"If you were given the chance, how would you help kids at your school graduate?
If you look around the education system, it is easy to observe that our kids are struggling. Our school system's children come from all over, facing different adversities, living in different environments, and learning in different ways. Is it really a surprise that the dropout rate is as high as it currently is? Students are not happy. They are not learning, not thriving, and not being driven enough to fully desire a graduation of their own."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/20/students-sound-off-high-s_1_n_825298.html
I am not so sure how behavior modification fits into this article. If the issue is learning, we all learn differently and this article is calling for the ability to recognize these differences to help children learn better. Perhaps, to go with our class we could discuss teaching behavioral techniques that coincide with studying. If students are not studying regularly or doing homework, then we could apply behavior modification techniques such as reinforcement for doing so. But then again, depending on the situation at hand, this may all circle back around my thoughts on truent kids not attending school (if they not interested in learning now, they wont, even in the presence of reinforcement or punishment). I think this article wants to call attention to the fact that we have kids who want to learn but are not because their learning styles or misgivings are not being met.
I am not sure I agree with you. Thinking about everything we have learned so far in this class, behavior modification can be associated in almost every move we make. Such as me replying to your post. The ABC's of behavior could also be applied to the classroom and getting students attention. I do agree that we all have different ways of learning. I am very visual, but even then I can be very forgetful. I think we need to ask ourselves about our own experience in high school, whether it is about your learning ability, your siblings, friends or even someone you tutored. There had to be some particular reason why they didn't do good in school. In my opinion and my experience the environment was BORING!!! When students relate school to being boring... why would they be motivated to go? Learning doesn't have to be that way.
I think there is a lot more we can do to learn better in school as teenagers, and I really do not think attendance has that big of an impact as long as work is being kept up and the student is disciplined. Also I do think reinforcement and punishment have a greater impact in learning than many people believe.
I enjoyed reading this article and found a lot of good info in it. I liked how the one teacher asked questions of each of her students, and I think taht is some of the problem today, teachers dont take the time to get to know each of their students. Everyone has a different style of learning and teachers cant expect to teach one way and have each student learn from that. I still see one of my elementary teachers every once in a while and she remembers my name and says hi every time. This is because she took the time to get to knwo her students and learned about them. I work w/ hs students now who have a hard time reading, but some of the teachers dont take the time or effort to work with them, they keep assigning some of the same reading assignments and not only are these students not progressing, they are getting further behind. There are some wonderful student mentors though at some of the schools and the one on one help is wonderful for these students. I will be watching "Waiting for Superman" this week;)
I can highly related to this article. I feel that with some professors, they don't really care about how students learn or want to learn. I feel that there is a need for teachers to take more time to learn things about their students and how they learn best. Most teachers have their teaching styles set and don't change them much. Not all students learn the same and it is hard for them to when the teachers have teaching strategies that don't work for them. Learning how students learn the best and creating or forming new ways of learning for these students really help students to learn better. With new methods of learning or methods that help these students, could change their behaviors about education and encourage them to learn more.
I agree. I feel like a lot of professors don't really care about their students and are just there for a paycheck. That is not what teaching is about. At all. I think passion is a must if you want to be a teacher.
I really enjoyed reading this article. It seems like these days, teachers don't seem to care about students' learning. I say that from some past experiences. Getting to the how the student's learn best is the first step. Every student learns differently. In order for them to do better in school, I think the teacher's should implement some sort of reinforcement. This would encourage the students to take a more active approach in their learning. The only way to do this is to encourage the teachers to change their styles of teaching to make it more productive and better for the students.
I think this can be related to behavior modification. This student is emphasizing the role of individual teachers in individual students' lives, so the learning behaviors of individual students are relevant. The problem is, if we look at graduating high school as a behavior, it's way too complicated, so we have to break it down into smaller behaviors. What behaviors correlate with high school graduation? Because I don't have much time to type this right now, I'll stick with just one: enjoyment of reading.
When I was in grade school we had a program called "Accelerated Reader", which in retrospect was really behavioral. Almost every book in our library had a point value on a scale of 1-5 (the points were derived from the reading level of the book). When you read a book, you could take a quiz on the book and if you passed the quiz you earned those points. At the end of the year those points can be used to "buy" prizes. I think it would be more effective if the points could be used in day-to-day life (like a 5 minute recess extension for a certain amount of points).
It's not perfect, since it's a fixed ratio reinforcement schedule rather than variable ratio, but I think it could be altered to make it more variable (for example if the points you get from the quiz reflect your grade on the quiz rather than an all-or-nothing pass/fail system).
