Teaming

I just started reading Amy Edmondson’s book entitled, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy. I have been waiting for her to consolidate her research into one book. Although her work is primarily geared towards business, it is highly relevant to the issues we face in education. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in promoting a type of education that empowers our students to be leaders in work and life.


She covers familiar ground in reviewing the management model that worked for a factory system. I have yet to find anyone in education agree that we should manage and organize our schools based on the factory model of management. This intellectual acknowledgement, however, has had little or no impact on changing how schools are structured for our staff and students. What this book contributes is an excellent framework for understanding how we need to change.

She proposes that there are two basic frameworks for organizing a collective endeavor:

• Organize to execute

• Organize to learn

Organize to execute

Edmondson describes how the demands of getting people to perform in predictable, standardized, measurable ways created a system designed to implement and manage predetermined plans (designed by those in leadership positions)to produce desired outcomes. Organizations need their plans to be executed efficiently and workers were evaluated by how well they follow these plans or orders-basically doing what they were told to do. Since the work was often repetitive, tedious and arbitrary, everyone in the organization needs to be controlled usually through rewards and consequences.

Edmondson states: “Many consider the ability to measure and reward the specific, differentiated performance of individuals crucial to good management-a belief that is inaccurate and unhelpful in certain settings…fear worked reasonably well to motivate employees…As a society we are still largely inured to a fear-based work environment. We believe (most of the time, erroneously) that fear increases control. Control reinforces certainty and predictability. We don’t immediately see the costs of fear…In fact many managers believe that without fear people will not work hard enough…Traditional models of organizing emphasize plans, details, roles, budgets and schedules-tools of certainty and predictability… the managerial mindset that enables execution actually inhibits an organization’s ability to learn and innovate.”



Organize to Learn

Edmondson explains that organizations today need to be able to adapt to a complex, constantly changing environment. She says,“ In this dynamic environment, successful organizations need to be managed as complex adaptive systems rather than as intricate controlled machines.” Organizations need to be designed to be constantly learning and growing. “The learning imperative requires relinquishing control as the ultimate goal. Teaming is the way for organizations to learn. Teaming means bringing people together to generate new ideas, find answers and solve problems. Teaming, it seems, requires a new type of leadership that supports speaking up, asking questions, and sharing ideas…learning is a process of action and reflection, in which action is taken assessed and modified to produce desired results…this requires leaders who work to create environments that support and encourage sharing, experimenting and learning.”

Transitioning
She describes how the “organize to execute” mindset is hard to lose: “it frames how we interpret our own and others actions, shapes are expectations for busyness and often determines our response to failure. Despite rhetoric to the contrary, many of us still expect ourselves and others to get things right the first time. We view failures as unacceptable. We issue directives to those below and look for direction from supervisors above. We prefer going along with the majority opinion rather than risk conflict or job loss if we truly speak out.”

“To promote teaming, leaders must trust those they lead…Letting go of outmoded, but taken for granted, concepts of authority and hierarchy takes effort.”

Today’s dynamic environment needs people who “… know how to experiment, how to think on their feet, how to work in the absence of rules, how to adapt quickly”.

Application to Bullying Prevention

You might be thinking, “How does all of this apply to bullying prevention?” My answer would be everything. Bully prevention efforts (no matter how “well executed”) will continue fail, until educational leaders on all levels see this connection and start to change the school environment. We must first recognize that schools are typically entrenched in the “organize to execute” structure designed to control and manipulate administrators, teachers and students. This recognition needs to spark the change process toward something aspirational, something designed to promote the skills, knowledge and attitudes necessary for “teaming”. The teaming that Edmondson describes, coincidentally, is the type of learning the people welcome and embrace without the need of tight controls and management. It is the type of learning that is intrinsically motivating that develops self - regulation based on an awareness of and respect for the contributions and the needs of others.

I am convinced that students, who are rewarded for compliance to authority and with following the rules being paramount in their minds are not likely to be empowered as bystanders; they will fail to develop the moral conscience that will guide them to doing what is right often requiring them to take risks. Effective bullying prevention requires more than just preventing and reducing bullying; it requires moving from as Amy Edmondson would say from “organizing to execute” to “organizing to learn.” It shouldn’t be a radical idea to assert that schools of all places should organized to learn.

