AEDU 303 Educational Psychology - Summer Session, 2019

I interviewed Eda Guven of EPIC Academy which is a charter school and the school I am currently at for my placement. I interviewed her because she is a first year teacher and figured she could give good insight since the year just ended. I have sat in her classroom a couple times throughout the school year and she has a great classroom community to correspond with her classroom management. The students really respect Ms. Guven, and they also were willing to work hard whenever I sat in on one of her lessons. She also treated her kids with respect. I asked her many questions about how her classroom management changed throughout the year and she basically said that it is a learning experience. But that I should get to know my students because it will help bridge the gap between educator and student. Also, it will help us understand maybe why certain students act out and how to teach to their weaknesses. While discussing how to handle the students, Ms. Guven says that she rarely likes to...

This weeks readings are chapter 7 and 13.  Chapter 7, Behavioral Views of Learning. The chapter starts off by explaining learning, it also covers what we learned a lot about classical conditioning and operant conditioning. The chapter puts it together with applying operant conditioning to behavior analysis. The chapters talks about reinforcing the teacher attention, and talks about the praise-ignore strategy. This is praising good, acceptable, and desired qualities, and ignore the misbehavior or undesirable behavior like random outbursts, "When is the game this Friday?" This can be helpful, but not effective for all classroom management situations. (GUILTY! hahha)  Effective praise must be (1) be contingent on the behavior to be reinforced, (2) specify clearly the behavior being reinforced, and (3) be believable (O'leary & O'leary, 1977) The book focuses on sincere and clear feedback. Next, the chapter also delves into the Premack principles. One thing that stu...

I find each week to be a wealth of information with some more overwhelming than others.  This week I was overwhelmed and mainly with Chapter 7 - Behavioral Views of Learning.  Chapter 13 - Managing Learning Environments was less overwhelming as I felt it was less technical and intimidating.  I think this is because of my past experience with Psychology 101 as a college freshman.  I struggled understanding and remembering the different learning styles and theories.  This week brought back so many adverse memories where I still remember sitting in my Psych 101 class in Gregory Hall at UIUC with the musty smell.  I had to purposely put myself in a different state of mind and a relaxing environment so I could create new associations with these concepts of positive and negative reinforcement, classical conditioning and behavior methods.  The reinforcement schedule on page 270 was helpful.  It provided the definition, example, response and reaction fo...

Teacher Interview             Megan Truesdale is special education resource teacher in school La Grange School District 102, her focus is in special education. Her students are blended (kindergarten to 5 th grade). Her classroom is not your typical classroom—she teaches and provides additional support to students who need help in math and reading. These students are general education students who receive these “pull-out” (special education) services in a smaller environment.             All efforts directed toward building positive relationships with students and creating classroom community are steps toward preventing management problems (Woolfolk, 2019, pg. 524). Ms. Truesdale was asked a series of eight questions in regard to her teaching methods. When asked about her classroom management structure, she stated that her classroom is not your typical classroo...

For my teacher interview, I interviewed a teacher, Jackie Whowell at my school that I work at. She is a fifth grade teacher, that really utilized every aspect of her room. She was know for having really good classroom management and a big focus on SEL. One of the things that stuck out to me, is that for 13 year olds, she set up a calming station, and got these blue carpets and pillows, timers, and posted a sign that gave expectations and guidelines. The students were allowed to come back at any point of the day, and sit in this calming station for 5 minutes. She encouraged the student to feel what they felt, reset and come back to the learning. This was so interest and respectful to the students, I really wanted to get her insight so I could use these strategies in my class. I have to admit if you haven't already caught on this teacher is my mother. I know that I am biased, however she is an amazing teacher, and as you read the interview you can see what makes her so special, and w...