I completely agree with this article, there is too much differentiation between teacher's teaching habits for it to be beneficial for each and every student.
Today's class got me thinking (on differential reinforcement) about the most productive ways for teachers to teach their students. A lot of times-- in grade school up through college, it seems as though teachers don't care, and any time there is a problem student, or the student doesn't care, the teacher resorts to punishing the child/student for that behavior, instead of trying to better the situation.
When I was in grade school I remember my greatest teachers, and the teachers that I would be TERRIFIED to come to class to. School should never be a scary place for kids but I had one or two teachers that would have my heart rate elevated just sitting in class waiting for them to arrive, because we knew that if we made one mistake (academically or behaviorally) we would basically be publicly humiliated, which is TERRIFYING as a child. I think that if all teachers focused on learning strategies that were based on reinforcing children in many different ways there would be an enormous increase in learning and good behavior, and less children acting out and failing.
I think this article is really interesting and applies to all stages of learning. Preschool and Elementry school are crucial times in a child's life. Everything that they learn there is the foundation that is built upon for their rest of their lives. If this area is faulted or the child isn't learning what they need to know it can damage their abilities and learning habits in the classroom forever. Middle school is used to build upon and sharpen the child's skills for high school level work. High school, I believe, is a very crucial stage as well. Personally, I think high school is where a child should learn and become prepared for college. The teaching should be more reality based and more molded to fit the college atmosphere. I came from a small Catholic high school in Fort Dodge where I graduated in a close knitted class of 74. I believe that our graduating class was a great class to hit our hallways of our high school because we were all very close to one another and we excelled academically and athletically. I came from a high school with an excellent English department, but a crumbling Math and Science department. I am so thankful that all the English teachers in my high school realized how important it was to prepare their students for the college world, and they did. I was shocked my freshman year when I took a college writing class when half of the class did not know how to do basic functions when writing a research paper. Unfortunately, our high school's math and science departments were not up to par. Because of this, I have a basic understanding of science principals and math was never my best subject. Because both of these departments were not the best, all the students that were required to take chemistry and algebra, were taught at a minimal level that the teachers would hopefully help them survive their oncoming college years.
All in all, I think it is important for teachers of every level to take a step back and learn from their students and mold their classes to mold their students into prepared and academically sophisticated college students so that they will be prepared for the many roads ahead of them.
I like this article because I have actually carried on many conversations with other students about the different ways professors teach. As a young child it is important to be involved one-on-one with their learning skills and to also keep this going as their education progresses. I think many professors think that because we are in college we do not need that attention while we are learning in their classes. I have had professors who taught my class of over 100 students who still remember my name but I have also had classes with 10 people and the professor never really learned my name. It is important for students to have the one-on-one basis with professors because we then feel as though they really do care that we are learning and succeeding in our higher education. If teachers don't act as though they care about their students in middle school or elementary school I think it would be very hard to get those same students to go to college.
This is a good article! I liked what the writer had to say about the need for the teachers to get to know the students on a personal level to have the ability to adjust the teaching style to best effect change in each individual child. Even in college I have found that I learn more and receive higher grades in the classes where the teacher connected with the students. The teachers who respect their students, get to know them will have much better results in the classroom. In order to better education in America we have to work on strengthening the teacher student relationship.
I think this is a good article, and I think that it can relate to behavior modification. If you learn more about what helps the students learn the information the teacher will get a lot better results in the class. Once the teacher understands what is working and what's not working, they can use that in their classroom. I think that if a teacher has a better and personal (knowing the students names) connection where they will communicate with the students and showing the respect to the students. The students will learn and the teacher will get respect and better results in their classroom.
I think it is great that a part of the media that can have a great influence has made this issue that has been going around for many years noticed. When I was in high school, and still today thought that there were too many improvements to be made. My class only consisted of 99 students. However, my graguating class was only 89 students. I know that isn't a large number, but I came from a small school where everyone knows everyone. If there was any chance that multiple teachers could intervene to prevent this from happeneing, this was it!!! Yet, it still didn't happen. That also doesn't include the students that left our class to go to a intermediate school. I don't know if it is just the town I came from, but I was always extremely dissappointed in the education system.
The first thing that needs to be done, is create a better environment for the students. When I associate the smallest things with school such as the smell of books, I get agitated because that is how much I hated school. Anything that reminds me of it, makes me feel like I am there. I am sure that I am not the only one that feels this way.