With No Strings Attached

The story of Pinocchio is a parable for how children can grow from being extensions of ourselves, or mere social constructions,  to becoming  authentic full human beings.  This is a process not a one time event and it does present challenges for everyone involved.  The transformation that took place in the story was not just for Pinnochio; it was for Geppetto too.

Looking back on my experience as a parent, I realize that I didn't so much raise my children as much as the process helped me learn what it was to be a responsible, caring adult.  Realizing what I wanted for my children was not always the same as what they needed was a learning process for me and probably for any parent or educator.  Robert Bly once said that it takes 35 years for someone to stop living the unlived life of their parents.  The moments that I most regret were the times I realized that I was pushing my children to do things or achieve things that were more for my own sake than it was for theirs.  Looking back I was glad I realized this and learned to respect them for who they were and allowed them to make mistakes, fail and struggle.  I tried to provide a home base for them so that I support them through these times.  It would have been easier to intervene or control rather than respect their need to experience their own life rather than the life I wanted for them. 

Ed Deci states that whenever anyone tries to control another person's behavior in any way there are two main responses: compliance or defiance.  I went to a very strict, punitive Catholic school where most of my behavior was compliant.  I was afraid and anxious about what would happen if I didn't comply.  In fact to this day I can remember seeing a student in first grade being physically disciplined by a nun grabbing him by the ear and shaking him.  I recall witnessing this and feeling that I never, ever wanted that to happen to me.  Looking back I now see the power that this fear had on me, not just for the 12 years of Catholic education, but over my own life.  I can see how in school I was the person that the school wanted me to be.  I recall longing for the summer where I played outside with my friends with a great deal of freedom.  I felt like I was two people-I was myself in the summer and someone else in school.  Since success in school governed so much of how we view our lives, my summer self was left behind as I grew older and most of my decisions as I grew up were ones shaped and influenced by the self shaped by the school. 

Ironically for me, I viewed success and approval easier to get in school rather than out of it, so I became a teacher and later a principal.  I think however my professional commitment was to promote a type of education that was opposite from the type I had.  I wanted schools to be places where kids could be who they really were and not just be who we wanted them to be.  I viewed mistakes and problems as just part of growing up.  When kids didn't "behave", my response was not  to get them to comply; I felt that it was my responsiblity to find out why school wasn't working for them. I took their acting out a signal that the school needed to do a better job of figuring out how to meet their needs. In figuring that out,  I learned many, many things about myself and about kids.

Luckily, my parents had too many of their own problems to be concerned with trying to control or manipulate my life.  I think  I would have been a lot worse off if I had faced such control from both home and school together. I think I was able to 'survive' my compliance response to a controlling school even though I developed a great need for approval in order to justify many things that I did.  I was a success in school by most measures because I happened to have the skills and temperament to gain approval.  Looking back I feel  bad for the kids who didn't come school equipped to succeed through no fault of their own.  They often needed to define themselves in opposition to controlling forces in their lives. Either way, cutting the strings was not an easy thing for those who complied or those who defied.

Bullying is a terrible sympton of the failure of an organization to value and understand the importance of "cutting the strings" that are attached to people. Healthy organizations want people who don't just follow orders and comply with the status quo. Bystanders, who speak up and respond to bullying as something that is morally wrong and take the risks to do something about it, have to be full human beings who operate without strings attached. They have to shed their strings and replace them with deeper bonds of caring and respect for their fellow human beings.  People who act in this way cannot be programmed to do so-they must grow into it with our guidance and love supporting that growth.


This is why I feel it is imperative that educators really think through so many of the "givens" that are accepted about how we educate our children. We cannot just follow along with programs like PBIS because everyone is doing it and their results are so good.  We have to have higher standards for success.  We have to think about what education really means and how our main task is to help children become full human beings with no strings attached.

Authenticity

I just returned from the Learning Forward conference in Boston. I had the great opportunity to hear Michael Fullan and Andy Hargraeves deliver a keynote address. They spoke about their most recent book that they co-authored entitled, Professional Capital. They take the concept of capital from economics (something that adds value and net worth to any enterprise) and extend it to education.


They contrast two versions of capital in education today. One version is of business capital that views education in the marketplace where the  motive  is to reduce costs and increase profits. This type of capital carries several assumptions:

 Teaching is simple and doesn’t require extensive learning

 Data gives you the answers

 Teachers can be replaced by technology

 Education is aligned with lay notions of teaching and learning


This means that teachers can be trained in series of skills or mechanical behaviors following a program or teacher proof materials. This  falsely equates the enthusiasm for teaching by new teachers with competency. (New teachers cost less than experienced ones).

