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Terrence M. Scott, Ph.D. - Guest
Terrence M. Scott, Ph.D. is a professor, distinguished scholar and director of the Center for Instructional and behavioral Research in Schools in the Department of Special Education, Early Childhood and Prevention Science at the University of Louisville. Dr. Scott spent 24 years as a professor and researcher in special education and was the senior principal education researcher at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). He began his career as a counselor in residential treatment and has worked with students with challenging behaviors across a variety of settings. Since receiving his PhD in Special Education at the University of Oregon in 1994, Dr. Scott has written over 100 publications, has conducted well more than 1,000 presentations and training activities throughout the United States and across the world, and has successfully competed for more than $24 million in external grant funding. In 2004 he received the Distinguished Early Career Award from the Research Division of the International Council for Exceptional Children, and in 2012 he received the Outstanding National Leadership Award from the Council for Children with Behavior Disorders. He was elected president of this organization in 2013 and served as a two term editor of the journal, Beyond Behavior. His research interests focus on schoolwide prevention systems, the role of instructional variables in managing student behavior, functional behavior assessment/intervention, video-based training for school personnel, and scientific research in education. |
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W. Keith Sutton, Psy.D. - Host
Dr. Sutton has always had an interest in learning from multiple theoretical perspectives, and keeping up to date on innovations and integrations. He is interested in the development of ideas, and using research to show effectiveness in treatment and refine treatments. In 2009 he started the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, providing a one-way mirror training in family therapy with James Keim, LCSW. Next, he added a trainer and one-way mirror training in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and an additional trainer and mirror in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy. The participants enjoyed analyzing cases, keeping each other up to date on research, and discussing what they were learning. This focus on integrating and evolving their approaches to helping children, adolescents, families, couples, and individuals lead to the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy's training program for therapists, and its group practice of like-minded clinicians who were dedicated to learning, innovating, and advancing the field of psychotherapy. Our podcast, Therapy on the Cutting Edge, is an extension of this wish to learn, integrate, stay up to date, and share this passion for the advancement of the field with other practitioners. |
Dr. Sutton: (00:25)
Welcome to Therapy on the Cutting Edge, a podcast for therapists who want to be up to date on the latest advances in the field of psychotherapy. I'm your host, Dr. Keith Sutton, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. At the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, we provide training in evidence-based models, including family systems, cognitive behavioral therapy, emotionally focused couples therapy, eye movement to sensitization reprocessing, motivational interviewing, and other approaches through live in-person and online trainings, on-demand trainings, consultation groups, and one-way mirror trainings. We also have therapists throughout the Bay Area and California providing treatment through our six specialty centers, each grounded in an evidence-based approach, with our Lifespan Centers, Center for Children, and Center for Adolescents, where all the therapists are working systemically, our Center for Couples, where all the therapists are using emotionally-focused couples therapy, and our Specialty Issue centers, our Center for Anxiety, where all the therapists are using CBT and EMDR for trauma.
Dr. Sutton: (01:27)
And our Center for ADHD and Oppositional Conduct Disorder clinic, where we're integrating those four approaches. In the institute, we have our licensed experienced therapists, and for those in financial need, we have an associated nonprofit Bay Area Community Counseling where clients can work with associates, psych assistants, and licensed clinicians who are developing their abilities and expertise. Additionally, as part of our nonprofit, we also have the Family Institute of Berkeley, where we provide treatment, training, and one-way mirror trainings in family systems. To learn more about trainings, treatment, and employment opportunities, please go to sfiap.com and to support our nonprofit, you can go to sf-bacc.org to donate today to support access to therapy for those in financial need, as well as training in evidence-based treatment. BACC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so all donations are tax-deductible. Today I'll be speaking with Terry Scott Ph.D., who is a professor, distinguished scholar, and director of the Center for Instructional and Behavioral Research in Schools in the Department of Special Education, Early Childhood, and Prevention Science at the University of Louisville.
Dr. Sutton: (02:34)
Terry has spent 24 years as a professor and researcher in special education and was the senior principal educational researcher at the Stanford Research Institute. He began his career as a counselor in residential treatment and has worked with students with challenging behaviors across a variety of settings. Since receiving his Ph.D. in special education at the University of Oregon in 1994, Terry has written over a hundred publications, conducted well more than a thousand presentations and training activities throughout the United States and across the world, and has successfully completed more than 24 million in external grant funding. In 2004, he received the Distinguished Early Career Award for the research division of the International Council for Exceptional Children, and in 2012 he received the Outstanding National Leadership from the Council for Children with Behavioral Disorders. He was elected president of the Council for Children of Behavioral Disorders in 2013 and served as a two-term editor of the Journal Beyond Behavior. His research interests focused on school-wide prevention systems, the role of instructional variables in managing student behavior, functional behavioral assessment intervention, video-based training for school personnel, and scientific research and education. Let's listen to the interview. Hi, Terry. Welcome.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (03:53)
Oh, thank you.
Dr. Sutton: (03:54)
Yeah, thanks for coming on today, I really appreciate it. I know about your work, I was actually doing some searching online for research papers on positive reinforcement. It's an area that, when I'm working with families and when I'm teaching, I'm helping to highlight and understand because I think a lot of people will kind of gear towards more consequences or so on as they're setting structure, whatever it might be, but it's such an important aspect. So, I ended up finding your information and reached out to see if I could interview you to hear about your work and your thoughts on positive reinforcement, some of the research, and so on. Before we even get into that, I'd love to hear about you, the evolution of your thinking, how you got to doing what you're doing.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (04:47)
Yeah, well, it's an evolution that was unplanned. So that's the way I think about it. I had an undergraduate degree in psychology and ended up working as a counselor in a residential treatment center. It was a fantastic experience, one that I think everybody who works with kids should have. One of the things that is really cool about having that experience is, I spent five years there. Every day you go in, you're challenged with some behaviors, and because it happens so frequently, you get conditioned pretty quickly to what works and what doesn't work. And, that always interested me, the idea of probability. We would set goals for “Could we have fewer problems with kids of this nature, that nature?”. And when we start thinking about setting goals, it puts an incentive in there for you to think about, “Well, if I really wanted these behaviors more than these behaviors, what kinds of things could I do that would affect that probability?”.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (06:11)
When I went to my doctoral program, my focus and interest were on instructional strategies for kids with challenging behaviors and I became very versed in effective instructional strategies. And one of the things that I always think about when I think about instruction is that feedback is an inherent part. It's not something that you can divorce from teaching. And if you're going to say, “I'm gonna teach somebody to do something really novel that they've never thought about before”, to have them then do that and refuse to give them any feedback on their performance wouldn't work. What I do run into a lot in talking to schools is this notion that negative feedback and positive feedback are equally effective, which is not the case. Clearly, there's a teachable moment when someone's made an error. But to simply allow people to make errors and continue to tell them they're wrong doesn't increase the probability of success. It increases the probability of whatever error they might be making, but it doesn't increase the probability of a better outcome. So I really try to focus on “How do we create an environment where kids are doing things that are successful so that we get to say “wow, good for you’”.
Dr. Sutton: (08:05)
So setting them up for success?
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (08:07)
Absolutely. And I had heard for everyone I was working in residential, “Catch them doing something good”, and I can remember thinking, well, what if they never do anything? And it removes responsibility from us. So I really prefer to think, what could we do to make them do something that we could catch them doing good. So the responsibility comes back to me for “What do I say”? “How do I say it”? “What body posture and language should I use”? All of those are probabilities for my ability to say, “Good for you. This is on you”. A lot of times I say that I define a teacher as somebody who plays tricks to make kids fall onto success and then gives the kids the credit for it.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (09:08)
That's our job. So all of that just evolved from working with kids that challenged me, repeatedly, day-after-day-after-day. And you get conditioned into, “Okay, I do these things”. My interest in research was “Why do these things seem to work more clearly?”. I've never run into anything that works every single time, nor anything that works with every single kid. But there are probabilities out there. And, so, if I am thinking about walking into a school or a classroom, or with children who are likely to make errors or have misbehaviors, my thought should be probability. “What can I do to maximize the probability that I'll get to say more positive things than negative things?”. And I think that ratio is really important, and we don't have very good hard evidence on that ratio…
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (10:18)
…in education. I know John Gottman has talked a lot about that. A lady at Michigan, Barbara Fredrickson, also has talked about that mainly for people with mental health, and I think John Gottman's mainly for relationships. That ratio seems to fall somewhere between three and five to one for optimal. The problem with that for us in education is: we are a lot of times dealing with kids who have had zero to a million. And even five to one doesn't make up for that very easily. And there's some evidence if you just look at academics, that if we're talking about a kid whose performance is more than a standard deviation below their peers, that ratio probably needs to be more in the neighborhood of fourteen to one. And that's really hard to do. I hear a lot of times in schools, people complaining that four to one is really hard, and a lot of times it is. But, the impetus for continuing to do it is that it'll be more than that if we can't make this work.
Dr. Sutton: (11:51)
Yeah. Yeah.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (11:53)
And there's a point at which I don't think we have any good evidence that we can bring it back. And I often talk about this as a snowball rolling, and that snowball's getting bigger and bigger. And once it gets bigger at all, before you can roll it downhill on the good side of the hill, you've got to roll it uphill. It's going to take fourteen to one to roll it up the hill and start using three to one to roll it down again.
Dr. Sutton: (12:20)
Sure, sure
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (12:22)
There's this constant thought about early intervention, and I don't think it means early childhood only. It means, as soon as you have opportunity to be with a kid, we should be thinking about that.
Dr. Sutton: (12:34)
Great. Great. And part what I've always thought about too is that, oftentimes, those three to five, one ratio that… and I also do a lot of work with kids with ADHD, so I'm telling parents the kids with ADHD are getting in trouble ten times more. So you have to do ten times more of the positive, but it doesn't necessarily mean you have to give them whatever ice cream or candy or something for all the positive. But even I think, and Gottman talks about this, even just a smile, even just a positive that I actually like you, that you are not, versus like a scallop like, “Ugh, you’re so annoying or pissing me off”. And that ratio, which I think sometimes too helps, at least the parents I work with, see it as like, that there are smaller things that they can do to also provide that positive reinforcement, or even just positive interaction, rather than “Hey, why didn't you do your homework?”,...