Teachers need to catch up with society instead of being frozen in time. There is more to learning than just sitting in a classroom, listening to a lecture and taking notes. Students aren't learning anything from this. (Dr. M is the only teacher I have had so far that actually understands this).
As far as behavior modification goes... where do you start? I saw high school as aversive, we need to change that. AS we talked about in section 2.1, there are four reasons we change behavior. First I would like to discuss is " the behaviors emitted bother others". For example, students don't like boring lectures, and teachers don't like students falling asleep.
Second, "Behaviors lead to trouble" teachers should limit the chance of students cheating and make the material more understandable to prevent them from cheating. Teachers need to ask themselves, "why do my students cheat" I think it is because they are obviously not learning the information in class, and something needs to be changed, and it is no fun. Create games that are productive instead of doing a regular test that everyone else does.
The article was right about getting to know your students. If the students are comfortable with the teacher they are going to be more likely to come to them for help. It is also hard to teach a class one particular way and expect every student to learn YOUR way. everyone is different, the teacher should take into consideration what the students want. If you make them feel like they are a part of the class rather than just sitting in, they will be more likely to participate.
I could probably go on forever, but the most important hing is to reinforce your students. Make your classroom a fun, desirable place to be, instead of a place that every student is trying to avoid.
I think that this article proposes a great idea and that individual learning is very important to a child's development. Many schools (elementary, middle, high, college, universities) focus on the same method of education, they don't take the time to get to know many of the students individual needs before implying a specific teaching style. However, I think that along with learning individual needs for students, the way teaching is taught needs to be changed/challenged. If teachers are learning to teach their students a specific way throughout college, that's generally the way they are going to teach. It is also likely the the way you are taught, is the way you're going to teach. So I think that college/universities should change the way that they imply teaching strategies to future teachers so that the future teacher can imply those techniques to their prospective students.
Behavior modification fits in with this article in several ways. The way that sticks out the most to me is target behavior. The target behavior would be changing the ways that teachers teach their students, and making the teaching be on a more personal level as opposed to a general format for every student. Also, I believe that the use of positive reinforcers could greatly help students and teachers achieve a better learning environment. I think this because if the student is being positively reinforced, the student is more likely to engage in the behavior that they were engaging in when they got reinforced. This leads to another point, I think that positive punishment should be taken out of the schooling system, or any type of punishment at that. Because if you punish a student, they're just going to remember what they are not allowed to do as opposed to what they ought to be doing.
This article really does have some valid points. Kids don't want to go to school because school isn't fun. No teenager wants to sit there and listen to a lecture and read because at that age no one is really mature enough to learn that way. I think the best way to get kids to learn more is to focus less on extrinsic learning and focus more on intrinsic learning. I believe if teachers would to let the students focus on the topics they believe are interesting than the learning process will be that much easier for them. An example of intrinsic learning could be a teacher assigning a project to students about WWII, but it's up to the students to decide what they will do the project on and how they will do it. So one student could write a paper, another might do a power point, etc. It's all about learning about things that interest us and when we do that other learning will occur beyond this. I know that extrinsic learning has to occur but I believe if we give just a basic outline of the extrinsic things we want children to learn and then let the kids focus on the things out of the extrinsic learning they like then learning will be easier because they are taking the material learning more about it than they normally would.
I really found this article interesting and I believe that behavior modifications can be applied to the article through reinforcment. For example, regarding this class I enjoy being reinforced for attending class by getting two points every time I show up. If I didn't receive points for attending class, I can say that I wouldn't attend class as frequently as I have. I also feel that teachers have relied too much on teaching directly from power point slides, which is boring. Also many teachers post lecture power point slides online which reinforces students to not attend class. Studies have shown that students who attend class regularly preform better in the class than students who don't regularly attend. Since many students have differnt learning techniques, teachers should try to incorporate a variety of different teaching methods to meet the needs of their students. There are several ways to decrease the student drop out rate, but providing reinforcement for students who attend class and incorportating different teaching techniques to keep class interesting are a few areas to start with.
I think a really good way to help students and keep them engaged in learning is for them to have passion for what they are teaching. If they know and understand it, they should be able to translate and teach the children effectively. A good way to keep kids engaged and included in the experience is to constantly ask them questions, keep them involved, and get to know them as an individual. Make them feel safe so that if they do have troubles, they are not afraid to come to you. I'm not saying this would fix the issue but I know it could help it a lot.