taken from
winsights by win wenger, ph.d.
Responsiveness
With
headphones, microphone and amplifier, I can feedback to your ears
the sounds of your own speech, faster and clearer than they normally
reach your ear by air and convection. Result: both your speaking
and thinking will be clearer and faster for hours afterward.
With the same
gear and a tape recorder with loop to delay feedback to your ears
for 1/8 second (or with very poor acoustics in some auditorium or
hall), I can so muddy your speech and thinking that you'll go around
confused for hours afterward.
---------------------
Studiously ignored
by six or so generations of American teachers, Maria Montessori in
the 1900s demonstrated that learning comes best, easiest, strongest
and most effectively when it comes as feedback from the environment
as a result of one's own activities. In the 1950s O.K. Moore - who
still is based in University of Pittsburgh's Sociology Department
(1997 note:) - used only feedback from a child's own spontaneous activity
to teach 2-year-olds to read, type and write.
Summing up
findings after 30 years of his intensive studies of the brain and
vertebrate nervous systems, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, acknowledged
father of neuroanatomy, in 1911 wrote that it was feedback through
the senses from one's own activities, especially from the activities
of infancy, that most developed the cells and circuits of the brain.
The entire
content of the field of study of Behavioral Psychology is in terms
of effects of feedback from responses. (All reinforcement is feedback,
by definition.)
Support
GBD.com without it costing you a dime. Learn
How
The secret
of success in dealings with business fellows, friends, or even your
own family, is: make the other person feel good about the things
you feel he is doing right.
Would you rather
work in a firm where everyone ignored you and it didn't seem to
make any difference what you did - or in a firm where people noticed
and responded to you, and where the things you did appeared to make
a difference? In which setting would you work at your best, and
learning things?
Which way would
your child answer for himself, given the same sort of choice?
Why, then, do you expect him to get anything from his schooling
the way that such schooling is usually set up now?
The proper
role of the schools is: to enrich, repair, support, reinforce learners
-- and then get the heck out of their way. It matters not one whit
what the schools teach: it matters only what the learners learn,
and all else is costly distraction. What would things be like if
our schools were centered on what learners were learning?
In Your
Own Home:
Is your own
child growing from his strengths, or is he mainly having to fit
into the spaces he is directed into by your expectations, leaving
behind his special awarenesses, his initiatives, the things which
catch or have caught his interest which could have most strongly
motivated and empowered his development as a human being? (--And
what have YOU yourself been forced to leave behind?)
The basic human
nutrition is: appropriate feedback. Does your child have enough
of your time and attention for you to be able to provide that?
And on the
Other Foot:
Which child
are you more likely to like and accommodate: that little urchin
who really appears to hear what you say and seeks to respond to
it, even though he usually goes his own way; or the child who is
unresponsive even if apparently obedient?
Correspondingly:
with your own friends, co-workers, associates: when are you likely
to be more accepted, more able to "get away with more?"
When you actually hear them and take their views into account, even
though you often then go on and go your own way? --Or when you don't
hear what they are saying, even when you don't step out of line?
There are numerous
larger issues looming here. How many of them do you see? Punch them
into "Forum" here at Botree and share some of them with
your colleagues and fellow readers....
©1998 by Project Renaissance (regarding this internet version
only, other copyrights may apply). While we encourage the free distribution
of this article (complete text only, including this notice and acknowledgement
of source), we do require that expressed permission be granted by
Project Renaissance for any major republication. For minor printing
and sharing, we only request that you notify us. To
reach Win Wenger, please visit his website at Project
Renaissance.
New information
on the latest Double Festival is available here.
This version
originally published on Anakin's
Brain (now Genius By Design) |
