At the New York Times editorial notebook, Brent Staples offers three lessons from the cheating scandal in Atlanta.
The first is that overemphasizing scores is a mistake.Methods of teaching, pedagogy, have been on my mind a lot recently. After I questioned the limits of the Praise Sandwich, the Texas Tornado, Mark Bennett, was unconvinced.
The second is that teacher evaluation systems — now under development in most states — will be of little use unless they include mechanisms for showing teachers who receive average ratings how to become great, or at least good, at what they do.
And finally, the country will not build a first-rate teacher corps solely by threatening to fire people who are less than perfect early in their careers.
The Sandwich Theory has become social convention because it works. It works because most human beings—not just law students—are fragile; by sandwiching constructive criticism between slices of praise, the teacher sends the message that the criticism is not personal.After a prolonged discussion with a commenter named “Justin” to Bennett’s post, two points became abundantly clear: students want to be taught effectively, but effectively from their perspective. In other words, it’s not that they want empty praise in lieu of meaningful instruction, but they still want to be praised even if it comes at the expense of meaningful instruction.And yes, criminal-defense lawyers should be tougher than that. But the Sandwich Theory is a teaching tool—perhaps an effective one—and if you want to teach people you’ll use whatever tools come to hand.
While denying that there was any value to empty praise, it didn’t diminish the desire for praise at all. I saw his position as “unprincipled,” as he wanted it both ways but refused to admit that was what he sought. Thousands of words were murdered in explaining why this wasn’t so, each paragraph sinking the argument deeper into a hole of no return.
In Atlanta, the teachers found themselves in a similar conundrum. Their worth, and consequently their jobs, are gauged solely by test outcomes. There are three ways to achieve good test outcomes. One is to teach to the test. Two is to fix the results. Three is to be an excellent teacher. Of these options, the third is by far the hardest.
But as the second and third lessons offered by Staples suggests, teachers, particularly young ones, are being set up for failure. Bennett informs me that the Praise Sandwich is “perhaps an effective tool” as it has become a social convention. While it’s certainly true that it has been widely embraced as a teaching tool, is that because students like it, students much prefer being praised when being taught?
The argument that it’s effective is largely based on the fact that it doesn’t scare away those who do poorly in the beginning, who need positive reinforcement to persist in the educational process. This goes to the “novice” versus “expert” aspect of the Praise Sandwich, which I suspect Bennett and Justin misunderstood.
They argued that third year law students aren’t “experts,” and thus fell in the category for whom the Praise Sandwich was critical. I don’t think that’s what is meant by “experts,” and it’s a facile rationale for perpetuating and enabling people who should be determined to achieve mastery of their subject to instead hide behind the third-grader within them. What is missed is that the Praise Sandwich, by definition, requires praise to be given first and last, regardless of whether there is anything praiseworthy to say. Make it up. Do whatever you have to do to be encouraging. But praise. That is the tool: there must be praise.
I am similarly unpersuaded that it’s necessarily a bad thing that people who lack the chops to excel shouldn’t be scared away. Not everybody can grow up to be President, despite our popular belief to the contrary. Nor be a lawyer. Nor a teacher. This isn’t a bad thing. What is a bad thing is to enable those who should have been weeded out to continue under the false security of praise and competence.
If you have a student in the Atlanta school system, are you more concerned about your child’s teacher feeling good about himself or his ability to teach your child? Bear in mind that teachers, unlike lawyers, are not compelled to attend a three year, post-graduate, course of study directed solely to becoming a member of the legal profession. They are certainly no more experts than new lawyers, having not had those extra three years to gain greater “expertise.”
And yet, no parent is more concerned with the teacher’s self-esteem than the child’s education. Nor should they be. But the parents will not have a first-rate teacher corps unless there is a mechanism to teach them how to be great. Will the Praise Sandwich accomplish that goal?
At some point, we need to stop enabling the child within to demand praise and reach a higher metacognitive level. No doubt, teachers, like law students, want to be told how well their doing. Perhaps it’s effective for making them feel good about themselves and encouraging them to continue their pursuit. But when do they shift from the need for validation to the desire to achieve excellence? It is this desire that’s meant be “expert.”
The alternative, as happened in Atlanta, is that we continue to enjoy the social convention of tummy rubbing that so many crave and enjoy, and just cheat our way to success. Because no amount of tummy rubbing will make anyone a first-rate teacher. Or trial lawyer. Or anything else, for that matter.
What happened in Atlanta was the by-product of a widely embraced pedagogy. It failed and dozens of teachers and administrators were indicted for cheating. They better hope their lawyers weren’t the products of the same pedagogy, or they’re doomed.
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I’m unclear. Are you saying that we should do away with praise and that it’s better to teach only by being critical?
No. I’m saying that a teaching method that requires mandatory praise, regardless of whether it’s warranted, because the students are deemed too fragile without it, is counterproductive at the point where students are about to, or taking, responsibility for other people’s lives. Whether teachers or lawyers (or physicians, or police officers, for that matter), we need to end the enabling, the prolonging adolescence into their chosen careers.
We praise to reinforce skills that are worthy of praise. We criticize to improve skills that are not. And sometimes, we need to hand a student a dime and tell them they won’t be a lawyer.
“Not everybody can grow up to be President, despite our popular belief to the contrary. Nor be a lawyer. Nor a teacher.”
This gets to the heart of the matter in my mind.The following exchange in the movie “The Incredibles” accurately reflected my feelings on the “everyone is special” teaching culture that prevails in education:
Helen: Right now, honey, the world just wants us to fit in, and to fit in, we just gotta be like everybody else.
