Module 3

Chapter 7 from this week’s reading is written about the behavioral views of learning. It introduced things like classical conditioning with Pavlov’s dog and went into operant conditioning as well. After explaining these types of conditioning, the chapter starts to talk about how a teacher can use these types of conditioning in their classroom. One thing that the reading recommends for teachers to use is a technique called shaping. Shaping is the process of giving a student reinforcement for their hard effort when trying to get better at something instead of waiting for that something to be perfect to give their students reinforcement

One thing that I can relate to in chapter seven is how the author described how group consequences should be used in order to be effective. One thing that the author states is to not use group consequences when one student is continually messing up and the whole class is receiving a consequence for that one student’s mess-ups. When I was in high school I was a catcher on the high school’s baseball team. When someone said something stupid that would make our coach angry we would be forced to run timed sprints. The problem with this was if the action that made my coach made happened when I was in catching equipment I would be forced to run the timed sprints in my catching equipment. In high school baseball, people who play catcher specialize very deeply into the position. For most of my practices, I was in catching gear for 95% of the time. This meant that I would have to run timed sprints wearing full gear in the same time as someone who was running without any catching gear. If I didn’t finish in time we would have to run the sprints again. By the end of the year, everyone hated the catchers because we would be the ones to make the whole team be sprinting for hours. This is the exact opposite way that the book recommends a teacher uses group punishment.

Chapter 13 from this week’s reading is about managing learning environments. Two of the more important topics that are included in this chapter are classroom management and creating a healthy classroom environment. The point of classroom management is to control a classroom to work diligently and efficiently. This does not mean that the entire class has to be completely silent, astute learners all the time, but it does mean that student should be able to control their actions that disrupt the flow of learning in a class. In order for a classroom environment to be efficient, certain rules need to be set in place when the school year starts. Failing to do so could result in a teacher spending countless, precious, hours of their school year explaining to students that they do not need the teacher’s permission to do simple things like sharpening a pencil or blowing their noses.

This chapter also went into a specific strategy to teach to students so they can best express their feelings to their teachers and fellow students, called I-messages. I remember when I was going to a middle school that had an issue with students fighting all the time. I was forced to learn about I-messages and it was one of the most annoying things that I was ever forced to do. The whole point of the lesson was to allow students to state what their “problem” was without using the word “you”. This lesson was supposed to help students deescalate their confrontments with one another, but all this did was lead the students getting very sarcastic in their berating of someone. Instead of fixing my grade levels problems, it made it quite worse because anyone who used an I message would not get into trouble for what they said. Because of this, I-messages were pretty much thrown out the window at my school and we were not forced to use them for more than a week.