Context
I work as a volunteer for the ombudsman's program at the Caddo Council on Aging, so today I'm attending a workshop on the validation method of communicating with the disoriented elderly, led by Naomi Feil. Early in the day, she role-played an old woman who was disoriented and nonverbal and asked a volunteer from the audience how she would deal with the situation. No matter what the volunteer did, Feil acted more and more upset.
Commentary
I've seen the situation I described above before, and in fact, I was the victim one time. The consultant in question told me she would be playacting the part of a child, and it was my job to get her dressed to go to the doctor. When every tactic I tried failed, she said I shouldn't have been trying to get her dressed, I should have focused on the ultimate goal of getting me to the doctor. There's a phrase we use to describe this in the education community: it's called "changing the prompt."
Feil didn't change the prompt, but I'm pretty cynical about whether there was anything her volunteer could have done that would have elicited a positive response from the elderly character. I wonder if this is a common technique consultants use to prove their worth, i.e. "You couldn't possibly get out of this kind of predicament yourself; it's a good thing you hired me."
I guess this phenomenoncaptured my interest because I never teach this way. I'm always looking for a way for students to succeed, not fail, and even wfhen they give answers thaf are very far from what I'm expecting, I try to understand their thinking and fit it into the current situation. In Feil's case I found the "setting up to fail" particularly ironic, since the main theme of validation communication is empathizing with older people, being where they're at.
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