Matt Normand, a professor at the University of the Pacific who maintains a site he calls “The Skinner Box,” publishes a series of podcasts about behavior analysis. The second of these, released 5 August 2008, is a discussion of functional behavioral analysis (FBA). Much of the content features a conversation with Brian Iwata about his experiences in early work on FBA as well as other matters (e.g., comparison of FBA and simpler descriptive analyses). The latest episode of “Current Directions in Behavioral Science” is available at Mr. Normand’s Web site. It’s worth a listen.
Sphere: Related ContentArchive for the 'Press' Category
In a column entitled “Teacher speaking out about beating,” Rick Badie (columnist for the Atlanta, GA, US, Journal-Constitution describes his reaction to a terribly unfortunate incident in which a middle school teacher was injured by a student. Here are the first few paragraphs of his column:
The swelling has subsided, but her head still throbs.
Her nerves are shot. She feels hot and cold sensations in her mouth. She needs new glasses. Her old ones got broken in the attack.
Janie Fair says she was standing in the hallway of Lilburn Middle School. She didn’t see the 12-year-old girl approach her side. The seventh-grader yelled insults and called the teacher names. She punched Fair four or five times.
It was a beatdown.
“I had a ballpoint pen in my right hand,” Fair told me Monday. “I took my left hand and pushed her away from me and tried to restrain her. Another teacher jumped in, grabbed her and took her to the office.”
Last Wednesday, Fair became the county’s poster child for teachers who get assaulted by students. Physical attacks against teachers, or school employees, apparently are rare in Gwinnett.
Mr. Badie goes one to explain his repulsion to this event and his concern about the lack of discipline in schools. There are very many comments on this post. It’s worth reading not just Mr. Badie’s calmly reasoned view, but the more inflammatory comments.
Let me know if you see any that offer constructive recommendations.
Sphere: Related ContentJust in case anyone doubts the need for preparing teachers to manage classroom behavior, here are five illustrations:
Continue reading ‘Need for management training’
In one more example of the mis-representation of “behavior modification,” another of those facilities aimed to serve (not the right word?) children and youths with behavior that their parents find unacceptable has been identified as a “behavior modification facility. Tranquility Bay, more accurately characterized as an extremely strict re-education camp, is the subject of a documentary. It is one of the schools affiliated with the World Wide Association Of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS), a group that has had facilities closed because their methods were inhumane (see example of a story from New York Times appended here).
Continue reading ‘B mod NOT’
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