| Subject: Re: Assignment #2 |
Author:
Brooke Isaacs
|
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Date Posted: 21:29:12 06/13/10 Sun
In reply to:
Dr. M-J
's message, "Assignment #2" on 19:25:40 06/11/10 Fri
>Assignment 2 (Behaviorism): June 13
>Post a response to the following question by first
>clicking onto "Post a Reply to this Message"
>
>Think of a problem/situation in your area (teaching or
>counseling or as a parent) where you would use of have
>used behavioristic or social learning theories.
>Provide an example of the problem/situation and the
>solution.
I have always been a firm believer in the influence of one's environment on their development, behavior, and actions. I have witnessed it in my own family and in the community I grew up in. I studied sociology during my undergrad where I was first exposed to behaviorism and social learning theories and became extremely interested in them.
Presently, I teach in a school located in North Memphis and most of my students come from very unstable homes. I see the influence of their environment on them on a daily basis. Many of my students have very poor behavior and study skills and anger management problems. I am always correcting learned behaviors and rarely go a day without having to enforce some kind of punishment. Education is not valued by the majority of the students, parents, and community and parental support is almost zero. I have many situations that exemplify behaviorism and could go on for days and days, but for the sake of this discussion I am going to talk about one situation.
I have a particular student who was a constant disruption in my class, who frequently arrived in my class with a very negative attitude, and who was always on the defense and very argumentative. After calling home and talking to his mother about his behavior, it became very apparent where his behavior came from. She was very rude, uncooperative, defensive and insisted that her son was not at fault. After I hung up the phone with his mother, I realized 2 things. Number 1 was that his behavior was not completely his fault because he was simply modeling the behavior of his mother and number 2 was that if that behavior was learned, it can be corrected.
I became very creative on how I dealt with his behavior and set up a "contract" of rewards and punishments. When he followed the procedures and expectations, he was given a reward (computer time, gum, candy, free time, reading time, game time, good phone call home, free field trip etc.) and when he did not, he was given a punishment (seating change, not allowed to participate in a game, phone call home, detention, removal from the room, etc.) After a few weeks, his behavior improved (was far from perfect, but a drastic change for him). He started looking forward to coming to my class and was very proud of himself when he demonstrated the appropriate behaviors.
I later found out that the same student was a problem for all the other teachers and that my class was the only class that he would come to and behave. I told the other teachers what I was doing to correct his behavior so they could use it in their class and by 2 months his behavior had drastically improved in their classes as well!
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