The teeming Earth, yet guiltless of the plough, And unprovok’d, did fruitful stores allow: Content with food, which Nature freely bred, On wildlings and on strawberries they fed;
– The Golden Age, Metamorphoses
The term comes from Gemba Kaizen meaning ‘Continuous Improvement’ (CI).– Kaizen Philosophy: A Review of Literature
An exceptionally talented and capable student, in her very recently concluded EOY exams spelled experienced as expierienced even though the correct spelling was right before her. Proofreading would have helped her spot and correct this.
English belongs to the family of languages which proceed from left to right. It could be because students read from left to right, often just once, especially when reading for entertainment, that they form the view that writing is to fill a page with words from left to right, top to bottom, just once.
Students may not take to proofreading for three other reasons. First, it slows them down and sometimes arriving at the accurate version may take very much longer than expected. Second, they may be labouring under a (mis)apprehension that corrections imply some degree of shortcoming on their part. Finally, it could be because, students are used to and have come to rely on, eagle-eyed teachers who routinely spot their errors and often even indicate the correct form of words on their script.
We could deal with each in turn.
The gold standard for writing processes can be discerned from best-selling authors. One such author is J.K Rowling whose Harry Potter series has sold more than 500 million copies worldwide (pottermore, 2018). According to an article featured on CNBC, J.K. Rowling reveals the routine she uses to write her best-selling novels, the prodigious writer, “remains dedicated to long-term thinking, iteration and improvement”. In other words, even Rowling does not purport to create her stories by hitting print from the final version in her mind to obtain a neatly printed, or in her case, handwritten script.
Instead, what writing a best-selling novel looks like, is a series of continual revisions, some minor and some less so. According to Luna (2015), “commonly used (pre-)writing strategies” of “high-scoring students” include “drafting, outlining and proofreading”.
This process of iteration, defined according to one dictionary as, repetition of a mathematical or computational procedure applied to the result of a previous application, typically as a means of obtaining successively closer approximations to the solution of a problem and as the process of doing something again and again, usually to improve it, according to another, is not confined to writing.
Indeed, it’s what manufacturers swear by. A philosophy developed in Japan in 1950, known as Kaizen (kai means ‘change’ and zen means ‘for the good’ – mindtools.com) achieves continual improvement through the principle of iteration. Kaizen is predicated on a fundamental premise, that, “there is no end to make a process better” (Singh & Singh, 2009). An article on Mindtools puts it another way; it’s the “small” and “incremental” changes which “add up to substantial changes over the longer term, without having to go through any radical innovation”.
Therefore, students should be made aware that anything worth doing is worth doing well and anything worth doing well cannot be rushed or expected to be achieved in one fell swoop.
The second reason students do not proofread relates to self-imposed conceptions of shortcomings. A student may view mistakes as proof of shortcoming or some lack of ability. On this view, having to reread one’s work for accuracy in spelling, punctuation, grammar as well as meaning is akin to looking at a less than satisfactory reflection of self in a photograph. If they were equipped with some other metaphor, say that of a living being and a mirror, they might be freed from this misconception.
One’s first draft is not a photograph on which even with the most advanced software, there is a limit to edits. Instead it is a living being which is not restricted in any way from effecting improvements so that what is seen is more in line with its innate strengths and potential. Think of it this way. The first draft faces a mirror on its opposite side. The student’s eyes act as the mirror. A mirror is the very definition of an objective reflection. Objective is different from permanent and certainly in no way reflective of any limit on possibility.
There are two advantages of thinking of a first draft as a living being and not a photograph.
A photograph captures just one angle within a limited frame, a state of affairs at a point in time. It doesn’t take very much to see how this can result in misrepresentations of reality.
On the other hand, it is perfectly natural to look at a mirror to recognise and take pride in the result of consistent efforts over a long time and to make adjustments as may be necessary. A mirror allows appraisal from multiple angles. A mirror encourages and allows for improvement. If one could perfect appearance without recourse to a feedback mechanism, there would be no need for mirrors.
People usually do not feel shy about looking at mirrors. Mirrors empower people to improve and bring out their best. It may be helpful therefore, for students to think of proofreading as looking into a mirror.
The third reason relates to over-reliance on meticulous and ever so watchful teachers. Students typically do not expect their work to be error free. When they submit work, they expect feedback and that such feedback would be formulated in accordance with the expertise of professionals, who have at the forefront of their minds, their best interest and whose raison d’etre is the sound development of their charges.
When giving feedback teachers are very mindful that a child’s efforts must be affirmed. In fact, some pedagogy lecturers exhort teachers to encourage effort over objective evaluation against some benchmark. So, for example, comments such as, “Good Effort” are preferred over “Good Work”. This signals to students that they should have a growth mindset instead of a fixed one. This extends also to work that is on an objective basis, that is, in comparison to other students who have attempted the same piece of work, ranked highly.
Educators operating in systems with tight quality control would never tear down or in any way dismantle a child’s work in a manner that discounts time spent. Students generally do not require too much intervention and would be able to, as they have always, in the natural course of things, transform and produce good fruit without such deep ploughing. As Denison (2019) in Becoming a Good Enough Coach writes, a good coach “intervenes only when necessary” and it has been added elsewhere, only to the extent necessary.
Sometimes a student who knows the answer may still get it wrong. This could be because of wrong word choices or grammatical structure. Also, being able to put in words exactly what one knows to be true is a skill which takes time to develop. To the extent possible, a teacher would in these instances make only minor changes to represent more accurately what the student actually wishes to convey.
Even so, the best outcome for students is to be able to arrive at conclusions and be left to write on their own. This is why students are taught to proofread.
Proofreading refers to close “analytical reading with focus on both form and meaning” and to engage in “monitoring” and “repair” (James & Klein, 1994). It involves periodic reviews on their own accord when they assess it appropriate and fitting to do so. They do this because they take pride in their work very much like a homeowner looks at his house and beams inwardly.
The student who spelled experienced as expierienced got the foundations of the word right. Students are taught a specific technique to get spellings of words correct. It involves breaking up a word syllable by syllable and to experiment with different versions of each syllable. The second step is to assemble different versions of the same syllable to constitute the final word. This step entails recourse to intuitive word recognition. An experienced student would be able to recognise a word spelled correctly.
In this instance, even without using any technique, she got almost every syllable right. There was in fact no need for her to systematically dismantle this word at all.
All she had to do was delete ‘i’ from expierienced and she would have recognised how all the other constituent letters gelled together as only letters which belong can.
The Brain Dojo
