Mastering the Basics

The first time I got a tiger to sit up on cue took five or six weeks.  Admittedly, I didn't work on it every day.  If I had, perhaps it would have only taken me a couple of weeks.  Later on, I learned how to get a pretty reliable sit-up on cue in a a few days.

The sit-up is pretty standard fare for training circus cats—especially tigers.  There are two reasons for this.

One reason that sit-ups are "standard" tricks is that it is something lions and tigers do anyway.  The trick is getting them to do it on cue and with good posture.

Another reason a sit-up is common is that many other performance behaviors are based on the sit-up.  A sit-up aligned with other big cats doing a sit-up is an impressive—and therefore commonly performed—part of a circus cat act.  A sit-up on a pyramid structure alongside other cats is another standard performance device. Perhaps most impressive in terms of aesthetics is the sit-up atop a large, revolving mirrored ball.

Here's a wonderful example of the mirrored-ball sit-up originally trained and performed by the amazing Charly Baumann and later refined by Gunther Gebel-Williams and Wade Burck.  This trick (which you must see live to fully appreciate) cannot be performed unless you have a tiger who can sit-up and hold their position confidently while their seat rotates for a minute or so. This is an advanced skill that is built upon a basic skill.

I've seen some large acts that include several lions or tigers that only have two tricks in their repertoire: sitting on their assigned seat and doing a sit-up one or more times during the performance.  But sometimes that sit-up is an advanced sit-up.

The thing about the sit-up behavior is that it's part of the "core curriculum" in training circus cats. But like any commonly expected outcomes, sometimes it's an easy goal to achieve and sometimes it's not.  It depends.

One factor involves the native abilities the tiger or lion brings to the lesson. Tigers do sit-ups frequently as part of their natural behavior, so most of them are ready to learn how to do it on cue.

Lions are slightly less prone to do a sit-up naturally and also come with a physical limitation that requires some accommodation—a really thick tail base that can get in the way when trying to sit upright. You sometimes have to take more time with lions—perhaps altering the surface a bit and providing soothing reassurance—to get them comfortable with a sit-up on cue.

A standard sit-up may take more time and effort with an easily-annoyed lion than with an eager tiger.  But the outcome is the same.

Another factor is the level of experience and expertise the trainer brings to the lesson. As I stated earlier, after a while, you can get success in training a sit-up more efficiently than when you first started.  You've experimented with what works best for different individual cats—and you've seen all kinds of cats by then.

The very best of those highly skilled trainers who can "teach any cat a sit-up" are those who have not let failures stop them.  Instead, they persist in trying out new (or old) techniques that may work better with certain animals. They have accumulated more tools in their toolbox.

What can we use from this in our teaching?

• There are some basic learning outcomes that are considered to essential.  We'll call them "core outcomes."
• The core outcomes must be mastered before any advanced outcomes are possible.
• Sometimes core outcomes can be easily achieved, sometimes not.
• Some learners are ready—they have existing abilities—to learn a core outcome quickly.
• Some learners come with challenges that must be addressed as they master a core outcome.
• Learners who take more time and effort—and perhaps some accommodations in how lessons are taught—can often still achieve the same outcomes as other learners.
• Teachers can become more effective as they are exposed to more teaching experiences with more students.  
• Teachers who persist when confronted with failure often evolve into expert educators.
• Experienced teachers often have more tools in their toolbox from which to choose when dealing with particular students or teaching challenges.

Photo credit: Circus No Spin Zone

Lion taming team

Assistant letting a lion into the arena

If you've ever seen a lion act, you may not have noticed the men and women in nondescript coveralls along the edges of the ring (sometimes even inside the cage).  You're not supposed to notice them, so don't feel bad if you didn't.  The spotlight is supposed to be on the lion tamer and the lions . . . not the rest of the lion taming team.

Anybody in the entertainment industry knows that the term "solo performer" does not mean that only one person is involved in presenting what you are seeing and hearing.  This is absolutely true in lion taming as well.  One person may take the spotlight, but a coordinated team effort is required to successfully train and present a lion or tiger act.

