MODULE 3

 

Concept 1: Reinforcement and Shaping Behavior

   

Summary:

    In chapter 7, Woolfolk discusses behavior and behavior management in the classroom. On page 273, she discusses how praise can be used to encourage good behavior, saying that, “To be effective, praise must (1) be contingent on the behavior to be reinforced, (2) specify clearly the behavior being reinforced, and (3) be believable.” If praise isn’t clearly tied to a certain behavior, then it doesn’t communicate what kind of behavior is good or desirable. And if the praise is not believable, meaning that students can see through it as a cheap way to influence their behavior, then it will not be an effective strategy. Woolfolk later dives into using other privileges and rewards to encourage desirable behavior, which she outlines on page 274: “A helpful guide for choosing the most effective reinforcers is the Premack principle…this is sometimes referred to as ‘Grandma’s rule’: First, do what I want you to do, and then you may do what you want to do.” Teachers can motivate students to focus on a less preferred task by making a more popular activity or privilege contingent on completion of what is less popular. 

Reflection:

    Behavior management is a controversial issue—one embroiled in debates over ethics, students’ rights, and even in determining which strategies are actually effective in influencing behavior. I appreciated that when discussing praise, Woolfolk was careful to attend to this in noting that praise-and-ignore strategies, and other strategies that leverage praise to coerce students into certain behaviors, can be both ineffective in actually influencing behavior, and risk adverse outcomes for students, like working only for praise or losing motivation and enjoyment in learning. I agreed with her that insincere praise is harmful, in part because it doesn’t encourage students to learn, but also because of the ethical issues that Alfie Kohn discussed in his interview with Ron Brandt. Kohn said that using praise of one student to talk to other students, rather than out of genuine recognition of good work, is manipulative, and a failure to respect your students as fellow human beings. I wish that Woolfolk had pushed this point further, becauseI think that sometimes, in their attempt to create a functional learning and schooling environment, teachers stop seeing their students’ personhood and autonomy as equal to their own. If we looked at children as people with human agency that needs to be respected, we wouldn’t herd them around or try to manipulate and train them into complying with what we want. It’s condescending and wrong to try to bait students into doing what we want, and becoming who we want, because that behavior implies that they are not capable of making decisions themselves or having goals and desires. I believe that praise should only be used as recognition of something good that a student is done, for the purpose of showing them care and encouraging them not to change their behavior for the classroom’s sake, but to continue making choices that will help them grow and thrive.

    A point of disagreement that I had with Woolfolk stems from this distinction between using rewards (like praise) out of care for the student and using rewards for the teacher’s benefit. Woolfolk says that the Premack principle is a good way to find and implement effective reinforcers by promising students that if they are obedient, they will get to do something that they want. I have several issues with this idea, the first of which being that it arbitrarily privileges the teacher’s goals and desires over the students’. Of course, the assumption here is that the teacher’s goals and strategies for learning are better than the students’, and are therefore more beneficial, but this isn’t always the case. I can remember my AP US History teachers spending an entire class period discussing a hypothetical scenario in which his daughter got arrested for drunk driving, and the class was to decide if/when he should go pick her up from the police station. This was not an effective teaching or learning strategy, and not remotely related to the content; the many students who took the period to work on our chapter outlines instead already were forming better goals than our teacher was. The Premack only works when the students believe that the teacher’s plan is a good plan, or respect (or fear) their authority enough to obey. However, many students do not trust their teacher to teach well, do not respect their authority, and may not even fear the consequences of disobedience. In my K-12 experience, students pick up on how unfair and arbitrary the privileging of the teacher’s ideas is when no justification for these ideas is provided, and this leads to distrust, resentment, and even open challenge and disruption. I think that instead of simply telling your students, “Do what I want, then we can do what you want,” teachers should explain to their students why the activity that they’ve planned is important and helpful. Doing this communicates respect to your students; we are doing what I planned first because this activity is necessary for you to learn, and we have more time for a fun discussion later. This approach also compels teachers to think critically about their lessons, because it requires a rationale for selecting and ordering their activities. When there is a rationale for the structure, it’s likely to be a better plan, and students are more likely to respect both the teacher and the activity.

