Precision Teaching
Precision Teaching is an instructional approach, or tool, for accelerating students' development in basic skills or basic knowledge areas and for improving instruction as well as monitoring its effectiveness. Precision Teaching does not take the place of the instructional programs we offer; rather, it adds a 'fluency' component to the work we and our students do. For five years, we have used the methods of Precision Teaching, which were initially formulated by Ogden Lindsley in the 1960's. As a result, our students finish their educational programs with us more quickly than was previously possible.
Adding a fluency component means that we teach skills that students then practice until the skills are not only accurate but performed at a rate which ensures that they are retained and maintained even without practice, that they are available even in taxing or distracting learning situations, and, finally, that they are transferred to more complex skills or knowledge tasks. In other words, students are learning to be proficient and to perform without hesitation in addition to being accurate. Moreover, when skills and knowledge are secure, students are confident rather than resigned to an inability to learn.
We chart students' progress according to correct responses during timed practice—the number correct per minute rather than just percent correct; this is an integral part of Precision Teaching. We share students' progress with them and teach them to chart. Both students and teachers can identify the difference between struggling performance and fluent performance, and teachers can make adjustments in
teaching and/or target the skill components necessary for fluent performance.
According to National Institutes of Health supported research published in 2000, fluency—the capacity to recognize words easily, to read with speed, accuracy, and expression, and to understand what is read—is essential for reading comprehension. Moreover, taught as one of a combination of techniques, it is effective in teaching children to read.
This important concept is now recognized in some mainstream teaching methods. Starting fluency training at the level of reading connected text, however, jeopardizes success when more basic, or 'foundation', skills are weak (proficiency in naming letters and producing the sounds which they make as well as instantly recognizing frequently occurring words). Moreover, the need for fluency extends
outside reading. It is necessary in what are typically classified as 'speech and language' skills: articulation, vocabulary, basic language concepts, and word finding. In spelling it is necessary that letters are formed quickly in addition to being formed accurately. In written composition it is necessary to not only write quickly but to be able to quickly access the spellings of words and phrases. In mathematics, it is
necessary to write numbers and access basic math facts quickly rather than to think about the orientation and order of numbers or to refigure a basic math fact for each computation. Particularly in mathematics, teaching higher-level skills without the prerequisite fluency in foundation skills wreaks havoc with
students' learning at a level commensurate with their intellectual ability.
The importance of students' proficiency in basic skills--so that they can use those skills independently in more complex tasks--is well-documented by Precision Teaching research. Lindsley and others have demonstrated significant correlations between rates of performance and students' abilities to retain and apply skills.
More detailed information about Precision Teaching is available at the websites for the Haughton Learning Center, haughtonlearningcenter.com, The Fluency Factory, fluencyfactory.com, Morningside Academy, morningsideacademy.org.
Elizabeth Haughton consults with our practice on a regular basis. She is a teacher who used techniques of Precision Teaching in her classroom for many years and who participated in the originally conducted research that demonstrated the correlation between rates of performance and students' abilities to retain and apply skills. For more than fifteen years, she has run the Haughton Learning Center where she has trained and supervised teachers. Elizabeth is trained in, and uses, many instructional programs, including the Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing (LiPS) program. Currently, she works privately and is a consultant to Morningside Academy, a school for children with significant learning difficulties in Seattle, Washington as well as other schools. |
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