To help someone improve at dance or sport, ignore poor performance but reward good performance immediately, for example by shouting “Good!” (Buzas & Allyon 1981) The reason you should ignore poor performance if you say “No, you’re doing it wrong!” you are inadvertently punishing the effort. A better response to a mistake would be to reinforce the effort: “Good effort! You’re almost there! Try once more.”
I got a demonstration of how true this is yesterday when, during my taekwondo class, I was paired up with one of the senior black belt students, who has some but not a lot of experience teaching. He was supposed to be fixing up my poomsae (same thing as a kata in karate) and each time he watched me do it, I would finish and he would immediately launch into a description of what I was doing wrong. His feedback was pretty useful–specific, with demonstrations of exactly what to change in order to do it right–but without any prelude of “yay, good job!” or even “okay, the punches were way better that time...now let’s work on the stances”, I found myself getting really discouraged. Reminding myself that I wasn’t actually doing worse than usual, that he just had a different teaching style, helped a little… But my subconscious brain still decided to feel resentful and unenthusiastic, no matter how counterproductive that might be towards my actual goal of improving my poomsae.
As a swimming instructor, I do make sure to dole out a LOT of praise, but I’m wondering if I should push it even further...
Well, a lot of non-specific praise would water down the value of non-specific praise as a reinforcer, but taking the time to pick out more specific elements that are good/improving would probably reduce discouragement.
I think one of the things I forget most as an instructor is how easy it is to get discouraged, especially when you’re being taught by someone who seems to be able to do all of it effortlessly. There’s also the element of “I already know I’m doing it wrong! I just can’t get my body to listen to my brain!” Instructors who don’t acknowledge this and give praise for trying or noticing that I’m doing it wrong are a major source of discouragement for any new physical skill I try to learn.
Break complex movements down into lots of simple movements (“drills”) and practice them individually, a lot...then string together the first two simple movements and practice that sequence a lot...then the first three in sequence...etc. Also, don’t start by teaching/trying to learn the full complex movement in the first place–always start with the simplest possible subset, master that, and then worry about the next step.
Very much second this. The most useful thing I’ve learned about learning, is how to break down a complex action in to multiple simpler ones that I can drill independent of each other.
I think you do have a valid point… However, in my experience, most instructors err way on the side of “too little praise” and don’t have to worry about using it too much and lowering its effectiveness. And most humans I know have a brain setup where after hearing “good job on X” ten times, hearing it an eleventh time is still really reinforcing. So you’d have to really go to extremes to praise them too much...
I was originally going to say I don’t like excessive praise, but thinking about it, what I actually dislike are two things:
1) False praise. I really hate it when it’s obvious someone is formatting EVERYTHING they say to match a script (the one that annoys me most is the “sandwich” model of praise-critique-praise. It’s great for blows that need to be softened, but if you soften everything, then every mistake becomes equally trivialized).
2) Wasting my time. If the feedback boils down to “You did exactly as well as you did last time” then (a) I probably know this and (b) you can say approximately that without spending 2 minutes extolling my virtues. I’m usually impatient to get back to actually doing the activity. If I’m not impatient, it means I’m either seriously discouraged or don’t value the activity at all—either way, unless it’s my actual job, I’m unlikely to care about feedback at that point.
These apply to critiques even more-so than praise, but the style of “make everything 90% praise and act like mistakes are just this mild little thing” is a pattern I recognize very quickly, and find extremely discouraging, since it means I’m no longer receiving feedback that actually honestly represents how well I’m doing.
I also hate being given “points for effort” unless the person is correctly reinforcing “You’ll probably need to repeat this drill 500 times before you have it down correctly, so be patient with yourself” (saying this when others are figuring it out in 5-10 drills is clearly lying, and will again seriously impact all feedback from that source >.>)
Well, it sounds like you’re someone who, if you already know how you did on something, don’t need people to shower on praise unless it conveys new information. Am I right that you would find specific praise, or praise on something that you genuinely didn’t know whether you’d done well on, less annoying?
I also hate being given “points for effort” unless the person is correctly reinforcing “You’ll probably need to repeat this drill 500 times before you have it down correctly, so be patient with yourself” (saying this when others are figuring it out in 5-10 drills is clearly lying, and will again seriously impact all feedback from that source.)
