classroom whether you want one there or not. One of three systems will inevitably emerge depending on the choices you make as teacher, encouraging one of three student responses: slowing down, sloppiness, or diligence (Jones p. 112-113). Without creating an incentive for speed (such as preferred activities when students are finished), you create one for taking it easy. (Think of the janitor being switched to an hourly wage, or having a neighborhood kid who just mowed your lawn do some weeding for free because they got done early.) If you create an incentive for speed but don't check work, you create an incentive for fast-but-sloppy work. Only if you create an incentive for speed and check work do you provide an incentive for diligence.

Do preferred activities cheapen learning and put a price on good behavior? The research Jones helped conduct suggests otherwise (p. ix). But that doesn't mean preferred activities alone will build self-motivation. By comparing preferred activity time (PAT) to money, the Jones system helps train students to use time more wisely and responsibly, and see the social consequences of their behavior. This is a crucial step. But I think additional techniques--cooperative learning, democratic training, and project-based learning, all explored below--are required to build authentic self-discipline.

E. Increase cooperative learning (CL), student authority, and project-based learning (PBL) (my addition). Motivation comes from how you feel about what you're doing right now, as Jones acknowledges with his strategies for immediate student success and fun. How you view what's coming, whether 20 minutes away or 20 years away, is always secondary. That's why PAT, like the "Discipline" strategies discussed in Part III, always succeeds or fails on the strength of how much it gives students an excuse to do what they'd want to do anyway.

Do students want anything else from school besides the instructional strategies Jones suggests? I think so. Young people aren't just learners, but social beings, political actors, and creative explorers. The first thing kids worry about at school is friends. The last thing that eventually sends them out the door is the urge to join the world, to make their own way and create something new. In between, they push back against power and control in countless ways. Goofing off, an idle fourth option, is always the default setting in the middle. Is it any wonder that, for many of us, some combination of those things is all we remember about school?

The problem with not addressing the social, willful, restless needs of students directly is that meeting them requires skills that need to be learned, just as with everything else. "The craziest thing schools do," I wrote in my essay on Gatto, "is throw hundreds of kids together and not teach them how to" live together. More important, treating basic needs as distractions ignores a rich seam of motivation. If we "try harder for someone we love and respect," as Jones writes, multiply that effect many times for trying on behalf of peers. If students feel ownership in PAT and Bonus PAT, imagine what they'd feel voting on curriculum or creating it themselves. If high-achievers build self-confidence by taking off-campus courses, imagine the effect of all students creating projects that take them into the adult world. 

This isn't just dreaming, it's good pedagogy. "Say, see, do" teaching is as essential for large concepts and processes as for drilling basic skills. Which is why project-based learning (PBL) spanning weeks or months is essential, and is successfully employed by many great schools. PBL allows "learners to see the whole before they work on the parts," writes the Buck Institute (Project-Based Learning, 2003, p. 21). Cooperative groups are similarly more crucial than Jones suggests (as mentioned above, I address his more recent criticisms separately), and critical for PBL. Not only do learners work harder for each other, they have more fun together, allowing teachers a clearer window into their personalities. And cooperative social skills form the basis of a program I'd recommend to increase student community, democracy, authority, and autonomy--a learning curve as important, I'd argue, as independence and diligence.

As students learn to complete projects by working together, and learn to determine their educational destinies democratically, they prepare for the world in a way that will help them not only find happiness and success, but offer both to others because it feels good. Ultimately, you want students to "try harder for" themselves. This requires true self-motivation, and a greater range of choices than even Jones allows.

1. Use cooperative groups every day. Use cooperative learning (CL) most of the time in class. A large mass of research supports the conclusion that CL improves achievement, peer relationships, and psychological health more than either its competitive or individualistic counterparts (see Cooperation in the Classroom, by Johnson, Johnson, Holubec, 2013)--which isn't to say those counterparts are never appropriate. Students know what CL is, even if they have distorted views of it from watered-down misuse, and it's been widely acknowledged since the early '90s.

The immediate effect of cooperative learning is plain to any teacher using it well: a surge of spirit and self-discipline. "I've never seen them work this hard," a special education assistant told me recently when I subbed for Language Arts, after I turned a reading assignment into a CL activity. The student she was watching was also more engaged. PAT fits this program perfectly, as mentioned. I used just two minutes of free time (without any other activity to offer) to help an entire 6th-grade class to read 20 pages and answer five comprehension questions orally. 

Processing the entire cooperative learning program of Johnson, Johnson, and Holubec will be the substance of my next essay, but to get started,

a. Use informal cooperative groups. Use "think-pair-shares" and other arrangements during introductory, mid-class, or closing class discussions, helping to put the "do" in "Say, See, Do" teaching by giving students the opportunity to process information, do quick reading or writing tasks, or generate new ideas (paraphrasing from Johnson, Johnson, Holubec, p. 1:3).

b. Use formal cooperative groups. Assign formal groups of 2 or 3 every day to make pre-instructional decisions, get instructions, find out the cooperative structure, complete a task, show their learning, and do group processing about their effectiveness (paraphrasing from Johnson, Johnson, Holubec, p. 1:3).

For example, these would be like the reading groups described above, where I assigned trios by having students count off to 9 and pointing the groups to the front and back of each row of desks, telling them that whoever lives closest to school would start reading.

As they took turns reading out loud, I did "cruise and check" while "setting limits" on goofing off. Then I "quizzed out" the groups on questions from a PowerPoint slide made before class, a kind of visual instruction plan (VIP). This assessment showed me they understood the content. Then they signed their names to a post-it I gave them, and I told them this was their points for the day. Students could have free time in their when finished, until everyone was done, when I asked students to bring their post-its to my desk, straighten the rows, and put their books back before having a couple minutes to themselves.

The social skill I used was merely "Everyone reads," and I didn't have time for them to do true group processing--where students evaluate themselves based on social skills taught separately. But, with a shorter reading, these goals would have been reachable. When there was initial tension in one group, I emphasized to individuals that they should be positive about enforcing specific rules they come up with to ensure everyone reads, and to remember that they'd all need to succeed for any of them to get credit. This worked like a dream, creating individual accountability and positive interdependence--the crucial factors of CL.

c. Use base groups. Assign carefully chosen long-term base groups that provide support, encouragement, reminders, celebration, and social connection for students (paraphrasing from Johnson, Johnson, Holubec, p. 1:3). Without necessarily using them every day, try opening a class by having base groups meet to check understanding, ensuring members are caught up, or process previous lessons. Then have them meet at the end of class to check understanding again, make sure materials are where they're supposed to be, and check for any homework assignments (though the Johnson siblings are far bigger on homework than I am).

These rituals are comforting to students, particularly when used at the start and end of a week. They can also be combined with bell work at the start of class every day. At the end of class, however, they conflict with PAT. Whenever you can combine PAT with base groups, do so. Otherwise, remember that even meeting with other students is likely less desirable than PAT.

d. Teach the skills of creative controversies. Teach the skills of pursuing academic controversy, negotiation, and mediation. Learn these yourself and model them in making decisions cooperatively and resolving conflicts with faculty (paraphrasing from Johnson, Johnson, Holubec, p. 1:3).

e. Teacher other CL techniques. Teach every new CL technique using "say, see, do" cycles, and gradually expand your own CL repertoire: Think-pair-share/class discussion; Roundtable; Pass the Problem; Formulate, Share, Listen, Create; Jigsaw; Inside-Outside Circle; Ask Something; Creative Thinking-Reading Activities; Group Reading Activities; and more.

