SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Tips from a master teacher

I am reading a fascinating book, Teaching Needy Kids in Our Backward System: 42 years of trying, by Siegfried Engelmann, which I will review in due course, but I decided to post this long-but-worth-it excerpt (pp. 204-205), for two reasons: the author is writing about a couple of experiences he had in Canada (at Thistletown near Toronto and Bellevue, ON) and he provides powerful insights on teaching autistic children and training dogs.

“I explained that there are two ways to work effectively with these [autistic] children. One is ponderous, to plow through the program. The other is to trick the learner. To illustrate the trick technique, I asked the teacher to name some objects the child could not reliably identify. She listed six things, including a watch, a ring, a book, and a pencil. We got examples of al six objects from the teacher and people in the audience and put them on a table. Then I worked with the child. I did not review or even say the names of any of the objects on the table. I presumed that he actually knew the names of these objects. I tested that presumption with tasks that emphasized something other than the object name.

“For the first task, I pointed to a woman in the front row and said, ‘You’re going to give something to that person right there. Look at her.’ I told the woman to raise her hand. ‘That’s the person, right there. Listen: give the watch to that person. That one, right there.’

“The child picked up the watch and gave it to a man sitting three seats from the woman.

“I did the same thing with all the other objects. For each task, the child picked up the object I named incidentally and gave it to the wrong person. I pointed out that he did know the names of these objects in some form but he didn’t know how to mobilize his knowledge or link it to tasks that required him to focus attention on that object and the relationship of object to name. (If I had changed the task so that I acted as if the name of the object was important, and the person in the audience was secondary, the child would have picked up the wrong object and given it to the right person.) The child’s problem was not one of compliance but of not being able to control his attention. When he attempted to attend to something he experienced something like a blind spot. Things on the periphery were clear, but the thing he tried to attend to wasn’t accessible.

“The point was that the child needed work in plowing through the program so that he learned how to mobilize attention. At the same time, there were ways to accelerate the child or correct mistakes that did not involve repetition, but trickery. I demonstrated with a second child. For this one, I acted as if I was very concerned with his hands, which moved nervously. I kept reminding him to hold his hands down by his sides. I reinforced him for this behavior, and presented tasks from the language lesson with no particular reinforcement as if I was interested in his hands, not the tasks from the program. I made frequent comments about his hands. He performed flawlessly on material that he hadn’t been able to do when the teacher had demonstrated with him. I skipped far ahead in the program. He performed flawlessly.

“I combined trips to Thistletown with some work in Bellevue, Ontario, where I worked with first graders. After work one day, we went to a teacher’s house for a social get-together. The teacher had a large, playful German shorthaired pointer. One of the guests tossed a small pillow across the room and the dog retrieved it but woulnd’t let go. When the man tried to wrest it from the dog, the dog hung on, hunkered down, growled, and apparently thought this was the best part of the game.

“The dog’s master said, ‘It’s no use. We tried everything, and we can’t get him to let go of whatever he fetches.’ He listed some of the things they had tried - twisting his ear, swatting his butt. ‘Nothing works.’

“One of the guests said, ‘I’ll bet Ziggy could teach him to let go in three trials.’

“I said, ‘I don’t know. I think it would take four.’ (This was after a couple of drinks and my confidence level was high.)

“At the time, I didn’t smoke, but I knew from when I had smoked that dogs do not like it if you blow smoke in their face. So I lit up a cigarette and threw the pillow. The dog fetched and returned to me for the wrestling match. I grabbed the pillow, and he started his routine. I took a long drag from the cigarette, said, ‘Drop it,’, bent over, and blew smoke at the dog’s snout. The dog let go of the pillow and vigorously turned his head away.

“I did the same thing on the second trial - said ‘Drop it,’ bent over, blew smoke.

“On the third trial, the dog let go of the pillow as I was bending over, before I blew smoke.

“On the fourth trial, I said ‘Drop it.’ Before I started to bend, the dog let go.”