As someone who regularly takes more repetitions of a drill to learn a certain (physical) skill than the average person, I damn well like getting points for effort–they’re likely to be the only points I get for a while, and I tend to get seriously discouraged watching other people learn stuff easily when I’m struggling with it. I agree that someone who says “be patient, everyone needs to do this 500 times to get it right”, when that’s not the case, is not being helpful...but a simple “good effort, you will improve on this, don’t worry” is a) not lying, and b) helps with the discouragement factor.
This is indeed key, thank you for putting it more concisely than I
Am I right that you would find specific praise, or praise on something that you genuinely didn’t know whether you’d done well on, less annoying?
It varies. “Be specific” is usually better, but “be brief” is also often important to me. A slow break-down of specifics is important if I don’t know how to improve. A brief summary is fine if I’m improving on my own and really just need to get more repetitions. These days I’m usually aware of which one I need, and can ask for it. Previously, I’d just get frustrated if I needed more specific advice, because communication is exhausting, and learning is exhausting, and the combination of the two sucked.
I damn well like getting points for effort–they’re likely to be the only points I get for a while
I’ve found that it varies—if I have things down and just need to drill, I’ll often be entirely content off in a corner repeating something mindlessly with minimal feedback (an occasionally “good effort, you will improve on this, don’t worry” is very rewarding, but we’re talking every 15-30 minutes)
Basically, I can enjoy drilling. I actually find it a ton of fun with most skills I’ve gotten good at—the skills I fail to improve are usually the ones where I don’t enjoy drilling, and thus… don’t drill. The assumption that just because I’m stuck repeating something a lot, I must need encouragement… tends to de-motivate me, because it says “hey, you’re slow and abnormal and so I’m going to focus a lot on fixing you”, which has a lot of bad connotations for me.
I strongly suspect your teaching style would not annoy me (or that you’d quickly adapt it around me), but a lot of people get stuck in the meme of “ALWAYS follow this script” and start completely ignoring body language cues that indicate a particular student DOESN’T do well with a certain script.
As an example: I hate, HATE the “positive—negative—positive” sandwich. It means I associate positive feedback with a lead-in to “something bad”, and so any compliment is now a threat to me, a sign I did something else wrong. I also pattern-match fairly well, and once I figure out when it’s a sandwich vs a genuine compliment, I’ll get impatient to know why I was REALLY brought in to talk (i.e. what I did wrong).
Previously, I’d just get frustrated if I needed more specific advice, because communication is exhausting, and learning is exhausting, and the combination of the two sucked.
This sounds like a challenging situation. How were you able to move past this in order to be able to ask for more specific feedback when you needed it?
I’ve found that it varies—if I have things down and just need to drill, I’ll often be entirely content off in a corner repeating something mindlessly with minimal feedback (an occasionally “good effort, you will improve on this, don’t worry” is very rewarding, but we’re talking every 15-30 minutes)
You are very lucky to be content in this kind of situation. I wish I could be more content.
The assumption that just because I’m stuck repeating something a lot, I must need encouragement… tends to de-motivate me, because it says “hey, you’re slow and abnormal and so I’m going to focus a lot on fixing you”, which has a lot of bad connotations for me.
I think I almost have a good connotation around this kind of situation. There are at least two areas (singing as a strong example, and competitive swimming as a weaker example) where I started out pretty awful. I could have compared myself to the people starting out at the same skill level as me...but that would have been pretty pointless. Other people who were as tone deaf as I was at age 11 just didn’t try learning to sing. So I made my reference group the people who were doing solos in my choir. After a few years, I think most people actually forgot that they had originally considered me “slow and abnormal.” I started to get the comment “well, obviously someone with your natural musical talent...” Ha. Right. But I did succeed in proving, to myself if not anyone else, that if I put myself into situations where I am “slow and abnormal” compared to everyone else, I will make much bigger improvements than if I stick with the activities where I’m already stronger than average.
This sounds like a challenging situation. How were you able to move past this in order to be able to ask for more specific feedback when you needed it?
It’s not really exciting to say it, but:
1) I learned to identify, internally, what my emotions correspond to (most critically, if I’m frustrated, it’s probably because I’m practicing the wrong thing)
2) I’ve memorized a few phrases that tend to garner the feedback I need (“Can you be more specific?”, “Can you break that down in to smaller pieces?”, “I feel like there’s some little piece I’m missing that would make this all click together”, and “can you demonstrate slowly and narrate what you’re doing?”)