2. Increase student authority through a program of increased choices, respect, responsibility, peer mentoring, and democracy. Use cooperative groups and PBL (below) as the basis of a program to increase student authority. As Jones writes, "It is hard for adults to appreciate how sweet it is for young people to have control over their own destiny" (p. 117). Yet I don't think the range of choices he presents quite quenches students' thirst for self-determination, which surfaces in the culture they create and embrace.

"Like TV fans with a satellite dish, who imagine that they create their own entertainment out of an infinity of channels," writes Greil Marcus, audience members at a participatory performance art piece "feel as if they have intervened in the spectacle of the artist's performance, but they have not; they have played by the artist's rules" (Lipstick Traces, p. 100). The real "intervention" he adds, "would be for someone to step out of the crowd and shout, 'No, no, I am now the artist, you must do what I tell you to do, you must play my game'" (Lipstick Traces, p. 100). This is the impulse of punk rock, and the heart of my expansion on Jones: Teaching people to rewrite the rules of their own game. To do this, teach students to run the game in a way that enhances both their own authority and that of everyone else in the class.

a. Use choices as a powerful gift. Give choices to students, and keep increasing those choices.Start by giving the choices that Jones has already discussed: choices of assignments, test questions, how to use work time, how to spend PAT, and how to create Bonus PAT. Then extend choices to curricula and projects. Like the giving of time, these choices are both a gift of something students need, and a lesson that can teach them about life.

i. Frame choices as a gift. Again, present choices as gifts, not privileges that can be revoked. The penalty aspect of bonus PAT, for instance, may be necessary at first, but don't abuse or rely on it. Penalties only teach by setting limits that some students must test to know they're real. Repeatedly restricting choices as a punishment for bad behavior is as misguided as using any punishment to teach good behavior (see Part III).

ii. Answer good and bad choices with "praise, prompt, leave." As you increase the range of choices students have, they will make good and bad ones. For each choice, praise students for what they did right in a succinct and factually descriptive statement, referring back to what they did before they did anything wrong. Then prompt them to the next step at the mistake.

As an example of factual praise, I recently assigned a "nice corrector" during an all-class reading, based on other students voting for him by pointing. As a result, the class was self-regulated for 20 minutes, making good choices at every step. When they were done, I simply said: "I want to point out that you've been basically teaching yourselves for the past 20 minutes. If anyone ever asks you if you can self-manage, there's your proof. Now have a great lunch!"

With every new choice comes power, freedom, and the chooser's own increased potential for giving. You don't need to ladle on excessive praise for students to feel good about good choices, or appreciate your brief acknowledgment.

iii. Give students with special needs more choices about curriculum. Give students with IEPs (individualized education programs) an increasing number of choices to help them differentiate their own curricula. Keep adapting and modifying your lessons in response to their performance, but include students in decisions about curricula from the start. Students have a right to these choices under the law, so these gifts aren't optional. But students will appreciate your effort regardless. Increase their choices as you go, and as you're able to generate more of the learning that works for them.

iv. Increase the choices students have over project-based learning (PBL). As detailed below, projects can be entirely planned by you or entirely planned by students. Increase student choices over time until they're generating projects independently. 

b. Give authority with every interaction. Give power and respect while setting limits to nourish self-motivation in students. To do this,

i. Treat power as yet another powerful gift. Give power as a gift that (like PAT and choices) meets needs and teaches lessons. Do this to teach students to also give power. Gradually increase student power to show you have confidence in them, encourage ownership in the class, and help students practice using it conscientiously. Students will appreciate having power even as they come to understand how exercising it fits their sense of their own rights. But if students use it irresponsibly, others may push back. As with choices, give power in increments by scaffolding the required learning at every step in "say, see, do" cycles.

ii. Teach the giving nature of authority. Give power to help students understand how giving builds real authority, whether the giver is a person, a group, or a government. This kind of lesson can be taught in "say, see, do" cycles that are both brief and based in experience. With each cycle, teach the giving discussed above under "Learn the social power of giving time as an incentive." Emphasize that real authority (power with legitimacy) can only be given, never taken--and that authority itself is also established in giving.

Teach that government is giving. Use this more controversial example of authority in humanities or social studies classes. But it's an idea worth keeping in mind as you increase student authority in any class. Government gives to the public to meet a range of needs. If it doesn't, it risks losing its real authority--the legitimacy given by the consent of citizens. A government can't give rights: Those are given to us by birth. But it can protect those rights, or stop violating them itself. The question is: Can you teach government to give? And if so, how?

Framing political authority in this way will provoke something stronger than cognitive dissonance in students given the history of government oppression. As I've mentioned, most of us associate "authority" with aggressive power (the imposing kind that intimidates people into submission) or with legal authority (the law). Yet the actual, in-the-room authority of parents or teachers--which is also given by people, but in the moment--is often stronger than a government's authority in that same room. Even when backed by military or police power, government relies on cooperation from vast numbers of citizens and other residents, including many who openly defy its authority--sometimes meeting with aggressive law enforcement as a result.

We also know from experience that passing laws to protect the rights we were born with often requires a political struggle, one that justifies the language of aggression or competition: In a real sense, we "fight for" and "win" our rights, though they were also given to us at birth. "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor," wrote Martin Luther King from Birmingham Jail in 1963; "it must be demanded by the oppressed" (The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Clayborne Carson, 1998, p. 190). So how can a law protecting freedom by ending its suppression really be considered a "gift"?

Many argue that it can't. But as I've explored separately, social movements that actually change institutions are a teaching program as well as a confrontation. Some kind of giving, in other words, and giving of cooperation in return, will always be necessary to teach government. People hoping to change society must therefor gain authority in the same way that good teachers do, rather than "seizing" control. The teaching skills Jones outlines can be used to help students teach adults, employees teach managers, and friends teach each other. Because this fairly radical idea also has staggering implications for violence and nonviolence, I've examined it in depth elsewhere.

ii. Treat students with respect. Recognize that students are people who make good and bad choices, and thank them for their good choices.This may seem uncontroversial,yet just saying a heartfelt thank you to a student for his cooperation is unusual for many teachers, who absorb the notion that to protect our authority we must never be seen by students as equals. To disprove that theory, try simply sincerely thanking a student, and watch the effect it has. More often than not, thanking increases your authority, rather than decreasing it.

Jones urges teachers to "model common courtesy" regardless, because it's "something that many students need to learn" (p. 199). But I find his brilliant discussion of primitive versus social power (explored more deeply in Part III) inadequate because he describes legitimacy purely in terms of manipulation--"the art of getting your own sweet way" (p. 179). You could be Dale Carnegie, and if "your own sweet way" is wrong, immoral, or wildly unpopular, your authority will crumble.

In reality, you get authority by giving it. Teach this lesson to students as you give them more authority. Just as the Law of the Jungle whispers poison in our ears about learning and life, it distorts authority, which isn't based on being better than the people we have authority over--even if some students susceptible to the Law think so (and are more defiant or compliant as a result). John Holt offers this wisdom: "We present ourselves to children as if we were gods, all-knowing, all-powerful, always rational, always just, always right," he writes in How Children Fail. "This is worse than any lie we could tell about ourselves" (1964, p. 171). In fact, lying undermines our authority, where honesty and respect build it up. Remind students they don't have to even like you, Holt urges, because adult neediness and propriety scare them away. "It is a rare child who, anywhere in his growing up, meets even one older person with whom he can talk openly about what most interests him, concerns him, worries him" (Holt, p. 173).