Dr. Sutton: (13:33)
“How was your day? Tell me all about it”, or whatever it might be. Those are the ratios too.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (13:41)
Absolutely. One of my main frustrations is there tends to be amongst kind of the lay person, a very negative view I have found in my personal experience with the concept of positive reinforcement. I believe that negative view is largely because they think only in terms of tangibles.
Dr. Sutton: (14:10)
Yeah. Like bribing?
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (14:13)
Well, we've got to buy something and give it to them. And you were just describing things that are just as powerful, telling somebody “Wow, you should be proud of yourself”. And this gets into some of my new research that you talked about a little bit, but just the way you look at students, there's pretty good evidence that kids can tell whether they were approving of them or not simply by the way we interact with them. And I don't think we think enough about what we're doing in that regard. And so we started about 15 years ago, and the data on the degree to which in schools people say positive things to kids has for years said it's horribly low. It's almost nonexistent in a lot of classrooms.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (15:15)
So we started looking at it in terms of kid behavior. We would go into a classroom and we randomly select a student. So I would just tell that our observers, when you go into a classroom, before you walk in the door, say to yourself, I'm gonna take third row, second person, that's your person. Now I want you to be coding the degree to which that student is actively engaged. You know, watching, talking, being involved. Or passively engaged, meaning they're there and their eyes are open versus not engaged at all; they're doing something else or they're asleep. And, disruptive behaviors. And you can predict those behaviors really well by the number of positive statements teachers make. But the number of positive statements that the average teacher makes during instruction varies by grade level. At elementary, it's in the neighborhood of a teacher says something positive that the random kid would be a part of, whether it's group or to them…
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (16:25)
…about once every six or seven minutes. At middle school, it's about once every 13 minutes. And at high school it's about once every 23 minutes. If we talk to teachers about those levels, they'll say they do it at way higher rates than that. And I'm guilty of that too because I will say, “I'm going to go teach, I want you guys to code me. I'm going to use really high rates” and it's always way lower than I thought it would be. Which is interesting, It's like I'm, I don't know if it's cultural or if it's part of being a human, but it isn't natural to be super positive all the time. Or just, anyway, and I don't know why, but we really struggle with that.
Dr. Sutton: (17:20)
Yeah. Well, and that's actually something I was wondering about. It feels like there are some people where it does actually come natural and second nature. Like, you know, some people that just are very warm and just affirming and they're not even putting much effort towards it. I don't know if you've ever looked at that or what is going on for those people or how they're doing, or “How is it so natural?”. Like how you're saying when for most people it is not as natural.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (17:57)
I don't know. One of the things we thought we would be able to do is really look at “How does that variance impact things?” And the problem is there's extremely small variance.
Dr. Sutton: (18:13)
Hmm.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (18:14)
It's not as if we've got teachers doing gigantic amounts and teachers doing small, there are some outliers. But it's really hard to find high rates. But you bring up a point, again, it's kind of where I'm going with a lot of my research, which is there is a reinforcing personality…
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (18:41)
…that I can't define. And I would bet you I could walk into a classroom and watch for five minutes and then write down, “Do you think this teacher has a good relationship with kids and the kids like this teacher?”. And I bet we would agree the vast majority of the time. But I can't teach somebody to have that if they don't. And it's like you were saying, there seems to be some people who are really good at that or natural with the way they interact with kids. And there's things that I can't measure…
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (19:24)
…but there's something there.
Dr. Sutton: (19:26)
Yeah. I was just thinking of a grad school teacher I had that was great. And you'd always walk out of conversations feeling really good. Like there was interest, a warmth that felt like, “Wow, she sees something in you”. And again, I don't think she was trying to do that on purpose, but I think sometimes there's some people like that, that kind of give you this sense. And one of the things that I've thought about with, when I'm doing behavioral systems with parents, that we're showing the kids that we see the good kid within them, despite the behavioral problems. Like one of the kids I was working with, she was 10 years old and I walked the parents through, they were having trouble doing the point system reinforcement.
Dr. Sutton: (20:10)
So we did it and I had them read it over and point out, “Oh, you did this good and that good and that good”. And I sent them out and I asked her “What was that like?”. And she said, “I didn't know they ever saw I did anything good”. And then I brought the parents in and had her tell them that. And it just like broke their hearts. Like they didn't even realize that it was so meaningful for her to see that they saw any goodness in her. I do a lot of work with oppositional defiant disorder. And so that was a piece there.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (20:42)
Do you think people…
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (20:53)
That somebody thinks “If this person did something wrong, they really need to know that was wrong”. And so I feel that feedback and then there's this mindset. “I can't say anything positive about anything right now because it's like I'm negating the fact that I'm upset with them for doing that thing”. And so they've elongated this negative feedback to, it basically puts kids in time out. We refuse to say anything positive to you regardless of what you do. And they think that it's a differential reinforcement, but it's not. It's only using one kind and ignoring the rest, putting it on extinction.
Dr. Sutton: (21:34)
Yeah, it makes me think of couples therapy too. I also do couples therapy and couples will oftentimes get into a, it's almost like when it's holding up the protest sign, they're not going to give anything positive of warm until they feel like the other person like really gets it or takes responsibility rather than sharing their hurt with them, but also doing a little soothing to keep the person in, saying “I know you're not a bad person, but this…” and that dance back and forth. What you're saying about this aspect of “If I bring in any of that in, then it negates and I have to drop the protest sign, I'm done. My argument's over. If I actually point out that there's anything positive or lovable or whatever it might be, that the other person won't hear it”. Like we have to get them to hear it first before we can then have that warmth back or that connection.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (22:25)
And just within the last week I was at a school and was asking some things about what their challenges were with behavior. And one of the things that they said that I hear quite often is, this kid does this thing, it's wrong. I send them out, the principal deals with it, and then the principal sends them back and I'm supposed to just treat them like nothing happened. There is this, and I think, again, it's this human nature thing that they haven't been punished enough yet. This needs to be bigger and bigger and bigger, with this notion that the bigger this gets, the better it will work, which is clearly not the case. What is it about us that we operate that, how have we been conditioned to think that way?
Dr. Sutton: (23:20)
Well, that's something that I find curious too. One of the things that my colleague Jim Keim who did a lot of writing on oppositional defiance talks about that kids that are more oppositional tend to be different than your average. Like your average kid, they get in trouble they get what four they get whatever the screens taken away for a week, they don't do it again. And there's a lot of people that are kind of like that. Like something big happens and they're like, okay, I'm not doing this again. But often for kids that are oppositional, for whatever reason, emotional regulation, ADHD, trauma, anxiety, or, you know, just temperament that they keep getting in trouble. It's not like that one big consequence is going to change it. And so oftentimes the parents and teachers get into this struggle or this pattern of interactions where they keep trying to extinguish the behavior with negative reinforcement, but it essentially makes the kid feels picked on. Or feeling just chipped away at rather than actually changing the behavior. I don't know if that's something at all because I think that some people think, “Well if somebody gave me that consequence, I would stop”. So they use that situation not knowing that maybe it's a different kind of scenario.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (24:34)
Yeah. What's interesting to me is it seems to be specific to social-type behaviors and not academic ones. So if you teach somebody to do plus two is four, and they mess that up horribly and say five, people do understand that, that requires a correction. We want to set them up to get it right as quickly as possible. But as soon as it becomes a social behavior, that logic goes right out the window. And I don't know, it's hard for me to understand why we tend to treat instruction of behavior so much differently than instruction of academics.
Dr. Sutton: (25:25)
Well, it seems like too, like you're saying it has to be more significant. It's almost like there's a kind of shunning from the tribe, like kicking the kid out of the tribe or like, “I'm going to give the cold shoulder, whatever, I can't just like be normal with them again after the kid comes back from the principal's office because I need to let them know that it was wrong or upset or so”. And so sometimes using the relationship as the consequence and pushing away rather than letting the consequence be the consequence, whatever that may be, and then separating out the relationship. One of the things I do with the families I work with helping them separate that out. So, say the kid gets grounded for the weekend because they were acting out, the parent can then let that go…
Dr. Sutton: (26:13)
…they don't need to give them the cold shoulder all weekend. They can say, kid says “I wanna go out with my friends”. “Well, you can't go out with your friends, but we can order pizza. We can watch a movie”. “Well, I don't want to do that. I want to go with my friends”. “Okay, well if you want to, I'm here”. You know, and that way, not using that relationship as the consequence. Or, the kids saying, “I want my phone”. “Sure. After your homework's done, you earn your phone”. “Well, I want it now”. “Well, you can't have it now, but I can help you with the homework if you want”. Coming in as the relationship, as the support in helping them get what they want. But I think oftentimes there's a feeling of not feeling valued or dismissed or, I don't really like the word disrespect because sometimes it gets used in connotations where maybe the kid doesn't really feel like they would respect the parent or the teacher. But this idea of feeling valued, I think oftentimes hurts. And the other person has to dig in until they get back that value or respect or so on.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (27:12)
Right. The other thing that I think this made me think of is one of the things that, when I talk about creating a positive environment, one of the arguments will be, well, this isn't fair to all those kids that are doing it right right now that I'm going to go…, and again, I'm saying we're not talking about tangibles, I'm talking about you. Saying, “Well this isn't fair to those other kids”. I would say that if you are providing regular feedback to all your kids, “I'm so proud of you guys”, “You guys get your work done”, “You're so responsible”, “I love having you guys' class”. When you try to individualize for a kid who needs more, those kids feel way above that. Like, poor guy. I'm not upset by that. But if everybody's in deficit, you've never said anything positive to anybody, and now you're going to do this only for the kid with problems, you're going to get a mutiny
Dr. Sutton: (28:19)
For sure.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (28:20)
You created a deficit. So if you want that to work differentially for a kid, you've got to make sure that the whole environment's positive.
