Part 2 – Seeing the Forest Through the Trees

One acorn started it all. Now we have a forest of oaks and still a long way to go. When Michael Maloney founded Quinte Learning Centre in Belleville, Ontario with one small classroom, one desk, one blackboard, and a single student in 1978, he had no grand vision of the future. Instead, he had a new relationship, including two young children, a dog, a cat, a mortgage and no job.

Fortunately, he also had faith in his experience of seeing struggling students blossom into classroom stars using the methods he had gleaned from his mentors and used in special education classrooms in his local school district.

1.    The three major methods all came from the behavioural community. Classroom management strategies were derived from the work of B.F. Skinner and his students and colleagues from Harvard. This method showed teachers how to get kids in their seats ready to learn.

2.    The second method, Direct Instruction, came from Zig Engelmann, Wes Becker and their associates at University of Oregon. It demonstrated a method that provided consistently successful instruction in reading, writing, spelling and math.

3.    The third method, Precision Teaching, which measures student progress in a minute or less, came from the work of Ogden R. Lindsley and his colleagues at Kansas University. Being fortunate enough to have these three creators and their students as his mentors was really all that Michael needed to build a successful tutoring company.

In a small town, like Belleville Ontario, word of mouth travels quickly, so that within 18 months, Michael added a full service school to his learning centre. Community support continued in abundance. The Chairman of the district school board pulled his son out of a district public school and placed him with Michael.

For the next 38 years, Michael, his teachers and the ever growing group of colleagues created learning centres and schools in an attempt to increase the impact of the combined methods and to help many thousands of children. Michael, Anne Desjardins and Pam Broad, the original QLC teachers, published the seminal research article on the effects of the amalgam on special needs students in the Journal of Precision Teaching in a paper called “Teach Your Children Well” which will be reviewed in future posts.