Professional capital as opposed to business capital in education values the collective work of professionals supporting one another’s ongoing growth and expertise. The type of capital has these assumptions:

 Teaching is technically sophisticated and difficult

 Teaching is about developing wisdom and judgment over the years

 Teaching is perfected through continuous development

 Education requires collective accomplishment and responsibility

 Education should moderate and maximize the use of technology



I share this perspective because it resonates with what I have been trying to articulate in my recent blogs. Although it might seem to be a stretch (stretching is good thing), these two perspectives of ‘capital’ reflect the two visions of education in schools today.


The business capital articulated by Fullan and Hargraeves is based on a behaviorist view of education most prominently reflected in the PBIS programs that seem so prevalent in our schools. In these programs teachers need to follow the program, i.e. the scripts and protocols telling them what to say and do in response to student behavior. This is the opposite of viewing teaching as a professional that requires thinking, judgment, creativity and expertise.  Fidelity or compliance with the program is paramount; compliance on the part of teachers is essential for getting the compliance on the part of students. In both cases, thinking, questioning, or any deviation from the program is frowned upon and in many cases considered unacceptable. Data in the form of the number of behavioral referrals or time on task (regardless of what the task is) is proof of the program working-it gives the “objective” answers for dictating a course of action-it is something you really can’t argue with.


In doing some research on PBIS, I discovered a disturbing trend but one that makes sense from the business capital perspective:  many schools using PBIS have come to the conclusion that if it works for students, it should work for staff. There are now schools where teachers earn tickets and can accumulate them for rewards, e.g. special privileges in the school-parking spaces nearest the building. Teachers earn these tickets when they are "caught", “catching students being good”.


Ed Deci in Why We Do What We Do provides the best explanation for how these two views shape how we view the human experience:
Most modern psychologists and sociologists view the self as socially programmed, which means that people’s concepts of themselves are said to develop as the social world defines them…For these theorists, whatever the social world programs us to be, that is what constitutes our self.

The problem with that view of self … is that it makes no distinction between true self and a false self. It fails to recognize that we each begin with an intrinsic self (nascent though it be) as well as the capacities to continuously elaborate and refine that self. Thus self can develop in accord with nature, or it can be programmed by society. But the self that results from these two processes will be very different.

The intrinsic self … is a set of potentials, interests and capabilities that interact with the world, each affecting each other…the development of the self is significantly influenced by the social world but the self is not constructed by that world. Instead, individuals play an active role in the development of self and true self develops as the social world supports individual activity.


True self begins with the intrinsic self-our inherent interests and potentials and organismic tendency to integrate new aspects of our experience. As the true self is elaborated and refined, people develop an ever greater sense of responsibility. Out of their needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, people develop a willingness to give to others, to respond to what is needed. By integrating such values and behaviors, people become more responsible, while at the same time retaining their sense of personal freedom.

... the false self develops as children accept the identity that controlling caretakers want them to have. In an attempt to please their parents and gain contingent love, children gradually intuit what it is that their parents want.



We as educators must first believe that children are not just socially constructed beings shaped in accord of what we want them to be. We must value their individual identity over our desire for the efficiency and order of getting everybody to do the same thing, at the same time just because the rules say so. Achieving such consistency cannot  and should not be our measure of success. We must believe that our role is to support students as whole human beings each with an unque identity.  Our intention must be to create the optimal conditions for their true and authentic selves to develop and flourish. This is extremely different from trying to control or manage them to fit our need for order and efficiency. It is a false dichotomy to say that this approach means letting kids just do what they want. It means raising them, educating them, guiding them, influencing them by example and by designing environments that meet their developmental needs.  This far from a laissez-faire approach. This type of education is how courage, wisdom, generosity, and a moral conscience emerge in children, they can choose the do the right thing even when they get nothing in return. The people who develop in this way ultimately become the people who have what it takes to stand up not just to bullying but to injustice. We need more and more people like this and our democratic society is dependent upon having citizens who can think and act with moral integrity with attention to the common good. 

