Home > Features > Humanistic Teaching > Murmurs > Feedback Fallacies

Humanistic Teaching

An approach to learning English

Feedback Fallacies

Festivals

Murmurs

Quick Activities

Untried Ideas

Worksheets

December 06, 2009

One of the presuppositions of NLP is that when communicating, the response received indicates the message that was sent. Meaning that the meaning of the communication is in the response that comes back. So, for example, if you try to help a child and the child gets angry then that is a good sign that the child feels you were talking down to them, or treating them like a child when they wanted to be treated as an independent human being.

I receive very few messages about the stuff I write here so I guess that means I'm not hitting the mark, or perhaps not hitting the mark enough. It could also mean that I'm writing in a vacuum and very few people are actually reading this at all. I could do with finding out some statistics about the this site and my pages in particular. But I guess I'm guilty of too much pontification and not enough pork. This week will be no different! Christmas is coming. The goose may be getting fat but it's also getting frantic and frayed at the edges. Too much to do and too little time to do it in.

Any way, if you feel that recently this blog has been substance light then have a look here. The link will direct you to a report I wrote on my recent excursion to Osaka as one of the two guest speakers for the 2009 Kansai ETJ expo. Apart from the report there are several complete activities and games that can be downloaded. There are even some written rules!

Burt actually, this week I wanted to pen a few words about the Kansai guest speaker presentation given by Kim Horne. This was a powerful, energetic wonderful presentation packed with information that somehow left me feeling apprehensive and queasy.

Kim spoke on Brain Rules and Power Teaching in the Classroom. She presented three rules and gave attendees some tools to activate the rules. The three rules are:

Exercise boosts brain power

Repeat to remember, remember to repeat

The brain craves excitement

I agree with these rules, especially the first and the third and I hope to examine them in more detail at a later date but right now I want to focus upon one of the tools that Kim presented which was a scoring system.

The system was simple enough. It consisted of a table with two rows. One with a smiley face and one with an unsmiley one (at least that's how I remember it. Neither my memory nor my eyesight are what they were even a few months ago. So if you are reading this and saw it differently please let me know.

The idea is simple. At the end of each activity the teacher rates the overall performance, participation, and sheer energy of the class during the activity and either gives them a smiley point or an unsmiley one. The class are then supposed to respond accordingly. This might be a mighty cheer or dramatic sighs of desperation or even two catchphrase linked to a particular theme. In the presentation Kim showed us two for a pirate theme.

The aim of the points is to give the children - kindergarten and elementary ages being the recipients - feedback. The idea is to encourage them to think about what they did well and conversely what they could do better if they miss a smiley point. However, even during the presentation I felt perturbed. I could hear a sinister little whisper at the back of my mind, "test!"

This may partly have been because I was feeling severely tested by the TPR Kim was throwing at us. I think TPR is a powerful tool and I'm always wondering how to incorporate more of it in my own classes but it seemed Kim had a gesture for everything and there was too much for me to take in.

I actually like words, and for me gestures can easily get in the way! One thing I raised with Kim after the presentation was that I like to mix and match when it comes to gestures. Some things, for example prepositions I think it is useful to have shared gestures but for others, especially anything to do with expressing their own feelings I think it is better for children to come up with their own gestures. Of course this means having a classroom culture that encourages gestures, otherwise children will likely come up with nothing. So from this point of view spending time getting children to learn gestures that help with metacognition is time well spent, as long as the children don't feel overwhelmed.

One of the downsides of the ETJ expo presentations is that they are only 45 minutes long. Invariably presenters need to rush at breakneck speed. A little bit more time would allow a little bit more reflection. as it was I personally couldn't keep pace with the number of gestures and chants Kim was showering us with. Now I think showering children with meaningful English is a very useful way of getting them to acquire English rather than learn (study) it. The younger the child the more useful showering is, but the older the more one has to be careful with overload. Overload turns a shower into a flashflood which can wash away confidence and motivation in an instant.

So for me, the number of gestures were too much, especially with the scoreboard on the board. I felt there was too much pressure for me to get it right rather than enjoy the process for its own sake. Probably, people who are more comfortable with gestures wouldn't have felt this way, but now a week later I am sensing it just as clearly. Rather than feedback I felt the scoreboard was grading our performance. It was clear that it was meant to be a tool for enlightenment rather than one for ranking and control but I felt it belonged to the teacher rather than to the class. It is as if the teacher is some mighty Roman Emperor at the circus deciding whether to allow the defeated gladiator to live or to die. In my mind it would make more sense if the students could assess each activity themselves, but something a little bit more sophisticated than a thumbs up or thumbs down approach would be required.

I think there is a vast difference between feedback and ranking, even if the ranking is applied to the class as a whole. I think the best way to give feedback is to simply make observations, to describe in detail what one has seen. There's an interesting YouTube video that makes a similar point about the dangers of praising children. Of course, one of the difficulties of detailed description is how to do it and remain in English and be understandable. Otherwise one's feedback becomes a test of understanding which then defeats the very purpose of giving the kind of feedback I am suggesting in the first place. When and how to use mother tongue is a whole other mess of worms. But for now I'll conclude by saying that finding tools that allow children (or adults too for that matter) to notice things about what and how they are learning is very important. If you know of any please let me know. A score board may be better than nothing but I am very doubtful. There must be something better, out there, somewhere.

Humanistic Teaching

An approach to learning English

Feedback Fallacies

Post a comment

Comment Preview