Discuss a question, confusion, or something you wonder about after reading the chapter (when commenting, look for these questions and answer them)
After reading module 9, I have a question about the praise-and-ignore strategy. From reading about this, I gathered that ignoring an inappropriate behavior and praising a good one, teaches discipline. I completely disagree with this. A student could be doing inappropriate behaviors and disrupting the class and the teacher ignoring them? I do not think this technique is effective or maybe I am not understanding it correctly?
A behaviorism learning theorist believes that everything can be learned through paired associations. CAN everything be learned in this way? Why or why not?
From the examples given in the module 9, it seems that many things can be learned through paired associations. I believe this concept to be true because associating things together helps facilitate learning. I learn quite well when I have pictures or sounds to go with textbook readings. However, after thinking about this concept, it is not true for everything. Many things a child learns in school have no paired associations. When a child is learning to read and write words, there are many that have no "pictures" or "sounds" to associate them with. Another example would be when a child is learning to ride their bike. They can see a picture or see someone else doing it, but it does not help with their learning process. They must practice on their own to be able to master it. In all, many things throughout a child's life can be learned through paired associations. These associations help facilitate learning and understanding concepts. On the other hand, not everything can be associated with something and much practice must be done to be able to effectively learn the concept.
From what I understood about the praise-and-ignore strategy, was that a teacher should ignore behaviors that students exhibit when they want unneeded attention. Like speaking out of turn or clowning around in class. If no one pays attention, they will stop. If however, the behavior is something that is harmful or dangerous or really distracting, this method wouldn't work. Minor disruptions and somewhat bad behaviors are what this method is truly meant for. So I guess it depends what the inappropriate behavior is for this method to actually be effective.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Rebecca above. There is a certain point where the teacher should know that ignoring is just not working with this specific child, but in the beginning of their inappropriate behavior, ignoring tends to work well in stopping the child from speaking out of turn or being inappropriate. I also disagree with praising a good student to a certain point. Some students take advantage of being praised by their teacher and acts in a way that might bring other students down. I feel like there is a happy medium that can be acted upon as teacher that disciplines the misbehaving students and compliments the achieving students somewhere.
ReplyDeleteYou clearly have a strong opinion about why praise and ignore isn't effective, but could you explain more about WHY you don't think that it worse? Remember that there is no ONE right way of teaching or classroom management, but just different theories with strengths and weaknesses. A behaviorist would say this is effective for students who crave attention (from praise OR punishment). In this case, the behavior would decrease MORE if they are not punished each time. They would increase in the behaviors that are praised to get the attention they crave. Does that make sense? For those students, punishments ('Stop that, Stewart!' or putting the student out in the hall) are rewards because they enjoy attention and increase their behavior which gets them attention.
ReplyDeleteRemember that you can pair more than pictures or sounds in increasing/decreasing a behavior. Those are the most common examples, but you can PAIR almost anything if it works. You use a lot of your opinions here and don't connect to the theory of behaviorism. For behaviorists, learning IS pairing associations. They're the same thing. It's increasing a desired behavior. Try to describe your thoughts but connect it to behaviorism in some way, especially general phrases like 'help their learning process'.
Some kinds of pairing are more natural than others. A child who falls down on their bike when they don't pay attention to balance will LIKELY improve in balance over time....