Consider all this when thinking about how to present yourself to students in Part I. The key for beginners is diffusing the tension you naturally feel when you are still unfamiliar with your role. I find that giving humor, simply putting people at ease with laughter, helps students find their social power and let go of aggression or fear. (The same applies to almost any new social situation.) Another method is asking questions, or simply showing interest. 

Gratitude is a third strategy. Offering thanks is only one small way to remind a student that she exercises social power in making a choice. Like time in preferred activities, giving power in our interactions rather than taking it away models the idea that (contrary to Gatto) we can make a community out of a network. 

c. Increase student authority. Assign teaching assistants, appoint committee members, train mentors, and develop other individual positions of authority that empower students.

i. Give TAs power to shape curricula. Have students work as teaching assistants not just to help "quiz out" students but to create tests, design lessons, and develop curriculum. I began using TAs while teaching, but never really developed the idea into a program. Take a week over the summer and develop a full set of teaching-assistant expectations, training guidelines, and a parallel TA curriculum with your class that teaches "say, see, do" and other techniques.

In addition, Jones already recommends assigning individuals to do tasks such line monitoring or letting students help out with teaching tasks--see "Group chores..." in Part I and the PAT activities such as "Helping the teacher" and "Students teaching students" above. But I'd go even further to... 

ii. Assign other individual positions of power. Assign "nice correctors," team captains, game refs, discussion leaders, attendance takers, and countless other positions of individual authority every day, emphasizing that authority is only given by the class to someone doing their job well by giving.

iii. Give all your committees more choices. Jones already recommends assigning committees for mundane class tasks such as cleaning up. Gradually start giving these committees more choices and authority, both by giving them more power and giving the class more power to choose committee membership and function.

Cleanup. Give them choices about where to put recycling, trash cans, etc.

Decoration. Give them choices about themes, materials, and how often to switch out decorations.

Enrichment. Give choices about new games, learning centers, movie lists, and more.

Clerical. Let the committee develop its own system of paper distribution and attendance.

iv. Initiate peer mentoring. Advise your older students to volunteer for your school's peer-mentor link group, and if one doesn't exist, start training the same skills in your class at any age. The idea is to pair older mentors with newer or younger students, whom they check in with and support. In many large high schools, about a hundred juniors and seniors help 9th graders make the transition to the 9-12 setting through a series of fun special events, monthly meetings, grade check-ins, and other supportive rituals that make new students feel at home.

d. Increase democracy. Help the entire class work toward creating, shaping, and approving its own curricula and pedagogies through democratic and participatory processes, eventually making all-class decisions about PAT, learning subjects, and other issues that matter to students.

With classroom democracy, we enter a more controversial terrain, because it's a trail littered (by many accounts) with failed programs from the '70s. Yet experience leads me to wonder if these programs had any (never mind all) of the other elements that make the Jones system work. Introducing democracy to a classroom where students aren't learning, aren't motivated, and aren't protected simply recreates the alienation of the real-world "democracy" outside school. No wonder so many students hate politics!

At the same time, contrary to Jones's excellent and useful program for turning around oppositional students (explored in Part III), not everyone challenges teachers just because they're alienated. Many want more control because control is good: Everyone wants their own sweet way. Jones intuits as much in several parts of his system, and PAT makes the idea manifest. But he stops short of advocating the potentially hazardous step of introducing voting into the classroom. One sensible reason for avoiding democracy is that it opens a can of logistical worms, especially for beginning teachers. To avoid problems,

i. Let students experience different learning models before voting on them. As with all learning, teach democracy one step at a time. I don't have a specific program for this, but I know one thing: Don't hold a vote about curricula or pedagogy the first day of school. Let students experience your class and its variety first before allowing them to make informed choices about what works for them. 

You can check their decision-making power however you like, and include stipulations and limited time-spans for trying different options. But set the limits as much as possible ahead of time, rather than imposing them later. A gift, once given, becomes a punishment when you take it away.

Students could vote on any number of issues: Electing your committees, approving TA appointments, nominating "nice correctors" for readings, and establishing other positions of authority, some of which could switch in rotation. They could vote on all-class project ideas, PAT ideas, field trips, and other activities. Finally, they could eventually vote on how and what they want to learn: What subjects are they most interested in? How do they learn best? You could divide the class into groups for the top choices. The possibilities are endless.

ii. Protect the program. Even if your program of democracy is successful, I can imagine it would meet resistance from some faculty and parents anyway. Though this could be true of any teaching practice that doesn't work for some students, democracy in particular has the added burden, like PBL, of still being in the experimental stage at many schools. It also lacks academic research as backing, and presents other teachers with the specter of additional work.

I'd recommend two guiding principles as useful with any experimental teaching technique, but especially democracy. First, as my old cooperating teacher used to say, never do anything in teaching that you can't justify later. Second, remember that students will use anything good about your class as whiny leverage against other teachers: "Why can't we vote like we do in the other class?"

To prevent this, train students in diplomacy by helping them understand that for a democratic program to gain credibility, it must first show success. Only then can it be adopted by teachers themselves (who are learners like anyone else), and only voluntarily. After all, for many teachers, in the short run, giving students more power means giving themselves more work.

3. Use project-based learning (PBL) to increase student autonomy. Use PBL starting with one highly structured project in the fall, then increase use throughout the school year. PBL involves leading students through an "extended inquiry process structured around complex, authentic questions and carefully designed products and tasks," writes the Buck Institute in its Project-Based Learning handbook (Buck Institute, 2003, p. 4). So PBL can include two-week projects or yearlong ones involving community participation.

a. Use PBL to nourish self-motivation. PBL has the advantage of being able include multiple disciplines, which is why it's embraced more fully in alternative schools (such as the one where I taught for my first two years as a social studies teacher). But it's also used well in departmental settings, where fun in-class projects can be integrated as part of regular curriculum or PAT.

Because PBL usually involves topics of interest to the student and longer timelines for completion, it has the side-benefit of building up self-motivation--Kohn's term for wanting to do something without immediate intrinsic or extrinsic benefit, because you know it's good for you. Self-motivation grows from developing your own reason, values, interests, curiosity, and passions with a view toward long-term goals.

b. Scaffold PBL and teach academic basics. Remember that PBL is trickier than simply setting student loose on a project (more below). Students need training in the basic skills and knowledge required for any particular project, which can often involve teaching them with a regular lesson of direct-instruction or cooperative learning before going into the project. Projects also require scaffolding in the skills of PBL itself, which involve "collaboration, research, project management, and oral presentation" (Buck Institute, 2003, p. 8).

Cooperative learning is the perfect curriculum for collaboration skills, but research and presentation need their own programs and lessons, to be developed separately. "Often, teachers do not introduce projects until the midfall or later," writes the Buck Institute, "giving them time to assess students and prepare them for project work" (Buck Institute, 2003, p. 8).

c. Lead students through a project. Though space does't allow a full processing of the entire PBL cycle, the outline provided by the Buck book's chapters and content offers a useful thumbnail of how to take a project from start to finish. These explanations are paraphrased from the relevant pages, as well as from essential forms in the back of the book (Buck Institute, 2003, p. iii-v and more):

A. Begin with the end in mind. Start with the idea, scope, and learning standards of your project, as well as what you want your classroom to look like while students work on the project.

