And then the reply to that, the rebuttal might be that, but I just, I want them to do it because they want to. I want them to be intrinsically motivated. Oh,

so the myth of intrinsic motivation. Ah, this is my favorite one. All right. So there's absolutely zero evidence, zero zip, zilch, that a particular behavior is, or that some kids are born intrinsically motivated to read, for example, and some are not. There is zero evidence of that. What there is evidence of is that there's kids who are born into certain types of families that create highly enriched environments so that kids at a very young age are interacting with letters, with letter sounds, are having books read to them, are looking at books themselves. They're playing with academic toys. And guess what? Those kids tend to acquire early literacy skills. And guess what? Those kids seem to appear that they're intrinsically motivated to read. They weren't intrinsically motivated to learn to read. They actually were provided with an environment that reinforced reading and they were able to acquire that skill. And then guess what? Yes, they actually came into contact with the naturally reinforcing properties of reading. But that doesn't happen until a child can actually freaking read. And so what do you do when you have a kid who's not interested? So if a kid's supposed to be intrinsically motivated to read, but doesn't read and doesn't want to read, then what are you going to do? Do you tell me how you're going to change their intrinsic motivation? And I promise you, you won't because no one ever has. You know how you change that? You establish fluent reading skills. You actually get them engaging in phonics and decoding and reading words. And you do that by providing a lot of reinforcement for their participation in fluency-based or whatever type of practice we would do, fluency-based practice. But whatever type of practice you do, you've got to use some type of reinforcer to bridge the gap until that behavior is so masterful that it's actually fun to engage in it. So things that are called intrinsically motivated are actually mastered. Those are masterful repertoires that a person enjoys performing. But it's not fun to perform a skill that you suck at. It's actually not fun at all, and kids want to avoid it, which is why it's really important for educators to know how to design instruction and design practice in such a way that a child will participate in it so that they can master the skills they need to then access the naturally reinforcing properties of being good at that skill. But that requires extrinsic reinforcement first. It's

kind of interesting how the folks who kind of put themselves up on a pedestal by talking about intrinsic motivation tend to blame the child. Oh, sure. In that instance, where from a behavioral approach or I'm a big Zig Engelman kind of fan.

I'm

a big direct instruction approach. We're really always going to blame the instruction or the environment every single time. It's

like that you admire a child for, if you admire a child for their talent and blame them for their failure, it gets you nowhere. What you want to do is evaluate why has this particular kid gotten so good at this? And why has this kid not gotten good at this? And what kind of a history, what kind of experiences has this kid had with this skill versus this kid? And how do I change this kid's experience with this skill? It's my job. You know, I got to tell you the learning disabilities, fricking crisis, you know, kid who can't read, it's naturally they, oh, they have dyslexia. Are you kidding me? I mean, no. How about they've never learned phonics? They don't know how to decode words. They can't read words. They, you know, there's a million other explanations for this. We behavior science, we never blame the organism or the human or the person that we might be working with ever. We're going to evaluate the environment, our role in the role of everyone in that environment with respect to what's occurring for that person. Always. Perfect.

Here's another one I hear. Okay. That using a behavioral approach doesn't really get to long-term understanding, but only sort of short-term changes that eventually disappear very quickly?

Again, I don't know where they're... I mean, I'd love for them to cite some evidence of that, but the scientific base that I'm coming from, that's absolutely incorrect and has been invalidated a lot, you know, for years. So, you know, when people come up with these baseless claims that, you know, I would, it would be nice if there was maybe a research list for them to point to. But so it's not only behavior science, but this has also been, you know, has been reinforced in neuroscience. So what we know is that when you, when you provide explicit, repeated, reinforced practice opportunities to perform a skill, when that skill starts improving, what happens is it changes, it starts increasing in rate or frequency. So in, for another word for that would be, it gets faster, right? So like if you're, if you are explicitly teaching a kid to decode short vowel words, for example, and you're giving them lots of very explicit practice opportunities to sound out short vowel words. When I talk about increasing in rate, what that means, because this is how we measure everything in behavior science, that child might go from 10 per minute to 17 per minute to 25 per minute to 30, so on and so forth until they're doing it at, you know, 100 per minute, which is where they really should be. So as that rate is increasing, what we also know is that that is producing a permanent neuropathway in the brain. So what really drives me crazy when you mentioned this in the beginning about the brain stuff that's always brought into the science of reading, that's also done in such a weird way because we know that learning is a symbiotic relationship between the behaving person, their environment, right, genes and their neurology, which all works together. So as a skill is practiced and reinforced, that's actually producing a neurological change in the brain, but it's not just the brain that's changing. It's the entire organism. It's the entire person is changing. People just want to like take their brains out and like, oh, we're brains walking around in jars. It's actually work like that. Like the brain is a part of a very complicated system that is a human being in the learning process. So it's their biology, their genetics, their behavior, their environment, all interacting to change their neurology when that repeated practice is happening. So we know that with repeated reinforced practice that is designed to explicitly increase rate or the speed of behavior, that produces a permanent neuropathway, which then becomes neurologically permanent, meaning it doesn't go anywhere. So, you know, it drives me nuts when these things are stated, because if you just, you know, just think about it in terms of common sense, like think about like fluent musicians, right. Who started playing the guitar when they were like three and now they're 50 and, you know, they have, they learned some of the pieces they play, they learned when they were in their twenties and they can still play them with their eyes closed, even if they haven't practiced them in months. Because that's how learning works. But it wasn't because someone lectured the guy on the piece of music and then tested it on at the end of the week and then they moved on. Well, of course, no, that doesn't produce permanent learning. What produces permanent learning is repeated, reinforced practice over time, thousands and lots of it, tons of it. you know, all of these examples are either being pointed to really bad behavior analysis, which is out there, unfortunately, or a misunderstanding of what behavioral instruction actually is. But if it's done the right way, which is measuring rate of response over time and explicitly creating the kind of practice opportunities to increase rate on skills and then testing for that kind of phenomenon retention is what we would call it in behavior science. I, that's not, that's empirically actually invalid, that statement. It's not true.