Archive for the 'Other Sites' Category

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Jim Wright’s resources

Published on 13 January 2009 in Classroom management, News, Other Sites, Press and Research. 0 Comments

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.

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Freed kids and behavior mod

Published on 30 December 2008 in Extra-classroom matters, Other Sites, Press and Understanding. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

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.
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Consistency in discipline

Published on 22 December 2008 in Classroom management, News, Other Sites and Press. 0 Comments

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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Some resources

Published on 22 July 2008 in Other Sites and Understanding. 4 Comments Tags: , , , .

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.
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Reflections on control

Published on 10 July 2008 in Classroom management, Other Sites, Teaching b mod and Understanding. 0 Comments Tags: , .

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.

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Management at the door

Published on 16 March 2008 in Classroom management and Other Sites. 1 Comment

Over on Math Stories, Mr. K. has some comments about classroom discipline that are worth reading. Try this for example:

What the “good” teachers do
So, at this school at least, discipline is a huge part of being able to teach at all, much less well. Many of the teachers are successful. They have well run organized classrooms, their students are engaged and learning, and succeeding at it. In talking with one of them, we came to the realization that there are a lot of different styles, but they all have at least one thing in common:

The classroom is a culturally isolated from the rest of the school.

Teachers stand at the doors, and do a brain check on each kid as they come into the classroom. Every kid is given some sort of reminder that that door is a threshold, that when they cross it, the rules change, the expectations change, and their behavior better change. Those classrooms are little individual fortresses, and the successful teachers bring in the kids, but have set up barriers to keep the bad behavior out.

This reminds me of a study that I use sometimes in class. Allday and Pakurar (2007) examined the effects of having teachers greet students at the door. They found pretty clear increases in students’ attention to task during the class periods when the teachers complimented students as they entered the classroom.

Read Mr. K.’s full entry. Flash of the electrons to Liz Ditz for her post for alerting me to this. You can download a PDF the full version of the study by Allday and Pakurar for free.

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