Concept 2: Positive Behavior Supports

Summary:

    In chapter 7, Woolfolk also dives into the concept of PBS, or positive behavior supports. She says on page 285 that, “Positive behavior supports are actual interventions designed to replace problem behaviors with new actions that serve the same purpose for the student.” Woolfolk goes on to explain that these supports “can help students with disabilities succeed in inclusion classrooms,” but that “PBS approaches are not only for the classroom or for students with disabilities.” (286) Because PBS clearly establish the behavior that needs to be corrected and the behavior that will replace it, and identifies steps for intervention, Woolfolk says that this strategy is helpful at a “whole school level.” (Woolfolk, 2019, p. 286) I want to set up my classroom as a respectful, effective learning environment, and these kinds of clear expectations are necessary for such an environment. All students, not just students with disabilities, benefit from clear communication with their teachers and the security that it provides.

Reflection:

    I appreciated that Woolfolk discussed behavior management strategies for neurodivergent students, because it’s important for neurotypical people, like myself, to understand that our students with certain disabilities think differently than we do. Neurotypical behavior is interpreted differently by neurodivergent people, and they behave within a different social paradigm from the neurotypical paradigm. For educators, this means that sitting down with students and communicating behavior expectations, and the reasons for those expectations eliminates the kind of discomfort, misunderstanding, and frustration that many students with disabilities describe feeling when they’re disciplined for their behavior. One of my friends with autism described how she just didn’t understand neurotypical behavioral expectations, that the things that communicated respect, politeness, and engagement for her teachers and peers simply did not communicate those same things for her. Opening up the conversation to explain why students need to raise their hand, why they need to use a certain tone and volume level, why their peers need personal space, etc., not only makes the desired behavior more clear, but also provides an opportunity for students to advocate for themselves and explain what behavior means for them. Then, there is room for negotiation and understanding; it simply isn’t fair to expect students to guess what they need to do and why, or to impose standards of behavior without discussing whether or not those standards actually work. 

    Woolfolk’s emphasis on PBS as an intervention that substitutes disruptive or other problem behaviors with behaviors that serve the same purpose for the student, but aren’t disrupted appropriately prioritized that critical sense of fairness and equity that I value in the classroom. Students make choices to try to fit their needs, and in managing a classroom, it’s incredibly important to recognize those needs if our strategies are going to be effective in correcting the behavior and supporting our students. A student I worked with in my fall placement talked out of turn during class discussions frequently because he always had something that he wanted to share, and while he struggled with patience, he also recognized that if the teacher decided not to call on him, he wouldn’t be able to share, and that would bother him. To correct that behavior, the teacher could have formed a PBS plan where if the student waited to be called on, he wouldn’t be missed or skipped over, and if he didn’t, he might be ignored, or asked to stay quiet. This kind of intervention creates security, where the student understands that he isn’t being ignored out of dislike or frustration, and that he won’t miss his chance to share by following instructions. Of course, this also requires the consistent implementation of the teacher and a certain level of trust between the student and teacher; if the teacher doesn’t follow through and call on him, or if there is animosity between the teacher and student, that trust will be broken, and the behavior will not be affected. This is why I agree with Woolfolk that the implementation is just important as the tools, and that planning is a key way that teachers can monitor behavior and keep themselves accountable to consistent management. 

    Sometimes it seems like behavior management, and really any aspect of teaching, is focused on some kind of power hierarchy, where teachers control students in their learning and in their behavior. Teachers set expectations, and crack down when students move outside of those expectations, and if they can’t, then students take away the power. I disagree with this approach to teaching, which is why I found Woolfolk’s discussion of how teachers and students work together to manage behavior in positive behavior supports very interesting. Giving students an active role in staying engaged and following expectations—sharing the responsibility of behavior management with students—doesn’t in any way undermine the teacher’s authority. Teachers can have control of their classrooms without trying to dominate their students, and when students have a hand in shaping expectations, the classroom not only is better suited to their individual needs, but those expectations are also more meaningful to them. I can remember multiple teachers in my high school who set classroom norms with their classes at the beginning of the year, and while at first I thought the exercise was largely performative, I eventually saw that they really worked. When students acted out, those teachers pointed to the expectations and reminded us that we all agreed on them; acting out wasn’t just disobedience, but a breaking of trust and going back on your word. It creates an environment where students can’t create a scene by arguing with the teacher about the rules being unfair, or that they don’t need to listen, and that already takes a lot of wind out of disruptive students’ sails and prevents escalation. Starting on the same page, and on fair footing, is the best way to set up a classroom for success.

