Sculpture: "Instances"

Array of five.
Media: Plaster and cloth over expanded polystyrene, acrylic paint. Each "house" is approximately 5"W x 7.5" H x 3" D.


Completed July 5, 2014.

Experiment with recursion and accident amidst restricted form, color and movement.

The "house form is an archetype in our culture. Together they form a streetscape, a neighborhood.

I cut the forms out on a table saw, then worked layers of plaster over them until each had a unique shape. Working from a limited palette, I threw on successive streams of paint from different angles.

A Leadership Development Game for High School Students

Today I observed an iteration of Promises Promises, a proprietary experiential learning game created by Eagle's Flight, of Guelph, Ontario . The game was played by 60 high school students and facilitated by an experienced adult trainer. The game simulates an economy among 10 "Island Nations", wherein country teams execute trades of commodities and services in order to achieve given game goals. The game is constructed to permit an overall solution ( "that all countries shall keep assigned promises"), despite the fact that initial resources are unevenly distributed and inter-group communications are arbitrarily inhibited.

The involvement of the participants was impressive--the students were selected by their home schools for "leadership qualities"--and appeared to generate several of the game's intended insights, at least for 10 or so of the participants who shared personal reflections afterwards.

What is less clear is what learnings the game actually delivered for each of the participants.The Kolbian learning cycle, experience, reflection, conceptualization and testing, did not seem to be fully provided for in this design. The reflection was open-ended and voluntary. There was no requirement that everyone construct some meaning of the exercise, nor was there opportunity to test and refine any newly acquired insights.

The "point" of the game, as I think the facilitator saw it, was that the overall goal of any "team of teams" can be lost when a competitive rather than cooperative paradigm reigns. This was not suggested until after play ended. It's not clear how many got would have gotten to that particular realization on their own.

In the context it was presented, this was to be a leadership development activity. It may have been more of a demonstration of who the incipient leaders are. At least one member of each country team seemed to emerge as spokesman or leader early in the game action. Without a methodical, real time observation of the dynamics within each of the teams, it would be hard to say what the game activity was calling forth from each of the participants. Those who emerged as leaders here might well have been the same ones that would come forth in any other exercise. Team dynamics seemed to stabilize quickly. A brief exercise like this may persistently favor the "first movers" ( those already accustomed to assuming leadership roles) and see them persist for the balance of the game.

For this exercise to develop new leadership skills, not just demonstrate them, it might require a lot more time for recursion; for insights to be tried out in practice, and to let group dynamics further evolve. My guess is that experiential learning is still perfectly valid, under Kolb's theory as well as other constructivist views, but a reasonable application of it requires considerably more time and rigor than is typically granted in conventional training settings.

Visitor's Notes: Parish Episcopal School "Chapel"

Parish Episcopal School's daily "Chapel" is a behavior setting  that reinforces certain non-academic values and behaviors among the students by presenting short, non-denominational homilies accompanied by prayer and sacred music.

March 21 2014

PES is a private school in North Dallas, affiliated with the local Episcopal Diocese. serving grades k-5 in a lower school and grades 6-12 on an upper school campus. My observation was made at the upper school on Sigma Drive.

"Chapel" is a daily event during the school year here. It is the responsibility of the upper school's chaplain (Episcopalian). I had learned of the Chapel from Ann Harris, one of the school counselors, on a previous visit, and she graciously invited me back when I expressed interest in the event as a part of my little study of such rituals.

All 350 or so high school students are expected to attend this event, which is scheduled early each day. This day's Chapel began with a Christian hymn and procession of the vested Chaplain and two student-acolytes bearing a large crucifix to the front of the assembly room ( a converted parking garage). The students sat in rows assigned by grade level, in chairs arranged to the left, right and center of a raised lectern.

PES students are required to wear a school uniform, but this was a non-uniform day, and so, as my host related "...it's a little noisier than usual". The decorum seemed to me to be much he same as you'd expect of any adult audience. The students filed in and sat, and all side conversation ended once the Chaplain began to speak.

The Chaplain welcomed everyone with a brief prayer and then invited a teacher to the lectern. She made a few announcements and then read names and college destinations of seniors who had been recently received acceptance letters. The audience responded with spontaneous applause for each one. I'd assume these announcements continue throughout the "acceptance season" of early Spring.