3) Most important, I have a strong CONCEPT of “this technique is actually a series of smaller techniques that I can drill separately”. It’s very hard to ask someone to break something down in to simpler steps when you’re stuck thinking about it as a single step. And I’ve broken things down often enough that I can communicate the idea to an instructor who doesn’t have it as a concept.
3rd one also helps me evaluate things in advance: “this skill is beyond me—I will need to do something smaller and simpler first, otherwise I’ll feel totally overwhelmed and have trouble learning.” The tricky bit is usually just finding smaller pieces, but that’s where an instructor is useful :)
Hmm, I wonder if providing a lot of negative reinforcement on some attribute of them you don’t care about would make the positive reinforcements more effective on the things you do care about.
Example: trying to teach someone math, and praising them at everything they do right with the math, including trying, but complain abut their physique, fashion choices, hygiene, etc. Especially timing those unrelated complaints to when they seem less focused on the math but subtly enough they don’t consciously notice the correlation.
Not that this isn’t a bad idea for other unrelated reasons...
There’s a couple of factors here worth keeping in mind.
One is that classical conditioning continues to work, even when I’m concentrating on operant conditioning. So one result of this strategy is that my target will come to associate me with aversive stimuli, which will in turn reduce the effectiveness of my attempts at reinforcement. They will similarly associate the teaching sessions and math with those stimuli, which may be counterproductive.
Another is that a target consciously noticing my attempts at conditioning changes the whole ball game, in ways I don’t entirely understand and I’m not sure are entirely understood. Sometimes it’s a huge win. Sometimes it’s a huge lose. Staying subtle is more predictable, if I can do it, but of course it’s not always possible to avoid detection, and sometimes it’s better to admit to my attempts at conditioning than to be caught out at them. The safest move is to first establish a social context where my attempts at conditioning can be labelled “manners,” such that any attempt to call me out on them is inherently low-status, but that’s not always possible either.
When using praise signals as reinforcers for systems, like some humans, who are capable of skepticism about my motives, it helps to be seen to use expensive signals. (Attention often works well, which is one reason Internet trolls are so persistent.) Of course, that typically means I have to invest resources into my conditioning efforts.
In general, the approach I endorse is to maintain (and adjust as needed) a consistent threshold of evaluation, ignore behavior that falls below that threshold, reward behavior that clears it, and resist the temptation to go meta about the process.
Hmm, I wonder if providing a lot of negative reinforcement on some attribute of them you don’t care about would make the positive reinforcements more effective on the things you do care about.
The example you give is either punishment of the other attributes or negative reinforcement of the desired behavior (if you look at it from the perspective of taking away the aversive stimulus only when the math is done.)
I got a demonstration of how true this is yesterday when, during my taekwondo class, I was paired up with one of the senior black belt students, who has some but not a lot of experience teaching. He was supposed to be fixing up my poomsae (same thing as a kata in karate) and each time he watched me do it, I would finish and he would immediately launch into a description of what I was doing wrong. His feedback was pretty useful–specific, with demonstrations of exactly what to change in order to do it right–but without any prelude of “yay, good job!” or even “okay, the punches were way better that time...now let’s work on the stances”, I found myself getting really discouraged. Reminding myself that I wasn’t actually doing worse than usual, that he just had a different teaching style, helped a little… But my subconscious brain still decided to feel resentful and unenthusiastic, no matter how counterproductive that might be towards my actual goal of improving my poomsae.
As a swimming instructor, I do make sure to dole out a LOT of praise, but I’m wondering if I should push it even further...
I’m not sure a lot of praise is a good idea since that would lower its effectiveness as a reinforcer.
Well, a lot of non-specific praise would water down the value of non-specific praise as a reinforcer, but taking the time to pick out more specific elements that are good/improving would probably reduce discouragement.
I think one of the things I forget most as an instructor is how easy it is to get discouraged, especially when you’re being taught by someone who seems to be able to do all of it effortlessly. There’s also the element of “I already know I’m doing it wrong! I just can’t get my body to listen to my brain!” Instructors who don’t acknowledge this and give praise for trying or noticing that I’m doing it wrong are a major source of discouragement for any new physical skill I try to learn.
Any advice on getting one’s body or one’s student’s body to be more cooperative?
