Grandma's Law

In the post below Dennis Edinger, Professor of Psychology and Special Education (Retired), shares an early 1967 Precision Teaching experience with us. The post was part of a response to a chart share session (www.tli.com) and exemplifies the effectiveness of the Standard Celeration Chart in focusing the teacher's attention to the pupil's daily, charted behavior to improve learning.

Simmone Pogorzelski (SPogorzelski_AT_chilli.net.au [e-mail?])

From Dennis Edinger
Sent: 26 April 1999
To: SClistserv@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
Subject: Analysis of Abigail's Charts

Two weeks into working with Og (Ogden Lindsley), he sent me to a juvenile penal facility as a teacher of children who refused to enter the school and roamed the campus at will. On my first day I was attacked with a tire iron, on my second one a kid tried to drop a Remington typewriter three floors using my head as a target. After two weeks my charts were bouncy and Og's door remained closed to me.

I sought consolation with Joe Edwards (a senior Ph.D. candidate who ran the Free Operant Conditioning Laboratory). He asked me to consider, over the weekend, not only what I was doing, but what I was not. He told me the answer was in the charts. Thanks Joe! I discovered that although I had charted behavior, I had not one charted behavior under control.

There was an "off limits" building on campus, an old warden's residence, where I could always find the kids. It was their hangout. On my 30-minute drive there I noticed an old candy store and I bought a couple of gross of chewy caramel candy. I arrived at the state certified, banned and posted "off limits" building (but the only building where I could get the kids in a group) and I put a piece of candy on the fireplace. I announced that any kid who could run up and down all three flights of stairs could have a chewy caramel candy. They were no fools; this was "off limits" and free candy! I started my chronograph and they started running. In thirty minutes I had nine dead tired kids, faces grubby with caramel, breathing hard and asking "What next?"

I was ready. I was a real certified special education teacher! I had my curriculum. Arithmetic First! One piece of chewy caramel candy for each ten correct responses, "Raise your hands when you have done ten" (the worksheets were grouped in problem sets of ten.) Hands went up, but no candy was presented. By the second group of ten, several kids had candy. They became restless and started to mouth off about me not being fair. I said, "Okay, run the stairs, but now two laps for each piece of chewy caramel candy". They bitched, but they ran. Then back to another set of worksheets for a different subject. Joe was correct; I hadn't had any behavior under control, right or wrong, old or new! I had valued the curriculum, not the behavior. Not a single behavior! But now I had a class at a bare minimum, in a forbidden building.

Og heard of my little success and invited me into his office. Beaming and waiting for praise (by then I'd learned about "reinforcers") I stood at parade rest. Og commented: "Nice charts, too bad the kids aren't learning anything (edited response)". He was right. I had adjusted the response difficulty correctly for each child as any curriculum expert would, but I had failed to note that the kid's rates were hit and miss on spells correctly, spells wrong, adds correctly, adds wrong, etc. Again I headed for the basement lab and Joe Edwards. "Damn, Dennis", he said, "The answer is in the charts and you already know it! Read the data, man! Read the data!"

I told the kids the next day (about a week from "staircase running" day) that they could only have a chewy caramel candy if they could get ten addition problems WRONG! It took three days for them to figure out that if they did their addition correct and then erased the answer and added one that they got the most candy. They learned everything wrong for a full week, but at markedly slow rates (having to do their work right first, check and change). I changed the contingency back to correct responses. By then we had a brand new Xerox and clear black charts in place of the thermal stuff we'd been using. I spent the entire weekend charting all my data.

I came in and showed it to Nancy J.A. Johnson. She hugged me, grabbed my charts and ran into Ann Dell Duncan and Eric Haughton's work areas screaming "He's got alligators, he's got alligators!" I was a student at the University of Florida (Go 'Gators), not KU and I was confused. The house was in disarray. "Dennis has alligators!" Now for Nancy an "alligator" was a chart sequence that looked like this <. Correct going up, incorrect going down or flat on the floor. Og spent twenty minutes with me that day, just talking. He took me to the basement and pulled out a Conjugate Reinforcer Servo and gave it to me "for my rack" in the Free Operant Laboratory. I was in heaven.

Ok Dennis, you say. You're bragging. What's the point? Ok, I'll agree I like remembering how I learned new stuff. I cherish my very first 'Sponse, each and every one. They teach me and, they teach others.

The point is this. Og had a Grandma. I had a Grandma. Everybody had a Grandma. And all Grandmas had a Law: "Try, try, try and try again". "Grandma's Law" was the first law of behavioral science I ever learned.

What I like about the Standard Celeration Chart is that it allows me to be Sherlock Holmes. Instead of a simple prism to show color frequency it gives behavior a precise six cycle semi-log spectrometer and I can both see and count all the characteristics of the behavior spectrum I choose. It is the correctly refracted lens for my eyes that lets me see precise behavior characteristics instead of fuzzy curriculum plans.

Finally, Tommy, Eric, Carl, Nancy, Ann, Joe and the early PT students at KUMC all assured me that the IF I COULD GET THE BEHAVIOR ON THE CHART, THE KID WOULD TEACH ME TO TEACH HIM! They force-fed me "Grandma's Law". This is the solution, I think, to Abigail's concerns about her student's behavior. TRY, TRY, TRY AND TRY AGAIN!

Dennis