The Chaplain returned and led the group in another hymn, "Praise to God". During the hymn, perhaps half of the students and teachers seemed to be singing, and I did not get the impression many were familiar the piece. I understand that the majority of the students are from "Christian backgrounds", but there are many Jews and non-church attenders. The largest single denomination represented is Catholic.

The Chaplain read a scripture from St. Matthew, which was flashed on the video monitors around the room. He then introduced a Mr. Rais Bhuiyan, (http://worldwithouthate.org/) who spoke (quite eloquently) about his experience as a victim of hate crime and how it affected the course and mission of his life. The core of his fifteen-minute speech was that forgiveness is the only productive response to evil, and that one can make good come out of it if one chooses to do so. The students responded with rapt attention and a half dozen or so had questions after he finished.

The Chaplain returned and read a passage quoting St. Francis of Assisi  ( Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace; Where there is hatred, let me sow love; Where there is injury, pardon, etc.) before dismissing the group. Students filed out in no particular order after the Chaplain's recessional.

PES Daily Chapel has some of the values-bearing aspects of the Lyceum event I saw at BOMLA, but was less interactive. In Barkerian terms, the PES setting would be high in occurance and inclusion, but low in terms of penetration (the students and faculty are attending but passive) and behavioral diversity (prayer, quiet listening, and singing). Where BOMLA enshrines striving and personal responsibility in a secular context, this setting, at least in this instance, seems to promote personal virtue and service in a decidedly religious context.

At BOMLA, "Lyceum" is followed by "Success Hall" for those students who are having seen as having problems with compliance ( inappropriate behavior, not doing homework, etc.).  PES Chapel is followed by breakout sessions of 20 or so students for additional "guidance activities" for all students. I understand that these revolve around academic issues more than personal or behavioral ones.

Both settings reinforce "non-cognitive" messages and values systems deemed important by the school, albeit in subtly different ways. BOMLA Lyceums, at least in the Spring semester, may feature intellectual or academic content, but overrall, the principal there speaks to the "social and emotional needs of boys". In the case of PES, the homilies stress humanistic themes. I've reached out to the schools to get a list of speech topics and homily titles.

TBA: Attachment

Program materials from both schools

Embodied Realism-Roots and Branches

Beyond the simplest acts of self-preservation, humans cannot think without metaphor. This uniquely human “trick of the mind” allows us to build a stable knowledge of the wider world and move about in it successfully. Metaphor is not only woven deeply into our language for everyday events, but indispensable to our deepest scientific theories.

“Embodied realism” is the philosophical position that places our metaphoric ability at the center of human cognition. In doing so, it recognizes metaphor’s limiting as well as liberating functions. Those metaphors that can be substantiated by empirical testing are “apt” while others, especially those that have fallen below the limen of consciousness, can lead us astray. Identifying, analyzing, and testing the aptness of our metaphors is a challenging task, but one that can provide great rewards.

In Sales: How we think of, and present our business offerings to others. How we help others re-appraise their needs.

In Problem-Solving: How we frame business problems, define challenges, and account for resources.

In Strategy: How we define our purposes and environments. How we assess risk, and approach uncertainty.

In Learning: How we can apply experience from one domain to understanding of another. How we can use practice to develop new habits and liberate our attention.

In theory: How we can replace our explanatory models.

Anatomy of Metaphor

Conventional metaphors: so deeply embedded in our language that they often escape detection.

Conceptual metaphors: those more consciously applied and explicit in their entailments and inferential structure.

Source domain or vehicle and target domain or tenon

Inference patterns: the most basic logic functions of inclusion or exclusion: links that declare "is" or "is not"

Entailments: the sub-parts of the metaphor; on the source side, which can generate additional hypotheses or insights when "run down" rigorously.

Mappings: those elements of the source that are carried over to the target domain; congruent elements.  