1. Develop a project idea. Do this by working backward from a topic, using your standards, finding ideas online (start with bie.org), matching what people do in their daily work, tying the projects to current events, focusing on community service, or otherwise examining the local community to ask questions and develop themes  (Buck Institute, p. 13-14).

As Martha Rapp Ruddel writes in Teaching Content Reading & Writing, you could also "explore personal, family, and community histories...; engage students in exploration of global issues...; or develop any of a myriad of other big ideas" (Ruddell, p. 422). "Effective development... requires two conditions": topics growing from the "felt needs" of students, and development involving "multiple resources" (Ruddell, p. 422).

2. To map your community, ask: What cultures, opportunities for learning, businesses, organizations, celebrations, citizen actions, political issues, problems (noise, pollution, housing, graffiti, erosion, trash), youth-led projects, talents, stories, important or interesting people, workers, industries, architecture, parks, and other things exist in your community (Buck Institute, p. 23). Project activities could include descriptive research, hypothesis testing, analysis, design, composition, diagnosis, conducting problem-solving episodes, decision making, and model-building research (p. 89)

3. Decide on the scope of the project. Determine the duration, breadth, depth, location (in or out of the classroom) technology use, outreach level, teacher partnerships involved, and ultimate audience of the project--all based on student experience, readiness, school schedule, the subject, and your level of comfort and expertise (Buck, p. 14). Student autonomy can range from limited student input (where the teacher defines the topic, outcomes, products, activities, and timeline) to maximum student input (where the student controls those things), with negotiation and solicitation in between (Buck, p. 16).   4. Select standards. You could start from a vision or idea and work backwards to the learning standards, but make sure you make clear what outcomes you're assessing. Base these on federal, state, district, school, or department standards. Make sure to include literacy as a core standard in every lesson. Identify the key skills students will learn and habits of mind they'll practice.

5. Incorporate simultaneous outcomes. Include multiple standards and skills, as well as "habits of mind such as curiosity, flexibility, and perseverance" (Buck, p. 18).   6. Work from project design criteria. Make sure a project has authenticity, academic rigor, applied learning, active exploration, adult connections, and thoughtful assessment practices (Buck, p. 19).

7. Create the optimal learning environment. Connect your project to people and phenomena beyond the classroom, including partnerships with other classes, schools, individuals, groups, mentors, organizations, communities, countries, and your community. Alter your classroom's look and feel to resemble aspects of your project. Study content so that the project can apply to authentic problems. Make schoolwork more like real work (Buck, p. 21-22).

B. Craft the driving question. State the essential question or problem statement for the project. Address all the project content and outcomes while focusing student inquiry.Make sure your question is provocative, open-ended, goes to the heart of a topic, is challenging, and is consistent with standards (Buck, p. 37-39). Your question can also arise from real-world dilemmas (p. 38).

To refine the question, you can broaden it, take it into the future, push it into the past, apply it more narrowly, apply it to multiple cases or types, anchor it in local geography, reframe to add challenging elements, or expand it to a problem-based format (p. 39-40). Examples include: Are wars avoidable? What effects does the Civil War have on us today? Should African Americans receive reparations for slavery? (And many more on p. 41-42.)

C. Plan the assessment. Create an assessment plan that includes both formative and summative assessments of skills and knowledge (Buck, p. 45-46).

1. Know what to assess. Establish performance criteria: How will a product allow a student to demonstrate learning? Unpack content standards and skills to let the student know specifically what will be assessed (p. 51).   2. Define the products and artifacts for the project. Identify culminating products for a project--the thing they'll create. Use multiple products and a checkpoint system for giving feedback to students along the way. Also use artifacts that simply show progress (journals, checklists, and more). Make clear what the products should look like early in the project, during the project, and at the end.

3. Create detailed rubrics for each aspect of the project. State the criteria for exemplary performance for each product, and accompanying exemplars in rubrics showing less-than-perfect performance.

Use the following general elements: impact of performance, work quality of craftsmanship, adequacy of methods and behaviors, validity of content, and sophistication of knowledge employed. Create a scale and criteria for: content, work ethic, collaboration, and presentation (p. 53-57). You could also use Bloom's Taxonomy: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation (p. 61). Ultimately, you'll also create your own project grading worksheet (p. 79).

D. Map the project. Create a long-term VIP for students showing what they'll do and when, as well as what skills they'll need along the way.

1. Organize tasks and activities. Break project into steps. Plan to teach any necessary skills, or plan to teach them through the project (p. 83). Create "Project Planning Form" for "knowledge and skills needed" and check whether they're "already learned," taught before project," or "taught during project" (p. 84). Plan to scaffold skills through direct instruction, handouts, orientations, guided practice, feedback events, or self-management training (p. 90). Teach students planning, breaking problem into parts, coordinating, and communicating (p. 88).

2. Decide how to launch the project. Create an "entry event" into the project, or use an "entry document" (p. 84-85).

"Decide what stimulus you will use to get students thinking about what they know and don't know about a big topic," writes Ruddell. "Will it be a walk around the community? ads you've collected from magazines and other media? a movie or videotape? quotations you've gleaned from newspapers or from conversations you've heard in your classroom?" (Ruddell, p. 430).   3. Draw the storyboard for the project. Sketch out a bubble diagram of major activities according to a timeline with important milestones (p. 87).

4. Gather resources. Create bank of resources, websites, books, forms, and more (p. 85).

E. Manage the process. Help students through the project by orienting them to its goals, connecting it to their needs and interests, modifying as you go, managing the workflow, evaluating the products, and celebrating when they're done.

1. Share project goals with students. Present the entry event and either orient students to the goals of the project, or help them create those goals (in Step 2 below), referring to the guiding question. They'll be more motivated if the goals are relevant to their lives. Assign groups wisely ahead of time, or assign them wisely according to emerging interest (Step 2 below) (p. 97-98).

As Ruddell writes, "Identify specific expectations for the outcome of the project--what students are expected to produce, how productions will be graded, group responsibilities, and so forth" (Ruddell, p. 430).

2. Use problem-solving tools. Have students write or use "know/need to know" lists, learning logs, and planning briefs (Buck Institute, p. 100). This process can help shape the project, as Ruddell writes. Begin by "leading a class discussion about 'Things We Know' about a particular topic... Let students work in pairs or groups to list what they know; give them plenty of time and expect ideas to range considerably. Share these in whole-class discussion. Then let them go back to their partner or group and first list 'Things We Don't Know' and later 'Things We Want to Know'" (Ruddell p. 426).

Guide students to group "want to know" ideas into categories of interest, and possibly allow "students to form groups according to" these categories (Ruddell, p. 430). Then address resources and locations for information, and explore examples of successful projects. The more this step shapes the project, the more you'll need to revisit the specific expected outcomes and learning goals. 

3. Make accommodations and modifications. List preparations necessary to address differentiated instruction for ELLs and students with special needs.

4. Use checkpoints and milestones. Use some kind of management system to organize workflow and teach students time management skills. Most systems involve the production of artifacts to provide a record of progress. Organize the project schedule by setting and enforcing deadlines, monitoring student progress using time limits and benchmarks (p. 98, 100). Systems include: informal briefings, quick writes, random interviews, weekly reflections, progress logs, journals, sitting in with different groups, and debriefing sessions (p. 100). My addition and innovation would be to simply have different groups check on each other and monitor each other's progress.

