Over on Docere est Discere, G. Broaddus has a post about an in-service session that, from his well-written report, appears to have made a lot of sense. Here’s a snippet from his introductory paragraph:
We had Indiana State University (at Terre Haute) professor Todd Whitaker giving us a presentation entitled “What Great Teachers Do Differently,” and it was humorous, insightful, and engaging (and many other attributes would be appropriate). Whitaker is the author of several books, one of which shares the title of the presentation with the subtitle “Fourteen Things That Matter Most”; appropriately, we were given a list of these fourteen things, but Whitaker could only cover some of them in the four hours or so we would be there.
Mr. Broaddus, who apparently is documenting his experiences during he time he is completing student teaching, gives specific examples of points made by Professor Whitaker. Among them are factors in classroom management that have appeared here (e.g., use praise; manage one’s own behavior). I’ll be checking into Professor Whitaker’s books, and I’ll revisit Mr. Broaddus’ blog.
Link to the entry on Docere est Discere.
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Over at Intervention Central Jim Wright is publishing lots (and lots!) of useful resources about various teaching matters, including behavior management. Mr. Wright has assembled tips and techniques that go beyond the usual in one very important way: They are expressly based on research!
Intervention Central offers free tools and resources to help school staff and parents to promote positive classroom behaviors and foster effective learning for all children and youth. The site was created by Jim Wright, a school psychologist and school administrator from Central New York.
Visit to check out newly posted academic and behavioral intervention strategies, download publications on effective teaching practices, and use tools that streamline classroom assessment and intervention.
Continue reading ‘Jim Wright’s resources’
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People, including B. F. Skinner, often talk about the philosophical proposition that operant principles reduce humans to animals whose behavior is determined by features of the environment, denying the be-loved construct of free will. For a variety of reasons (just one here: Read Dan Wegner’s excellent The Illusion of Conscious Will), I am pretty well convinced that those principles of stimulus control, reinforcement, punishment, shaping, and etc. explain great deal—even virtually all—of human behavior.
Mayhaps in another series of posts, I’ll write about the freedom-determinism question, but in this post I’m going into a simpler concern about freedom: Allowing children the freedom to do things on their own. If children are denied the opportunity to function in free-operant situations (i.e., those enviroinments where many different behaviors may occur and repeated), it will be very difficult for them to learn contingencies that exist in those environments.
Continue reading ‘Freed kids and behavior mod’
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Over on Cal Teacher Blog, there’s a good post about classroom management. Under the title, “Mean it,” Cal explains that he follows through on his rules and does so in what appears to be a matter-of-fact manner. This is good advice.
When I tell my students they must arrive on time for class and that I will send them to detention when they arrive late I have to mean it. Then, when a students comes nonchalantly strolling into class two minutes after the tardy bell rings, I have to actually send them to detention. I can’t express enough how much I HATE when a student sits in detention and not in my class learning and doing. Unfortunately, it is in the best interest of all of my students that when one or two of the students are tardy that they pay this penalty because it really does encourage the other students to arrive on time.
In my class, I stress to students that consequences must be administered contingently, consistently, and immediately. Cal Teacher’s clearly doing this.
Link to the entire post on Cal Teacher Blog.
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As a result of prowling around the Internet for a while, I’ve been assembling resources about applications of behavioral principles to problems relevant to the content of this blog. Of course, one of the foremost areas of application is improving the lives of individuals with autism. Indeed, applied behavior analysis (ABA) is sometimes misunderstood as a synonym for the discrete trial training procedures associated most closely with the work of Ivar Lovaas and his colleagues. Although they shouldn’t be considered synonymous, there is a great deal of communality.
But, that’s a topic for another post. This post is just an opportunity to list a few of the blogs that one can follow and learn about the application of behavior analysis to autism.
Continue reading ‘Some resources’
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Over on Another Brick in the Wall, Donna posted an entry about the term “classroom control.” It got me thinking about the concepts of control, management, and teaching. Here’s her lead
Teachers use the term “classroom control” for classroom management techniques. I have also used those terms. Lately I have been thinking about how much control makes sense and if the goal is to keep children simply controlled or to change their behavior in a more lasting way. Change is a process that takes place inside the child before you see it in the behavior.
Continue reading ‘Reflections on control’
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