Schemas: "bare bones" diagrammatic images

-----------

A Metaphoric Workshop (Experiential Learning Process)

Present speech and writing samples

Identify the conceptual metaphors

Derive entailments on source side

Apply and test inferences on target side

Coin new metaphors: personal, literary and scientific

Mine for entailments and implications

Related papers:

http://inform.nu/Articles/Vol8/v8p075-086Kooh.pdf

This paper explores open source as a metaphor for e-learning. It builds the case that e-learning and open source movement are rooted in the constructivist movement and the constructivist  movement is itself rooted in the pragmatism and instrumentalism that pervades John Dewey’s

theories of understanding as applied to learning. As a result, it recommended that the use of open source as metaphor for e-learning be further explored in three areas: instructional practices, instructional platforms, and instructional philosophy. Keywords: Open Source, E-Learning, Metaphor, Learning Object, Constructivism

Thinking that can be linked to embodied realism:

Synectics, William Gordon and George Prince

Gordon emphasized the importance of "'metaphorical process' to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar". He expressed his central principle as: "Trust things that are alien, and alienate things that are trusted." This encourages, on the one hand, fundamental problem-analysis and, on the other hand, the alienation of the original problem through the creation of analogies. It is thus possible for new and surprising solutions to emerge.

As an invention tool, Synectics applied a technique called "springboarding" for getting creative beginning ideas. For the development of beginning ideas, the method incorporates brainstorming and deepens and widens it with metaphor; it also adds an important evaluation process for Idea Development, which takes embryonic new ideas that are attractive but not yet feasible and builds them into new courses of action which have the commitment of the people who will implement them.

Lateral Thinking by Edward de Bono

Current practices may reflect adequate solutions, but better ones may lie undiscovered.  The creative problem-solver can systematically challenge cliches and old-patterned ways of thinking to break through to new arrangements of the same elements. He offers a number of visual exercises. He also discusses application of analogy:

Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Transformational thinking requires the abandonment of old paradigms and adoption of new ones. The old and new paradigms are dualities, like figure-ground; one way of thinking is incompatible with another.

Stephen Pinker, The Stuff of Thought

Cites Lakoff and Johnson extensively. Describes work of Herbert Simon, Roger Schank and others on AI. He presents how one can solve problems by finding a different version, or “problem isomorph”. The example Pinker cites is the “Tower of Hanoi” which is isomorphic to another much more challenging word problem stated here:

Lev Vygotsky

Zone of proximal development" (ZPD) is Vygotsky’s term for the range of tasks that a child is in the process of learning to complete. The lower limit of ZPD is the level of skill reached by the child working independently (also referred to as the child’s actual developmental level). The upper limit is the level of potential skill that the child is able to reach with the assistance of a more capable instructor.

Linked Ideas:

“Scaffolding” was coined by Bruner, but V. had the idea:  “Scaffolding”  is changing the level of support to suit the cognitive potential of the child. Over the course of a teaching session, a more skilled person adjusts the amount of guidance to fit the child’s potential level of performance. More support is offered when a child is having difficulty with a particular task and, over time, less support is provided as the child makes gains on the task. Ideally, scaffolding works to maintain the child’s potential level of development in the ZPD. An essential element to the ZPD and scaffolding is the acquisition of language. According to Vygotsky, language (and in particular, speech) is fundamental to children’s cognitive growth because language provides purpose and intention so that behaviors can be better understood.[22] Through the use of speech, children are able to communicate to and learn from others through dialogue, which is an important tool in the ZPD. In a dialogue, a child's unsystematic, disorganized, and spontaneous concepts are met with the more systematic, logical and rational concepts of the skilled helper.[23] Empirical research suggests that the benefits of scaffolding are not only useful during a task, but can extend beyond the immediate situation in order to influence future cognitive development. For instance, a recent study recorded verbal scaffolding between mothers and their 3- and 4-year-old children as they played together. Then, when the children were six years old, they underwent several measures of executive function, such as working memory and goal-directed play. The study found that the children’s working memory and language skills at six years of age were related to the amount of verbal scaffolding provided by mothers at age three. In particular, scaffolding was most effective when mothers provided explicit conceptual links during play.

PIVOTS

The child wishes to ride a horse but cannot, so he picks up a stick and stands astride of it, thus pretending he is riding a horse. The stick is a pivot. "Action according to rules begins to be determined by ideas, not by objects.... It is terribly difficult for a child to sever thought (the meaning of a word) from object. Play is a transitional stage in this direction. At that critical moment when a stick – i.e., an object – becomes a pivot for severing the meaning of horse from a real horse, one of the basic psychological structures determining the child’s relationship to reality is radically altered".

