Positive Teaching, Positive Learning

Rob Barnes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9781138472174
• eBook ISBN: 9781134676729
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Positive Teaching, Positive Learning offers teachers and student-teachers in training a number of practical strategies for developing and improving teaching and learning. It provides insights into very positive teacher-pupil management and learning, such as ways to increase pupil involvement and give constructive feedback from assessment.
The book draws together findings about pupils' and teachers' classroom practice, and suggests how practical steps can be taken to create a positive attitude towards generating high expectations. It includes quoted material researched over five years through interviews with known effective teachers (identified by OFSTED) about the teaching strategies they use.

Chapter 1

Positive and negative thinking

Sophie was not supposed to improve, and why she did is a question that has resurfaced many times during my teaching career. The mother of this fresh-faced 12-year-old was the librarian at the art school where I was a student. Sophie’s mother was adept at finding anything we wanted to know about and seemed always to have book references at her fingertips. She was helpful, knowledgeable and enthusiastic, someone reliable, who could run a generously stocked library where students’ questions led her to enthuse rather than frown. Sophie frowned a great deal and would sometimes be there in the evenings when her mother was on the later duty.

When, two years later, I found myself taking over a class in my first teaching post, I was surprised to find Sophie sitting there. Information about pupils was thin on the ground and I assumed she was as bright as her mother. Sophie listened carefully, seemed to enjoy what she was asked to do and wrote pages of steadily improving text. She was involved and she was enthusiastic, just like her mother. Sophie even brought in extra work she had done at home. It was only towards the end of the year that I discovered that she had needed special help in her previous years and had been labelled ‘a backward child’ by other teachers. Fortunately, the label on this child had gone missing.

According to her mother, Sophie had improved her schoolwork dramatically that year compared with other years. From my point of view, she had done no more than I expected she would, and I was surprised to find she had been any different. The reasons why Sophie improved are no more than informed guesses. Maybe the extra help over previous years had finally paid off. Maybe she just liked the way I taught or she sat next to another pupil who gave her better explanations of the tasks she was to do. I would like to think that she improved because I expected her to, but that is far too simple a reason.

Were my expectations higher than they might have been? There is no shortage of educational advice, counter-advice, research and articles suggesting that high expectations can lead to high achievement and success. A classic example comes from a famous flurry of research activity in the late 1960s and early 1970s, surrounding a controversial experiment by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson. Their work is another example of a story that will not go away, and sticks in the mind like Sophie’s story of expected improvement. Despite many reservations their critics have voiced about it, Rosenthal and Jacobson’s story persists as one of apparent self-fulfilling prophecy. Known as Pygmalion in the classroom’, their experiment led teachers to think that certain specific pupils would experience an academic growth spurt during the coming year. In reality these children were chosen at random. At the end of the year, ‘spurters’ demonstrated greater gains in IQ than other children (Rosenthal and Jacobson 1968). In other studies, teachers were told that particular pupils were gifted. Later, their teachers could be observed giving them preferential treatment. Further inquiry looked at naturally occurring teacher expectations and showed that self-fulfilling prophecies can and do occur in the classroom (Seaver 1973). Like the Sophie story, there are reasons why positive effects of this kind are viewed with some suspicion, but they cannot be entirely dismissed.

There are six aspects of positive teaching and learning comprising the main ideas in this book. The first of these is about learning to understand and redescribe difficulties so that they can be minimised. Pupils and teachers can learn practical and optimistic strategies in order to dispute their negative thinking. The second aspect concerns ways in which high expectations for classroom feedback can be created. Do pupils expect that whatever the task there is a strong chance they will need to give feedback? Will feedback be demanded early in a session or project? High expectations include pupil selfassessments, which then inform future teaching and learning. Third, there are ways in which pupils might learn to become responsible, tenacious and selfrewarded through working in a special group exploring their difficulties.

The fourth aspect of positive teaching and learning concerns the use of descriptive praise. There is a powerful, detailed and practical means of giving praise that allows pupils to credit themselves. A fifth aspect is that of developing pupils’ positive self-awareness as a result of the feedback they encounter. The sixth aspect deals with ways in which both pupils and teachers can avoid unnecessary stress through taking a more realistic, yet positive view of their lives. There are examples of stress-busting strategies that are known to work for teachers and pupils.