Dash: But Dad always said our powers were nothing to be ashamed of. Our powers made us special.
Helen: Everyone’s special, Dash.
Dash: Which is another way of saying no one is.
The Atlanta scandal is being repeated in several other states (Ohio being one of them) and for exactly the same reasons.
Design a system where test scores are the only measure of success. Tie administrator salaries and retention based on those scores. And let the administrators be the ones gathering and collating the test results.
The outcome is highly predictable. Unlike private industry, teachers and principals can’t fire underperforming workers. So, the results get fixed. (In Ohio, the method was to mark as absent thousands of students across the state, which meant the admins could throw out those low scores, raising the average.) Teachers were pressured and threatened to go along with the fixes. Voila: higher test results, administrators got raises, and the state looked good to the Feds…which meant that there wasn’t much incentive to question the results.
Not every student will be brilliant. A great many of them won’t even be average. And as long as you have a system that insists that every student can be made to perform as the system insists, then this sort of scandal will continue.
But doesn’t it make you feel better about yourself to think you’re special? And feeling better about yourself is the root of all goodness.
I remember one of the first appellate briefs that my mentor – he was somewhat of a legend, and still is – had edited. I never saw so much red ink, and he said “don’t return until you’ve edited this brief to under 60 pages.” I took all his criticism to heart, but never took it personally. I was a newbie and felt I had the privilege and honor to learn from such a skilled, experienced attorney. Still, he said several times during our discussion, “look, I’m not yelling at you. You write well, but…” I learned later why he kept offer this caveat. Apparently, he had a few recent editing sessions where the newbie would break down and sob. All over some mild criticism that the newbie was lucky to even receive! Unfortunately, I am a member of this “praise first” generation. I like praise, but some of my contemporaries fail to realize you have to earn it first.
And yet you scorned my suggestion of using the beauty salon model for schools.
You’re highly scornable (though I have no clue what you’re talking about).
It looks to me as if two different types of expertise are under discussion here, but each side is arguing as if the other means the same thing when they use the term “expert”. Mark and Justin seem to mean specialized expertise in a given subject, while Scott seems to mean generalized expertise in pursuing educational goals.
I’d have to go with the second concept as being more appropriate when discussing professional education. As a scientist, I’ve been through several years of post-grad education, and I don’t recall it dispensing sandwiches like a deli takeout counter. (Well, I suppose it might have resembled a deli run by John Belushi wielding a samurai sword.) It shouldn’t HAVE to. One should have outgrown the need by the time one gets out of high school, much less through an undergrad degree. If the K-12 experience no longer teaches kids how to learn somewhere along the way, then it is failing them badly.
If I were to retire and decide to study law (so as to while away my golden years pestering Scott without making anyone dumber), I would hope I would not need praise sandwiches despite my current no-doubt-appalling ignorance of law. I already have general learning skills and know how to apply them. Particularly when a course of study is one of my own choosing, my instructors should certainly be able to assume that I have sufficient internal motivation to obviate the need for coddling praise.
You’ve explained it better than I did. Thank you.
As an undergrad, here’s how I view it (Warning, I’m a math major an so look at many things askew from how others do):
Praise is nice, criticism is necessary. In math, and really any foundational discipline, it is vital that my knowledge be right before I move on and try to build on it. If a teacher looks at my homework and says to him(her)self, “Well, he didn’t quite get it, but he got the general idea, so I won’t mark it wrong,” I have lost on the exchange. I have to be told when my understanding is in error so that I can fix that error.
Hard disciplines, like math, have discrete answers. Law is soft, so the right and wrong isn’t necessarily clear or consistent, making it a far more wiggly discipline to pin down. Still, there are parameters beyond which it’s not in the ball park. So criticism has to be tempered by the fact that there are often many answers in law that fall within the “right” spectrum.
But the core of your point, that without a meaningful understanding of correct and incorrect, you have no foundation on which to build, applies to everything. And you can’t get that understanding from empty praise.
The sandwich can be subverted. For example:
I really like the way you tie your shoelaces. It’s a thing where you are a real expert. Now, when it comes to your performance in this actual matter… But anyhow, I think you also managed to button your shirt correctly.
When the student is indoctrinated in the use of sandwich model, he knows that the initial positive comment is obligatory. When it concerns something that a six-year-old can do correctly, it tells about the depth of your mistake. By changing the level of behaviour you are “praising”, you can give quite a lot of signals.
Being an excellent teacher isn’t a way to ensure success as a teacher. A lot depends on the material one has to work with. The more mush the students’ brains are, the less likelihood the teacher is going to see test scores that make the bureaucrats, politicians, and soccer moms happy.
It’s akin to measuring a defense lawyer’s ability by how many acquittals he secures without regard to context of the cases (the defendants, the evidence against them).
It can also be ignored, but the problem is twofold: First, whoever is running the show gets to call the pedagogy shots, so it would be wrong to either subvert their decision to rely on the Praise Sandwich or ignore it, and second, it’s not juts a matter of any one individual subverting or ignoring it, but putting an end to it as an appropriate teaching tool for law students, as well as others who are supposedly prepared to be responsible for other people’s lives.
We can’t control what we have to work with, but we can be responsible for ourselves.
I totally agree with this, but just want to make one caveat. I think it’s key to note that there is a difference between praise earned and empty praise. It is critically important in any environment to have errors pointed out so that we can fix them or learn from them. At the same time, we should not hesitate to let people know when something they did is done well, that way they can repeat the behavior.
No need for a caveat. As noted, it’s just as important to let someone know what they’ve done.