Sometimes Negative Feedback is Best - Heidi Grant Halvorson. By Heidi Grant Halvorson | 8:00 AM January 28, 2013 If I see one more article or blog post about how you should never be “critical” or “negative” when giving feedback to an employee or colleague (or, for that matter, your children), I think my head will explode. It’s incredibly frustrating. This kind of advice is surely well meant, and it certainly sounds good. After all, you probably don’t relish the thought of having to tell someone else what they are doing wrong — at minimum, it’s a little embarrassing for everyone involved.
But avoiding negative feedback is both wrong-headed and dangerous. Wrong-headed because, when delivered the right way, at the right time, criticism is in fact highly motivating. Dangerous because without awareness of the mistakes he or she is making, no one can possibly improve. Hang on, you say. And don’t people need encouragement to feel confident? In many cases, yes. Confusing, isn’t it? But what about motivation? How Do We Measure What Really Counts In The Classroom?
The world is caught up in an Information Age revolution, where we are all evaluating products, restaurants, doctors, books, hotels, and everything else online, but education has not yet moved past the standardized assessment, which was invented in 1914. Frederick Kelly, a doctoral student in Kansas, was looking for a mass-produced way to address a teacher shortage caused by World War I.
If Ford could mass produce Model T’s, why not come up with a test for “lower order thinking” for the masses of immigrants coming into America just as secondary education was made compulsory and all the female teachers were working in factories while their men went to the European front? Even Kelly was dismayed when his emergency system, which he called the Kansas Silent Reading Test, was retained after the war ended.
By 1926, a variation of Kelly’s test was adopted by the College Entrance Examination Board as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). That’s just the beginning. Ideas About Games and Learner Assessment. Harrisburg Presentation Resources Here are some resources from my presentation in Harrisburg. Defining and Exploring Gamification from Karl Kapp Here is some additional information. Articles and Blog Entries of Interest 8 Types of Stories to Effect Change Storytelling and Instructional Design Eight Game Elements to Make Learning More Intriguing Games, Gamification and the Quest for Learner Engagement Gamification, […] Continue Reading → 2014 DOE Symposium Conference Resources Here are my resources for the 2014 DOE Symposium Conference.
Continue Reading → Great fun at ITEAA Conference & Introduction of Exciting Game-Based Learning Modules Last week I had a chance to attend the ITEAA Conference which is the conference of the International Technology and Engineering Educators Association. Continue Reading → Instructional Games and Narrative Instructional games work best when there is a narrative that provides the learner with the proper context for the learning that needs to take place. Learning by Doing: Contents. In brave new world of online ed, Smarterer wants to track what you’re actually learning. When Boston-based Smarterer launched in late 2010, it was conceived as a way for people to quickly show others what they know. But, two years later, the company says it’s stumbled on to an important lesson: especially with the emerging crop of education startups, life-long learners need a way to assess their progress for themselves. To that end, Smarterer (see disclosure), which uses crowdsourced tests to measure skill mastery, is shifting its attention away from being a site for public validation to being a platform to track personal learning.
“We started with the vision of you’re doing this because you want to prove to the world what you know – it was more about reputation management [and] trying to get the job,” said co-founder Dave Balter, who is also the CEO of marketing firm BzzAgent. “The deeper we got, the closer we came to the realization that people were using the system for much more intrinsic purposes … to understand if they were growing or not.” Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops | Wired Magazine. In 2003, officials in Garden Grove, California, a community of 170,000 people wedged amid the suburban sprawl of Orange County, set out to confront a problem that afflicts most every town in America: drivers speeding through school zones.
Local authorities had tried many tactics to get people to slow down. They replaced old speed limit signs with bright new ones to remind drivers of the 25-mile-an-hour limit during school hours. Police began ticketing speeding motorists during drop-off and pickup times. But these efforts had only limited success, and speeding cars continued to hit bicyclists and pedestrians in the school zones with depressing regularity. So city engineers decided to take another approach. The signs were curious in a few ways. In other words, officials in Garden Grove were betting that giving speeders redundant information with no consequence would somehow compel them to do something few of us are inclined to do: slow down.
A feedback loop involves four distinct stages. Metacognition And Learning: Strategies For Instructional Design. Do you know how to learn? Many people don’t. Specifically, they don’t know how to look inward to examine how they learn and to judge which methods are effective. That’s where metacognitive strategies come in. They are techniques that help people become more successful learners. Improved metacognition can facilitate both formal and informal learning. But let’s start at the beginning. What is metacognition? Metacognition is often referred to as “thinking about thinking.” The Two Processes of Metacognition Many theorists organize the skills of metacognition into two complementary processes that make it easier to understand and remember. Metacognition and Expertise Many experts cannot explain the skills they use to elicit expert performance.
Examples of Metacognition Skills You May Use Successful learners typically use metacognitive strategies whenever they learn. Metacognitive Strategies Metacognitive strategies facilitate learning how to learn. Ask Questions. References: How Leaders Become Self-Aware - Anthony Tjan. By Anthony K. Tjan | 9:01 AM July 19, 2012 A plethora of people, courses, and self-help guides profess to lead you by the hand to the promised land of business success. The problem is that things are always messier than the how-to’s make them out to be. This is why it is often better to consider less the specifics and more the principles and qualities that bring success. In my experience — and in the research my co-authors and I did for our new book, Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck — there is one quality that trumps all, evident in virtually every great entrepreneur, manager, and leader.
That quality is self-awareness. Without self-awareness, you cannot understand your strengths and weakness, your “super powers” versus your “kryptonite.” That self-awareness is a critical factor for business-building success is not a new insight. 1. 2. 3. This is the trinity of self-awareness: know thyself, improve thyself, and complement thyself.