The Yes and No – collaboration and negotiation
“Start with No and negotiate” or “Yes and let’s collaborate” are two approaches to reaching an outcome… Apologies for the cross-posting from my eLearning blog, but I think it might resonate with some of the parents in our basketball fraternity who are definitely there for their children and all who aspire…
Terms like negotiate, win-win when coupled with a Yes or No are generally associated with the striking of deals rather than teaching and learning, and yet I hear these terms used between and about teachers and students.
Reading through the literature associated with two of the more prominent current teaching and learning methodologies, Visible Learning and Direct Instruction, I see three words that resonate with me when I think of how I can positively influence the people around me from a life-long learning perspective.
These three words describe traits of both learners and facilitators, travellers and guides, students and teachers – basically anyone in a mutual quest to learn and teach.
These three words are aspiration, inspiration and adaptation – characteristics when demonstrated and practised by the learner and teacher cause each other to reach goals beyond where they could go individually.
The words are easy and make sense; but how do we create, foster and maintain aspiration, inspiration and adaptation on both sides?
Peers, Parents, Teachers and Learners are the biggest generators of those three key components to learning… and the words “Yes and let’s collaborate” work way better than “Start with No and negotiate”…
No and negative terms add stress when heard and far being a bubble-wrap cotton wool advocate, I believe that there are times when all positive receptors need to be activated and flooding people with negativity will create the opposite effect.
So think about that when working with your child, your partner, your colleagues, your student or your teacher.
My son gives me inspiration and as he grows, my approach must adapt to his growth into a young man. My aspirations are for him to have the best opportunity possible and I see that he has aspirations, but to be honest I can’t put my finger on the specifics of why he is driven to learn and others we know beyond his cohort don’t always have the same aspirations.
Sometimes as a person of “responsibility” it is easier to start out with No, and I am certainly guilty of that… but it is more productive to say Yes and negotiate from a positive starting point.