Maybe the Answer is in Black and White

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” - Hannah Arendt

I have been doing some research on how PBIS (Positive Behavior Intervention Support) is actually implemented in schools.  There are many variations of it and these variations are encouraged as long as the basic tenets and practices are implemented.  These variations come from a PBIS committee in each school that looks at data to determine how to improve student behavior.  Depending upon the school, different strategies usually involving differentiating rewards, methods of distributing rewards and protocols for addressing problems are developed by this committee.

In all the schools I researched just about every has some system of giving out tickets to students who are “caught being good” that is following the rules or acting appropriately.  These tickets can be called many things often related to the school name or mascot.  They are also acronyms for the basic categories of positive behavior, e.g. Be Safe, Be Respectful, Be Responsible. The PBIS website recommends this:

Another activity for the SWPBS team is to determine a "gotcha" program. The gotchas are a system for labeling appropriate behavior. This website has many examples of gotchas in the primary section. Some schools use NCR paper for gotchas with one copy going home to parents, one to the classroom teacher, and one to the principal for weekly drawings.

These basic categories are made more specific in School-wide Behavior Matrixes.  These usually look like this:

Rules	Classroom	Hallway
Be Safe	Have materials ready	Have pass available
Be Respectful	Enter quietly	Use indoor voice
Be Responsible	Take seat promptly	Accept consequences without arguing

This is just a very small sample of a matrix.  Most school have more elaborate ones with many more rules spelled out  down to smallest detail.  Most of them leave no room for error and are supported by detailed lesson plans when the procedures are presented and practiced.

There are menus of rewards that usually describe how many tickets will earn more valuable rewards.  Many of these are turned into lotteries or raffles.  Students who earn the most tickets are often honored in monthly assemblies or special activities.

These programs are becoming prevalent in our country and schools received federal and state money to implement them.   This includes staff training and often requires a full time person in the district to maintain fidelity to these programs.

As I explained in earlier posts, these programs might help “stop the bleeding in some schools” by replacing emotional outbursts by teachers, harsh consequences and confusing inconsistencies among adults. 

 

A test that I think should be put to any type of program to determine its worth is asking this question:  What would the school/organization look like if the program worked perfectly?  The answer to this question for PBIS would be the elimination of inappropriate behaviors or zero behavioral problems to deal with. 

This is the scary aspect of this program.  If it is true (I believe it is) that the “medium is the message”- John Dewey said that it is the environment that “educates”, then what is the message that is really being given to students about education? It is pretty clear that the message is:  problems are bad and shouldn’t happen.  

That is not only scary message; it is one that is foreign to everyone’s existence.  Ask most people about a time when they learned the most and they will invariably tell you about a problem they had and how they learned from that problem.  The same would be true for if you asked a scientist or artist about how they had creative breakthroughs-they encountered a problem.

Here are some alternative to matrixes, menus, gotchas that I recommend that we try before going to such great lengths for manage our children: 

• how about using strong, trusting relationships to talk to kids about what is happening in their lives; 
• how about using stories about how we had problems and learned from them, 
• how about accepting the fact that kids are works in progress and will make mistakes and assume our role as caring adults to help them when they do; 
• how about assuming that they want to do good but sometimes are not sure what it is. 

Maybe we could just watch some old black and white TV shows like Andy Griffith and then talk to our kids.  

Here is one I just saw:

Opie is given a slingshot by his dad but told to only use with inanimate objects like tin cans.  He forgets his father’s directions and accidentally shoots into a tree killing a bird.  He feels terrible about this and runs into the house.  His father comes home and finds the dead bird in the yard.  While at dinner he mentions the dead bird thinking that the neighbor’ cat had killed it, but Opie runs from the dinner table to his room once he hears his father mention the dead bird.  His father confronts him about the dead bird and he admits that he didn’t follow directions.  His father explains the reasons why he gave him those directions.  Opie asks if he will get a spanking.  His dad says “no” but opens up the window to hear birds singing.  They look out together and  see three baby birds whose mother was shot by Opie.  He tells Opie that it is not just enough to be sorry that actions do have consequences and asks him to spend some time thinking about it.  The next morning he discovers Opie finding insects and worms so he can feed the baby birds until they can fly on their own.  His father supports him in doing this and they even put the nest in a cage to protect them from the cat.  The birds thrive and Opie is tempted to keep them as pets.  His father talks to him about how birds need to be free.  Opie listens and voluntarily decides to let the birds fly free even though he is sad. They walk into the house together arm and arm.