5. Plan the evaluation, reflection, and celebration. Have students discuss, analyze, and reflect on their learning experiences as part of a culminating evaluation in which students answer: What did we learn? Did we collaborate effectively? What skills do we need to practice? Where can we improve? (p. 101). The evaluation could be whole-class debriefing sessions led by a student facilitator, a fishbowl technique (where a few students facilitate and debrief the group), a survey that allows students to comment on the project, or a self-evaluation for both teachers and students.

Then celebrate at the end of the debriefing day. Or create "a special event such as a reception, ceremony, or presentation of awards" (p. 102).

d. Increase student independence with each project. With each successive project, increase students' range of choices, level of input, and degree of autonomy and independence. As the Buck Institute puts it, "most teachers introduce student autonomy in stages" (Buck Institute, 2003, p. 8).

Kohn holds that extrinsic motivation harms true self-motivation, but as PAT shows, this may not be the case when that extrinsic motivation offers more power and choice rather than less. I think the real test of Jones's system is whether we can teach students to use its methods "on themselves" in PBL.

Once students show their responsibility to a base group, for instance, you can begin a program that will eventually let them "go out on their own," ideally outside the school, and report back to the group about independent learning projects.

Many students prefer independence from the start, but don't let PBL derail your program of cooperative learning, which teaches essential skills that many students would as soon avoid ever learning, if they could. The ultimate aim is to teach students to work without teacher supervision and to set and reach long-term goals.

e. Train authentic self-discipline. Use PBL to teach authentic self-discipline (my term for Kohn's concept), the self-discipline that grow out of true self-motivation.

Teachers can promote this, according to Kohn (quoting Deci and Ryan), by "minimizing 'externally imposed evaluations, goals, rewards, and pressures' as well as proactively supporting students' sense of autonomy." PBL seems like the perfect strategy for both increasing a sense of autonomy and reducing external evaluation, as the assessment process moves toward self-evaluation and self-processing.

f. Avoid imposed self-discipline. As Kohn warns, always frame students' success in terms of their own goals and desires--nor yours, not their parents', not their peers'.

Whenever I'd give a "pep talk" or have a "heart to heart" with a disenchanted student, I'd start by asking (or knowing by having asked before) what they want now, and also what they want in life. Start talking about these wants as realistic goals that can be reached. Teach self-disciplineas merely the various learnable skills required to complete difficult or unpleasant tasks without immediate intrinsic or extrinsic incentives, using willpower to achieve goals. But keep in mind, and help students keep in mind, that self-discipline isn't always an expression of true self-motivation: It can sometimes be imposed.

Imposed self-discipline (my term for Kohn's concept) grows out of values you accept and internalize without choosing them, believing in them, or necessarily even agreeing with them. These may be values you embrace out of a sense of duty, conformity, surrender, or insecurity--when you do things because you "should" do them," as Kohn writes, quoting psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, "or because not doing so might engender anxiety, guilt, or loss of esteem." 

Imposed self-discipline is like "installing a policeman inside each child," Kohn writes. As a result, a student studies because "she knows she's supposed to (and will feel lousy about herself if she doesn't)." And dutiful students suffer from "what psychoanalyst Karen Horney famously called the 'tyranny of the should'--to the point that they no longer know what they really want, or who they really are."

This kind of "self-discipline can be less a sign of health than of vulnerability," Kohn writes, a signal reflecting the "fear of being overwhelmed by external forces, or by one's own desires" or a "perpetual need to feel better about" one's self.

Next: Part III of the Jones system!

Posts and essays in this series:

How to keep school from Dumbing Us Down.

Why classrooms aren't communities.

What, me motivate? Part I

School and the Law of the Jungle

Teaching or violence?

Lesson plan template (January, 2014)

What, me motivate? Part II

What, me motivate? Part III

Authority and freedom revisited: John Locke and A.S. Neill

Notes on Jones's 3rd Edition and cooperative learning

[petescholtes-blog-blog]

Lesson Plan Template January 2014

Lesson Plan Template - Scholtes January 2014 

What to do before class:

Name of lesson: ____

Grade level: ______

Time needed for lesson: ____

Estimated PAT: ____

Learning standards: ____

General learning goal:  ____

Rephrase as essential question:  ____

Specific observable and challenging goals: ____

Prior skills and knowledge needed: ____

Remedial teaching strategy:  ____

Skills developed in lesson: ____

New-skill teaching strategy:  ____

Vocabulary developed: ____

Vocabulary teaching strategy:  ____

Hands-on element: ____

Choice, judgment, creation, or play: ____

Explicit connection to future learning experience: ____

Connections to students' experience, passions, lives: ____

Connections to previous learning: ____

Unit assessment (culminating project, product, or test):  ____

Part of assessment for which this activity prepares:  ____

Criterion of mastery: ____

Materials and resources needed: ____

Use and numbers of materials:____

Distribution plan: ____

Classroom preparation or arrangement: ____

Guests or collaborators: ____

Preparation time needed: ____

Structure for encouraging commitment to the goal, including any cooperative learning (CL) structure, group practice, preparation, and support:

Cooperative learning structure:

Positive interdependence: ____

Individual accountability: ____

Intergroup cooperation: ___

Expected behaviors: ____

____

____

What to give substitutes:

Thank you for teaching my classes today! Here are some names and phone numbers of helpful staff.

Here's your schedule today: ____

Instructions on board: ____

Teaching procedure and rules: ____ (Take this from "Lesson structure" below.)

How preferred activity time (PAT) works: ____

Answer key or work check: ____

Please leave a note about how classes went! Include any information you'd like me to add next time.

  What to write on the board:

Name of class: ____

Date: ____

Learning goal: ____

Themes: ____

Bell work: ____

Vocabulary: ____

Daily PAT: ____

Weekly PAT: ____

  What to write in the VIP:

Task today:

____ (For example) Groups of 2-3, knee to knee.

Take turns reading "Secrets of Vesuvius," p. 20-25, out loud. Answer questions on overhead and memorize your answers.

You are not done until: ____You quiz out with teacher. (Criterion of mastery)

Social skill: ____Encouragement.

[Any drawings you create would also go on slide, board, or poster.]

Lesson structure/what to tell students:

I. Setting the Stage (7 minutes tops)

A. Bell work or base group meeting, Automatic Bonus PAT routine and greetings. ____

B. Brief lecture/discussion/intro activity:

1. Briefly introduce lesson using

any of the following:

Raise interest and make connections to future learning goals, present lives, or past experience. ____

Build on yesterday's learning. ____

Give background of today's learning. ____

Create disequilibrium (present mystery or problem). ____

Provide advance organizer. ____

Practice vocabulary. ____

Do think-pair-share or other CL. ____

2. Conclude with all of the following:

Read learning goal on the board. ____

Give instructions for lesson, read VIP out loud, including challenging and specific goal for today, connection to future learning, work check method, and criterion of mastery. ____ (This could also be saved for structured practice below, with or without cooperative groups.)

