Effective Communication Requires a Fertile Mindset

Systemically, educational consultants provide a great resource toward achieving the mission of learning for all.  Optimally, the educational consultant is an effective communicator promoting empowerment and collaboration.  However, a key to being an optimal resource is effective utilization of communication skills. 

While key communication skills include listening skills, feedback skills, and presentation skills, it is essential to recognize the role of one’s mindset in the communication process.  One’s mindset is the greatest influence upon whether communication skills will be optimized.  Based on one’s mindset, communication efforts become either “effective” or “ineffective.” 

If one approaches any relationship with the mindset of willingly advancing collaboration and empowerment, the subsequent communication can elevate the tenets of peace, joy, and love.  By contrast, whenever someone approaches any relationship with the mindset of control, the subsequent communication typically escalates fear, anxiety, and frustration.  Therefore, it becomes essential to calibrate one’s mindset to effectively utilize communication skills that promote optimal learning. 

When learning a new way of thinking, better results occur when acting our way into right thinking rather than merely trying to think ourselves into right action.  Yet, when learning to truly embrace and promote empowered collaborations, it is helpful to reflect upon which mindset will be utilized prior to engagement.  With practice, a mindset elevating the tenets of peace, joy, and love become evident in ALL your relationships. 

Currently, do you seek to advance collaboration and empowerment through communication that elevates the tenets of peace, joy, and love in ALL relationships?  Or, do you rely upon the desire to retain control?  In the latter, you may not yet realize you are thereby establishing communication that escalates fear, anxiety, and frustration!  Therefore, when honest self-awareness fails, another question is, are the people in your life happy, joyous, and free from their relationship with you or do far too many exhibit misery, irritability, or discontentment from their interactions with you? 

To summarize, before we can esteem to being effective consultants, we need to want to willingly empower and collaborate with others.  Prior to willingly empowering and collaborating, we need effective communication.  A prerequisite to effective communication is a mindset seeking to invite others to positively grow through the relationship.  Such invitations require communication grounded in peace, joy, and love.  Given this, does it matter whether the relationship is with a colleague, family member, significant other, parent, child, or student?  

Once our mindset is right, we can use learned communication skills to better effect.  A mindset seeking to elevate the tenets of peace, joy, and love, provides a fertile place for subsequent growth.  Perhaps the following parable now has more meaning:

"A farmer went out to sow his seed.  As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up.  Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow.  But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root.  Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants.  Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop…” (NIV, Matthew, 13: 4-8). 

To Cite:

Anderson, C.J. (February 7, 2014) Effective communication requires a fertile mindset [Web log post]

Retrieved from http://www.ucan-cja.blogspot.com/

 

Does Behavioral Theory Belong in Classroom Management?

      In theory, operant conditioning  (Skinner, 1953) is a learning process that involves an increase or decrease in the likelihood of a targeted behavior resulting from provided consequences.  Consequences can be either reinforcements or punishments.  While child-centered classroom management advocates such as Noddings (2001) and Kohn (2006), hold behavioral theories in disrepute, there is still a place for basic elements of behavioral theory when striving to develop a classroom culture of mutual respect, high expectations, and civility.  Few would argue that these tenets lay the foundation whereby constructivist, child-centered principles can then take hold to build nurturing learning communities aimed at helping students independently make good choices and develop self-management.    

      Educators should use reinforcements only when the expectation is to increase or minimally maintain the desired behavior.  By contrast, use a punishment only when the desire is to remove or mitigate an undesired behavior.  Anything else is fraught with possible unintended consequences.

      For positive reinforcement, the reinforcer should be seen as important, desirable, or relevant to those exhibiting the desired behavior.  Reformists such as Noddings (2001) and Kohn criticize behavioral theory for classroom management on this point because they don’t believe in reinforcing good behavior and punishing students for poor behavior, advocating that students should have more choices and opinions.  Yet even Kohn acknowledges structures and restrictions are acceptable if “they protect students, provide for flexibility, are developmentally appropriate, and lead to student involvement” (Arends, 2012, p. 206). 

      In this regard, using praise to promote understanding of high expectations, mutual respect, and civility is an important classroom management approach, especially for younger students needing to learn socially from those more cognitively or socially advanced (Vygotsky, 1978). Raising self-awareness, self-management, and social awareness are important tools for the child-centered approach.  Yet, is it possible to completely divorce classroom management from strategies grounded in behavioral theory?

      “Let’s see who else will quietly raise their hand to answer the next question.  Thank you for sitting so quietly and raising your hand.”  This simple strategy, grounded in behavioral theory, will quickly help develop a desired classroom culture based on high expectations, mutual respect, and civility.

      So how did behavioral theory get such a bad reputation?  Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?  Any theory aligned with training or “conditioning” animals is going to be problematic with parents.  Who wants to think their school is “training” children? 

     The concern with teachers using behavioral theory as the core of their classroom management is the likelihood a certain behavior will increase due to the presentation of something pleasant after the behavior.  The misuse of “punishment” based on the perception that yelling, humiliating, or embarrassing students initially works too often results in the increase in yelling, humiliating, or embarrassing students.  Good people can easily become bullies rather than teachers. 

      For this reason, anyone seeking to implement elements of behavioral theory into his or her classroom management should avoid punishment.  It is also very important to avoid confusing negative reinforcement and punishment.  They are different.  Negative reinforcement involves an increase in a behavior.  By contrast, punishment involves a decrease in a behavior (Amabile, 1985).  Because of the unintended consequences often resulting from the misuse of negative reinforcement, avoid this strategy too! 

      As an example, if a young mother closes the door when her child tantrums and experiences peace and quiet thereafter, she would be inclined to repeat the door closing strategy to thereby experience more peace and quiet.  Therefore, this is an example of negative reinforcement.  Notice that while the mother realizes increased peace and quiet, the increase in door closing whenever her child tantrums holds the possibility of unintended consequences related to the child's behavior.  Is there any effort to identify the cause of the child's behavior?

      How does this appear in the school?  If a teacher closes the door when a neighbor's noisy students are returning from recess and thereafter experiences quiet in her class, she would be inclined to repeat the door closing strategy to experience quiet whenever a neighbor's noisy students are returning from recess.  Therefore, this is an example of negative reinforcement.  Notice that while the teacher closing the door increases quiet in her classroom, the increase in door closing whenever her neighbor's noisy students are returning from recess holds the possibility of unintended consequences related to the neighbor's noisy students behavior.  Is there any effort to mitigate the behaviors exhibited by the neighbor's noisy students? 

      Too often, the result of negative reinforcement is the offending stimuli ends up shaping your behavior.  Educators should reflect upon how negative reinforcement can reinforce bad habits.  As a social constructivist (Vygotsky, 1978), the educator should recognize the ability to shape the offending behavior/stimuli to ensure high expectations, mutual respect, and civility within the class room and school.

References

Amabile, T. M. (1985). Motivation and creativity: Effects of motivational orientation on 
       creative writers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48, 393-399.

Arends, R.I (2012). Learning to Teach, 9/e. McGraw Hill. ISBN: 978-0-07-802432-0