I think all kids are like Opie.  All kids need relationships to learn not tickets and rewards.  Maybe if we all just slowed down a bit with our plans and schemes to change and control kids and were a little more like  Andy Griffith, we might just discover that life with all of its flaws is a pretty good thing to share with others-just for its own sake.

Always let your conscience be your guide

Conscience: the sense or consciousness of the moral goodness or blameworthiness of one's own conduct, intentions, or character together with a feeling of obligation to do right or be good.

  

Last night on 60 Minutes, there was a segment about research being with done with babies as young as 3-5 months. It seems that babies at such a young age already show signs of moral judgment by preferring a puppet who has done a good deed rather than one that did something mean or unkind. The research also showed babies preferring puppets that liked the same food that they liked and this ‘bias’ towards similarity, could override their preference for the puppet who did good. It seems that as we are born ‘wired’ for language development, we are also born wired for moral judgment. The researchers commented that part of raising children meant nurturing and supporting this preference for doing well while at the same time helping them see and understand that differences among people are ok.

The key take-away is that children are not blank slates that need to be shaped and formed into being good. It is the old nature versus nurture debate that has been resolved toward an elaborate interplay between the two. I don’t think the implications of this research and other similar types of research have made their way into our educational system when it comes to behavior management.

  

I began my career in special education and was well versed in behavior modification theory and practice. I recall that one of the major assumptions that behaviorists held was that all behavior was a result of elaborate systems and sequences of stimulus and response behavior. They dismissed any ideas that attributed any behavior to internal processes or mechanisms. For them there was no “there there”. Cognitive structures described by Piaget were just mental constructs that could not be proven and therefore be misleading and a waste of time. The result of this school of thought resulted in a very behavioral focus for any attempt to deal with behavior that was inappropriate or not desired. In a way this approach is appealing since we can’t go inside of a person and make changes, we can only response to the person’s behavior. I think, however, that our need to simplify can blind us to aspects of human development, although complex and difficult to understand, are critical to education. Not everything can or should be reduced to merely managing behavior.

In the case of PBIS, the proponents of it will cite examples of it working and how it brings order to chaotic environments. As I stated in the previous post, it is not its success that I question. If it is working for whom is it working? Does it help adults keep kids on schedule and moving through a building? Does it help insure that every student takes out a book when the teacher says to take out a book? I will admit that it can do that and the better that it does those types of things, the less likely the adults in that schools will change anything about the school and the nature of education.

  

Perhaps the best story to counter the behavioral approach and its inherent limitations is the one Ed Deci offers in his book, Why We Do What We Do. He said that when he was just starting his career in psychology he noticed that young children needed no behavioral manipulations to learn-they naturally explored objects, were curious, would engage in trying to solve puzzles, etc. He wondered why when they entered school they suddenly needed rewards and consequences. He thought more about the institution that stifled the learning, than about what was wrong with the child who wasn’t learning in school. Learning and doing what you are told are two very different things, but I think schools have lost perspective on the difference between the two.

  

Ironically it is the success of the behavioral approach and of getting kids to do what they are told, that inadvertently makes bullying so difficult to address in school.

There are many reasons for this:

•  When students have less autonomy in the adult world, they will tend to seek it in the peer world, especially if they have few outlets for autonomy outside of school.
•  Moral behavior is more than following the rules. Moral behavior sometimes requires even breaking some rules think of MLK and Gandhi.
• Bullying can easily occur within the rules of most schools.
•  Intervening as a bystander requires a degree of risk taking that is not encouraged or supported in school environment that is primarily rule governed.
• Pleasing adults in control to gain favor or approval becomes the primary focus for students or becomes what constitutes good behavior in their eyes.
•  Control of behavior is external so when the external controls are not present, kids can lose their bearings and are at a loss for how to act.

Kids who become empowered bystanders can operate in an ambiguous world; they take risks, they use judgment, and they ultimately decide how to act based on an internal compass-their conscience. The more they act that way the stronger it will get. We set the bar too low for our children if all we do is expect them to follow the rules and gain our approval. Although it is a more nebulous endeavor, our goal as educators should be to work with parents in helping develop a child’s moral conscience. It is much better designed for addressing bullying than learning just to follow the rules.