Dr. Sutton: (28:31)
Definitely. You were talking earlier about the residential treatment and I worked at four different residential treatment programs before graduate school. And it was so interesting because there was only one that really had positive reinforcement. The kids earned points, which then earned levels and so on, versus all the rest, they would just lose. It was almost like they would automatically get the points, but they would lose those points. And I found that just in my own experience, that earning model actually was much more effective than the takeaway model because otherwise the kids feel entitled to everything and then mad that it's getting lost or taken away rather than feeling proud that they earned. And when I talk to parents about this, I talk about too that it's tough because it takes more energy because you have to be proactive, versus it's much easier to be reactive. Like, “Hey, you did that. I'm taking your phone away”. Rather than actually, like in Howard Glasser’s book, Transforming the Difficult Child, the Nurtured Heart Approach, he talks about how, for example, stopping talking on the phone to compliment the five-year-old who's not interrupting you. Remembering to reinforce not interrupting sometimes is harder because it's reinforcing the lack of the negative behavior
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (29:58)
So much harder. You don't need a reminder to say something when they've done something wrong, that's built-in. That's so important that it is so hard to do that. In the center where I worked, they could earn and lose points. But what would end up happening would be at the end of an hour, someone would go, “Okay, it's been an hour, so you've earned this many points”. They weren't linked to behavior.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (30:33)
But the negative points, you didn't say at the end of an hour, “You did this”. You said it right when they did it.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (30:40)
It became more like what you've described as you've got your points, you get them automatically. But you lost them for these things. And I think the way you described that is perfect, that they need to see that they're doing these things and that we're noticing those things as they happen rather than that these points are just automatic. We’ve lost that connection between what you're doing and what I'm saying.
Dr. Sutton: (31:12)
And Glasser talks about how kids want your energy and we tend to give more energy to the negative behavior than the positive. Say the kid's supposed to take out the garbage. I tell parents, if they took out the garbage, you might not say anything at all, or you might say “Oh, thanks”. But if they don't, you're like “Hey, you gotta take out the garbage, if you don't take it out…”, giving so much energy to that. And like you're saying, that positive reinforcement in the moment, I imagine with the puppy training you're trying to give that reinforcement in the moment that they do that thing, using a clicker or “yes” or whatever it might be.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (31:50)
Yeah. And, we're not using a clicker, we're trying to do it without one. And I make this point to people in schools all the time. The reason we never even consider using clickers with kids is because we've got words that they understand. “You did this, and doing that is exactly right, good for you”. The puppy's not going to understand that. The kids do, but they don't get that if we don't say it.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (32:19)
It’s, what repetition is necessary? And I think about this: how many repetitions of doing this with our puppy did it take before he understood what it meant to do this? But we'll say all the time, “I already told him” about a kid. But you wouldn't expect that from teaching academics. “Hey, I told him about algebra yesterday. If he's not getting it, that's on him”. You'd say, “We need repetition. We need to keep doing it”. But for some reason, when it comes to more social-type behaviors, all that logic again just goes out the window. It’s human nature, we all do it.
Dr. Sutton: (32:58)
It makes me think actually about couples therapy too. Because sometimes the partner will say, “I need this from you”, or whatever it might be. And they feel like, “Well, I told them”, but then they never say anything again, or when it happens in the moment, they're not going to say “Hey, that didn't feel good. I really need this”. And sometimes the way I describe it to my clients is that it's like learning to dance. We have to teach our partner how to dance with us. Just explaining the foxtrot and then expecting them to do it is not going to happen. And even when they do try to do it, it'll be awkward and missteps. And so we have to say, “Actually don't step there, step over here”. And there is a lot of nuance, like you're saying with the academics. There's all these little pieces that they're providing some teaching or correction on, or helping them learn how to do it better in such minuscule ways. But with the behavior, it's just blanket. It would be like if they just gave a grade on something the kid wrote, without actually pointing out what you took points off for and what they could do differently next.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (34:03)
Oh, that's a great analogy. I sometimes say, are we teaching kids or are we telling kids? Because I think there's a difference, and this gets back to the probability stuff. Saying to somebody, “Here's the rule, do it” is a pretty low probability. And the reason it's a low probability is because it doesn't attach to anything. And good instruction should link to something. Explicit instruction should say, “Because you already know this, and we all agree this is something important, this is important too and it connects to that. And there's this research, and I can't think of the authors off the top of my head, saying, when we teach things, and tell things to kids that we want them to do that don't connect to anything, it's just a random rule.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (35:07)
They're generally gone in 30 seconds. It went in one ear and out the other because they don't know where to put that. And so I like to talk about how your brain has all these folders. “What does it mean to be respectful?”. But if you don’t tell them what folder that goes in, it gets lost. So one, being explicit and really talking to kids about why we're asking for this, and two, engaging them in it. You're sitting there looking at me nodding your head, but you're thinking about something a mile away. We're not really teaching it. So how do I get your attention and get you talking to me as much as I'm talking to you? That's effective instruction. I think in schools, people get both of those things, but they separate them. And they say, “First I'm gonna tell you when you're gonna shut up, then I'm to engage you”. Well, they weren't listening while you were telling them. You need to engage them through the whole thing.
Dr. Sutton: (36:10)
Sometimes I think about it like creating bite-sized pieces.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (36:14)
Yeah.
Dr. Sutton: (36:14)
Helping them get the first part. Then we can add the second part, and then the next part. Because otherwise if you just give so much of it, it’s in one ear out the other.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (36:25)
So if you just count in a classroom or in a school the number of what we call OTRs, opportunities to respond, to instruction that teachers are giving. And I don't mean for the whole class period. I mean, while they're giving instruction on something novel or complex. And the number of times they indicate either with a gesture, thumbs up, or verbally. Just knowing that is the best predictor we have of whether students will be disruptive or not. We can't find anything that's a better predictor of that. And so I always am trying to remind people that instruction is the most powerful thing we've got if we're doing it correct.
Dr. Sutton: (37:15)
Yeah. So let me understand that. While they're giving the instruction or teaching whatever it is that they're teaching, you're saying giving some reinforcement, thumbs up to the kids, that is going to help kind of manage or decrease the potential behavior because they'll be more engaged in the instruction?
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (37:38)
I'll just give you the study we did where we looked at three things: (1) the degree to which the teacher was actively teaching. This is the percent of time looking at kids and doing stuff with kids. (2) Rate per minute of opportunities to respond. “What do you think? Turn your neighbor and tell them”, “Raise your hand if you agree”, “Pull one of those”. And the (3) rate per minute of positive feedback of any nature.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (38:03)
So you put those three things together and run a latent class analysis, and you get three clusters. So I think of them as high, medium, and low. Now, if you use those to predict the behavior, we know that if I watch a classroom teacher teaching a new lesson for 10 minutes, if the rate of those three behaviors falls into that lowest cluster, if I watch this whole class, these kids are 23% more likely to be off task than the typical classroom. And there's a 67% higher likelihood of misbehavior, disruptive behavior.
Dr. Sutton: (38:41)
Mm-Hmm.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (38:42)
What the teacher is doing when they're driving instruction is the most important thing we've got for predicting student behavior. And, this is my hypothesis, when you create instruction that makes kids successful and you give them the credit for it, the incentive to do other things goes away. “Hey, I'm good at this”. We all like being good at something, and we want to doing things we're good at. So those teachers are just creating higher rates of success and then giving the credit back to the kids.
Dr. Sutton: (39:18)
So it is the opportunities to interact, positive reinforcement… What was the third one?
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (39:27)
So one is just what we call active teaching. You're looking at kids, talking to kids, and you are driving this lesson, which is, again, just a percent of time. The other two were the rate per minute of opportunities that you gave the students to respond during your instruction and the rate per minute of the number of positive feedback statements that we gave.
Dr. Sutton: (39:50)
And I imagine too, it's got to be really hard for parents and for teachers because they've got so many kids. And I imagine sometimes, I use this analogy when I'm working with somebody that has difficulty with boundaries, I say, it's like if you were a teacher and you're trying to cater to every single child in the classroom, you'd be overwhelmed. You wouldn't be able to do it. Sometimes you have to make the decision that this is what we're doing. What are your thoughts on that, because I don't know if I could be in a whole classroom of third graders and manage that. That sounds overwhelming. But I'm sure there's the expertise that they have and the experience. But then also, it seems like it's maybe juggling with one hand and then doing something over here with the other hand for the kids that are struggling the most.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (40:46)
It definitely is something you need to practice. In my perspective, we aren't putting enough emphasis on this when we train teachers. Do they know that engagement is a good thing? Yeah. Do they have a set of strategies and are they skilled at using them? No. And I don't really know what to say about that other than it needs to be our focus. To me, this is what we call effective instruction. But I did, in a Midwestern state… they asked me to come and talk to new teachers and I had like 400 brand new teachers. And I talked about engaging kids and I talked about the strategies. And at the end I said, “How many of you have ever heard of any of these strategies before?”. Not a single hand went up. That's a problem. All of them said, “Oh yeah, engagement's important”.
Dr. Sutton: (41:45)
Yeah.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (41:46)
But it's almost like we're thinking engagement's important, but it’s the kids' responsibility to be engaged instead of my responsibility to engage them.
Dr. Sutton: (41:56)
That makes me think of something from motivational interviewing, one of the things that I took early on and learned. And what I took away from that is that resistance is something that's due to the therapist, not something that's within the client. And I think, similarly, like you're saying that the teacher is creating the context. Again, it's not that disruption is due to them. But they have a lot of influence, themselves, rather than maybe feeling like, “Oh, I have no influence”. It's these individuals that are outliers rather than this interactional kind of effect or pattern between the context that I create or the way I interact and how these children interact.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (42:42)
Interesting. We are just finishing up a federal research grant with the topic of how to change teacher behavior in classrooms and we're using motivational interviewing as the intervention. But the focus is on changing what adults do and using that as our avenue for changing the probability of student behavior.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (43:10)
It's really hard to change adult behavior compared to kid behavior. We don't have the contingencies. It's just hard.
Dr. Sutton: (43:21)
Yeah, that's kind of more ingrained. One thing that I was thinking about too, I'd love to hear your thoughts on, with ADHD, there's a lot of comorbidity with oppositional defiant disorder. And one way I think about it is that the kids with ADHD get in trouble 10 times more. So, they're getting yelled at and don't do that and whatever it might be. And so I think of Cooley's looking glass theory of self that we get our sense of self from how we're reflected in others' faces. And when we see a teacher or a parent always frustrated, annoyed or irritated with us, then we get this kind of internalized sense that I must be annoying, irritating, or bad, or so on, which can go one way to depression or the other way to feel like I'm not bad, they're just picking on me and I'm going to fight back and hurt them because they're trying to hurt me. Do you have thoughts on oppositional defiance or that kind of concept?