As children get older, their reliance on pivots such as sticks, dolls and other toys diminishes. They have internalized these pivots as imagination and abstract concepts through which they can understand the world. "The old adage that 'children’s play is imagination in action' can be reversed: we can say that imagination in adolescents and schoolchildren is play without action"

Jerome Bruner: On Knowing, Essays for the Left Hand

Much of Bruners wonderful essay unconsciously tapped metaphor and embodied realism. He's so close. 

The “right hand”, dexter, is the the doer. The hand of reason and law. The “left hand”(“awkward” for some, but not for me) is the dreamer. The left hand is the way of knowing that comes through indirection, through myth and metaphor. It is characterized, (in the appreciation as well as the conduct ) of any creative act, as a surprise. The right hand is the tester against experience, the converger, the doubter-until-proven, the cinch.

Bruner’s pedagogy  (tracing a direct line from John Dewey) prefers the hypothetical to the expository, the discovery by the student over the  pronouncements of the teacher.

(1966) Bruner proposed three modes of representation: enactive representation (action-based), iconic representation (image-based), and symbolic representation (language-based). Rather than neatly delineated stages, the modes of representation are integrated and only loosely sequential as they "translate" into each other. Symbolic representation remains the ultimate mode, for it "is clearly the most mysterious of the three."

Bruner's theory suggests it is efficacious when faced with new material to follow a progression from enactive to iconic to symbolic representation; this holds true even for adult learners. A true instructional designer, Bruner's work also suggests that a learner (even of a very young age) is capable of learning any material so long as the instruction is organized appropriately, in sharp contrast to the beliefs of Piaget and other stage theorists.

'knowing how something is put together is worth a thousand facts about it.'

Following Lev Vygotsky the Russian theoretician of socio-cultural development, Bruner proposed that social interaction plays a fundamental role in the development of cognition in general and language in particular. He emphasized that children learn language in order to communicate, and, at the same time, they also learn the linguistic code. Meaningful language is acquired in the context of meaningful parent-infant interaction, learning “scaffolded” or supported by the child’s Language Acquisition Support System

Narrative theory of construction of reality: Actual Minds, Possible Worlds

Bruner’s 4 Hypotheses of Discovery Learning

1. Intellectual potency is the belief that patterns, or solutiomns, or explanations can be found.

2. Autonomous reward rather than extrinsic

3. Self-organization & integration with other mental contents

4. Conservation of memory. Self-construction of learnings facilitates organization, and thus, their later retrieval (ret. is the true challenge of memory)

"So I'm standing up here, pretty confident that I have knowledge in my head that I can impart to you. I have that knowledge nearby, not right at hand, but waiting for me, just beyond the next word I'm going to say. I know it'll be there when I reach for it, but I won't really have it or be able to share it until I say it.

So at every instant I'm making a decision about what word to use next..... this choosing work helps me develop a better understanding. You on the other hand as the audience listening to me have to accept what I say at face value, unaware of all the choices I might have been making. I am making all the choices, so I'm doing most of the work, and I’m getting rewarded for my effort”. I am reconnecting my neurons emerging from this with a stronger grip on my own knowledge. But what about you?

I’m organizing my knowledge. When I do so, I’m going to find it easier to retreive and use later.

If all you are doing is following me, you are not able to organize the thoughts. That’s why so often, after the lecture the speaker is energized and the audience is exhausted.

Scaffolding: WILLIAMS, HUANG AND BARGH, Yale 2009

It has long been a staple of psychological theory that early life experiences significantly shape the adult’s understanding of and reactions to the social world. ... It is proposed that via the process of scaffolding,

these early sensorimotor experiences serve as the foundation for the later development of more abstract concepts and goals. Experiments using priming methodologies reveal the extent to which these early concepts serve as the analogical basis for more abstract psychological concepts, such that we come easily and naturally to speak of close relationships: warm personalities, moral purity, and psychological pain.

Dewey’s Instrumentalism and Pragmatism

Reflex arc

Context-dependence

Social verification

Going Deeper still

Husserl, Edmund. “Perception, Spatiality, and the Body.” Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. In The Essential Husserl. Ed. Donn Welton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).163-185.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motricity.” In Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald A. Landes. New York: Routledge, 2012. 100-48.