I think the story of Pinocchio (even the Disney version that featured the song “Always let your conscience be your guide”) provides a parable for child rearing. Children cannot remain puppets whose strings are manipulated by adults. They have to live and make mistakes and ultimately find who they really are “without strings” in order to be full human beings. The stories we tell, the examples we set, the love and freedom that we give our children does ultimately guide (not control) them into being full human beings.

What If?

Discipline policies, codes of conducts, behavioral programs are all designed to maintain an orderly school environment and to control student behavior within that environment.  The underlying assumption is that these are written for the students.

 Here is another way of thinking about this:

“Our belief is that the policy is written for the school staff… It is not written for the students. Eighty five percent are well-behaved, and are not affected by it.  The other 15 percent have had people telling them not to do this or that most of their lives and are experts at ignoring those demands.  If rules (policy) changed behavior, we would no longer have a problem… We argue that school-wide discipline policies are written for a school staff so that it can create classroom and school environments where students can learn. “ -  Barrie Bennett and  Peter Smilanich in Classroom  Management-A Thinking and Caring Approach

This book makes the most sense on this topic than any book I have read.  It also doesn’t offer an elaborate system or protocols for managing classroom/student behavior.  It provides teachers with a way of thinking about and interpreting student behavior that will help them make better judgments and decisions when faced with any type of student behavior.  It also offers guidelines for deciding what behaviors require a consistent school wide response and what ones don’t.  It also advocates for changing the school culture and climate and puts the responsibility on adults for gaining students’ trust and respect (winning them over.)

This approach makes a lot more sense than so many of the approaches being used in schools today.  So much time, energy and money is invested in evidence-based behavior programs that require a high level of staff training and fidelity.   Staff need to follow elaborate protocols designed to be consistently applied to all students. 

I do understand much of the motivation for establishing such programs. I am sure to those who believe in a strict behavioral approach, inconsistency is to be avoided at all costs.  If there are teachers who yell at students for behaviors that other teachers ignore, students get confused. Teachers who react emotionally to students often do more to worsen the problem than correct it.    There are schools where staff behavior is out of control.  In those schools, teachers need to act and respond differently and often do not have a repertoire of alternate responses.  Programs like PBIS can come in handy to stop the bleeding, but triage is only supposed to be temporary-not a permanent approach to health.

 

I suggest that we use a little of our imagination to look at the problem of misbehavior through a different lens.

What if in our schools :

• ·      Adults placed a high priority on building positive, trusting relationships with all students-especially the ones who have the greatest needs.
• ·      Students had more choice in what they learned and learning was engaging and meaningful.
• ·      Teachers consciously worked toward building a strong sense of community in each classroom.
• ·      Students were coached in navigating the social world and had more opportunity to talk about problems.
• ·      Social skills were integrated into academic learning where students had to work interdependently.
• ·      Teachers invested more time in helping students understand the rules and have a voice in developing them.
• ·      The focus was on social responsibility rather than just following adult authority as the basis for following the rules.
• ·      Adults became consistent in demonstrating respect towards students, showing kindness, and accepting misbehavior as part of maturing rather than defiance.
• ·      Adults realized that they truly influenced student behavior by what they said and did rather than by controlling behavior by rules, rewards and consequences.
• ·      There was a greater recognition that responsibility required more from our students than just following the rules imposed by the school.

I could list a lot more “what ifs” but even these few would not only dramatically change the need for a behavioral program like PBIS, but would more importantly change the culture and climate of the school.   Programs like PBIS accept the basic assumptions underlying how schools have traditionally operated and therefore strives to do a better job of getting students to function within that traditional structure.  It operates under the assumption that the curriculum and instructional program can remain status quo rather than strive to be more meaningful and relevant.  It assumes that teachers can keep instructing the way they have for generations and students just have to attend to those ways.  Programs like PBIS ultimately let adults off the hook for accepting responsibility for the way things are and continuing to think that the students are the problem. 

Ultimately, programs like PBIS, fail to recognize that students want to learn, want to do well, want to get along with others and that learning is a rewarding and satisfying activity in and of itself.  This is more of the natural state of affairs and doesn’t have to be manufactured and controlled.  We need to look long and hard on why we as educators don’t believe in the fact that students are wired to learned and place a priority on the conditions for allowing learning to flourish.

Could we at least try putting some of these “what ifs” into place before we impose these behavioral programs on every student.