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faariano

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  1. I'm not sure that I'm lucky enough to get a response, but in any case, it doesn't hurt if I post my writing here: “The best way to teach 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 recommendation and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, describe specific circumstances in which adopting the recommendation would or would not be advantageous and explain how these examples shape your position. The statement claiming that the best teaching method is to appreciate positive acts and ignore negative ones relies on the efficacy of positive thinking: that the learner will be encouraged and motivated if their strong points are appreciated by the instructor. While there is some truth in the recommendation, this too strong claim ignores the importance of learning from mistakes. Before explaining why the statement in this absolute form can’t hold true, let me begin by mentioning some merits of the recommendation, The traditional method of teaching focused on the weaknesses and negative actions of the learner, as tough the positive ones were taken for granted: In other words, the student was supposed to be do things perfectly. Accordingly, punishment, rather than reward, was the main tool to correct the mistakes. This made learning a painful and unpleasant experience, since the student should always wait for being scolded and punished for their possible negative acts. In contrast to this method, the statement invites us to praise the students for what she does well, and instead, forget the mistakes. This would make learning a pleasant experience, as in contrary to the other method, students can always expect praises and rewards. It’s easy to see that this kind of teaching can be especially beneficial in specific cases: for example, consider a shy student that is not confident about her abilities: praises based on her real positive acts can give her back the confidence she lacks, while not mentioning her problems can help her stop her habitual negative thinking. However, there are serious problems with the recommendation, since while it’s essential to emphasize the positive side, it’s equally important to not forget the negative side. For one thing, the main aim of teaching is to help students to improve. Thus they need to know and work on their problems and weaknesses. In fact, sooner or later, when they are to utilize what they learnt in real life, they will find out their problems. But then, it’s much more difficult to change those habits that have been unnoticed for years: Consider a young person looking for a job: How can she cope with the problems of the world of business, if she wasn’t been told and helped with weaknesses by her teachers before? The world is too cruel to give her many chances to correct herself. Secondly, in some respect, acknowledging your negative acts can be more helpful than being appreciated for your positive one. It is so, since negative acts can reveal some essential weaknesses in us, so knowing and correcting them can help the student to prevent similar problems in the future. For example, if a student’s performance in exams is below her real knowledge, it might show that she has some problems coping with pressure. Thus, first acknowledging the problem and then finding a plan to resolve it, can help her prevent many more problems likely to happen to her in stressful situations. Thirdly, from the psychological point of view, while it’s important to give student enough confirmation and confidence, it’s as important to not make her have a distorted picture of herself; as tough she does everything perfectly. In fact, just praising someone for what she does well, leads to pseudo-confidence, because, sooner or later, in face of real problems, she will notice that she is not as perfect as she thought, hence the unrealistic image of herself disappears. This means that while praising someone for her good points can help her become confident, ignoring the negative one can even remove the good effects of the justified praise. Overall, the best teaching method would consider both positive and negative acts: How much we need to emphasize on one or another, depends on circumstances: For example, maybe the student is over-confident, so she should be more aware of her problems. Or perhaps, the situation is totally the opposite. The bottomline is that an efficient teaching method should take both sides into consideration, what the traditional method and the statement don’t do.
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