Assign groups, roles, and room arrangement. ____

Tell celebration method and today's Daily PAT option. ____

Announce brain break (if there will be one). ____

II. Structured Practice (10 minutes tops). This usually bleeds into or blends with Guided Practice below. Use a version of A with any combination of B or C:

A. Say, See, Do cycles:

Explanation (Say): ("Here's what we do next.") ____

Modeling (See): ("Allow me to demonstrate.") ____

Structured Practice (Do): ("Now you try.")____

Source of feedback for student performance during structured practice: (teacher, partner, group, whole class?)____

Expected range of performances during structured practice, and corresponding feedback cues:____

Anticipated difficulties: ____

Backup strategies: ____

Other notes for high-quality feedback: ____

B. Cooperative group strategies:

Think-pair-share/class discussion.

Roundtable.

Pass the Problem.

Formulate, Share, Listen, Create.

Jigsaw.

Inside-Outside Circle.

Academic Controversy.

C. Other active lesson formats:

Project-Based Learning (PBL).

Hands-On Activities.

III. Guided Practice (14 minutes tops). Use a version of A and D in any combination with B and/or C:

A. Guided practice or independent practice (individual or with cooperative groups). This includes the following in order of frequency of use:

1. Guided practice: Supervised practice.____ 2. Independent practice: Students are their own coach. ____ 3. Generalization: Variations on a theme, different interpretations. ____ 4. Discrimination: Correct and incorrect performance. ____

B. Cruise and check progress toward criterion of mastery with check master. Use VIP and "Praise, Prompt, Leave." For cooperative groups, criterion could include group processing (positive feedback, goals for improvement) and celebration. I often "quiz out" cooperative reading groups and include processing as part of the quiz. ____

C. Have students check each other's work: If it's too visually complex to check at a glance, dismiss students to PAT temporarily until everyone's done, then use "Keep 'Em Honest," "Double-Checking," or "Quality Control Circles." Cooperative classes could also end with full-class discussion and then full-class processing and celebration. Other possibilities include help from Teaching Assistants. ____

D. Excuse to PAT anyone meeting criterion of mastery.

  IV. Preferred activity time (PAT) (at least 10 minutes)

Feedback from students:____

Post-lesson reflection/modification

Proudest moments: ____

Things to work on: _____

How to alter lesson to improve it: ____

How to alter next lesson in light of students' progress today: ____

Individual student notes on cognitive, personal, and social coping strategies: _____

Posts and essays in this series:

How to keep school from Dumbing Us Down.

Why classrooms aren't communities.

What, me motivate? Part I

School and the Law of the Jungle

Teaching or violence?

Lesson plan template (January, 2014)

What, me motivate? Part II

What, me motivate? Part III

Authority and freedom revisited: John Locke and A.S. Neill

Notes on Jones's 3rd Edition and cooperative learning

[petescholtes-blog-blog]

Teaching or Violence?

Who benefits from the Law of the Jungle? Who gains from the idea that the world is a ruthless, competitive meritocracy and battlefield, a hierarchy of talent, looks, strength, intelligence, aggression, and self-made independence? I've argued recently that this belief destroys us all, but it doesn't destroy us equally: Like any falsehood protecting illegitimate power, the Law corrupts through inequality. Where racism exists to preserve white power and sexism male power, the Law justifies illegitimate authority of any kind, any power that doesn't give: aggressive power itself. Its lies are transparent yet seep into our bloodstream, shaping the language even of those who would oppose it.

So the story of the social movements of the 1960s told by the left is one of fighting and winning, its achievements the spoils of war, the prizes of sport. The story told by the right is of spoiled children rebelling. And the story told in history books is of great leaders saving us. None of these challenges the Law. Even the counter-narrative of nonviolent resistance, when framed by needy privilege, makes morality a competitive quantity to be monopolized by peaceful protesters and forfeited by the powerless defending themselves against violence.

It's true that dramatic confrontations were what captured the world's imagination about the civil rights movement, to take one dramatic example, but why? "Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue," wrote Martin Luther King from Birmingham Jail (The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Clayborne Carson, 1998, p. 190). So the movement was a fight, but it was always something more. Teaching wasn't just the practical heart of Freedom Summer the following year in Mississippi (where "freedom schools" used curriculum developed in New York by educators who would popularize cooperative learning): It was the movement's strategy. Confrontation was the classroom, and it always taught a larger classroom. The fact that rioting followed on the heels of these lessons, and that the threat of federal troops accompanied them, doesn't negate their power--it underlines it. We revisit the beautifully planned irony of the lunch-counter sit-ins today because they were one of the clearest learning experiences ever set in motion.

Many movement veterans lost faith in teaching the country after years of traumatic violence, and some opened the rulebook of the enemy. Critics of nonviolence say that rulebook is all we have. To answer the criticism of violence as a surrender to impulsive feelings, Peter Gelderloos points to the intellectual work and psychic endurance required to carry out violent revolution under conditions of "total war," such as those in the Algerian Revolution (How Nonviolence Protects the State, 2007, p. 120-121). But the mental violence of aggression is always measured in effects, not causes--from upset to simply ending the consciousness of the other person.

The question is: What effect do you want to have? Even a sociopath can learn the skills of calm described by Fred Jones in Tools for Teaching (2007), and many great warriors are also givers in other areas, loving parents or teachers, who refrain from applying the same principle to the particular category of human beings they fight--the enemy. People cherish these examples because they ease the tension in our minds between what the Law tells us about greatness and what experience tells us about goodness. Advocates of political violence find particular solace in this.

But the contradiction becomes strained in life. It's my emerging suspicion that, along with the physical and traumatic factors of depression and social anxiety, the thing making us miserable is the ideology we believe, what it makes us think about our lives, and the distorted conclusions we draw about ourselves and others every day as a result. The more we fear that we are weak or losing, the more we'll hate weakness and losing in others. You can feel it in any room full of strangers, with its mixture of genuine interest and shyness mingled with judgment, aggressiveness, and competitiveness. Without the spiritual equivalent of a good teacher breaking the ice and helping everyone gain a state of mind that allows us to give, majoritarian pressure and insecurity take hold.

This room is the world, I suspect. Anti-authoritarians seem particularly attuned to its warning signs. But anarchists also insist that government, rather than mediating this tension, is the reason people feel it in the first place. Eliminate the state, and they'll open up.

I remain unconvinced. For one thing, not all authority is illegitimate, as I've shown with classroom control, and pretending otherwise only encourages the most cutthroat license. Which might explain why reconciling anarchism with political violence isn't so much of a stretch as it first appears, never mind their long and suicidal coincidence in history. To adapt the logic of the Law to the egalitarianism that recoils from it, violent revolutionaries neatly divide the world into three categories: the privileged, the oppressors, and the oppressed. Not siding in a violent war between the second and third categories, they argue, is only a luxury of the first category.

The starker these distinctions seem, the more persuasive this line of thought becomes. Of course people being ground down into the dirt turn to violence, and of course others who would never use violence themselves sympathize or intervene. But where the lines blur or disappear, which is almost everywhere, the anarchist sees only privilege refusing to properly steel itself--against, for instance, human beings who put on a police uniform. Gelderloos adopts the same serene, exhausted behaviorism of the French--who visited all the terror they could imagine on their Algerian colony--to argue that street demonstrators can teach their enemies a lesson by punishing them. Physically "fighting back discourages future attacks because it raises the costs of oppression incurred by the oppressor," he writes--his example is police fencing in protesters. "The meek resistance of nonviolence only makes it easier for the attacks to continue" (Gelderloos, p. 121).

