INTRODUCTION

    How do you nail a piece of learning?
    The context is sports, as in nailing a 3-point basket, a vault dismount, or a downhill ski run. Implied are a key moment, a special effort, and a demonstration of excellence that leaves no doubt. In school, we watch a kindergarten teacher nailing learning on the first day of school:
    "When you’re on the playground and the bell rings, you form a line at the door. Now, what do you do when the bell rings?” They all answer together, AWe form a line at the door."
    The teacher congratulates them, and in a box on the board writes “1". She tells them, “You just learned one thing. Wasn’t that easy? That’s what we’re going to do every day. We’re going to learn lots of easy things and count them up. Now what was it, again, that you do when the bell rings?” They answer, “Line up at the door!”
    "One more time," she says, "and louder."
    "Line up at the door!" they shout.
   Now they own that piece of knowledge, and proceed to rules for the classroom and onward into their lifetime of knowledge: get this point, own it, get another, own it, and so on. The score written in the box on the board is like a deed to a piece of ground, a claim that this chunk is theirs for good. Minute by minute, they nail pieces of learning and feel invigorated. Their key moment is the teacher's challenging question, their special effort is to listen, their demonstration is to answer firmly, and the result is pleasure at success.
    Education always at that level, of course, would be like basketball as only a free throw contest—repeating a single behavior. The game is interesting instead because of the many ways to nail a demonstration of excellence—a tomahawk dunk, a perfectly executed fast break, an agile block, a crucial jump shot, and so on. Producing them organizes an entire field of effort and learning.
    Back to the schoolroom and kindergartners grown older. How do they get the same sense of challenge, special effort, and achievement? How does nailing their learning guide their effort? That's the question I try to answer here, making learning firm enough to satisfy any test yet with the emotional flavor of a 3-point shot in the closing seconds of a basketball game.

    I should point out that I'm not a teacher by trade though I've taught many courses, and not a researcher. While I appreciate good research and cite a few useful pieces, over the years I've noticed that teachers are seldom moved by it, and that the few conditions that really matter are so familiar as to be almost boring:

1. Skill development of any kind depends on practice.
2. Feelings and communications affect learning.
3. Students need to know where to place their effort.
4. They need increments of success and reinforcement for them.
5. They develop comprehensive knowledge by assimilating it piece by piece.

Nothing startling there. Some ways of doing those simple things discourage students, however, and others stimulate them by how they engage students' energy--which typically responds quickly. You don't need a district reorganization to know. In a few days you say, "This interests them. They sit up and take notice and want to keep going, and they're learning."
    I've seen the ideas explained here succeed from kindergarten through high school, and with the most difficult students any teacher is likely to encounter. I worked for six months at the Lake Washington Individual Progress Center with high school students who had severe emotional and behavioral disabilities, and conducted a school in my home for two years with middle and high school students who couldn’t manage the public system. I’ve shared the methods with teachers in Washington, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Alaska, observing their progress and learning with them, and applied the ideas to an acrimonious fourth grade class in Seattle that’s described in detail in Chapter 9. If this sample is too small to warrant changing your own class or school, note the distinction I suggest
above. In week you can test the ideas yourself with no fi nancial outlay, no reorganization, no new curriculum, and no one looking over your shoulder. Use the methods with what you already teach, and watch students learn
and feel better.

