Positive Reinforcement

Oona Searcy

ECE 201

Debra Lawrence

May 28, 2012

Behavior is something that starts at home and is hard for teachers to deal with if there is not support from the parents. When a child first enters into the school world teachers have no idea what to expect but they have to be prepared for any and everything that a child brings. Laying down the rules and procedure in the beginning can help. Teachers are like a child’s parent because a child spends most of their time in the teachers presents so motivating them to be and do their best is what a student looks for. In this paper we will discuss Doug’s situation and what positive reinforcement can be done to help out the situation and what strategies will help to fix the problem.

In Doug’s case all strategies can be used to help make the situation better because they are things that should be applied to a classroom on day to day bases, so the one that I chose to use is Contingent Instructions. Contingent Instructions are specific directions given to an individual student to cease an undesired behavior and to engage in a more appropriate alternative. Doug is so focused on his lego’s that nothing else matter to him and his teacher along with his parents must help find a way to make him focus on his assignments like he do his lego’s. The one way you can use the lego’s to do math would be to set the problems with the lego’s and allow him to figure it out that way he is using them and not disrupting the class and he is doing is work at the same time. Placing less desirable tasks (low probability) fist and follow them with more preferred tasks; not only is more enjoyable activity an incentive to focus on the less enjoyable one, it is also a reward for successfully completing it (www.education.odu.edu). In the case Identify behaviors related to breaking classroom rules and procedure, to disrupting the instructional activity, or to potentially harming the child or others (Curran, C. 2003). Reprimand is used in contingent instruction this tell the student what they should be doing instead of doing something else. Contingent Instruction also shows you different ways to talk to the student to let them know what behavior should stop and why they should be doing it. Verbal interventions, like corrective directions, are typically used after other teacher nonverbal cues have been tried to redirect the misbehavior. A good general rule is that positive feedback should occur three times as frequently as negative feedback (www.edu.gov.mb.ca).

As teachers we have to make sure we find ways to encourage our students to do their best and know that it might time one child more time than another to get it right. So being positive and not negative will motivate and push them to want to do their best to please the teacher. So in this paper these are way that Doug can be help as well as other students with the same problems as him.

Reference

Curran, C., & the IRIS Center (2003). Encouraging appropriate behavior. Retrieved on May 29, 2012,

from http://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/case_studies/ICS-005.pdf

www.edu.gov.mb.ca/k12/specedu/fas/pdf/5.pdf

www.education.odu.edu.esse/research/series/schedules.shtml