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (44:24)
I feel like the things that work best with those kids are the same things that work with all kids but done with far more intentionality. Which I think is what we're talking about. They need to be taught doing it right, as every kid does, but they may not do it right as often. And so what we're going to need to be far more thoughtful and intentional in the things we do. I guess one of the things that I believe from just my experience working with kids is that the good stuff, the high probability big effect side of stuff that we've got is pretty effective. Some kids do really well with it, some kids really need it, and some kids won't survive without it. So how intentional do I need to be? How intense for how long? I still run into this. “Well, I tried that and did it for three days and then I stopped doing it and they came right back to doing it". I was like, yeah but think of how many days they were doing it the wrong way. So those things are there, but they're going to need to go for longer, be more intentional, and be more intensive.
Dr. Sutton: (45:58)
Yeah. Maybe there's some different kids that need different levels of intensity, duration, or so on than other kids.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (46:11)
And there's this notion that we touched on earlier of relationships. Again, I don't believe I can teach someone to do this. What we started doing is, and we're just in the very infancy of this, but one of my colleagues, Alan Alday put a wristband on a teacher, pre-service teachers, and it monitors heart rate, movement, blood flow and, galvanic skin response. And then he has them watch videos of classrooms and when a kid misbehaves and any way it goes through the roof immediately. Now if I'm an adult, and this freaks me out, my emotions go up and the likelihood of me approaching that in a way that is instructional is pretty low.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (47:30)
Secondly, if that's the kind of thing that freaks me out, I need to have some systematic desensitization of sorts. I need repetition and practice with doing these things. So what we've done is we've written a grant proposal for this, and we're just playing with it right now, but we're putting the wristband on kids too. The teacher nominates kids that they say really have challenging behavior. Putting the wristband on them itself changes some things I'm sure, but…
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (48:08)
The question is, does, instructional behavior affect the biophysics, the emotions, et cetera of a student, and how does the student's emotion affect the teacher and back and forth?
Dr. Sutton: (48:26)
Yeah.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (48:27)
There's this emotional regulation piece that I think we think about for kids, but the adults play right into that. There's a really cool piece that we're not doing because it's too much right now, but it is possible to do facial recognition. There's a couple of people that say they can recognize like 30 personality traits or something with facial recognition. I don't know about that. But it would be really cool to say, can we predict how a student will respond, both their behavior and their biophysics, by the look on a teacher’s face? And if so, could we teach teachers to make those faces in the right way? And I'm not sure that we could, but I just believe there's a whole lot… I 100% think there's a set of effective teacher behaviors that have to be there.
Dr. Sutton: (49:25)
Yeah. Yeah.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (49:26)
But I also believe that, if you don't have the right personality, those things won't work.
Dr. Sutton: (49:31)
Sure.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (49:32)
And I can't put my finger on the personality part yet.
Dr. Sutton: (49:35)
Yeah. Well it sounds like there's a whole constellation, right. Maybe the teacher's emotional regulation, the way their nervous system responds. It makes me think of polyvagal theory and the idea of neuroception; how our nervous systems play off the nervous systems around us. It makes me think too, I also do EMDR for trauma and I do a lot of work with adults with ADHD and so on. And oftentimes the trauma, the big T or little T trauma, is the look on the teacher's face when they were in second or third grade, and they thought “I must just be such a bad kid that this person would get so mad at me”. It was so interesting, and it's been more than one person, but like you're saying that there is something on the face. It makes me think of Ekman's, work on emotions and how in such slight little bits, he’s got that kind of training to notice in the face, and it's a millisecond and you're supposed to pick that contempt or fear or whatever it might be.
Dr. Sutton: (50:53)
But our brains are picking that up on such micro levels.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (50:58)
Years ago, I don't remember where I read this, but is that a French anatomist Duchenne? And he mapped out all the muscles that you used to smile. To differentiate between an authentic smile and a forced smile, some research said you could ask kids, “Is this a real smile or not”? And fairly reliably they could tell. So there's something in that face that is pretty deep, again, I can't define it and measure it, but there's something in there. And if we could capture that, there's something we could use to increase the probabilities of success.
Dr. Sutton: (51:45)
Yeah, definitely. I think there was some research too on adolescents and that they perceived fear in adults as anger in their facial response to fear or seeing fear or so on. I don't know the reference for that. And I just think it's great the work that you're doing because I think the positive reinforcement is so significant and so strong. Have you seen a hundred humans at all from Netflix?
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (52:15)
No.
Dr. Sutton: (52:16)
So there's this series where they take a hundred people and they do different kinds of experiments over the the show. And one was they had one group hearing music with low notes and they're eating different foods. And then another group with high notes, different foods. And basically they have different experiences of sweet and so on. In one of the experiments, they teach the folks how to spin a plate on a stick, and they have a judging panel, and the guy picks out a different color ball, whether he is going to get positive or negative reinforcement. And then they get a score for the first time, then they come back the second time, and get a score. It's so clear. You can see how the positive reinforcement improves, whereas the negative reinforcement decreases their abilities and they become much worse.
Dr. Sutton: (53:04)
And there's one guy in particular that just flat out comes in and just sits down and refuses because the negative reinforcement from the first round was so negative. Later on, actually at the end, they then have that guy come up, and after they've explained the whole experiment and everybody's there cheering him on, he does it just the first time trying from all that positive support. Sometimes I have parents watch that because it's just so clear the effect that has.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (53:40)
Fascinating. I definitely have to check that out.
Dr. Sutton: (53:42)
It's in the “Pleasure and Pain” episode.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (53:47)
But it sounds like a cool show. Just the whole idea of these little studies that we get to see.
Dr. Sutton: (53:54)
It's definitely really interesting, they have several episodes where they do different little experiments. So what do you think is most important for folks to take away? I think sometimes people get confused that maybe it's only ever supposed to be positive reinforcement. And are you in that camp or are there also consequences or so on? I mean, you know, positive reinforcement is the most effective. But…
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (54:23)
If I ask what two plus two is and the student says five, if I don't say, “You are wrong”, I've missed an opportunity to teach something. I don't think that's the way we want to teach all the time, but we need to be able to have that. And I do think a lot of times when I talk to schools and I say, “We want to increase that ratio”, they hear “Stop saying to kids they're doing something wrong”.
Dr. Sutton: (54:51)
Mm-Hmm.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (54:53)
You can't do that. It won't work. We want to create an environment where you need to say that less often because they made fewer of those errors, at least compared to their successes. So I think it’s really important to think about both of them being really necessary components of effective instruction. But, again, if we're trying to teach solely or mostly by giving them negative feedback, they'll just stop trying. It is a learned helplessness essentially. “I can't do this. Why would I put myself through it?”
Dr. Sutton: (55:38)
Mm-Hmm.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (55:39)
“I bet if I flipped this teacher off, I wouldn't have to try this anymore.”
Dr. Sutton: (55:42)
Yeah.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (55:44)
The must-escape motivated behaviors.
Dr. Sutton: (55:46)
Yeah. And speaking of that learned helplessness, sometimes the kids are in so much pain and feeling so bad that they're then going to make the teacher feel bad too to offset some of that. So at least I might be miserable, but then I'll make the other person miserable too so it feels a little less bad.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (56:04)
And the other thing along with that is, and again, I make this academic versus other counts of behaviors… If you see in a classroom that a kid says “Two plus two is five”, the teachers will generally say, “Let's take a look at that”.
Dr. Sutton: (56:18)
Mm-Hmm.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (56:20)
“How do we do that? Let's count these up”. We call that a correction, that you've led them back through and made them get it right and said, “Good for you”. So we count those when we go to classrooms.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (56:36)
The rate per minute of those is so low that I've calculated it out. We see a teacher use one corrective statement for every nine schools we go to.
Dr. Sutton: (56:50)
Oh, wow.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (56:51)
It never happens. Now the problem with it happening that infrequently is that I can't get enough of them in a cell to run a statistic on it. If you just look at it like this in our string of code, here's a kid having a misbehavior teacher can do three things: do nothing, say “stop it”, or say, “What would be a better way to do that?” or something of that nature. Now I've got to look five minutes down the road in that string of code and say, what's the kid doing? When I look at it like that, the likelihood of the student being on task in the future is about the same for doing nothing and saying “knock it off”. But it’s higher when we've corrected it. So when we do use consequences for negative behavior, they should be instructional.
Dr. Sutton: (57:42)
Yeah.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (57:43)
But, as you know, we have this tendency to think “If I yell louder, they'll get it more or it'll be more meaningful, it'll work better”. It's just not the case.
Dr. Sutton: (57:55)
Yeah. And with parents, sometimes I encourage timeouts or take a break or whatever it might be. And then once both the parent and the kid are regulated, then they can come back and say “Hey, so what's going on? What led to that? Are you upset?” Or whatever to look at what's driving it and also potentially fix the behavior if there is instruction to be needed rather than just “You lost screen time” and then walking away from it rather than repairing or coming back together again. This is great, sounds like you're doing wonderful work, and it's such an important piece. I think it's psychology 101 and most people know this, but it is very hard to put into action. And I think like you're saying that there's some variance, but it's not a huge variance. It's something that's maybe a struggle for teachers and parents, and this isn't something that's maybe so natural outlying. But again, whatever it is, whether it's our human behavior or culture or so on, it's some intention that we have to set because we know that it's effective. It's just maybe hard to be able to get in that habit.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (59:13)
Yeah. It certainly is. And like I said, when I was proposing my dissertation in 1992, there was a guy named Hill Walker and I was asking him to be on my dissertation committee, and I told him about this study I was going to do to work with these kids with some social skills problems. And he did agree to be on the committee but said, “You know, we know that this works. We don't know how to make adults do it reliably”. And that was 30 years ago. I don't know that we're any better at that right now. It’s a little bit depressing.
Dr. Sutton: (01:00:02)
Yeah. That's an interesting area of research because we know there's been so much research seeing it works. I wonder how much research there is on how to get the adults to actually do it.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (01:00:13)
Right.