 During training, assistants inside and outside the practice arena are needed to supply treats (usually bits of fresh meat), position props, and move animals into and out of the arena.  These assistants usually help guide each animal during training and practice, meaning that more than one person is actually training the animals.  Sometimes an assistant guides one animal and the lion tamer another animal as they learn a behavior that requires two animals acting at the same time.

During a performance, sometimes it's the assistant helping to cue a particular animal to leave its seat and move to the middle of the arena, to enter or exit the arena, or stay put on their seat during another animal's time in the center.  The assistants keep watch on the seated animals so that the lion tamer can focus on the animal(s) performing at the moment.  Often, it's the assistants to rush to help diffuse a dangerous situation if it arises.

The best lion tamers are those who know that they alone cannot pull it off.  They are the lion tamers who spend extra time and energy building a team that can effectively work together.

Likewise, the best teachers are those who know how to use the team approach successfully.  

I've known teachers who do not respect other professionals involved in the learning process and fail to involve them in the learning process effectively.  Which often adversely affects the quality of learning in their courses.

For example, do we go out of our way to include library professionals, safety officers, maintenance and housekeeping staff, learning specialists, accessibility teams, and others in our planning and execution of our teaching? 

If we don't develop the habit of including ideas from--and enlisting active cooperation from--our teaching team, then we run the risk of being "eaten alive" when things don't go as planned.

Here are a few ideas to get started in team thinking.

• Library professionals are often eager to assist in researching content updates and new teaching approaches. They're often willing to walk our students through the "how-to" methods of doing research for their class projects. I've had librarians help me keep an eye out for new books and new articles that I'm likely to find interesting or useful.
• Safety officers can help us plan some strategies in  dealing with aggressive students or other potential hazards.  Developing a good relationship with your safety team makes all of you more comfortable and confident as you "perform" your daily work.
• Maintenance and housekeeping staff, when made part of your team, are often willing to assist you in keeping your classroom spaces "just the way you like them" to facilitate teaching and learning.  They often have some great ideas for making your space even better!  By having a working relationship with them, you are more likely to get the help you need--and get it right away--when things go wrong.
• Learning specialists and accessibility staff often have some useful tips and shortcuts, especially when dealing with challenging students and challenging groups.

Like circus-goers, we often let those team members in "nondescript coveralls" become invisible to us.  But it's better to be more like the lion tamer to relies heavily on their help to succeed. 

Old lion tamers

Jules Jacot, St.Louis Zoo

A few months ago I saw Jane Fonda on The Tonight Show and when Jay Leno chided her that maybe she was losing her faculties because of aging, she quipped "I may be losing my eyesight but I am gaining insight."

Of course, she's right.  Neuroscientists continue to demonstrate that our brains do indeed become much more capable of insight, wisdom, and problem solving as we age. This train of thought got me thinking about old lion tamers. Really, I swear to it!

Sometimes people ask me who the best lion tamer is or was. Although in my mind there are several close contenders, my immediate response is always Jules Jacot. Jules was the elderly lion tamer at the St. Louis Zoo when I was growing up. He was the first lion tamer that I ever saw perform and even now, looking back through the lens of an experienced lion taming enthusiast, certainly the best.

Whenever other animal trainers find out that I grew up in St. Louis, they asked me if I knew Jules Jacot. Although he never became famous to the public, he was very well known and respected among circus people and zoo people. 

When I first began working with big cats, I noticed that most of the new acts were being put together by elderly lion tamers, most of whom did not perform in public anymore. Jules Jacot had just put together a new act shortly before he died (in his sleep) at age 81.

At first I wondered why it was the older trainers, rather than the younger and presumably more energetic trainers, that were being hired for these challenging jobs training new groups of lions and tigers. It's one thing to present an existing act but quite another to quickly put a new act together with young, untrained wild animals.

Eventually, I came to realize that the older trainers were so good at training cats that they could put a really good act together in a much shorter time than a younger trainer could.  Of course!  These older men and women had experimented over a lifetime and their experience allowed them to apply their distilled wisdom to each new training assignment.

