I found it somewhat gratifying when I read in Chapter 3 of Building Classroom Discipline that behavior modification based on Skinner’s ideas on operant conditioning have been criticized by many authorities. When I was an undergrad in the late 70s, Skinner was the be-all and end-all of educational psychology, but I was never quite able to buy into behavior modification. My biggest problem with it was the fact that I would have to "pay" students to do what they were supposed to do. In doing this I would remove whatever intrinsic motivation students would naturally have and make the reward the focus. During my years of teaching I have felt justified in my beliefs when students come into the fifth grade expecting to be rewarded for everything they do. Many times when I incorporate a game into a lesson, students will ask, "What do we get if we win?" The first several times I heard that I was shocked! Wasn’t winning enough? Weren’t they glad they got to learn while playing instead of doing some boring drill? Then I realized that students’ expectations of rewards came from the constant rewarding they receive both at home and at school. I felt justified in my belief that behavior modification can be harmful, especially if overused.

I have also had a problem with behavior contracts. It seemed unfair to me to reward one child for what all the other children do all the time. I had an experience a few years ago that reinforced this concept in my mind. I had a student who just plain wouldn’t do his homework no matter what I tried. I decided to make a contract with him. To begin with, he was to get a small reward each time he came to school with all his homework done. Later, when his performance improved, the rewards would come intermittently until eventually I could phase them out altogether. After about 2 days of this contract, one of my other students wanted to know why Chris was getting rewards for doing homework when the students who do their homework all the time got nothing. He felt it was wrong, and I had to agree with him. So I extended the rewards to include everyone in the class. They all loved it. Chris’ homework performance did improve, but eventually he started to backslide into his old habits. I don’t believe his behavior was permanently changed by this contract.

This is not to say that I don’t believe in rewarding good behavior. I simply prefer to use praise and privileges as rewards over tangible things. Whenever my class is doing what they are supposed to be doing, I put a fistful of marbles in a jar. When they get 50 marbles they can vote on something special they would like to do. Some things they have decided on include watching a video, bringing pillows and blankets to school to lie on while they are reading, or having and extra recess. The students seem to enjoy getting to do something special because they were good.

I have also been known to make "deals" with certain students. Just this week I made a deal with one of my students who never turns in homework. He can barely read on a first grade level and had completely given up trying to do anything in class. I told him I would only help him if first he tried. The deal was that if he brought in his homework the next day I would give him a free pass on some other homework assignment, but if he didn’t bring in the assignment he would have to stay in for recess the rest of the week. From his enthusiastic reaction I thought for sure that he would bring in that assignment, but the next day all he had was a note from his mother saying that it was "lost". It was understood that he would have to stay in to do the assignment, but when he turned the work in I had him read to me from a simple picture book. He struggled with that book and couldn’t finish it in the 15 minutes we had. The next day I had him read the same book and then let him choose another to read to me. By the end of the week he was so excited about reading that he told me he was practicing at home and he was disappointed that the week was over. Our current deal is that he may choose to stay in during recess and read with me only if he turns in his homework. He was very excited about the idea. I feel these kind of deals are effective because the individual student is motivated to do what he should while getting the help he needs, and the other students in the class don’t need to know anything about it.

References:

Charles, C. M., Building Classroom Discipline, New York: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1999.

Personal experiences in 1979, 1995, and 2001

Choosing a fear to write about wasn’t difficult for me. I have been terrified of spiders for as long as I can remember. The difficult part has been figuring out how I acquired that fear.

As I said, I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t afraid of spiders. As I was growing up, the family joke was that if anyone hears a blood curdling scream coming from anywhere in the house, it was just me finding a spider. I didn’t realize I was such a source of amusement until one time, when I was a teenager, I encountered a spider in my room. As usual, I broke out in a sweat, my heart raced, my head throbbed, and I screamed bloody murder. From the other room I could hear my mother’s voice calmly saying, " I bet it’s a spider." Then she shouted to me, "Am I right?" She and my brother both laughed when I screamed, "Yes," and only then did they come to get the spider for me.