Dr. Sutton: (01:00:14)
Well, thank you so much for your time. This is great. I really appreciate it. We'll put up all your information to reference your work. I really appreciate this. It's been a great conversation. You're doing wonderful work.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (01:00:28)
Thank you. I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to talk.
Dr. Sutton: (01:00:31)
Great. Thanks a lot. Take care.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (01:00:34)
Bye
Dr. Sutton: (01:00:35)
Bye.
Dr. Sutton: (01:00:37)
Thank you for joining us today. If you'd like to receive continuing education credits for the podcast you just listened to, please go to therapyonthecuttingedge.com and click on the link for CE. Our podcast is brought to you by the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, where we provide trainings for therapists in evidence-based models through live and online workshops, on-demand workshops, consultation groups, and online one-way mirror trainings. To learn more about our trainings and treatment for children, adolescents, families, couples, and individual adults, with our licensed experienced therapists in-person in the Bay Area, or throughout California online, and our employment opportunities, go to sfiap.com. To learn more about our associateships and psych assistantships and low fee treatment through our nonprofit Bay Area Community Counseling and Family Institute of Berkeley, go to sf-bacc.org and familyinstituteofberkeley.com. If you'd like to support therapy for those in financial need and training and evidence-based treatments, you can donate by going to BACC’s website at sfbacc.org. BACC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit so all donations are tax deductible. Also, we really appreciate your feedback. If you have something you're interested in, something that's on the cutting edge of the field of psychotherapy, and you think therapists out there should know about it, send us an email. We're always looking for advancements in the field of psychotherapy to create lasting change for our clients.
Welcome to Therapy on the Cutting Edge, a podcast for therapists who want to be up to date on the latest advances in the field of psychotherapy. I'm your host, Dr. Keith Sutton, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. At the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, we provide training in evidence-based models, including family systems, cognitive behavioral therapy, emotionally focused couples therapy, eye movement to sensitization reprocessing, motivational interviewing, and other approaches through live in-person and online trainings, on-demand trainings, consultation groups, and one-way mirror trainings. We also have therapists throughout the Bay Area and California providing treatment through our six specialty centers, each grounded in an evidence-based approach, with our Lifespan Centers, Center for Children, and Center for Adolescents, where all the therapists are working systemically, our Center for Couples, where all the therapists are using emotionally-focused couples therapy, and our Specialty Issue centers, our Center for Anxiety, where all the therapists are using CBT and EMDR for trauma.
Dr. Sutton: (01:27)
And our Center for ADHD and Oppositional Conduct Disorder clinic, where we're integrating those four approaches. In the institute, we have our licensed experienced therapists, and for those in financial need, we have an associated nonprofit Bay Area Community Counseling where clients can work with associates, psych assistants, and licensed clinicians who are developing their abilities and expertise. Additionally, as part of our nonprofit, we also have the Family Institute of Berkeley, where we provide treatment, training, and one-way mirror trainings in family systems. To learn more about trainings, treatment, and employment opportunities, please go to sfiap.com and to support our nonprofit, you can go to sf-bacc.org to donate today to support access to therapy for those in financial need, as well as training in evidence-based treatment. BACC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so all donations are tax-deductible. Today I'll be speaking with Terry Scott Ph.D., who is a professor, distinguished scholar, and director of the Center for Instructional and Behavioral Research in Schools in the Department of Special Education, Early Childhood, and Prevention Science at the University of Louisville.
Dr. Sutton: (02:34)
Terry has spent 24 years as a professor and researcher in special education and was the senior principal educational researcher at the Stanford Research Institute. He began his career as a counselor in residential treatment and has worked with students with challenging behaviors across a variety of settings. Since receiving his Ph.D. in special education at the University of Oregon in 1994, Terry has written over a hundred publications, conducted well more than a thousand presentations and training activities throughout the United States and across the world, and has successfully completed more than 24 million in external grant funding. In 2004, he received the Distinguished Early Career Award for the research division of the International Council for Exceptional Children, and in 2012 he received the Outstanding National Leadership from the Council for Children with Behavioral Disorders. He was elected president of the Council for Children of Behavioral Disorders in 2013 and served as a two-term editor of the Journal Beyond Behavior. His research interests focused on school-wide prevention systems, the role of instructional variables in managing student behavior, functional behavioral assessment intervention, video-based training for school personnel, and scientific research and education. Let's listen to the interview. Hi, Terry. Welcome.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (03:53)
Oh, thank you.
Dr. Sutton: (03:54)
Yeah, thanks for coming on today, I really appreciate it. I know about your work, I was actually doing some searching online for research papers on positive reinforcement. It's an area that, when I'm working with families and when I'm teaching, I'm helping to highlight and understand because I think a lot of people will kind of gear towards more consequences or so on as they're setting structure, whatever it might be, but it's such an important aspect. So, I ended up finding your information and reached out to see if I could interview you to hear about your work and your thoughts on positive reinforcement, some of the research, and so on. Before we even get into that, I'd love to hear about you, the evolution of your thinking, how you got to doing what you're doing.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (04:47)
Yeah, well, it's an evolution that was unplanned. So that's the way I think about it. I had an undergraduate degree in psychology and ended up working as a counselor in a residential treatment center. It was a fantastic experience, one that I think everybody who works with kids should have. One of the things that is really cool about having that experience is, I spent five years there. Every day you go in, you're challenged with some behaviors, and because it happens so frequently, you get conditioned pretty quickly to what works and what doesn't work. And, that always interested me, the idea of probability. We would set goals for “Could we have fewer problems with kids of this nature, that nature?”. And when we start thinking about setting goals, it puts an incentive in there for you to think about, “Well, if I really wanted these behaviors more than these behaviors, what kinds of things could I do that would affect that probability?”.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (06:11)
When I went to my doctoral program, my focus and interest were on instructional strategies for kids with challenging behaviors and I became very versed in effective instructional strategies. And one of the things that I always think about when I think about instruction is that feedback is an inherent part. It's not something that you can divorce from teaching. And if you're going to say, “I'm gonna teach somebody to do something really novel that they've never thought about before”, to have them then do that and refuse to give them any feedback on their performance wouldn't work. What I do run into a lot in talking to schools is this notion that negative feedback and positive feedback are equally effective, which is not the case. Clearly, there's a teachable moment when someone's made an error. But to simply allow people to make errors and continue to tell them they're wrong doesn't increase the probability of success. It increases the probability of whatever error they might be making, but it doesn't increase the probability of a better outcome. So I really try to focus on “How do we create an environment where kids are doing things that are successful so that we get to say “wow, good for you’”.
Dr. Sutton: (08:05)
So setting them up for success?
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (08:07)
Absolutely. And I had heard for everyone I was working in residential, “Catch them doing something good”, and I can remember thinking, well, what if they never do anything? And it removes responsibility from us. So I really prefer to think, what could we do to make them do something that we could catch them doing good. So the responsibility comes back to me for “What do I say”? “How do I say it”? “What body posture and language should I use”? All of those are probabilities for my ability to say, “Good for you. This is on you”. A lot of times I say that I define a teacher as somebody who plays tricks to make kids fall onto success and then gives the kids the credit for it.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (09:08)
That's our job. So all of that just evolved from working with kids that challenged me, repeatedly, day-after-day-after-day. And you get conditioned into, “Okay, I do these things”. My interest in research was “Why do these things seem to work more clearly?”. I've never run into anything that works every single time, nor anything that works with every single kid. But there are probabilities out there. And, so, if I am thinking about walking into a school or a classroom, or with children who are likely to make errors or have misbehaviors, my thought should be probability. “What can I do to maximize the probability that I'll get to say more positive things than negative things?”. And I think that ratio is really important, and we don't have very good hard evidence on that ratio…
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (10:18)
…in education. I know John Gottman has talked a lot about that. A lady at Michigan, Barbara Fredrickson, also has talked about that mainly for people with mental health, and I think John Gottman's mainly for relationships. That ratio seems to fall somewhere between three and five to one for optimal. The problem with that for us in education is: we are a lot of times dealing with kids who have had zero to a million. And even five to one doesn't make up for that very easily. And there's some evidence if you just look at academics, that if we're talking about a kid whose performance is more than a standard deviation below their peers, that ratio probably needs to be more in the neighborhood of fourteen to one. And that's really hard to do. I hear a lot of times in schools, people complaining that four to one is really hard, and a lot of times it is. But, the impetus for continuing to do it is that it'll be more than that if we can't make this work.
Dr. Sutton: (11:51)
Yeah. Yeah.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (11:53)
And there's a point at which I don't think we have any good evidence that we can bring it back. And I often talk about this as a snowball rolling, and that snowball's getting bigger and bigger. And once it gets bigger at all, before you can roll it downhill on the good side of the hill, you've got to roll it uphill. It's going to take fourteen to one to roll it up the hill and start using three to one to roll it down again.
Dr. Sutton: (12:20)
Sure, sure
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (12:22)
There's this constant thought about early intervention, and I don't think it means early childhood only. It means, as soon as you have opportunity to be with a kid, we should be thinking about that.
Dr. Sutton: (12:34)
Great. Great. And part what I've always thought about too is that, oftentimes, those three to five, one ratio that… and I also do a lot of work with kids with ADHD, so I'm telling parents the kids with ADHD are getting in trouble ten times more. So you have to do ten times more of the positive, but it doesn't necessarily mean you have to give them whatever ice cream or candy or something for all the positive. But even I think, and Gottman talks about this, even just a smile, even just a positive that I actually like you, that you are not, versus like a scallop like, “Ugh, you’re so annoying or pissing me off”. And that ratio, which I think sometimes too helps, at least the parents I work with, see it as like, that there are smaller things that they can do to also provide that positive reinforcement, or even just positive interaction, rather than “Hey, why didn't you do your homework?”,...
Dr. Sutton: (13:33)
“How was your day? Tell me all about it”, or whatever it might be. Those are the ratios too.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (13:41)
Absolutely. One of my main frustrations is there tends to be amongst kind of the lay person, a very negative view I have found in my personal experience with the concept of positive reinforcement. I believe that negative view is largely because they think only in terms of tangibles.
Dr. Sutton: (14:10)
Yeah. Like bribing?
