Chapter 7 Book Two

A Solid Basis For RTP

W. Thomas Bourbon, Ph.D.
Perceptual Control Theorist
Rochelle, Texas

I've asked my friend, Tom Bourbon, to write this chapter. For many years after William T. Powers developed PCT as a theory of behavior, Tom was one of the few scientists in the world who conducted experimental studies, wrote working computer models to test PCT, and published the results in scientific journals. After receiving a grant, he joined me in 1995 to research RTP and to help me build more integrity into the process. Together, we have visited schools in 15 states, Australia, and Singapore.-Ed Ford

Ed Ford developed the Responsible Thinking Process (RTP) as a way to teach children how to achieve their own ends, without interfering with other people who are also trying to achieve theirs. In RTP, Ed embraced the fact that people always behave to make some of their experiences of the world be the way they want them to be; they act to control their own perceptions. The only theory I know of that explains how people control their experiences is perceptual control theory (PCT), developed by William T. Powers, starting in the 1950s. Ed Ford has tried to make RTP consistent with the ideas in PCT.

Three Ds: Disturbance, Disruption, and Discipline

A person who controls her perceptions must act or behave in order to affect things in the world around her. She must push and pull on things, or affect them in some other physical way. She must change some things and make other things remain the same. But there are many other influences in the world that can affect the same things as she can. If anything or anyone else disturbs her ability to make perceptions be the way she thinks they "should be," she will oppose the effects of that disturbance.

The person who wants to drive from home to work must continually act on the steering wheel, moving it any ways necessary to oppose the disturbing effects of crosswinds, bumps in the road, and poor tire alignment, to keep the view out the windshield changing so that he sees "progress along the road to work."

The person who wants to see a knot in a rubber band remain over a dot on the blackboard must pull continually on one end of the rubber band to oppose disturbances due to another person pulling on the other end, as explained by Ed Ford on page 5 of his book Freedom from Stress.

The student who wants to feel "accepted" by certain fellow students must vary her actions so she always sees the others treating her in a way she calls "acceptance." In each case, the person acts on the world to make what "is perceived" match what he thinks "should be perceived," so his experiences become what he wants them to be.

Whenever several people are physically close together, such as at school, at work, at home, playing a game, or working on a project, and all of them control their own experiences, it is inevitable that, sooner or later, one or more of them will affect part of the world in a way that disturbs the experiences of others. Often, that kind of disturb-ance is unintentional, but sometimes a person does it on purpose. Whichever is the case, people whose control is disturbed by someone else often oppose whoever creates the disturbance. When people are close together, occasional disturbances and opposition to them are natural and unavoidable, but when that kind of interaction occurs in school, it is often called "disruption," and the person who is identified as a "disrupter" is "disciplined."

In traditional discipline programs, students are often treated like objects that can be controlled by what happens around them, much the way the temperature of a rock is controlled by cycles of dark and daylight, the seasons, and the weather. This is a classic example of a "cause-effect" relationship, where something that happens to an object causes the object to change in a specific way. But even something as basic as a child's internal body temperature is not controlled that way by the environment.

A child is a living control system and keeps her own internal temperature constant, in spite of what goes on in the environment. A person controls his body temperature by actions, some "automatic," others intentional, that oppose the effects of disturbances from the environment. If the environment doesn't even control a student's body temperature, how likely is it that the same environment, in the guise of a teacher or parent or assistant principal, controls the student's attitudes, thoughts, emotions, and actions? Not very likely!

The Dance of Control and Counter-Control

A teacher who tries to discipline a student and control her behavior unwittingly becomes a disturbance to the student's perceptions, and the student will then oppose the teacher's actions. The harder the teacher tries to control the student's behavior, the easier it is for her to disturb the teacher in return and counter-control his behavior. Imagine a very simple example.

The teacher decides he will "get in the face" of a disrupting student. When the student sees him standing directly in front of her, she feels uncomfortable; he is standing closer than the student likes people to stand. To oppose that disturbance, she backs away from him, a move he might incorrectly interpret as the student "backing down." If he decides to press the issue with the student, he might step forward to keep the gap between them closed. If he continues to advance, and the student keeps backing away, he might believe he is "really putting her in her place."

He might be completely wrong. If the student has noticed that every time she backs away, the teacher ad-vances, she can move from "being controlled by the teach-er" to "counter-controlling the teacher." For example, if she wants to lead the teacher around the room, all she has to do is keep backing in the direction she wants to see him going. The dance is underway! The teacher sees the student doing what he wants her to do; the student sees the teacher doing what she wants him to do. The teacher thought he was "putting her in her place," but now the student can literally "put him" nearly any place she wants. Which of them do you think is smiling?

Trying Harder: Turning Up the Gain

When one perceptual control system tries to control the actions of another, counter-control like that in the previous example is always possible. That is why people who try to use traditional discipline programs to control students' actions nearly always feel like they are being "yanked around" by the students. They are.

When a person acts to eliminate "perceptual error," which is the difference between his intended perception and his present perception, he acts like a "control system." An interesting fact about a control system is that if you increase its "gain," then when it experiences the same amount of perceptual error, the system will produce a more vigorous "output." For example, a teacher might decide to "turn up his gain" and try harder to control a student. If he does, then for the same amount of difference between what the teacher wants to see the student doing and what he actually sees her doing, he will act more vigorously to try to "make her behave."

Teachers might decide to try harder, or do more, to control the "behavior" of making repeated visits to the RTC. The teachers have the same desired perceptions as before (to see students not make repeated visits), but they have "turned up the gain" (trying harder to make them not return).

Those teachers beg more passionately and yell more loudly than before. They adopt more coercive meas-ures. They contrive more intricate contingencies and more outlandish strategies. In every case, the result is likely to be the same: students will quickly discover that it is easier than ever before to counter-control the teachers. That is always a possibility whenever one control system tries to control the actions of another, and it is almost guaranteed to happen when a teacher "turns up the gain."

The Responsible Thinking Process and PCT

The greatest success with RTP comes when teachers un-derstand that each person controls his or her own experiences. Teachers who know that fact usually stop trying to control students' behavior. They are no longer subject to counter-control by their students, and they feel a great sense of relief. Rather than trying to control students' be-havior, teachers start helping them learn how to think their way through situations where they formerly "disrupted." The teachers know they cannot use traditional methods for "cognitive restructuring" to put ideas like "fairness," "re-spect," or "justice" into students' heads, but they can help students experience conditions that are labeled by those words. After they experience those conditions with RTP, students themselves can say what they mean and why they are important.

RTP is not something you "do to" students to "make them behave," once and for all. No discipline process can eliminate the fact that, at some time or another, each of us disturbs someone else, while we all go about the business of controlling our own experiences. But in schools where the Responsible Thinking Process is working well, both students and staff learn to think about their plans and actions, so that when they act to control their own experiences, they will minimize the chances that they disturb others. That is the best we can do.