Strauss, Erwin. “The Upright Posture.” In Phenomenological Psychology. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1980. 137-65.

From a U of I course catalog:

There is a developing body of work on human cognition which suggests that human thought is grounded in physical experience and extended by means of idealized cognitive models and metaphoric projections. According to this theory, basic preconceptual experiences (or schema) provide the organizing principles for the construction of conceptual models. Examples include link schema (such as the umbilical cord, hand holding); container schema (we experience our bodies as having an in-out orientation); part-whole schema (we experience directly the relationships between our hands and the rest of the body);and source-path-goal schema (from earliest childhood, we move from one place to another to obtain desired objects). The human capacity to conceptualize allows us to project these structures and to use them to organize other aspects of our experience. To take a simple example, we conceptualize purposes in terms of the source-path-goal schema; this gives rise to systematic source-path-goal metaphors that we use in our thinking about purposes. We can therefore perceive our purposive efforts as going a long way toward our goal, conceptualize something or somebody that interferes with our purposes as an obstacle that gets in our way, and describe some of our failings in terms of being sidetracked.

Polya, How to Solve It

A treatise on mathematical hueristic  “What is the unknown, what are the data? What is the condition? Do you know a related problem?”Polya  finds analogy at the center of his method: “...we may consider ourselves lucky when we succeed in finding a simpler analogous problem.”

JEC

The Lyceum at BOMLA: a Visitor's Notes

Lyceum begins every school day of the year at BOMLA. It is hard to imagine that taking part in so rich and interactive a daily experience does not impact, not just a “brother’s” academic learning, but his sense of self and his purpose in life. There is something remarkable here that other schools need to be studying and applying to their own programs. Below are my detailed notes and some speculation about where those interested in school reform might go with it. 

Visit Date: February 20^th, 2014
The Lyceum was convened, as it is every school day, at 7:55 AM. I was ushered to a seat in the back of the assembly hall and watched as the brothers, all in uniform (dark blue v-neck sweaters or blazers)  gradually filled seats in designated areas, by grade. There was a good deal of informal conversation, mostly between pairs or among small groups of students. The boys in general seemed animated; many were smiling. The noise level was lower than what one expected from a room full of pre- and adolescent boys-- a sort of busy murmur. I saw a number of cell phones being looked at, but no one appeared to be phoning.

At 7:50, a student went up onto the stage and began up on a piano behind the curtain. A minute or two later, another student called the assembly to stand for the Pledge to the American and Texas Flags. Following this, in what seemed to be a standard order of business, the Principal, Mr. Douglas, led recitation of the school mission statement, the creed, and a singing of the school song, supported by slides projected over the stage. The final line of the school song was a repeated chant of the school motto: “Believe. Achieve. Succeed”. Mr. Douglas called for a moment of silence before introducing the presenter for this lyceum, one of the math teachers.

Feeding the intellect--the lesson of the day

The main event was a 20-minute demonstration of a rapid multiplication technique based on certain properties of the Fibonacci series. After introducing the concept of the series (the progression of natural numbers, ordered in sequential, 2-integer, sums: 0,1, 1,2, 3,5, 8,13, 21, etc.) he had a few students work a problem using the technique, then challenged all to work as teams and solve for various large numbers. Everyone I could see was engaged in the process, while the first to get right answers were applauded. This was no derby—where only the swiftest can win—but a collective exercise, where all were expected to get the point and win the “prize” eventually. In the Fall semester, we were told, Mr. Douglas presides at all the lyceums and that his talks center more on personal ethics and social issues. I’ll plan to return for one of those, as I’m sure they would be quite interesting as well.

Cueing good order
At one point in the assembly, the presider evidently sensed some restlessness in the audience. He raised his arm and said in a loud voice, “BELIEVE, ACHIEVE, SUCCEED” This set off a cascading repetition of the school motto by everyone around the hall and quickly brought the room back to order.  At another point, when Mr. Douglas was speaking to the assembly, he got the attention he desired with the command “SLANT!” (derived from the  Advancement Via Individual Determination or AVID program) recollecting everyone's attention by delivering an explicit command by referencing a revered norm, the BOMLA motto. The gestures and responses, as used here, appear to be well-practiced and effective in re-establishing decorum.