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (14:13)
Well, we've got to buy something and give it to them. And you were just describing things that are just as powerful, telling somebody “Wow, you should be proud of yourself”. And this gets into some of my new research that you talked about a little bit, but just the way you look at students, there's pretty good evidence that kids can tell whether they were approving of them or not simply by the way we interact with them. And I don't think we think enough about what we're doing in that regard. And so we started about 15 years ago, and the data on the degree to which in schools people say positive things to kids has for years said it's horribly low. It's almost nonexistent in a lot of classrooms.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (15:15)
So we started looking at it in terms of kid behavior. We would go into a classroom and we randomly select a student. So I would just tell that our observers, when you go into a classroom, before you walk in the door, say to yourself, I'm gonna take third row, second person, that's your person. Now I want you to be coding the degree to which that student is actively engaged. You know, watching, talking, being involved. Or passively engaged, meaning they're there and their eyes are open versus not engaged at all; they're doing something else or they're asleep. And, disruptive behaviors. And you can predict those behaviors really well by the number of positive statements teachers make. But the number of positive statements that the average teacher makes during instruction varies by grade level. At elementary, it's in the neighborhood of a teacher says something positive that the random kid would be a part of, whether it's group or to them…
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (16:25)
…about once every six or seven minutes. At middle school, it's about once every 13 minutes. And at high school it's about once every 23 minutes. If we talk to teachers about those levels, they'll say they do it at way higher rates than that. And I'm guilty of that too because I will say, “I'm going to go teach, I want you guys to code me. I'm going to use really high rates” and it's always way lower than I thought it would be. Which is interesting, It's like I'm, I don't know if it's cultural or if it's part of being a human, but it isn't natural to be super positive all the time. Or just, anyway, and I don't know why, but we really struggle with that.
Dr. Sutton: (17:20)
Yeah. Well, and that's actually something I was wondering about. It feels like there are some people where it does actually come natural and second nature. Like, you know, some people that just are very warm and just affirming and they're not even putting much effort towards it. I don't know if you've ever looked at that or what is going on for those people or how they're doing, or “How is it so natural?”. Like how you're saying when for most people it is not as natural.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (17:57)
I don't know. One of the things we thought we would be able to do is really look at “How does that variance impact things?” And the problem is there's extremely small variance.
Dr. Sutton: (18:13)
Hmm.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (18:14)
It's not as if we've got teachers doing gigantic amounts and teachers doing small, there are some outliers. But it's really hard to find high rates. But you bring up a point, again, it's kind of where I'm going with a lot of my research, which is there is a reinforcing personality…
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (18:41)
…that I can't define. And I would bet you I could walk into a classroom and watch for five minutes and then write down, “Do you think this teacher has a good relationship with kids and the kids like this teacher?”. And I bet we would agree the vast majority of the time. But I can't teach somebody to have that if they don't. And it's like you were saying, there seems to be some people who are really good at that or natural with the way they interact with kids. And there's things that I can't measure…
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (19:24)
…but there's something there.
Dr. Sutton: (19:26)
Yeah. I was just thinking of a grad school teacher I had that was great. And you'd always walk out of conversations feeling really good. Like there was interest, a warmth that felt like, “Wow, she sees something in you”. And again, I don't think she was trying to do that on purpose, but I think sometimes there's some people like that, that kind of give you this sense. And one of the things that I've thought about with, when I'm doing behavioral systems with parents, that we're showing the kids that we see the good kid within them, despite the behavioral problems. Like one of the kids I was working with, she was 10 years old and I walked the parents through, they were having trouble doing the point system reinforcement.
Dr. Sutton: (20:10)
So we did it and I had them read it over and point out, “Oh, you did this good and that good and that good”. And I sent them out and I asked her “What was that like?”. And she said, “I didn't know they ever saw I did anything good”. And then I brought the parents in and had her tell them that. And it just like broke their hearts. Like they didn't even realize that it was so meaningful for her to see that they saw any goodness in her. I do a lot of work with oppositional defiant disorder. And so that was a piece there.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (20:42)
Do you think people…
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (20:53)
That somebody thinks “If this person did something wrong, they really need to know that was wrong”. And so I feel that feedback and then there's this mindset. “I can't say anything positive about anything right now because it's like I'm negating the fact that I'm upset with them for doing that thing”. And so they've elongated this negative feedback to, it basically puts kids in time out. We refuse to say anything positive to you regardless of what you do. And they think that it's a differential reinforcement, but it's not. It's only using one kind and ignoring the rest, putting it on extinction.
Dr. Sutton: (21:34)
Yeah, it makes me think of couples therapy too. I also do couples therapy and couples will oftentimes get into a, it's almost like when it's holding up the protest sign, they're not going to give anything positive of warm until they feel like the other person like really gets it or takes responsibility rather than sharing their hurt with them, but also doing a little soothing to keep the person in, saying “I know you're not a bad person, but this…” and that dance back and forth. What you're saying about this aspect of “If I bring in any of that in, then it negates and I have to drop the protest sign, I'm done. My argument's over. If I actually point out that there's anything positive or lovable or whatever it might be, that the other person won't hear it”. Like we have to get them to hear it first before we can then have that warmth back or that connection.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (22:25)
And just within the last week I was at a school and was asking some things about what their challenges were with behavior. And one of the things that they said that I hear quite often is, this kid does this thing, it's wrong. I send them out, the principal deals with it, and then the principal sends them back and I'm supposed to just treat them like nothing happened. There is this, and I think, again, it's this human nature thing that they haven't been punished enough yet. This needs to be bigger and bigger and bigger, with this notion that the bigger this gets, the better it will work, which is clearly not the case. What is it about us that we operate that, how have we been conditioned to think that way?
Dr. Sutton: (23:20)
Well, that's something that I find curious too. One of the things that my colleague Jim Keim who did a lot of writing on oppositional defiance talks about that kids that are more oppositional tend to be different than your average. Like your average kid, they get in trouble they get what four they get whatever the screens taken away for a week, they don't do it again. And there's a lot of people that are kind of like that. Like something big happens and they're like, okay, I'm not doing this again. But often for kids that are oppositional, for whatever reason, emotional regulation, ADHD, trauma, anxiety, or, you know, just temperament that they keep getting in trouble. It's not like that one big consequence is going to change it. And so oftentimes the parents and teachers get into this struggle or this pattern of interactions where they keep trying to extinguish the behavior with negative reinforcement, but it essentially makes the kid feels picked on. Or feeling just chipped away at rather than actually changing the behavior. I don't know if that's something at all because I think that some people think, “Well if somebody gave me that consequence, I would stop”. So they use that situation not knowing that maybe it's a different kind of scenario.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (24:34)
Yeah. What's interesting to me is it seems to be specific to social-type behaviors and not academic ones. So if you teach somebody to do plus two is four, and they mess that up horribly and say five, people do understand that, that requires a correction. We want to set them up to get it right as quickly as possible. But as soon as it becomes a social behavior, that logic goes right out the window. And I don't know, it's hard for me to understand why we tend to treat instruction of behavior so much differently than instruction of academics.
Dr. Sutton: (25:25)
Well, it seems like too, like you're saying it has to be more significant. It's almost like there's a kind of shunning from the tribe, like kicking the kid out of the tribe or like, “I'm going to give the cold shoulder, whatever, I can't just like be normal with them again after the kid comes back from the principal's office because I need to let them know that it was wrong or upset or so”. And so sometimes using the relationship as the consequence and pushing away rather than letting the consequence be the consequence, whatever that may be, and then separating out the relationship. One of the things I do with the families I work with helping them separate that out. So, say the kid gets grounded for the weekend because they were acting out, the parent can then let that go…
Dr. Sutton: (26:13)
…they don't need to give them the cold shoulder all weekend. They can say, kid says “I wanna go out with my friends”. “Well, you can't go out with your friends, but we can order pizza. We can watch a movie”. “Well, I don't want to do that. I want to go with my friends”. “Okay, well if you want to, I'm here”. You know, and that way, not using that relationship as the consequence. Or, the kids saying, “I want my phone”. “Sure. After your homework's done, you earn your phone”. “Well, I want it now”. “Well, you can't have it now, but I can help you with the homework if you want”. Coming in as the relationship, as the support in helping them get what they want. But I think oftentimes there's a feeling of not feeling valued or dismissed or, I don't really like the word disrespect because sometimes it gets used in connotations where maybe the kid doesn't really feel like they would respect the parent or the teacher. But this idea of feeling valued, I think oftentimes hurts. And the other person has to dig in until they get back that value or respect or so on.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (27:12)
Right. The other thing that I think this made me think of is one of the things that, when I talk about creating a positive environment, one of the arguments will be, well, this isn't fair to all those kids that are doing it right right now that I'm going to go…, and again, I'm saying we're not talking about tangibles, I'm talking about you. Saying, “Well this isn't fair to those other kids”. I would say that if you are providing regular feedback to all your kids, “I'm so proud of you guys”, “You guys get your work done”, “You're so responsible”, “I love having you guys' class”. When you try to individualize for a kid who needs more, those kids feel way above that. Like, poor guy. I'm not upset by that. But if everybody's in deficit, you've never said anything positive to anybody, and now you're going to do this only for the kid with problems, you're going to get a mutiny
Dr. Sutton: (28:19)
For sure.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (28:20)
You created a deficit. So if you want that to work differentially for a kid, you've got to make sure that the whole environment's positive.
Dr. Sutton: (28:31)
Definitely. You were talking earlier about the residential treatment and I worked at four different residential treatment programs before graduate school. And it was so interesting because there was only one that really had positive reinforcement. The kids earned points, which then earned levels and so on, versus all the rest, they would just lose. It was almost like they would automatically get the points, but they would lose those points. And I found that just in my own experience, that earning model actually was much more effective than the takeaway model because otherwise the kids feel entitled to everything and then mad that it's getting lost or taken away rather than feeling proud that they earned. And when I talk to parents about this, I talk about too that it's tough because it takes more energy because you have to be proactive, versus it's much easier to be reactive. Like, “Hey, you did that. I'm taking your phone away”. Rather than actually, like in Howard Glasser’s book, Transforming the Difficult Child, the Nurtured Heart Approach, he talks about how, for example, stopping talking on the phone to compliment the five-year-old who's not interrupting you. Remembering to reinforce not interrupting sometimes is harder because it's reinforcing the lack of the negative behavior
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (29:58)
So much harder. You don't need a reminder to say something when they've done something wrong, that's built-in. That's so important that it is so hard to do that. In the center where I worked, they could earn and lose points. But what would end up happening would be at the end of an hour, someone would go, “Okay, it's been an hour, so you've earned this many points”. They weren't linked to behavior.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (30:33)
But the negative points, you didn't say at the end of an hour, “You did this”. You said it right when they did it.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (30:40)
It became more like what you've described as you've got your points, you get them automatically. But you lost them for these things. And I think the way you described that is perfect, that they need to see that they're doing these things and that we're noticing those things as they happen rather than that these points are just automatic. We’ve lost that connection between what you're doing and what I'm saying.
