Please comment and grade on my GRE issue essay.

[dilotor]

Issue Topic: The best way to teach is to praise actions and ignore negative ones.

 

In general, praising a certain behavior encourages more of it, but this does not necessarily mean the best way to teach is to acknowledge and reward positive behavior while ignoring negative actions. This is just a good practice that must be complemented with other strategies, including correcting or improving defects on a student´s performance.

Rewarding a good behavior or good results is beneficial for a student because it is an incentive to keep doing more of it, but there are certain circumstances in which it could create the opposite. For example, praising a student constantly for getting straight A´s, can encourage the continuation of this results, but on the other hand, if done excessively, could make the student overconfident or egocentric, making him or her underperform. As Jimi Hendrix once said, “Compliments can become distractions”

As well as with praising positive actions, ignoring negative ones has similar consequences under different circumstances. For instance, identifying negative results, weaknesses and failure is a fundamental part of teaching because it tells us what our opportunities for improving are and turn them into strengths. So definitely, ignoring negative behavior is something that should be avoided, with some exceptions, such as when students are shy and lack confidence. In this case, for example, ignoring some of the student’s mistakes can be beneficial for a while because it can help him gain confidence and help him at the beginning.

In conclusion, the best way to teach is a combination of rewarding positive behavior and penalizing negative actions but while being conscious about the extent to which each is done and being able to identify under which circumstances it is proper to make an exception for each case.