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    A clue about how learning energy is aroused came to me in the early 1990s. On a Saturday afternoon when my son was in middle school, I watched him and his friends dash about a rain-soaked fi eld in a soccer game. They
were motivated, yet almost all were indifferent students. I could imagine them walking into their respective classrooms through an invisible force field that zapped their wits.
    How was the play field different from the classroom? The participants were the same, so it had to be their dynamics. On the field, twenty-two boys were motivated, executing tiring maneuvers under unpleasant conditions, but they demonstrated skill, scored to validate their effort, linked effort to results, had team support, performed publicly, and practiced to improve. A few simple guidelines unlocked the energy. Where, I wondered, was the pocket rule book that told how to do the same in classrooms?
The skill we want to reveal is the expression of learning. Imagine a student standing before his class, confident of what he knows, and enthusiastically and expertly explaining it. He practices to acquire skill, performs in public, and is acclaimed successful.
    Teachers model this. What they do to teach is what students need to do in order to learn. They obtain the knowledge in print, identify what s important in it, organize it, get it in their head, and express it over and over. As it becomes familiar, it affords them pleasure and creativity. They entertain challenges to it, add to it, reflect on it, and re-organize it. Students can’t do without any of those steps. They need the subject printed, prioritized, organized, impressed in mind, expressed repeatedly, added to, and modified. All the steps are critical at their right moment but they also appear to make education more complicated.
    One feature of soccer I realized, unified its tasks as it does with every sport, and simplified the classroom problem. In soccer, the whole effort hinges around how increments of success are identified. The soccer goal incorporates all the behaviors that lead up to it, so that players always know where to aim their effort. We look for a similar increment of effort that can organize classroom learning.
    Both national legislation and common experience identify it: to be able to tell back what one has learned, usually by test-taking. Put differently, mastery is the ability to explain something without help. Remove help and ask a question. What students can answer is what they know, and the boring principles above tell how. Because some ways of applying them are deadening, we need to find ones instead that enable students to be and feel constantly successful.
    At one level, how students learn is remarkably uniform. They take in a piece and then bring it out to demonstrate that they have it. They own that piece and then go for another. Absorbing and owning a point at a time, the first day they may have “12" in the box on the board. The next day they reclaim the prior day’s work so they don’t lose it, and add more. Stated in terms of their effort, their education mainly consists of accumulating pieces they can explain back. If every hour you arrange for them to increase what they can explain, they steadily expand their knowledge. Their score tells you where to direct their energy next, and they know clearly where it has gotten them--two understandings that help generate a successful class. Their increments nailed and counted this way present validly what they're aware of knowing, are measured the same by everyone, and need no comparison with other students.
    Of the seven core elements of the Silver Bullet Easy Learning System, five help to master knowledge, two create a positive atmosphere, and fifty-four activities apply them.
    Understand. Students understand what is conveyed or presented.
    Organize. They organize it to make it easy to practice, save, and retrieve.
    Practice. They assimilate knowledge by explaining and expressing it.
    Score. They score their learning objectively by counting points of knowledge gained or timing their explanation.
    Perform. They stand and perform what they know.
    Good feelings. They give each other good feelings.
    Communications. They improve the quality of their communications.
    The methods aren't separated by grade level because first graders can become just as proficient at many of them as older students. Teachers will readily understand what they can adapt to their students just by practice. Overall, fresh energy steadily comes available from understanding, organizing, talking, mental review, self-rating, feedback, performing, scoring, communicating, and sharing good feelings. Rather than focusing on the stresses that make students drop out, we can make their classroom experience so successful and satisfying that their determination to remain in school outweighs other influences they put up with.
    The title of the book is a response to the assertion that no single factor could turn education around quickly. To the contrary, the effort needed is commonplace, students' manner of learning isn't that different one to another no matter what their prior knowledge or disability, and the outcomes aren't hard to achieve. If we just arrange for students actually to accumulate and save knowledge hour by hour, this will shortly transform American education.
    We begin in Chapter 1 with imagining a visit to a classroom that's begun to use the design. Chapters 2-8 describe the methods in detail, arranged in several categories. The first set offers nine "quick-start" methods that comprise the basic structure for success and good feelings. Chapters 3-4 show how to develop refined communications and aid students' emotional self-management. Chapters 5-8 explain how to practice learning to generate permanent retention, ways to think about designing a curriculum and focusing student effort, how scoring instead of grading can solve the problem of assessing student learning, and ways students can demonstrate their learning that stimulate them to invest greater energy in it. Chapter 9 narrates how a troubled class applied the approach, Chapter 10 treats several issues about implementation, and appendices and references conclude the book.
    Depending on the context, my use of "we" may mean "you and I," "we humans," or "those who work in classrooms." When able to choose between terms in general use or those with specialized educational meaning, I try to stay with the former if their meaning is clear. I sometimes use boldface within paragraphs rather than section headings to emphasize key ideas, and also to present a teacher's words for applying a method. Sub-numbering within sections generally is to unify a set or sequence. Parenthetical numbers preceded by cf. refer you to one of the fifty-four methods, and my capitalization of a method within a paragraph indicates that it's explained in more detail elsewhere.

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