We’ll be featuring regular blogs and now that we’ve started,
they’ll be no stopping us. We haven’t
been much of a chatty bunch in the past, so now that we’ve finally started, it’s
time to make up for it. We’ll be discussing relevant topics, particularly
feedback and performance enhancing tools....
As feedback is such a huge and relevant part of our
professional lives, it’s not surprising that we are quite passionate about
it. We are hoping that as our blogs
become more interactive, that people will also want to discuss feedback and its
positive sides.
So where shall we start with feedback? One of the most obvious places to start would
be with one of our favourite quotes, Ken Blanchard, his quote “Feedback – the Breakfast of Champions” is
a good starting point for anybody’s journey into the feedback world. Although Ken Blanchard’s bibliography is vast, let’s take The One Minute Manager,(co-authored with Spencer Johnson) a really simple, short and effective book which has sold over 13 million copies and translated into 37 languages, clearly he must be doing something right. Spencer Johnson then went on to write Who Moved my Cheese, but that’s another story.
The brief volume of The One Minute Manager, gives us three different techniques of an effective manager, one-minute goals, one-minute praisings and one- minute reprimands. Each of these three techniques takes only a minute, but is potentially of a lasting benefit to all managers.
A friend of mine, a secondary school teacher, read this book
and decided to try and use this with her pupils in the education
environment. After all, in the
Introduction of the book, there is a quote by Confucius which advises us ‘The
essence of knowledge is, having it, to use it’.
My friend, the innovative teacher, thought this would be a good tool to
achieve results from her pupils in a small time frame. In taking on the ethos of the book, she
initially introduced goal setting with them in the framework of achieving their
homework targets etc. Moving on to the one
minute praisings and the one minute reprimand (although this was implemented on
a softer scale), she found that her pupils were engaged more and therefore more
productive. In particular, the goal
setting part of the experiment was the most successful and therefore worth
investing time in.
Staying on the theme of knowledge sharing and the
educational environment; here at Insightful Edge, we have spent 2 years
developing a range of feedback tools for schools which are achieving successful
results from the tracking studies we have carried out.
The tools measure the school climate by collating the
opinions of all involved (pupil, staff, parents and governors). All our tools
have been developed in line with the Ofsted framework and the DfE guidelines.
It would be interesting to find out what Ken Blanchard
thinks about our Insight 4 Schools project and whether he would deem this among
the breakfast of champions. Perhaps
we’ll ask him.
