When Behavior Analysis is Insufficient Have you ever head the saying "No good deed goes unpunished" before? In the last post, Back to the Trenches, I talked about helping with a school’s toilet training program. Now here’s a story where I learned when Behavior Analysis is insufficient. Having helped Dave with his schoolâs toilet training program, I began to get calls from other principals. Principal Chuck had a seventh-grade student, Darwin, who was evicted from class at least daily and was sent home frequently. His teacher and I set up Ed Kubanyi’s Good Behavior Clock system. Darwin earned rewards for his class by improving his attendance. Darwin became a model student and the class favorite. Two weeks later, as I passed by his desk to check a math assignment, I was confronted by a blank page. Darwin had done nothing because he could not read the questions. I had created a âdead man walkingâ, looking like a student and learning nothing. Behavior Analysis solved a behavior problem, but not the learning problem. In the research literature, I found the Project Follow Through Study, flew to Eugene, Oregon and was trained in Direct Instruction by Zig Engelmann. My colleague, Eric Haughton and I combined Engelmannâs Direct Instruction with Ogden Lindleyâs Precision Teaching measurement system, and Behavior Analysis. In education, there are times when Behavior Analysis in insufficient. But when combined with Direct Instruction and Precision Teaching, these educational forces became unstoppable! We took this amalgam into special education classrooms and consistently had students learning two years reading and math per year. During the next three years, parents began pressuring the system for more. Instead of expanding the program, the school board terminated it. Eric and I and our DI colleagues were dismissed, so I started my own private learning center. More from that story coming soon. Bonus: Check out the FREE lessons of the Maloney Method Digital Reading Program. If you can read, you can teach a child to read. CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR DIGITAL LEARNING WITH VIDEO LESSONS AND THE MALONEY METHOD