Break complex movements down into lots of simple movements (“drills”) and practice them individually, a lot...then string together the first two simple movements and practice that sequence a lot...then the first three in sequence...etc. Also, don’t start by teaching/trying to learn the full complex movement in the first place–always start with the simplest possible subset, master that, and then worry about the next step.
Very much second this. The most useful thing I’ve learned about learning, is how to break down a complex action in to multiple simpler ones that I can drill independent of each other.
Excellent point. I stand corrected.
I think you do have a valid point… However, in my experience, most instructors err way on the side of “too little praise” and don’t have to worry about using it too much and lowering its effectiveness. And most humans I know have a brain setup where after hearing “good job on X” ten times, hearing it an eleventh time is still really reinforcing. So you’d have to really go to extremes to praise them too much...
I was originally going to say I don’t like excessive praise, but thinking about it, what I actually dislike are two things:
1) False praise. I really hate it when it’s obvious someone is formatting EVERYTHING they say to match a script (the one that annoys me most is the “sandwich” model of praise-critique-praise. It’s great for blows that need to be softened, but if you soften everything, then every mistake becomes equally trivialized).
2) Wasting my time. If the feedback boils down to “You did exactly as well as you did last time” then (a) I probably know this and (b) you can say approximately that without spending 2 minutes extolling my virtues. I’m usually impatient to get back to actually doing the activity. If I’m not impatient, it means I’m either seriously discouraged or don’t value the activity at all—either way, unless it’s my actual job, I’m unlikely to care about feedback at that point.
These apply to critiques even more-so than praise, but the style of “make everything 90% praise and act like mistakes are just this mild little thing” is a pattern I recognize very quickly, and find extremely discouraging, since it means I’m no longer receiving feedback that actually honestly represents how well I’m doing.
I also hate being given “points for effort” unless the person is correctly reinforcing “You’ll probably need to repeat this drill 500 times before you have it down correctly, so be patient with yourself” (saying this when others are figuring it out in 5-10 drills is clearly lying, and will again seriously impact all feedback from that source >.>)
Well, it sounds like you’re someone who, if you already know how you did on something, don’t need people to shower on praise unless it conveys new information. Am I right that you would find specific praise, or praise on something that you genuinely didn’t know whether you’d done well on, less annoying?
As someone who regularly takes more repetitions of a drill to learn a certain (physical) skill than the average person, I damn well like getting points for effort–they’re likely to be the only points I get for a while, and I tend to get seriously discouraged watching other people learn stuff easily when I’m struggling with it. I agree that someone who says “be patient, everyone needs to do this 500 times to get it right”, when that’s not the case, is not being helpful...but a simple “good effort, you will improve on this, don’t worry” is a) not lying, and b) helps with the discouragement factor.
This is indeed key, thank you for putting it more concisely than I
It varies. “Be specific” is usually better, but “be brief” is also often important to me. A slow break-down of specifics is important if I don’t know how to improve. A brief summary is fine if I’m improving on my own and really just need to get more repetitions. These days I’m usually aware of which one I need, and can ask for it. Previously, I’d just get frustrated if I needed more specific advice, because communication is exhausting, and learning is exhausting, and the combination of the two sucked.
I’ve found that it varies—if I have things down and just need to drill, I’ll often be entirely content off in a corner repeating something mindlessly with minimal feedback (an occasionally “good effort, you will improve on this, don’t worry” is very rewarding, but we’re talking every 15-30 minutes)
Basically, I can enjoy drilling. I actually find it a ton of fun with most skills I’ve gotten good at—the skills I fail to improve are usually the ones where I don’t enjoy drilling, and thus… don’t drill. The assumption that just because I’m stuck repeating something a lot, I must need encouragement… tends to de-motivate me, because it says “hey, you’re slow and abnormal and so I’m going to focus a lot on fixing you”, which has a lot of bad connotations for me.
I strongly suspect your teaching style would not annoy me (or that you’d quickly adapt it around me), but a lot of people get stuck in the meme of “ALWAYS follow this script” and start completely ignoring body language cues that indicate a particular student DOESN’T do well with a certain script.
As an example: I hate, HATE the “positive—negative—positive” sandwich. It means I associate positive feedback with a lead-in to “something bad”, and so any compliment is now a threat to me, a sign I did something else wrong. I also pattern-match fairly well, and once I figure out when it’s a sandwich vs a genuine compliment, I’ll get impatient to know why I was REALLY brought in to talk (i.e. what I did wrong).
