TOPIC: The best way to teach—whether as an educator, employer, or parent—is to praise positive actions and ignore negative ones.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.
This issue raises the controversial issue of whether highlighting positive actions instead of negative ones is more effective way to teach. Indisputably, one can learn much from a negative feedback, however, the best way to teach is to praise positive actions which would encourage her to keep up the good work.
First of all, elementary school teachers’ one of biggest problems with new coming students is that have them sit still in the class. Based on their age, those who don’t have enough experience to focus on an issue constantly for even 20 minutes are hard to handle for a teacher to educate. Although every teacher based on her own knowledge and experience has a tactic to get such students focus. This tactic varies from awarding the ones who stand still or answer the questions correctly or punishing the ones who fail do to so. Taking the common characteristic of a nine-year old, it is likely that she will not understand why she got punished or kicked out from class when she does not behave. Instead, she tends to think that the teacher is awarding her favorite students and ignoring the others and she is one of the ones who got ignored. However, again based on a nine-year old characteristic when one of her classmates was awarded a star sticker from the teacher, she would be likely to envy her classmates and try to get a star sticker for herself. Taking advantage of this innocent competition among students the teacher can set certain rules and award the ones who obey them.
In addition, similarly, children tend to disobey their parents when their demands are not materialized. Based on the family culture, the parents might choose to lock their daughter up to prevent her leaving the house to join a party with her friends. In this case, many would think that the rationale behind this behavior of parents is understandable. An underage is not mature enough to make important life decisions such as whether she should drink alcohol or have sexual relationship with her friends. Although the parents might aim to teach a lesson to their daughters that she is too young it is very unlikely that she got the aimed message. Instead, she would feel restricted and punished for something she has not done yet. Instead the parents might have chosen another way of expressing themselves while successfully convincing their daughters to stay away from bad habits. Praising her success at school to her face and when others around would give her the message that her parents are proud of her because she is focused on her studies. This way she is likely to get more focused on the school work at the evenings rather than joining parties.
Same understanding applies to the relationship between employees an employer. Although employees are mature enough to make right decisions and should be able to take negative criticism from their employers when they make a bad decision, the best way to teach an employee would be encouraging her to make better decisions next time. Indeed, employees are promoted based on their good performance, but it is very rare that an underperforming employee is demoted. This is because a demoted employee would lose her passion to develop herself and likely to perform even worse. Such action by employers would bring her embarrassment among other employees. Also, even not getting promotion in expected years is a reason that many leave their jobs every year. However, since promotion brings encouragement to get another promotion and a rise in pay, employees are likely to do better when they are awarded for their good work rather than punished for their mistakes.
