Doc Meek

Archive for February, 2010

I spent more than two years in the Kingdom of Tonga, a group of islands in the South Pacific, helping administrators and teachers to inspire students to become more active learners in their own learning processes.

The idea was to have students depart from being bored passive learners, and to become more involved in/on their own learning pathways. As students found learning more meaningful, they enjoyed learning more, and perhaps became more involved in planning their own future. They might even learn to love learning and become life-long learners, an asset in today’s world.

Administrators and teachers (and students) found that switching from the British lecture model to active student involvement in their own learning, not to mention cooperative efforts to help each other along their learning pathways, created chaotic conditions in the classroom. At first.

As time went on, and teachers and students persevered in the new cooperative model, they all began to enjoy learning/facilitating more than the old style of “one-way” instruction or lecturing (and forgetting).

Over time, as the students and teachers enjoyed themselves more and felt more competent in using the “new way of doing things” in the classroom, student achievement went up. In-school test scores rose and external examinations scores climbed as well, making the classroom success a public accomplishment, not just a private satisfaction to the students and teachers (and administrators).

The overall success rates in the school went up, and the failure rates fell. An initial failure rate of 88% was reversed to a success rate of 88%. This was astounding to administrators, teachers, students and parents, and the success tended to reinforce itself with each passing year.

More importantly, student and teacher satisfaction with the educational processes (learning how to learn, not just what to learn) climbed, and the processes became even more meaningful to both the participants and the “onlookers” in the community, and even overseas in New Zealand, where the initial versions of the external examinations were created. – Doc Meek, South Jordan

I mentioned to the Mom whose son had been labeled ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) that I was not fond of labels. I said that while a “private label” may be necessary for funding, insurance, or medical purposes, I hoped that in everyday life, neither she nor her son would take the label too seriously in terms of finding solutions for school problems.

I have found that when working with a child who has been labeled ADD, say in grade 4, that I would generally ignore the label and inquire: “Harold, the teacher tells me that you have the ‘squirmies’ in her class, that you are a bit restless, that you don’t find it easy to stay at your desk. Is that right?”

I have found that it is much easier to help the child find ways to overcome the “squirmies” than it is to overcome a label, which is, in the final analysis, really a description of the child’s behavior, not an eternal pronouncement carved in stone.

No one really knows what’s going on inside the child’s head, exactly. I would much rather work with a friendly mystery, than a dismal certitude, wouldn’t you? Besides success is greatly enhanced when you work with concrete behavior, not deterministic labels.

The same problem occurs with adults. Let’s say somebody has been labeled “alcoholic.” It is a lot easier for them to change their behavior when I work with them in overcoming their “drinking problems,” which is a set of concrete behaviors, with which we can work, piece by piece, as opposed to trying to refute a label that some think is stamped in their psyche “forever.” – Doc Meek, South Jordan, Utah

With the help of that great Mom, Mrs. Elmer, whom I mentioned in my first post (and the boy of course), all three of us got to the top of the mountain!

The first thing we did was ask Mrs. Elmer’s son Bob what he liked and what he was good at. He loved sports so we began talking in a silly fun way to that part of his brain that was so smart about baseball. Then we introduced the smart baseball part of his brain to the spelling part of his brain, which was not so smart, yet.

Turns out the two of them (the two parts of the brain) were able to team up and turn the spelling part into a great team player. Bob learned to spell words he had always avoided and began to think, to himself: “Hey, maybe I’m smarter than I thought!”

This was just the beginning. We taught young Bob how to make pictures in his mind’s eye so he didn’t have to try and struggle to remember. He just looked up at his special TV screen (projected from his mind out in front of him) and wrote down what he could see clearly. No more hurt and anger about not being able to remember stuff. “I just copy it off my secret screen,” he says.

His marks went up. Now he was seriously thinking, “Hey, I am smarter than I thought.”

After we helped Bob discover he was smarter than he thought, his teacher told us what he reported to her: “Boy, I had no idea I could read like this! After I went to Dr. Meek, I liked going to school instead of getting into fights all the time.”

– Doc Meek