Strategies suggested concern the way we and our pupils can redescribe events to ourselves in more positive ways. If feedback to children about their progress is important—and I believe it is fundamental to their success—it is worth looking at ways to handle negative aspects of this. The strategies are subtle, because there is a fine line between boosting self-esteem and constantly monitoring children so they become dependent on us for approval. Relying on the teacher to approve and say ‘That’s marvellous, brilliant or wonderful’ is not the most positive of responses for children to experience. We do not want to create a situation where pupils depend for the most part on a teacher’s approval for their sense of security. An aim of positive teaching is to help pupils to make the best of learning. The role of a teacher is to help them in that process. Improved learning cannot be separated from developing a positive ethos in the classroom. What this means, and how it relates to classroom language and positive comment, are the subjects of the remaining chapters in the book.

A closer look at the Sophie story shows how difficult it is to find reasons. Teachers not only have expectations, but they also remember their pupils’ behaviour and achievements in ways that match established beliefs. Way back in the 1970s, Seaver pointed out that a teacher’s bias is one of personal perception as well as expectation. Teachers will assign higher grades to pupils they already believe are brighter, and lower grades to those they believe are less capable. In Rosenthal and Jacobson’s experiment it could have been that the teachers wanted to describe pupils as having improved whether they actually did or not. There are other effects. Teachers are known to speak differently to pupils depending on how they already perceive them. Studies by Blakey and his colleagues (1971) showed that teachers used a warmer tone of voice when talking with pupils who they believed were high achievers. There are further studies showing teachers treating younger brothers and sisters similarly to the sibling they previously taught. The younger sibling is frequently labelled as a high or low achiever from the outset. There have been other investigations that show how pupils identified as ‘gifted’ benefit from the teacher’s bias. Teachers can also be biased against children they regard as coming from an inferior social and ethnic background (Rist 1970; Babad 1980).

Pupils as positive self-improvers

The idea that high expectations have a positive effect on achievement is ultimately a belief, though one I find attractive. In Sophie’s case, my expectations were high and my attitude was positive almost as if by accident. Can positive attitudes be learned? In promoting positive approaches to teaching and learning, I assert six beliefs:

1. Ultimately, negative thinking is wasted energy.
2. Negative thinking feeds on itself.
3. Negative thinking is unnecessarily stressful.
4. Positive optimistic attitudes can be developed.
5. Pupils can take responsibility for becoming positive.
6. Feedback and action are necessary ingredients of improvement.

I also believe that teachers can positively influence pupils’ achievement despite the odds. A counter-belief is that pupils’ achievement generally matches expectations because teachers are good at forecasting progress. It may not be that they have expectations which influence pupils’ achievement, but simply that they forecast their progress so accurately that pupils match that forecast. Nothing unexpected happens. But do children really achieve according to expectations just because the teacher forecasted accurately? Might it be possible for pupils to achieve far more if teachers’ expectations were changed for higher ones? The impressive array of research does not conclusively show that expectations bias pupil learning. Nor, significantly, does it show that high expectations have nothing to do with a pupil’s success.

If we take the idea that positive teaching includes belief in pupils’ almost limitless capacity to improve, there are several consequences. First, the onus is on us to find ways to trigger improvement and to convince pupils they can achieve more than they think. The belief is that if we can only find a way, there will be breakthroughs and rewards for pupils concerning their achievements. This could of course be a recipe for making pupils over-dependent, but it need not be. The onus can be to find strategies that actually include teaching pupils how to learn for themselves. Positive teaching is not just giving pupils a rather generous ‘benefit of the doubt’ about their difficulties, and plenty of praise, but also about trying to set up the circumstances in which they can be self-improvers. Their rate of improvement and development will vary, but the onus is to teach as if achievement is just around the corner. We will also need to encourage an attitude that is very high on hope. That hope will be something along the lines that whatever difficulty appears, it is not permanent and pervasive, but specific and temporary and there are ways to change it for the better. An example would be the difference between saying that a pupil cannot spell, and saying that a pupil has not so far remembered the spelling of many words. A high hope factor is different from pretending pupils are achieving when they are not. There is little point in being optimistic about achievement if all that happens is that we lose a sense of reality by distorting perceptions of pupils’ results. It would not be very positive to try to hone skills and knowledge beyond children’s ability to cope, or ignore their apparent weaknesses.

Positive teaching assumes we will make the most of pupils’ potential, building on and describing their successes, rather than defining their limitations. This sounds so familiar that we might easily think we already do it. Faced with the familiar, we can easily fall into the trap of thinking that no self-respecting teacher would do anything but encourage, persuade and be positive towards pupils. How else would we do the job? It is logical to suppose that as professionals we are there to believe in our pupils, take a positive view of their potential and move them forward. It is likely that we may take numerous teaching qualities for granted, such as trying to interest and motivate pupils in what they do, or praising their efforts and achievement. Lidz (1991) summed up the problem of familiarity when describing formative assessment (assessment intended to feed back into learning in order to improve it). She commented that the ‘very logic of the idea that formative feedback leads to improvement could lead practitioners to think that they already do it’. Teachers may do all of these things to some extent, but not necessarily create a climate for high hopes of successful learning. Positive teaching is a familiar idea, so familiar that, like believing that people have no reason to drop litter, we might logically expect to live in a litter-free positive world.