After the math demonstration, Mr. Douglas returned to the stage for a few announcements, including recognition of a spelling bee winner and several recent athletic victories. He reminded all that at BOMLA, "we are student athletes, not athletic students".  He read out names of some students who were to stay seated after dismissal, which then proceeded by grade level, with the upperclassmen first. I decided to stay behind to watch what I later learned was a “Success Hall” I’ll save that for another post.

The function of the lyceum

The BOMLA lyceum I witnessed clearly reinforces a particular set of values (see creed and school song texts below). It uses repetition, in multiple media, of the value set and calls for diverse behavioral responses from the participants. It equates academic achievement with overall success, and suggests that effort, not talent is the critical factor in achievement. It places the responsibility for success on the individual youth and accepts no excuses for failure, other than his decision not to try. This is an optimistic set of values; it implies that one can control one’s fate, and that misfortune is indifferent to persons, merely something to be overcome. BOMLA places this call to individual striving in the context of a brotherhood, where one is obliged to help his fellow classmate and by metaphoric extension, improve his community.

Learning is social.
Much of our current assessment of schooling outcomes focuses on individual performance and individual choices. We gather and aggregate this data to evaluate our educational efforts and re-design them. The aggregate of individual behavior, however, is not the same as the data we might derive from more ecological approaches, such as ethnographic observation and assessment. Recent thinking across the behavioral sciences and neuropsychology looks at all forms of behavior, including teaching and learning, in a particular context. Another way of saying this is that kids don’t learn in a vacuum. They learn, or fail to learn, in a particular collection of settings that organize behaviors over time. While we do pay a lot of attention to one particular school setting, the “lesson”, we may be overlooking the power of other settings, some very intentional, and others seldom acknowledged, in generating long-term learning effects. Perhaps what happens in chapels, club meetings, playgrounds, study halls, and on the athletic fields is worth looking into for a deeper understanding of places of learning that work, or don’t to further the school's aims.

Lyceum is a tool for teaching values.
What is going on here at BOMLA is, I think, more than a mere collection of schoolhouse rituals, none of which is unfamiliar to us. However, when viewed as a coherent event, and given its frequency, participation levels and content, I think the “lyceum” warrants careful study as an instrument for a certain kind of learning, a strategic element in the design of the academic program, and in particular, to the constellation of "non-cognitive" traits, like resilience, persistence, and "grit" that many educators agree are as predictive of success, if not more than achievement test scores. Many educators are struggling to find ways to instill these traits into students. Clearly, some schools are "outliers" in their ability to project students successfully in college and other rigorous post-graduate programs. My hunch is that lyceum, as practiced here, is worth careful study for replication in other settings. The trick, I think, will be to deeply understand the practice, and not merely copy its superficial form. 

How can we better understand settings?
Lyceum fulfills the requirements of a “behavior setting” as described by social psychologists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior_settings) , as a recurrent, stable set of interactions within specific time and space boundaries. These are the ecological units of a culture, driving a complex of self-reinforcing, interactive behaviors within a particular time and place, and giving those behaviors meaning beyond it. Roger Barker, the pioneer of "ecological psychology" in the 1940's, suggested eleven dimensions of a behavior setting (below). These present a reliable and objective way to compare analogous settings in different schools, and determine their "robustness", or relative importance within the larger setting of the school. 

• Occurrence
• Duration
• Population
• Occupancy Time
• Penetration
• Action Patterns
• Behavior Mechanisms
• Richness
• Pressure
• Welfare
• Local Autonomy

Our next step would be to train a set of observers to apply these in comparative studies of the "non-classroom" settings across a number of schools, then to compare the content and robustness of such settings to their schools' performance in post-secondary placement and eventual success.

JEC

___________

Setting Dimensions

There are two temporal attributes: Occurrence (O), the number of days in a year the behavior setting is capable of occurring, and Duration (D), the number of hours the behavior setting functions during a year. Population (P) is the number of different persons who inhabit the behavior setting during the year. These three basic attributes allow for a calculation of Occupancy Time (OT), the number of person-hours spent in the behavior setting. It is the product of the occurrences (O), the average number of inhabitants per occurrence (P/O), and the average duration per occurrence (D/O).