Dr. Sutton: (31:12)
And Glasser talks about how kids want your energy and we tend to give more energy to the negative behavior than the positive. Say the kid's supposed to take out the garbage. I tell parents, if they took out the garbage, you might not say anything at all, or you might say “Oh, thanks”. But if they don't, you're like “Hey, you gotta take out the garbage, if you don't take it out…”, giving so much energy to that. And like you're saying, that positive reinforcement in the moment, I imagine with the puppy training you're trying to give that reinforcement in the moment that they do that thing, using a clicker or “yes” or whatever it might be.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (31:50)
Yeah. And, we're not using a clicker, we're trying to do it without one. And I make this point to people in schools all the time. The reason we never even consider using clickers with kids is because we've got words that they understand. “You did this, and doing that is exactly right, good for you”. The puppy's not going to understand that. The kids do, but they don't get that if we don't say it.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (32:19)
It’s, what repetition is necessary? And I think about this: how many repetitions of doing this with our puppy did it take before he understood what it meant to do this? But we'll say all the time, “I already told him” about a kid. But you wouldn't expect that from teaching academics. “Hey, I told him about algebra yesterday. If he's not getting it, that's on him”. You'd say, “We need repetition. We need to keep doing it”. But for some reason, when it comes to more social-type behaviors, all that logic again just goes out the window. It’s human nature, we all do it.
Dr. Sutton: (32:58)
It makes me think actually about couples therapy too. Because sometimes the partner will say, “I need this from you”, or whatever it might be. And they feel like, “Well, I told them”, but then they never say anything again, or when it happens in the moment, they're not going to say “Hey, that didn't feel good. I really need this”. And sometimes the way I describe it to my clients is that it's like learning to dance. We have to teach our partner how to dance with us. Just explaining the foxtrot and then expecting them to do it is not going to happen. And even when they do try to do it, it'll be awkward and missteps. And so we have to say, “Actually don't step there, step over here”. And there is a lot of nuance, like you're saying with the academics. There's all these little pieces that they're providing some teaching or correction on, or helping them learn how to do it better in such minuscule ways. But with the behavior, it's just blanket. It would be like if they just gave a grade on something the kid wrote, without actually pointing out what you took points off for and what they could do differently next.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (34:03)
Oh, that's a great analogy. I sometimes say, are we teaching kids or are we telling kids? Because I think there's a difference, and this gets back to the probability stuff. Saying to somebody, “Here's the rule, do it” is a pretty low probability. And the reason it's a low probability is because it doesn't attach to anything. And good instruction should link to something. Explicit instruction should say, “Because you already know this, and we all agree this is something important, this is important too and it connects to that. And there's this research, and I can't think of the authors off the top of my head, saying, when we teach things, and tell things to kids that we want them to do that don't connect to anything, it's just a random rule.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (35:07)
They're generally gone in 30 seconds. It went in one ear and out the other because they don't know where to put that. And so I like to talk about how your brain has all these folders. “What does it mean to be respectful?”. But if you don’t tell them what folder that goes in, it gets lost. So one, being explicit and really talking to kids about why we're asking for this, and two, engaging them in it. You're sitting there looking at me nodding your head, but you're thinking about something a mile away. We're not really teaching it. So how do I get your attention and get you talking to me as much as I'm talking to you? That's effective instruction. I think in schools, people get both of those things, but they separate them. And they say, “First I'm gonna tell you when you're gonna shut up, then I'm to engage you”. Well, they weren't listening while you were telling them. You need to engage them through the whole thing.
Dr. Sutton: (36:10)
Sometimes I think about it like creating bite-sized pieces.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (36:14)
Yeah.
Dr. Sutton: (36:14)
Helping them get the first part. Then we can add the second part, and then the next part. Because otherwise if you just give so much of it, it’s in one ear out the other.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (36:25)
So if you just count in a classroom or in a school the number of what we call OTRs, opportunities to respond, to instruction that teachers are giving. And I don't mean for the whole class period. I mean, while they're giving instruction on something novel or complex. And the number of times they indicate either with a gesture, thumbs up, or verbally. Just knowing that is the best predictor we have of whether students will be disruptive or not. We can't find anything that's a better predictor of that. And so I always am trying to remind people that instruction is the most powerful thing we've got if we're doing it correct.
Dr. Sutton: (37:15)
Yeah. So let me understand that. While they're giving the instruction or teaching whatever it is that they're teaching, you're saying giving some reinforcement, thumbs up to the kids, that is going to help kind of manage or decrease the potential behavior because they'll be more engaged in the instruction?
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (37:38)
I'll just give you the study we did where we looked at three things: (1) the degree to which the teacher was actively teaching. This is the percent of time looking at kids and doing stuff with kids. (2) Rate per minute of opportunities to respond. “What do you think? Turn your neighbor and tell them”, “Raise your hand if you agree”, “Pull one of those”. And the (3) rate per minute of positive feedback of any nature.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (38:03)
So you put those three things together and run a latent class analysis, and you get three clusters. So I think of them as high, medium, and low. Now, if you use those to predict the behavior, we know that if I watch a classroom teacher teaching a new lesson for 10 minutes, if the rate of those three behaviors falls into that lowest cluster, if I watch this whole class, these kids are 23% more likely to be off task than the typical classroom. And there's a 67% higher likelihood of misbehavior, disruptive behavior.
Dr. Sutton: (38:41)
Mm-Hmm.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (38:42)
What the teacher is doing when they're driving instruction is the most important thing we've got for predicting student behavior. And, this is my hypothesis, when you create instruction that makes kids successful and you give them the credit for it, the incentive to do other things goes away. “Hey, I'm good at this”. We all like being good at something, and we want to doing things we're good at. So those teachers are just creating higher rates of success and then giving the credit back to the kids.
Dr. Sutton: (39:18)
So it is the opportunities to interact, positive reinforcement… What was the third one?
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (39:27)
So one is just what we call active teaching. You're looking at kids, talking to kids, and you are driving this lesson, which is, again, just a percent of time. The other two were the rate per minute of opportunities that you gave the students to respond during your instruction and the rate per minute of the number of positive feedback statements that we gave.
Dr. Sutton: (39:50)
And I imagine too, it's got to be really hard for parents and for teachers because they've got so many kids. And I imagine sometimes, I use this analogy when I'm working with somebody that has difficulty with boundaries, I say, it's like if you were a teacher and you're trying to cater to every single child in the classroom, you'd be overwhelmed. You wouldn't be able to do it. Sometimes you have to make the decision that this is what we're doing. What are your thoughts on that, because I don't know if I could be in a whole classroom of third graders and manage that. That sounds overwhelming. But I'm sure there's the expertise that they have and the experience. But then also, it seems like it's maybe juggling with one hand and then doing something over here with the other hand for the kids that are struggling the most.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (40:46)
It definitely is something you need to practice. In my perspective, we aren't putting enough emphasis on this when we train teachers. Do they know that engagement is a good thing? Yeah. Do they have a set of strategies and are they skilled at using them? No. And I don't really know what to say about that other than it needs to be our focus. To me, this is what we call effective instruction. But I did, in a Midwestern state… they asked me to come and talk to new teachers and I had like 400 brand new teachers. And I talked about engaging kids and I talked about the strategies. And at the end I said, “How many of you have ever heard of any of these strategies before?”. Not a single hand went up. That's a problem. All of them said, “Oh yeah, engagement's important”.
Dr. Sutton: (41:45)
Yeah.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (41:46)
But it's almost like we're thinking engagement's important, but it’s the kids' responsibility to be engaged instead of my responsibility to engage them.
Dr. Sutton: (41:56)
That makes me think of something from motivational interviewing, one of the things that I took early on and learned. And what I took away from that is that resistance is something that's due to the therapist, not something that's within the client. And I think, similarly, like you're saying that the teacher is creating the context. Again, it's not that disruption is due to them. But they have a lot of influence, themselves, rather than maybe feeling like, “Oh, I have no influence”. It's these individuals that are outliers rather than this interactional kind of effect or pattern between the context that I create or the way I interact and how these children interact.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (42:42)
Interesting. We are just finishing up a federal research grant with the topic of how to change teacher behavior in classrooms and we're using motivational interviewing as the intervention. But the focus is on changing what adults do and using that as our avenue for changing the probability of student behavior.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (43:10)
It's really hard to change adult behavior compared to kid behavior. We don't have the contingencies. It's just hard.
Dr. Sutton: (43:21)
Yeah, that's kind of more ingrained. One thing that I was thinking about too, I'd love to hear your thoughts on, with ADHD, there's a lot of comorbidity with oppositional defiant disorder. And one way I think about it is that the kids with ADHD get in trouble 10 times more. So, they're getting yelled at and don't do that and whatever it might be. And so I think of Cooley's looking glass theory of self that we get our sense of self from how we're reflected in others' faces. And when we see a teacher or a parent always frustrated, annoyed or irritated with us, then we get this kind of internalized sense that I must be annoying, irritating, or bad, or so on, which can go one way to depression or the other way to feel like I'm not bad, they're just picking on me and I'm going to fight back and hurt them because they're trying to hurt me. Do you have thoughts on oppositional defiance or that kind of concept?