I soon learned that if I wanted to become a successful wild animal trainer, I needed to seek out the wisdom of these experienced trainers. A few of them have written books that contain the fruit of their experience. I read and reread as many of these books as I could. I sought older trainers and asked them to tell me stories about how they do what they do.

When they offered to let me watch them train and practice and perform, I jumped at the chance! It was amazing to me how quickly each of them could read their animals and use that information to train them quickly, efficiently, and with very little stress to the animal or the trainer.

I think this is a good lesson for us as educators. Teachers who have spent a lifetime experimenting with different approaches and techniques, teachers who have seen hundreds or even thousands of unique students over their careers, can be a wealth of information and insight for beginning teachers. For all of us.

In my modest experience, I have seen some new teachers quickly blossom into effective teachers and others not fare quite so well.  And most often, the difference is whether they invested time and effort into reading and watching the "old masters" at work.  

No matter where we are in our teaching careers, I think we can benefit from sitting in on a class or two taught by an experienced colleague.

Here's a good place to start . . . What the Best College Teachers Do

Practicing . . . some more

Lion practice. http://lion8.us/g0KOX5

In a previous post I ranted about the necessity of practice, practice, practice. I'd like to follow up with another example of how repeated practice can be facilitated in an active and engaging way in the classroom.

One of the most engaging ways to facilitate active, fun practice in the classroom involves the use of student response systems (clickers).  I've written about my use of clickers in my other blog The Electronic Professor. Although the first generation of such systems were difficult to use, the current systems are as easy as pie and extremely reliable.

In my anatomy and physiology courses, which are rigorous courses that serve as a foundation for all of the health-related careers, I have found clickers to be a wonderful tool for practicing problem-solving. My online tests and in-class exams are chock-full of case studies and other applications that require the ability to analyze situations, apply concepts, and solve problems. As you can imagine, students struggle with these items. At least at first. When I introduce an example of one of the trickier problems that students will encounter on a test as an in-class clicker question, it allows them to practice solving it is a group. And with me there to help.

Often, the graph showing how students have answered the item tells me that most, if not all, of them have failed to answer it correctly. That's because I try to choose the type of question that I know from past experience students give my students trouble. So when the results of the clicker poll are revealed, I can tell them that they've missed the mark and then ask them to try and figure out what went wrong.

With some leading questions, I can usually coax the correct response out of them. I usually only after some discussion and some group practice in analyzing the situation and applying concepts effectively. This way, they get a chance to make a mistake without penalty and completely anonymously.

And they get a chance to collaborate on fixing the mistake. In doing so, they are practicing the skills needed to solve such problems. And they are reviewing the concepts needed to apply to the problem situation. My coaching helps them learn where to start in solving a problem and what steps to take to get to a solution.

In a brief supplement course that accompanies my anatomy and physiology courses, we use the clickers to do another kind of practice. This one is more like a traditional drill. But not quite the boring rote learning of days gone by.

One of the things that my students really struggle with is how to identify anatomical structures in dissected specimens, models, and charts. They know that they will be tested in a so-called "practical" exam. That is, they will be given a specimen and asked to identify which structure is which. In other words, they have to be certain that they have found the right structures, they have to memorize a large number of these structures' locations and characteristics, and they have to be able to apply this knowledge at a moments notice in the presence of the lab instructor. Not having had much if any experience with this type of learning and testing, and being faced with an overwhelming number of such concepts to learn and apply, they struggle.

So what I do in my supplement class is let them practice on paper first. That is, they do "virtual" dissections of photographs. Then they go to their lab course and do the actual dissections. After that, they come back to the supplement course where I give them examples of what they will see on their practical exam. But instead of answering individually, they use the clickers to answer all at once. And anonymously. I reveal the graph of results from the clicker poll and we see how many people were successful in correctly identifying a particular structure.

If most people in the class were successful, then I either move on to the next item or a briefly remind them of the identifying characteristics of the structure to reinforce what they at least tentatively already knew. If a significant number of students were unsuccessful, then I can ask some pointed questions that will lead toward the correct response. This allows me to give them some additional tips on how to locate and identify structures. Such tips would likely fall on deaf ears at the beginning of the lesson. Learning such tips immediately after failing to identify a particular anatomical structure shows the student hi useful they really are.

