A Positive Perspective

How much emphasis should be placed on bad learning practices as opposed to good learning practice. Teaching should be a thing of positives rather than negatives. Good teachers are much happier showing students what to do to achieve better results rather than what not to do. Students also tend to respond more positively to this atmosphere by being happier learners.

After watching a colleague show a nicely prepared slide spending a lot of time on what should not be done with presentations, my thoughts digressed to thinking the time would have been much better spent showing the students how to advance their skills with good examples rather than bad ones. On occasions it is needed to create a perspective for students by using comparisons but these comparisons can still be between good and better examples.

The incongruous part of this negative presentation was that no students were creating this type of poor quality, they were all at the stage of good and better.

I then digressed as to the place of negative tuition and the use of sarcasm, negative reinforcement and blame, these have no place in the classroom and it is seen all too often.

For many years as a student support teacher (as well as a classroom teacher) I had to pick up the results of negative instruction that stopped students from performing. These same students excelled when put into a different environment where blame was not used and the dominating atmosphere was positive with examples of good and better.

As a footnote it could be added that some persons use blame and negativity to create stress to increase performance. The appropriate level of stress can be a good motivator but there are a lot better ways to create an appropriate stress level to increase student or employee performance. Imposed stress can be overdone too easily and destroys performance and sometimes with it lives are destroyed, where as self imposed stress can increase performance dramatically, but this is a topic for later discussion.