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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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.
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Just in case anyone doubts the need for preparing teachers to manage classroom behavior, here are five illustrations:
Continue reading ‘Need for management training’
Pat and I have a quiet tug-o-war between management and teaching. Although both of us recognize the importance of having both classroom management and instructional skills, she contends that the management skills are required. Pollyanna-ishly, I maintain that if one’s instructional management is strong, one will not need behavior management competence.
Too be sure, my view is idealist. That’s reinforced (ahem) by an article entitled “Schools Beef Up Classroom-Management Training” from by Vaishali Honawar of Education Week. Ms. Honowar provides the following lead:
Faced with concerns that too many teachers are entering the profession unprepared to manage classrooms, some colleges of education have in recent years increased their focus on training aspiring educators to handle disruptive students.
New teachers, even if skilled in academic subjects and pedagogy, often find themselves grossly unprepared to deal with student misbehavior. Discipline issues are one of the primary reasons given for teacher attrition. In fact, a 2003 study by the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, a Washington-based advocacy group, found that more than 25 percent of teachers who left the profession cited student discipline.
Given that I teach a behavior management class for my school’s teacher education program, I should be encouraged. I’ll still promote the idea that the first behavior management bulwark is powerful instruction, but I know I’ll have to teach them how to deal with problems, too. Here’s hoping I the evidence-based procedures I pitch to them will register…and stick.
Link to Ms. Honowar’s article.
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