I usually set up these drills in a sort of game show format with the timer and buzzer so that the students have to respond immediately, as they would during the practical exam. And like a game show, they seem to really get into it and cheer when they nail it (or groan when they miss it). Because the system allows them to remain anonymous, they are not afraid to make a stab at each answer. They can make their mistakes during our drill and not in a practical exam. By having a large number of such items, many of which show up in more than one drill, they get in a lot of practice, practice, practice.

Do you have some other ideas for effective practice of course concepts and skills? If so, I'd love to hear about them!

A whip and a chair

A classic image of a lion tamer includes a whip and a chair.  That style of lion taming was popularized in the early 20th century by American trainer Clyde Beatty and others.  It is called the "fighting style" because the audience is led to believe that the lions are fresh from the jungle, ready to attack, and the lion tamer must therefore constantly fight back at the ferocious beasts.

Of course, this is largely illusion.  I say "of course" but many folks still do think that these old lion tamers really were fighting, beating, and subjugating the animals.  The illusion was too well done, I guess!  Although some of the cats were "fresh from the jungle" in those days, they were definitely not itching for fight.  The behavior was induced in the lions for dramatic purposes.  Although lions really are dangerous, and a lion tamer does indeed take certain risks by being in there with these big predators, it's largely "for show."

Lions, like people, do not like chairs waved in their faces.  A trainer who approaches a lion with the legs of a chair extended outward will eventually invade the "personal space" of a lion.

Why a chair?  It's an easily obtained and carried object that is a good substitute for one's arms.  Better a lion take a swipe at a chair than at your arms!  A broken chair is easily replaced, eh?

When the lion tamer's chair first enters a lion's personal space, the lion will back away.  A savvy trainer uses this knowledge to artfully back the lion into whatever position is needed . . . up onto a pedestal, or whatever.

However, if the lion tamer makes a sudden move deeper into the lion's personal space, then the lion will defend its space and start to "fight" back.  Really, it's a more of a bluff than a full-out attack.  It's something lions do with each other all the time.  If you've been around house cats that live together you see this behavior frequently  . . . but with somewhat less noise and drama than when lions do it.  It's all about getting that darn chair out of the way.

A lion tamer can use this blustery, irritated reaction to get the lion to move toward the tamer.  A skillful trainer can use this interaction . . . which lion tamers call "bouncing" a cat . . . to get the lion to climb onto a nearby ball or cylinder.  With enough practice, the lion learns to bluster a bit and quickly move onto the ball and begin rolling it forward.  Now we have drama and acrobatic skill being demonstrated.

I think this aspect of lion taming is a good metaphor for teaching on several levels.

For example, just as lion tamers use their knowledge of lion behavior to induce certain reactions and eventually train complex behaviors, good teachers know what kinds of challenges will induce a "fight" in their students.  Not a literal fight, or even a blustery confrontation, but the kind of "push back" that allows the student to rise to a challenge.

Let me clarify with an example.  Just moments ago, my colleague Jennifer O'Malley told of today's lesson in which her biology students were expected to make some mathematical calculations about genetic probabilities.  Because she knows that nonscience majors often get scared by mathematical problems, she chose to "bounce" them through the exercise.  She broke the calculations down into steps and then for each step challenged them with, "can you add? sure you can! come on, get through it!"  The first "hoop" was jumped through.  Then, "can you multiply?  sure you can!  let's go!" and they jumped through the second hoop.

And so she continued with playful challenges as the students easily performed a mathematical calculation that they otherwise might have balked at  . . . and perhaps even have stubbornly refused to attempt.  But that chair in the face can be an effective stimulus to move forward anyway.

How many of us have challenged individual students or whole classes in this way?  Or perhaps by continually "getting in their face" to move forward and accomplish a goal that you have set for them?

Of course, as in the lion taming metaphor, a classroom teacher needs a certain degree of skill and savvy to do this effectively . . . and to avoid overstepping dangerous boundaries.  Happily, such skills are easy to acquire with practice. And when the teacher is willing to experiment and self-analyze the results of the experimentation.