Gelderloos is a brilliant polemicist and an anti-prison activist of evident commitment with a bracingly global range of reference. But he writes as if violence were just the zip a boring old protest needed, lamenting the drear of mass actions where "dignified suffering simply stops being fun," and where remote leaders declare victory based on "a combination of nothing more than the numbers of participants and the absence of violent confrontation" (p. 60-61). I'll take his word for it that, by comparison, the Battle of Seattle in '99 "empowered" activists who fought police, and electrified others (p. 61). But what power did these protesters gain, exactly? And what do violent demonstrations teach beyond the (alleged) marginal behavior modification of riot police? Gelderloos holds that they embolden further violent action to raise the costs of bad policy--the same strategy that helped end the U.S. war in Indochina (along with massive Communist resistance) (p. 15). But when people from the era talk about stepping out of the '60s into a new world, they don't mention violence except to let a shadow fall over their face, or at best a wry sadness. Only revolutionaries were disappointed that the revolution never came. For those who sympathize, self-laceration for privilege or lack of commitment folds right into the Law, where victory is everything.

The real revolution was always teaching: not just at teach-ins and mass meetings, but in music and books, in the way soldiers talked with each other, how women formed their own talking circles, how African Americans began telling their own story, and all the other thousands of interactions that taught the country, often with the same tension and reconciliation that classroom teaching requires. Gelderloos maintains that courts, public schools, and other basic institutions are "structurally immune to 'changes of heart,'" but that's demonstrable nonsense: Curricula have changed dramatically from their pre-'60s incarnation, when Columbus still discovered America, and the courts-based gay marriage movement has since caught many LGBT rights activists by surprise (p. 92). Changing our institutions isn't easy, but then we're still learning how to teach.

Most of us know we're still at war, in Afghanistan and in our cities. But a reluctance to respond with violent resistance isn't the problem. Reading Gelderloos on the difference between "acceptable" and "immoral" killing reminded me of the scene in 1999's Spring Forward where Liev Schreiber tells fellow parks worker Ned Beatty that he's going to get in touch with his inner warrior, and Beatty responds to the effect of, "Look around"--gesturing to a park full of kids playing--"Do you really think the nature of man is war?" (p. 142). Peace isn't a bubble: It's where people live. It's the breathing space that allows us to give--a right, not a privilege. Many who are decidedly not privileged--I'd wager to say most of them, though I can't speak for others any more than Gelderloos can--don't like violence, don't want violence, and don't use violence, either on the police or on anyone else. Fighting, however temporary or strategic, bypasses all the good things in life. It also ignores how good things can change the world.

Gelderloos quotes Frantz Fanon on the "cleansing force" of violence against colonialism, yet he glosses Fanon's tougher observations about its effects (p. 129; Fanon, 1963, p. 94). These include, among psychological examinations in The Wretched of the Earth, two Algerian boys who lured a European friend up a hill to murder him with a knife, not because of anything he did or said, but because his father was in the militia, and "they want to kills us, so..." (Fanon, 1963, p. 270-272). Killing, finally, is the negation of teaching, the laying of a person in the grave of his category. It's the fullest embrace of the Law.

Posts and essays in this series:

How to keep school from Dumbing Us Down.

Why classrooms aren't communities.

What, me motivate? Part I

School and the Law of the Jungle

Teaching or violence?

Lesson plan template (January, 2014)

What, me motivate? Part II

What, me motivate? Part III

Authority and freedom revisited: John Locke and A.S. Neill

Notes on Jones's 3rd Edition and cooperative learning

[petescholtes-blog-blog]

School and the Law of the Jungle

Discussed in this essay: Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (1968-2008), The Truman Show (1998), It's a Wonderful Life (1946), The Hunger Games (2012)

I wonder if the common fantasy children have that life is a show, put on for them with scenery and actors, might be a response to their unusual situation. In many ways, the world lies to them. Even in the happiest homes, parents put on their best face. They shield children from pain. The more unhappy parents are, the more strained the show becomes. The unhappiest parents cut open the scenery and turn on the audience.

Then kids go to school, where every classmate is a "friend." When others are mean, it can feel like a betrayal. But peers in a self-interested network aren't friends. Friends are the people who like you and care about you after the network is gone. The mutual self-interest of childhood--toys, games, playing, sharing a neighborhood or classroom--can blur these lines. You might enjoy playing with someone who's also mean to you.

Children eventually learn how to make friends. But along the way, they learn something called the Law of the Jungle: the lie that the world belongs to the strong, the smart, the beautiful, the talented, the wealthy, and the independent. They internalize dumb ideas about each of these concepts: that strength lies in aggression, intelligence is born, beauty is objective, and talent is fixed; that wealth means having things, and independence means not needing anyone. Viewing these qualities as hierarchical and competitive becomes self-fulfilling, reinforcing the lie. Of course "winners" play better than "losers."

To show children a way out of childhood, we encourage them to participate in social activities, sports, and other networks. We have them write birthday lists, and they get ideas for presents from commercials. Eventually we encourage them to get jobs. Along the way, we hope they find love, about which they get information from peers and media. At every step, parents share guidance, and schools discourage bullying. But reality speaks louder than words. If schools don't teach cooperation, coaching children in the social skills required, they learn the Law of the Jungle by default. Many look for recognition of the Law as a sign of maturity in other kids (and use it to fill the gap in sex and drug education). It becomes so ingrained that some adults think we should teach it outright, so at least kids can win.

If you doubt the pervasiveness of this ideology, think of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. For 40 years, Fred Rogers spoke truths to children on public television. He made emotions comprehensible by singing songs about friendship and belonging ("You Are Special"), caring for someone beyond the superficiality of appearance ("It's You I Like"), recognizing moral changeability ("Sometimes People Are Good"), and managing feelings ("What Do You Do?"). Now think about the popular music you associate with your own coming of age. How often do these topics come up? Mister Rogers isn't corny because he put on puppet shows and wore cardigans. He's corny because he challenged the Law of the Jungle.

Being a real man or woman, on the other hand, means caring for other people. It's the strength required to love unselfishly, work hard, and take responsibility for others. It's being interested in and empathetic toward people you don't know, and thoughtful of people you do. It also means being kind to yourself, especially your younger self. "I think that those who feel strangest about my work are those who cannot be in touch with their own childhood," Rogers once said. Without caring, you have only the cycle of achievement and distraction, the pattern of an empty life.

Breaking from this program is the subject of The Truman Show (1998), a movie that blows up the childhood fantasy of life as a show to invert it: Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) is the cheerful, unwitting star of a 24-hour reality show for a mass audience he's unaware of. His mother, best friend, and wife are all actors. Neighbors stop him on the street in front of strategically placed advertisements. His whole life is an advertisement. (Truman was "the first child to be legally adopted by a corporation.") When he tries to leave the island of his birth, he's discouraged by unseen forces. Even newspapers tout the beauty of staying put.

Truman's ultimate rebellion is to stop acting, to be himself. He realizes, in one poignant scene, that his wife actually hates him. Why would she want to have children with him? Real life can't begin until he figures out where the fake one ends.

This may seem like a reverse of It's a Wonderful Life (1946), a film that begins happily in youth and marriage until George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) has the same impulse to flee, then claws his way back in. The difference is that George and Mary love each other. Their trap isn't a patriarchal corporate plan. Instead, George is imprisoned by the dreams that free Truman, floating so far from his hometown of Bedford Falls that his obligations to those who love him begin to feel like shackles. George is every husband who reads Playboy, every bank employee with the urge to run naked through the grass, every would-be architect with buildings inside him.

