Positive Reinforcement Vs Negative Reinforcement

[jpaul]

You can push people to achieve better without the stupid crap. A positive approach doesn't mean nobody gets pushed or nobody gets chastised for lack of focus. It only means using techniques that aren't dysfunctional and disrespectful.

[84BDsop]

"The floggings will continue until morale improves" might make a good t-shirt, but it's NOT good managerial technique...

There's pushing to attain a goal and there's ABUSE to do the same.....very few people would respond well to abuse.

[keymodf]

I'm all for making a hornline run to a stop sign or water tower after a rep to improve conditioning, but in no way is running after making a mistake going to fix that mistake. Same with pushups. If the goal is that doing pushups is going to correct mistakes, why not just do a ton of push ups before every rehearsal? Ridiculous I know, but I feel it proves the point. If A (pushup) is going to prevent B (mistake) from happening, then A should come before B has a chance to happen.

[BRASSO]

You can push people to achieve better without the stupid crap. A positive approach doesn't mean nobody gets pushed or nobody gets chastised for lack of focus. It only means using techniques that aren't dysfunctional and disrespectful.

Any technique that " is dysfunctional " won't get the desired result..... which is improved result. Thus I think we can all agree that any supervisor that uses a dysfunctional style of supervision is engaging in " stupid crap " and won't be in that supervisory position for very long.

I never met a DCI staff that had on board a staff member that utilized " dysfunctional " teaching techniques. If they did, it was either not a very successful Corps, or that Corps got rid of that incompetent staff member before too long.

Edited March 5, 2010 by BRASSO

[MikeD]

You can push people to achieve better without the stupid crap. A positive approach doesn't mean nobody gets pushed or nobody gets chastised for lack of focus. It only means using techniques that aren't dysfunctional and disrespectful.

I agree. Even back in my Garfield days our staff did a great job without the 'stupid crap'. I don't recall George Tuthill even raising his voice to the drumline in 1971, and the same goes for Don Angelica when I played bari in 72.

All of our staff made their points in a respectful manner.

[Dir_en_X]

Just adding my $.02

When I was punished for things like lack of focus, repeated ticks, depending on which rehearsal block we were in I either dropped and did push-ups or ran with my section. But as I ran or pushed ground, I was thinking about how to get back into rehearsal. Getting worked up physically as a brass player with an elevated heart rate and shortened breaths were the opposite of what my staff wanted so I tried to take enough time to settle down my breathing and heart rate as possible.

The point? So that when I'm hauling across the field (rehearsal or otherwise), horn in a 'pop' position and playing full out, I'm able to relax and play how I was instructed to do.

[lilbugleboy]

Not as experienced as the psychologist and the behavior analyst, but as a psychology undergrad I'd like to chip in here.

I don't find that drum corps kids operate on a level as rudimentary as operant conditioning in their learning process. For most of the kids I march with as well as myself, the motivation is internal rather than reliant on the staff. In my experience the staff neither heavily reinforced or punished us; they merely gave us the information and we processed it with the drive to be a better corps. I may be wrong but this seems like the more mature approach to instruction, especially at the DC level.

[DAvery]

Not as experienced as the psychologist and the behavior analyst, but as a psychology undergrad I'd like to chip in here.

I don't find that drum corps kids operate on a level as rudimentary as operant conditioning in their learning process. For most of the kids I march with as well as myself, the motivation is internal rather than reliant on the staff. In my experience the staff neither heavily reinforced or punished us; they merely gave us the information and we processed it with the drive to be a better corps. I may be wrong but this seems like the more mature approach to instruction, especially at the DC level.

My point exactly. I also think "motivation" is a better term than "reinforcement" for what we are discussing.

[Peel Paint]

Not as experienced as the psychologist and the behavior analyst, but as a psychology undergrad I'd like to chip in here.

I don't find that drum corps kids operate on a level as rudimentary as operant conditioning in their learning process. For most of the kids I march with as well as myself, the motivation is internal rather than reliant on the staff. In my experience the staff neither heavily reinforced or punished us; they merely gave us the information and we processed it with the drive to be a better corps. I may be wrong but this seems like the more mature approach to instruction, especially at the DC level.

You're absolutely right. I agree with this. Operant conditioning is more useful as a model for understanding how and why people learn to change behavior than to be used as a motivational tool in teaching a corps basic skills and advanced charts and drills. We got into this not because we think drum corps camps should be run like lab rat mazes but because the thread started off with a common mistake (the misuse of the term "negative reinforcement") that kept getting thrown around synonymously with buttkicking as a teaching approach in drum corps.

There's a lot of good stuff in this thread, focused on more real-world uses of reward and punishment by drum corps instructors.

Historically, of course, drum corps came out of the military model, and there may remain in a few staffers the legacies of the fear and the "I'm God" drill instructor approaches to teaching which can change behavior and may work with some students. But these approaches carry a lot of risk and negative side effects and are likely not the most effective approach for every student or for a corps as a whole.

[whitedawn]

I was watching the Cadets rehearse in 2000 before a show here in Oklahoma. Their instructor (sorry, don't remember who it was...it was one of the caption heads.) started yelling at them and cursing at them. They were rehearsing the "meat grinder", and he would curse at the members and insult them and such, calling them out, etc. This really turned me and my wife off to the whole rehearsal as I had never heard that before. I wanted to slap that idiot. If someone spoke to me like he did, after I had paid my high priced dues and sweated my butt off and all of that...I would be pretty ######. Anyway, I don't know how many other corps do this when the public is not watching, but I hope it is not very common.

absolutely. did. not. happen.

i remember that day in tulsa. i remember that school, the set up of the site(the corps was at the show site), that the field faced south, and i remember what we worked on (ballad staging because it was like 110 degrees). i remember that scv's souvie wagon showed up about half way through marching rehearsal, which we thought was odd because it was very early. we had beef stew for lunch. the gym was like a basketball stadium.

the point: you may hear pointed things from time to time, but at no point has any staff member cursed at a member of the corps during a rehearsal. at least not while i was there, and i didn't miss a single rehearsal for six years.