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (44:24)
I feel like the things that work best with those kids are the same things that work with all kids but done with far more intentionality. Which I think is what we're talking about. They need to be taught doing it right, as every kid does, but they may not do it right as often. And so what we're going to need to be far more thoughtful and intentional in the things we do. I guess one of the things that I believe from just my experience working with kids is that the good stuff, the high probability big effect side of stuff that we've got is pretty effective. Some kids do really well with it, some kids really need it, and some kids won't survive without it. So how intentional do I need to be? How intense for how long? I still run into this. “Well, I tried that and did it for three days and then I stopped doing it and they came right back to doing it". I was like, yeah but think of how many days they were doing it the wrong way. So those things are there, but they're going to need to go for longer, be more intentional, and be more intensive.
Dr. Sutton: (45:58)
Yeah. Maybe there's some different kids that need different levels of intensity, duration, or so on than other kids.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (46:11)
And there's this notion that we touched on earlier of relationships. Again, I don't believe I can teach someone to do this. What we started doing is, and we're just in the very infancy of this, but one of my colleagues, Alan Alday put a wristband on a teacher, pre-service teachers, and it monitors heart rate, movement, blood flow and, galvanic skin response. And then he has them watch videos of classrooms and when a kid misbehaves and any way it goes through the roof immediately. Now if I'm an adult, and this freaks me out, my emotions go up and the likelihood of me approaching that in a way that is instructional is pretty low.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (47:30)
Secondly, if that's the kind of thing that freaks me out, I need to have some systematic desensitization of sorts. I need repetition and practice with doing these things. So what we've done is we've written a grant proposal for this, and we're just playing with it right now, but we're putting the wristband on kids too. The teacher nominates kids that they say really have challenging behavior. Putting the wristband on them itself changes some things I'm sure, but…
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (48:08)
The question is, does, instructional behavior affect the biophysics, the emotions, et cetera of a student, and how does the student's emotion affect the teacher and back and forth?
Dr. Sutton: (48:26)
Yeah.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (48:27)
There's this emotional regulation piece that I think we think about for kids, but the adults play right into that. There's a really cool piece that we're not doing because it's too much right now, but it is possible to do facial recognition. There's a couple of people that say they can recognize like 30 personality traits or something with facial recognition. I don't know about that. But it would be really cool to say, can we predict how a student will respond, both their behavior and their biophysics, by the look on a teacher’s face? And if so, could we teach teachers to make those faces in the right way? And I'm not sure that we could, but I just believe there's a whole lot… I 100% think there's a set of effective teacher behaviors that have to be there.
Dr. Sutton: (49:25)
Yeah. Yeah.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (49:26)
But I also believe that, if you don't have the right personality, those things won't work.
Dr. Sutton: (49:31)
Sure.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (49:32)
And I can't put my finger on the personality part yet.
Dr. Sutton: (49:35)
Yeah. Well it sounds like there's a whole constellation, right. Maybe the teacher's emotional regulation, the way their nervous system responds. It makes me think of polyvagal theory and the idea of neuroception; how our nervous systems play off the nervous systems around us. It makes me think too, I also do EMDR for trauma and I do a lot of work with adults with ADHD and so on. And oftentimes the trauma, the big T or little T trauma, is the look on the teacher's face when they were in second or third grade, and they thought “I must just be such a bad kid that this person would get so mad at me”. It was so interesting, and it's been more than one person, but like you're saying that there is something on the face. It makes me think of Ekman's, work on emotions and how in such slight little bits, he’s got that kind of training to notice in the face, and it's a millisecond and you're supposed to pick that contempt or fear or whatever it might be.
Dr. Sutton: (50:53)
But our brains are picking that up on such micro levels.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (50:58)
Years ago, I don't remember where I read this, but is that a French anatomist Duchenne? And he mapped out all the muscles that you used to smile. To differentiate between an authentic smile and a forced smile, some research said you could ask kids, “Is this a real smile or not”? And fairly reliably they could tell. So there's something in that face that is pretty deep, again, I can't define it and measure it, but there's something in there. And if we could capture that, there's something we could use to increase the probabilities of success.
Dr. Sutton: (51:45)
Yeah, definitely. I think there was some research too on adolescents and that they perceived fear in adults as anger in their facial response to fear or seeing fear or so on. I don't know the reference for that. And I just think it's great the work that you're doing because I think the positive reinforcement is so significant and so strong. Have you seen a hundred humans at all from Netflix?
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (52:15)
No.
Dr. Sutton: (52:16)
So there's this series where they take a hundred people and they do different kinds of experiments over the the show. And one was they had one group hearing music with low notes and they're eating different foods. And then another group with high notes, different foods. And basically they have different experiences of sweet and so on. In one of the experiments, they teach the folks how to spin a plate on a stick, and they have a judging panel, and the guy picks out a different color ball, whether he is going to get positive or negative reinforcement. And then they get a score for the first time, then they come back the second time, and get a score. It's so clear. You can see how the positive reinforcement improves, whereas the negative reinforcement decreases their abilities and they become much worse.
Dr. Sutton: (53:04)
And there's one guy in particular that just flat out comes in and just sits down and refuses because the negative reinforcement from the first round was so negative. Later on, actually at the end, they then have that guy come up, and after they've explained the whole experiment and everybody's there cheering him on, he does it just the first time trying from all that positive support. Sometimes I have parents watch that because it's just so clear the effect that has.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (53:40)
Fascinating. I definitely have to check that out.
Dr. Sutton: (53:42)
It's in the “Pleasure and Pain” episode.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (53:47)
But it sounds like a cool show. Just the whole idea of these little studies that we get to see.
Dr. Sutton: (53:54)
It's definitely really interesting, they have several episodes where they do different little experiments. So what do you think is most important for folks to take away? I think sometimes people get confused that maybe it's only ever supposed to be positive reinforcement. And are you in that camp or are there also consequences or so on? I mean, you know, positive reinforcement is the most effective. But…
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (54:23)
If I ask what two plus two is and the student says five, if I don't say, “You are wrong”, I've missed an opportunity to teach something. I don't think that's the way we want to teach all the time, but we need to be able to have that. And I do think a lot of times when I talk to schools and I say, “We want to increase that ratio”, they hear “Stop saying to kids they're doing something wrong”.
Dr. Sutton: (54:51)
Mm-Hmm.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (54:53)
You can't do that. It won't work. We want to create an environment where you need to say that less often because they made fewer of those errors, at least compared to their successes. So I think it’s really important to think about both of them being really necessary components of effective instruction. But, again, if we're trying to teach solely or mostly by giving them negative feedback, they'll just stop trying. It is a learned helplessness essentially. “I can't do this. Why would I put myself through it?”
Dr. Sutton: (55:38)
Mm-Hmm.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (55:39)
“I bet if I flipped this teacher off, I wouldn't have to try this anymore.”
Dr. Sutton: (55:42)
Yeah.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (55:44)
The must-escape motivated behaviors.
Dr. Sutton: (55:46)
Yeah. And speaking of that learned helplessness, sometimes the kids are in so much pain and feeling so bad that they're then going to make the teacher feel bad too to offset some of that. So at least I might be miserable, but then I'll make the other person miserable too so it feels a little less bad.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (56:04)
And the other thing along with that is, and again, I make this academic versus other counts of behaviors… If you see in a classroom that a kid says “Two plus two is five”, the teachers will generally say, “Let's take a look at that”.
Dr. Sutton: (56:18)
Mm-Hmm.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (56:20)
“How do we do that? Let's count these up”. We call that a correction, that you've led them back through and made them get it right and said, “Good for you”. So we count those when we go to classrooms.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (56:36)
The rate per minute of those is so low that I've calculated it out. We see a teacher use one corrective statement for every nine schools we go to.
Dr. Sutton: (56:50)
Oh, wow.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (56:51)
It never happens. Now the problem with it happening that infrequently is that I can't get enough of them in a cell to run a statistic on it. If you just look at it like this in our string of code, here's a kid having a misbehavior teacher can do three things: do nothing, say “stop it”, or say, “What would be a better way to do that?” or something of that nature. Now I've got to look five minutes down the road in that string of code and say, what's the kid doing? When I look at it like that, the likelihood of the student being on task in the future is about the same for doing nothing and saying “knock it off”. But it’s higher when we've corrected it. So when we do use consequences for negative behavior, they should be instructional.
Dr. Sutton: (57:42)
Yeah.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (57:43)
But, as you know, we have this tendency to think “If I yell louder, they'll get it more or it'll be more meaningful, it'll work better”. It's just not the case.
Dr. Sutton: (57:55)
Yeah. And with parents, sometimes I encourage timeouts or take a break or whatever it might be. And then once both the parent and the kid are regulated, then they can come back and say “Hey, so what's going on? What led to that? Are you upset?” Or whatever to look at what's driving it and also potentially fix the behavior if there is instruction to be needed rather than just “You lost screen time” and then walking away from it rather than repairing or coming back together again. This is great, sounds like you're doing wonderful work, and it's such an important piece. I think it's psychology 101 and most people know this, but it is very hard to put into action. And I think like you're saying that there's some variance, but it's not a huge variance. It's something that's maybe a struggle for teachers and parents, and this isn't something that's maybe so natural outlying. But again, whatever it is, whether it's our human behavior or culture or so on, it's some intention that we have to set because we know that it's effective. It's just maybe hard to be able to get in that habit.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (59:13)
Yeah. It certainly is. And like I said, when I was proposing my dissertation in 1992, there was a guy named Hill Walker and I was asking him to be on my dissertation committee, and I told him about this study I was going to do to work with these kids with some social skills problems. And he did agree to be on the committee but said, “You know, we know that this works. We don't know how to make adults do it reliably”. And that was 30 years ago. I don't know that we're any better at that right now. It’s a little bit depressing.
Dr. Sutton: (01:00:02)
Yeah. That's an interesting area of research because we know there's been so much research seeing it works. I wonder how much research there is on how to get the adults to actually do it.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (01:00:13)
Right.
Dr. Sutton: (01:00:14)
Well, thank you so much for your time. This is great. I really appreciate it. We'll put up all your information to reference your work. I really appreciate this. It's been a great conversation. You're doing wonderful work.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (01:00:28)
Thank you. I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to talk.
Dr. Sutton: (01:00:31)
Great. Thanks a lot. Take care.
Terrance M. Scott, Ph.D.: (01:00:34)
Bye
Dr. Sutton: (01:00:35)
Bye.
Dr. Sutton: (01:00:37)
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