Concept 3: Problem Intervention

Summary: 

    In chapter 13, Woolfolk looks at how how the classroom environment can be managed, with a particular emphasis on deescalation and preventing disruption. Woolfolk says on page 527 that, “It is critical that you have many effective ways to deescalate rather than escalate student behavior problems. As problems escalate, students may need to save face in front of their peers by challenging or defying the teacher.” Allowing a problem to get out of control requires stricter, more heavy-handed intervention, which can feel intrusive for students and create a power struggle. Escalation also causes emotions to run high on both the students’ side and the teacher’s, further contributing to a high-stakes situation where students may feel the need to save face rather than calm down, and the teacher is less equipped to professionally handle the problem. This ties into Woolfolk’s point that viewing behavioral problems rationally, as teaching moments in a social context: “Successful teachers tend to see their role in improving behavior as interpersonal and instructional.” (528) Having an attitude of teaching and supporting, rather than punishing and dominating, recognizes how a student reacts to discipline, and responds in a way that puts their needs and their success first.

Reflection:

    Before reading this chapter, I’d thought a lot about reframing my thinking from prioritizing demonstrating that misbehavior will not be tolerated, to behavior management as a kind of push and pull toward a more effective environment. I come from a school with a lot of discipline issues, and I’ve seen many teachers lose control of their classes very quickly when they were too lenient with their students. In my family, too, my parents didn’t tolerate disobedience or disrespect, so I’ve had a very deep-seated notion that misbehavior deserves penalties for a very long time. A teacher, or other authority behavior, rewarding partial compliance, or refraining from coming down on defiant behavior, felt wrong, and seemed to communicate that students could get away with whatever they wanted. However, I took a behavior management professional development for EDUC 215 last semester that discussed how sometimes teachers have to give a little, and put aside personal jabs that a student may take, and reward small steps toward progress to encourage taking more steps. The researchers explained that because trying to push a student into total compliance can quickly become an explosive situation, rewarding partial compliance actually deescalates the problem and allows the student to calm down, to feel cared for, and move back in line with expectations by choice—it doesn’t make students believe that they don’t have to follow expectations at all. This led me to change my thinking, and let go of the need to patch every behavioral breach and instead focus on classroom management as a supportive learning process, like Woolfolk said. I knew that taking student behavior personally was a mistake, but I still viewed disrespect as an act of defiance that needed to be put out before it spiraled out of control. Woolfolk’s comparison of behavior problems as academic problems helped me to contextualize this; we don’t look at mistakes in student work as subversive or intentional, and so we should also give students the benefit of the doubt when it comes to behavior problems. In this way, I agree with Woolfolk that a teacher’s attitude and intentions are incredibly important here, because if we approach problems in good faith, and with the desire to support and instruct, our decisions will be more effective, and we’ll be able to recognize defiance or subversive behavior when it shows up, and handle it appropriately.

    I appreciated the way that Woolfolk highlighted the social context of the classroom when it comes to behavior management. We don’t teach our students in a vacuum, and so it’s important to recognize our interactions with them as interpersonal, taking place in a complex social network. School can be high-stakes socially, and things can get very ugly very quickly when teachers fail to see that pushing their students into a corner will cause them to lash out in trying to save face with their peers, or that teachers also exist in a social context. My fifth grade teacher struggled with this, and she was unfortunate in that our class had a pair of students who enjoyed causing disruption and often established themselves by humiliating others. She struggled to establish clear expectations and follow through with consequences, and made it very clear that she couldn’t control those two students by grandstanding with them and losing out very publicly—the rest of the class wasn’t going to risk their own social standing by sticking up for an unpopular teacher, and the teacher had undermined the consequences that might have prevented further misbehavior. At one point, I remember the teacher threatening to send one student to the office in front of the class, and the student told her that she should. But because the student had already been repeatedly sent out and brought back, the teacher didn’t actually follow through, and the student used the intercom system to call the office himself in a mimicry of her voice. Many of the other fifth graders thought this was hilarious, and such a bold, public, and clear defeat ruined any respect we had for the teacher. This is one of the worst outcomes of correction that I’ve ever seen, but even at less extreme levels, failing to recognize social risk and the powerful influence that a students’ reputation (and a teacher’s) has in motivating behavior and shaping outcomes will always lead to ineffective management. Teachers who understand, respect, and care for their students understand that social status is important to them, and won’t try to undermine them in front of their peers not just because it backfires, but because it’s harmful. On the other side of things, effective teachers also understand that confrontation risks their own relationship with their students, causing animosity, dissent, and a loss of respect. Being a positive part of the school’s social network allows teachers to build their teaching on a strong relational basis that students will respond well to.