This sounds like a challenging situation. How were you able to move past this in order to be able to ask for more specific feedback when you needed it?
You are very lucky to be content in this kind of situation. I wish I could be more content.
I think I almost have a good connotation around this kind of situation. There are at least two areas (singing as a strong example, and competitive swimming as a weaker example) where I started out pretty awful. I could have compared myself to the people starting out at the same skill level as me...but that would have been pretty pointless. Other people who were as tone deaf as I was at age 11 just didn’t try learning to sing. So I made my reference group the people who were doing solos in my choir. After a few years, I think most people actually forgot that they had originally considered me “slow and abnormal.” I started to get the comment “well, obviously someone with your natural musical talent...” Ha. Right. But I did succeed in proving, to myself if not anyone else, that if I put myself into situations where I am “slow and abnormal” compared to everyone else, I will make much bigger improvements than if I stick with the activities where I’m already stronger than average.
It’s not really exciting to say it, but: 1) I learned to identify, internally, what my emotions correspond to (most critically, if I’m frustrated, it’s probably because I’m practicing the wrong thing)
2) I’ve memorized a few phrases that tend to garner the feedback I need (“Can you be more specific?”, “Can you break that down in to smaller pieces?”, “I feel like there’s some little piece I’m missing that would make this all click together”, and “can you demonstrate slowly and narrate what you’re doing?”)
3) Most important, I have a strong CONCEPT of “this technique is actually a series of smaller techniques that I can drill separately”. It’s very hard to ask someone to break something down in to simpler steps when you’re stuck thinking about it as a single step. And I’ve broken things down often enough that I can communicate the idea to an instructor who doesn’t have it as a concept.
3rd one also helps me evaluate things in advance: “this skill is beyond me—I will need to do something smaller and simpler first, otherwise I’ll feel totally overwhelmed and have trouble learning.” The tricky bit is usually just finding smaller pieces, but that’s where an instructor is useful :)
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Thanks :)
Hmm, I wonder if providing a lot of negative reinforcement on some attribute of them you don’t care about would make the positive reinforcements more effective on the things you do care about.
Example: trying to teach someone math, and praising them at everything they do right with the math, including trying, but complain abut their physique, fashion choices, hygiene, etc. Especially timing those unrelated complaints to when they seem less focused on the math but subtly enough they don’t consciously notice the correlation.
Not that this isn’t a bad idea for other unrelated reasons...
There’s a couple of factors here worth keeping in mind.
One is that classical conditioning continues to work, even when I’m concentrating on operant conditioning. So one result of this strategy is that my target will come to associate me with aversive stimuli, which will in turn reduce the effectiveness of my attempts at reinforcement. They will similarly associate the teaching sessions and math with those stimuli, which may be counterproductive.
Another is that a target consciously noticing my attempts at conditioning changes the whole ball game, in ways I don’t entirely understand and I’m not sure are entirely understood. Sometimes it’s a huge win. Sometimes it’s a huge lose. Staying subtle is more predictable, if I can do it, but of course it’s not always possible to avoid detection, and sometimes it’s better to admit to my attempts at conditioning than to be caught out at them. The safest move is to first establish a social context where my attempts at conditioning can be labelled “manners,” such that any attempt to call me out on them is inherently low-status, but that’s not always possible either.
When using praise signals as reinforcers for systems, like some humans, who are capable of skepticism about my motives, it helps to be seen to use expensive signals. (Attention often works well, which is one reason Internet trolls are so persistent.) Of course, that typically means I have to invest resources into my conditioning efforts.
In general, the approach I endorse is to maintain (and adjust as needed) a consistent threshold of evaluation, ignore behavior that falls below that threshold, reward behavior that clears it, and resist the temptation to go meta about the process.
Sounds like an interesting idea for an experiment, although it would probably violate ethical guidelines. :P
The example you give is either punishment of the other attributes or negative reinforcement of the desired behavior (if you look at it from the perspective of taking away the aversive stimulus only when the math is done.)
Would it? There would be greater contrast between the reinforcement and the ignoring of poor performance.
Well the idea I was going for was that it would be better to praise improvements in skill rather than just good performance.