The word ‘improvement’ is a rather flexible one. Believing in pupils’ capacity to improve could mean a variety of things, not all of them to do with achievement in a particular subject or skill. Rather in the way we might generalise about the importance of raising standards, ‘improvement’ suffers from meaning all manner of things depending on how it is used. Desforges (1993:8) poses two questions about improvement and learners. Can learners do things which they earlier could not do? Can they do things effectively which earlier they did clumsily or slowly? These two criteria are rough and ready reference points, but they at least give a starting point for assessing improvement. It might be that improvement means increased skills or better understanding. Can learners swim faster, for example, or do they understand more clearly why climate changes? It could be that pupils’ improvement means that they are better-adjusted human beings whose behaviour helps rather than hinders the smooth running of the classroom. Whatever we define as improvement is likely to mean that pupils have more than they had before, or that the quality of what they achieve is higher.

We need not be over ‘picky’ about what pupils improve so long as there is a starting point. Improvement can be holistic, so that success in one area of their lives may well spill over into other areas. I confess I have little evidence for this except what I have observed and other teachers have confirmed. I have found that the experience of success can boost self-esteem and give pupils the confidence to learn something new. Starting points for improvement are not quite so hit-and-miss as we might think. Teachers and children choose particular tasks through which to develop learning so these inevitably become the starting points. If children are to improve in their use of computers, for example, they obviously need to be involved in practising tasks using them or nothing much will happen. There is no guarantee that children will improve their skills and understanding, but there is certainly the potential for that. Improvement of the very best kind can be that children believe in themselves where previously they did not.

Feedback, self-esteem and positive comment

There are two main sources of feedback on success and failure when learning anything. First, feedback comes from tasks. Examples are tasks, such as doing a maths problem, writing, sawing wood or painting a surface. We observe our actions with varying degrees of accuracy and make adjustments much as a driver learns to steers a vehicle. Feedback on what is happening enables the driver to make decisions to steer in a particular direction. Sometimes during tasks we may even engage in self-talk (inside our head or verbalised to ourselves) in response to noticing what we are doing. The second source of feedback comes from people either through their expressions, actions or words. Some educational computer programs have encouraging responses built in as speech and text, such as ‘Well done!’ or ‘Good try. Have another go.’ The remaining feedback to children is likely to be written feedback as in the marking of work, grades and assessment marks. Little of this feedback is neutral in its effect on pupils’ self-esteem, though much of it may not exactly be earth-shattering in its importance. Tasks we do can invite a wide range of positive and negative feedback, feelings and responses. Depending on how any of us habitually copes with successes and failures, we can experience strong feelings about the task in relation to ourselves. We can feel very strongly positive or negative even before we start. As teachers we are not in control of how pupils themselves will respond, but we know from experience that tolerance of failure in individual pupils varies. More importantly, we have the chance to influence perceptions by the way we teach pupils to handle success and failure for themselves. Pupils’ sense of themselves is at stake. In an ideal world teachers could boost each pupil’s self-esteem on a daily basis, and some teachers believe they can actually do this. In my ideal world, pupils would become far better at recognising success and boosting self-esteem for themselves. They already have strong needs to be approved by their friends and teachers, as most pupils do. The need for well-handled positive feedback from teachers cannot be underestimated, but it need not create dependency or generate an even greater need for praise.

Realistically there is no guarantee that as teachers we can always remember to describe pupil progress positively. We might learn to give positive comments to pupils, but we cannot always guarantee to do this every time. Pupils have some responsibility for praising themselves. I have heard teachers talk about their pupils needing ‘to take responsibility for themselves’ and ‘take responsibility for their learning’. Too often, this can be misunderstood as a need to blame ourselves when things go wrong. Seligman (1990) is quick to point out that self-blame leads directly to low self-esteem, and can become an established reaction to failure. Self-esteem depends largely on the perceptions and feelings we have about events and ourselves in relation to others. It does not depend on the events that happen, so much as the way in which we view them. Pupils, for example, may have irrational perceptions of failing to achieve a high enough standard, or not getting close enough to a view of success they imagined. A gap between how anyone sees themselves achieving and an ideal is in some ways healthy for human development. Without aspirations towards ideals we could become passive and no longer strive for anything.