Penetration (Pe) is the degree to which an inhabitant is involved in the setting and consists of six incremental zones, ranging from onlooker to leader. Using these divisions, the average depth of penetration can be determined for population subgroups (e.g., frequency of minority students being leaders in a club).

Action Patterns (AP) are the functional attributes of the patterns of behavior (e.g., religion, education, and recreation). For each action variable, researchers note the activity’s frequency (participation subscale), its production of materials for use in another setting (supply subscale), and whether the activity is evaluated (appreciation subscale). Behavior Mechanisms (BM) are the modalities through which behavior is implemented in the setting, such as gross motor activity, talking, or thinking. Researchers note each mechanism’s frequency (participation subscale), the speed of the behavior (tempo subscale), and the expenditure of energy (intensity subscale).

Richness is a composite measure of the variety of behavior within the setting. It is computed from the prior attributes using the following formula: (∑Pe + ∑AP + ∑BM)OT/100

Pressure is the degree to which external forces act upon a person to approach/enter or avoid/withdraw from the setting. For example, a setting can be required (a child is for a class at school), invited (a child welcomed to a Sunday School class), or prohibited (a child is excluded from a bar). Welfare is the relevance of the setting to a particular group of inhabitants; that is, whether the group is served by the setting, whether the group serves others in the setting, or whether the setting instigates and supports other settings relevant to the group. Finally, the Local Autonomy of the behavior setting is the geographic level at which the setting’s operations are determined (e.g., town, district, county, state).

_________________

Motto of BOMLA: “Believe. Achieve. Succeed”

BOMLA School Song

 We are the brothers of BOMLA

With the goal of becoming the best in U.S.A.

We believe perseverance, not chance, is the way to achieve.

Our activities are governed by character, honesty, humility.

Excuses don’t exist!

We are loyal to our family

Committed to our community

Servants of mankind and humanity

We have the audacity to HOPE and SUCCEED

We are the brothers of Barack Obama Male Leadership Academy

We have the audacity to HOPE and Succeed

We have the audacity to Believe, Achieve, Succeed

We are the brothers of Barack Obama Male Leadership Academy

(Chant) Believe, Achieve, Succeed!

Settings: Measurable Dimensions (after Barker, et al)

·       There are two temporal attributes: Occurrence (O), the number of days in a year the behavior setting is capable of occurring, and Duration (D), the number of hours the behavior setting functions during a year. Population (P) is the number of different persons who inhabit the behavior setting during the year. These three basic attributes allow for a calculation of Occupancy Time (OT), the number of person-hours spent in the behavior setting. It is the product of the occurrences (O), the average number of inhabitants per occurrence (P/O), and the average duration per occurrence (D/O).

·       Penetration (Pe) is the degree to which an inhabitant is involved in the setting and consists of six incremental zones, ranging from onlooker to leader. Using these divisions, the average depth of penetration can be determined for population subgroups (e.g., frequency of minority students being leaders in a club).

·       Action Patterns (AP) are the functional attributes of the patterns of behavior (e.g., religion, education, and recreation). For each action variable, researchers note the activity’s frequency (participation subscale), its production of materials for use in another setting (supply subscale), and whether the activity is evaluated (appreciation subscale). Behavior Mechanisms (BM) are the modalities through which behavior is implemented in the setting, such as gross motor activity, talking, or thinking. Researchers note each mechanism’s frequency (participation subscale), the speed of the behavior (tempo subscale), and the expenditure of energy (intensity subscale).

·       Richness is a composite measure of the variety of behavior within the setting. It is computed frm the prior attributes using the following formula: (∑Pe + ∑AP + ∑BM)OT/100)

·       Pressure is the degree to which external forces act upon a person to approach/enter or avoid/withdraw from the setting. For example, a setting can be required (a child is for a class at school), invited (a child welcomed to a Sunday School class), or prohibited (a child is excluded from a bar). Welfare is the relevance of the setting to a particular group of inhabitants; that is, whether the group is served by the setting, whether the group serves others in the setting, or whether the setting instigates and supports other settings relevant to the group. Finally, the Local Autonomy of the behavior setting is the geographic level at which the setting’s operations are determined (e.g., town, district, county, state).