Learning to embrace the love you have and community you've made is such a lifelong process that It's a Wonderful Life's psychic rite of Christmas never stops being cathartic, even if we can laugh now that the nightmare of a non-George, business-run existence includes (gasp) juke-joint piano at Martini's or Mary working at the library. But the part of George that would feel elated if he learned that his family and friends were actors is always there in us, an urge to roam that feeds, and is fed by, the Law. It's the realization, in Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime," that possibilities are infinite and life isn't, that our cup of water excludes an ocean. Except the band seemed to celebrate the dilemma (writing a new gospel, Afropop, and punk traditional) as only human, curing the butterflies of high-diving into our cup. Freedom, the ultimate menu of possibilities, must include the possibility of a Pottersville, which remains chilling because it embodies a world that has grown more garish and unfeeling since the 1940s--the best argument yet for Truman to hesitate at the threshold.

People still care about George's fragile little community because the real creditors and police outside our doors are less forgiving as the gap between winners and losers widens. The bank rush in It's a Wonderful Life still stands as an American ideal of how a bank should work, or might work if our political economy were less Potter-like. That smashed "Buffalo Gals" record is every disappointment life holds next to pop. And I love that George isn't so far-gone suicidal that he can't pause to tell Zuzu she can dream her flower into a garden when she falls asleep. This isn't somebody who needs to learn to be a good parent, or a good person, but someone who needs to learn that those things are enough. That without them you have only the cold.

The shadow over George shows the power of the Law. It's always there waiting, even for those who reject it, ready for whenever your sense of self-worth or security is threatened. It follows you into freedom--in fact, that's where it lives. "Everything goes when anything goes," sang the Replacements in "Unsatisfied," another punk band testing freedom's emotional limits. "Liberty is a lie." Believing in some version of the Law may be in our biology, a philosophical counterpart to the fight-flight reflex. Herbert Spencer gave it a name, "survival of the fittest," turning Darwin into a cover for the new industrial order and helping racism outlive open human enslavement. But the era of It's a Wonderful Life made world war on the Law. Even the film's ethnic and racial stereotypes, with Lillian Randolph giving her Annie a flash of wit, are at least more humane than what came before.

When George says his late father was richer than Potter will ever be because he "never once thought of himself," he means it. Yet he still asks Mary why she didn't marry Sam Wainwright, the plastics speculator who got rich in New York. He still turns on Uncle Billy when the money is gone ("you silly, stupid old fool"). The darkness in George is why the community collection for him at the end is a grace note. The real climax is his gleeful, grateful run home to family and certain ruin after he has decided to live. "Isn't it wonderful? I'm going to jail!"

Our urge to strive, to be excellent, and dream beyond our home may be built into our survival instincts. Conservatives are right that it's what makes us great. But the impulse to give up is also evolutionary. It's a Wonderful Life is about how your survival instincts can kill you. We're all part animal and part angel, as sports psychologist Saul L. Miller puts it. We may have the benevolent bluster of Sam, who wires money to save George, or the loving endurance of Mary and Uncle Billy, who crowd-source the basket. But the lightly nagging, rational "pixie"--the angel Clarence, who convinces George to live--is the cortex that saves us. He isn't sharp, but he doesn't need to be. He's just right.

That glorious run through the snow has poetic power because it's a vision of winter as the second half of life, not its end. (It's not a coincidence that the 1993 coming-of-adulthood comedy Groundhog Day is also set in snow.) George's smile at the close is a recognition that his faith is a social force. Kipling actually coined the phrase "law of the jungle" to observe pack behavior in wolves, itself more humane than its human projection. But George has the wisdom that goodness comes from within, that the Wizard of Oz got it exactly wrong when he said a heart is measured by how much you are loved by others. The room glows because George is enjoying loving again. He's catching up with Mary.

By contrast, Truman's endless sunny days are the parental protectiveness of childhood made meteorological, in this case by a hidden producer (Ed Harris), his only real parent. Even the name Truman evokes nostalgia for the postwar America of It's a Wonderful Life but without the real social feeling George Bailey embodies. Truman's world is full of pretty faces, selling. It's television without Mister Rogers. There are no feelings to manage there. He's never encouraged to try, just to play along. And the thought that this might be enough for adults haunts the film.

Many young people feel they participate in a show at school, and that they are the actors. It's a result of how we educate. Great adults enter teaching, but I'm not sure our approach is fully grownup. We teach content, the knowledge supposedly needed to get a job or into college, to the exclusion of skills required to get a life: caring, trust, negotiation, cooperation, and taking responsibility. Without making learning active, we "cover" standards shy of actually teaching them. ("If your objective is to cover the material," Madeline Hunter quips in Fred Jones's Tools for Teaching, "cover it with dirt because it's dead.") We create an artificial scarcity of educational success. And by leaving social skills to the wind, we throw children into the gladiator's arena of self-esteem.

If you think I overstate things, consider that the most popular current fantasy among young people is a teen's nuclear winter rationalizing the Law of the Jungle as only what's required--you've got to take care of your own, after all. I wonder if the redeemed nihilism of The Hunger Games (2012) isn't partly why it's a hit. In the first part of the story, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) enters a fight to the death to save her younger sister. Yet even that little innocent tells her not to hesitate in killing other people's sisters.

For me, this pop totem will forever be wrapped up in my first years of teaching--and fondly so. I saw a great young teacher hook a remedial reading class with its clumpy language in 2010, handed the book out in my own first-year advisory, then finally read it out loud myself with my wife after one beloved student made a Hunger Games board game. I watched my school swept up as a colleague showed it on a wall early this year. The sequel (which is much better) is now in the air everywhere.

But both the first book and film skate the question of whether Peeta participates in the murder of a helpless opponent during the "games," which are a reality entertainment the size of The Truman Show's except its stars are aware they're being watched, killing and loving not just to survive but to court sponsors. To kids growing up more in public than ever, the cameras might seem natural. That the murders might also seem that way is more disturbing.

Of course, I'm not the first person to say that the "games" are school. The fantasy imagines a place where you wind up because your parents are too powerless or absent to save you. It imagines that people rebelled in the distant past and lost, and now their children are sacrificed to a public system of competition encouraged by an aloof, ridiculous elite. This is an emotional metaphor rather than a literal one. Making allies, being beautiful, even winning the game are all performed for the benefit of peers. The sorting of winners and losers happens in plain sight of everyone. Yet the smallest act of unselfish kindness can spark a rebellion.

For most kids, the pressures of being something that others want are as real as hunger. The first installment of The Hunger Games showed only the promise of a full, Truman Show-like refusal, or adulthood for Katniss in the form of caring about everybody's children. The second film begins to deliver. Instead of imagining a world that's cold, dying, crowded, and shrinking, where no one cares who you are, and you stop caring as well beyond the envy, competition, and performance that bring you into the arena, the sequel begins to envision an alliance of love. By the time I retire from teaching, and these movies are looked back on as a frenzy of our era, I hope the demons they exorcise no longer exist.

Posts and essays in this series:

How to keep school from Dumbing Us Down.

Why classrooms aren't communities.

What, me motivate? Part I

School and the Law of the Jungle

Teaching or violence?

Lesson plan template (January, 2014)

What, me motivate? Part II

What, me motivate? Part III

Authority and freedom revisited: John Locke and A.S. Neill

Notes on Jones's 3rd Edition and Cooperative Learning