Pupils who continually blame themselves can see themselves as being worthless, unlovable and stupid. Pupils who find reasons to blame external factors are, according to Seligman, simply protecting their self-esteem. He admits this is healthy enough for them, but not very helpful for us if we are trying to teach pupils whose view of learning is very negative. They may habitually blame themselves for their lack of ability (‘I’m useless at doing science’, ‘I’m not talented’) or blame external factors (‘I couldn’t see the board’, ‘He/she kept interrupting me’, ‘This is boring/a waste of time’). Although we may describe them as having low self-esteem, this is actually an overgeneralisation. A point made by McKay and Fanning (1992) is that low self-esteem, although thought of as a general state of being, actually relates to more specific situations. At school a child may have low self-esteem regarding academic ability, but at home higher self-esteem resulting from skill at playing computer games. Another pupil might feel they are good at schoolwork, but have low self-esteem about being a member of a group and socialising outside school. Levels of self-esteem also fluctuate according to how we perceive events affecting us for good or ill.

Most of the time individuals quite reasonably assume that the way they view events, relationships and themselves are accurate because there needs to be some basis for making day-to-day decisions. Where perceptions are negative, Martin Seligman (1990) and Harriet Braiker (1989) both offer strategies for changing them. Any accompanying negative devaluing self-talk, inside their heads, can be changed to a more positive dimension. Perceptions and beliefs, they claim, can change as we learn to think and talk about them differently. I will develop the educational context of their ideas and provide practical examples in the chapters which follow.

Remaining positive, and being aware of when we are negative, requires that we practise the classroom language to achieve this. In the heat of the moment things can still be different because feelings of frustration and tiredness take over. Teachers are fallible, not super-human. Like people in other jobs, they need a good old moan with a colleague now and again. Sharing difficult experiences with others is a way of getting a sense of meaning back into our world. I know all the theory. I know I need to step back from the situation and try to pick out strengths. I know I need to be patient and positive. But I got wound up with this kid Darren didn’t I? He was fiddling with his pen and talking as I looked at his work. He was supposed to understand division in maths and I must have told them a million times to carry the remainder over. This time I’d arrived late at school because the car wouldn’t start and I was already a bit angry and fed up, so I shouted at him, which I knew I shouldn’t have done. ‘What do you think you’re doing? No. Let’s get real What are you NOT doing that you should know how to by now?’ —all the things I didn’t want to hear coming out of my mouth. ‘How many times have I told you to carry figures over? Eh? How many times? Don’t think of showing me that until you’ve sorted it out properly, you hear me?’ Screaming pitch? Almost. The weird thing is I could hear myself saying all the wrong things but I couldn’t switch to a calmer, more positive exchange. I’d had enough of it and it felt like it was somebody else talking, and could hear myself saying inside my head, ‘Cool it. Don’t say it. Don’t say it.’ But I still said it didn’t I?

(Primary-school teacher)

We might know in our minds that negative critical comment is deadly to selfesteem, but it is another matter framing our words more positively to counteract this. The gap between theory and practice closes slowly. As teachers, we can catch ourselves being negative when we would rather be positive. We are human and we fail. Beyond the failures, there are changes we can try to make in what we habitually say and do in the classroom. If this seems difficult to achieve, we might remember that a similar process already happens for many teachers at the start of their careers. They change their classroom language and action as they discover what effect their comments seem to have on children. How can this process be extended to develop a positive framework for improvement, without ignoring the reality of pupils’ errors and failures? My experience is that teaching is a profession where the practice of correcting errors and saying ‘what is wrong’ is deeply ingrained. Of necessity, we are adept at noticing what goes wrong and trying to do something about it. Criticism and correction are after all part and parcel of teaching. Fortunately there are ways to redirect negative classroom language to something more constructive and positive than it often is. Seligman (1990), and Rogers (1992) both agree that redirection of this kind is difficult to achieve, but still possible and certainly worth learning.

In any situation, we have underlying automatic responses that quickly surface. The automatic responses tend to be buried within our style of explaining our lives, and they do not easily become dislodged. We have internal self-talk that can tell us something ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ have happened or that ‘we ought to be able to cope by now’ or that something should be better than it is. We compare how things are with how we think they ‘ought to be’ or ‘should be’ and turn the difference into negative criticism. An important ingredient in developing positive teaching is understanding the relationship between automatic self-talk and our perceptions. Any proposed changes to what we say, described in the following chapters, will inevitably include changes to self-talk. Reactions to tasks and events can be driven by highly emotional self-talk as pupils and teachers feel frustrated and disappointed, elated or excited (‘It’s just not fair!’, ‘I must get it right’, ‘I’m really bad at this’, ‘I liked doing that’, ‘It’s fantastic!’). The extent to which we ourselves...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Bibliography