It was after that incident that I asked my mother why she thought I was so afraid of spiders. She said that when I was very little I saw a spider on a screen. I thought it was a fly and tapped the screen to make it fly away. Instead of flying away, the spider crawled across my hand, startling me terribly. My mom said I was always afraid of spiders after that.

I think it is the element of surprise whenever I see a spider that reinforces this fear. Almost every time I encounter a spider, it takes me by surprise. For example, one morning when I was about 4, I woke up to find a spider on my pillow. I’ve never forgotten the terror I felt when I saw it. My big fear when I see a spider is that it will drop down on me or crawl on my body as my mother said the one on the screen did.

I believe that my fear is a case of Classical Conditioning. The spider was the neutral stimulus. The unconditioned stimulus is the element of surprise. Surprise would be a very effective stimulus for me in the fact that I am unusually easy to startle. In high school my friends used to get a kick out of poking me in the side to see how high I would jump. To this day I still jump when someone unexpectedly walks into the room and says something to me. My unconditioned response to surprise is usually so drastic as to startle the person who startled me. Occasionally my physical responses are so strong as to actually be painful. By pairing spiders with the element of surprise, the spiders became the conditioned stimulus that resulted in my conditioned response (panic).

References:

Charles, C. M. Building Classroom Discipline. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999.

Websites

Personal Experiences, particularly in 1961 and 1973.

Discussion with my mother, 1973.

One of the most difficult things that today’s teachers have to do is manage classroom behavior in order to maintain an environment that is conducive to learning. Years ago classroom discipline wasn’t so much of an issue because behavior and self-control were taught effectively at home. With today’s split families, blended families, and two working parent families, many students don’t receive as much guidance in their behavior as they should. This is why teachers have to devise management plans.

C. M. Charles stated that the Canters’ Assertive Discipline is the most widely used discipline model in the country, and yet this model has received much criticism from researchers, most notably Render, Padilla, and Krank, as being too controlling and ineffective. I have used this model for years and have found neither of these criticisms to be true.

• High expectations for student learning and behavior
• Establishing and teaching clear classroom rules and procedures
• Specifying consequences and their relation to behavior
• Enforcing rules promptly, consistently, and equitably
• Reinforcing appropriate behavior
• Sharing the responsibility of classroom management with the students

All of these effective practices comprise the entire focus of the Assertive Discipline model. These are the exact things that teachers using Assertive Discipline do.

The ineffective practices that Cotton lists include:

• Vague or unenforceable rules
• Teachers ignoring misconduct
• Ambiguous or inconsistent teacher responses to misbehavior
• Excessive punishment

These are the very practices that the Assertive Discipline model helps teachers to avoid. If teachers using the AD model are still having problems with discipline because of the above ineffective practices, it is because they are not incorporating the model correctly. Those teachers would have difficulty no matter what discipline model they used. Based on these two lists of discipline practices, I don’t see how AD can be considered any more or less effective than any other discipline model that follows these practices.

I believe that the criticism of AD being too harsh and controlling comes from the "increasingly serious sanctions" that teachers who employ this model use as consequences for misbehavior. Teachers who use AD create a hierarchy of consequences that are applied to each subsequent offense. The purpose is to teach students that as misbehaviors increase so do the consequences. In theory, this method could be considered too harsh or controlling if the consequences listed were excessive or out of line according to the severity of the offense. In practice, though, I don’t believe this to be true. I have seen a great many AD management plans among my colleagues and the consequence hierarchy almost always consists of an increasing number of lost minutes on the playground, communication with parents, and communication with the principal. None of these consequences can be considered harsh. They all fall under the effective practice of consequences in relation to behavior.

Neither can the above consequences be considered controlling because the students have a choice in the matter. The relationship between rules and consequences is specified well in advance of any misbehavior. The students are taught to understand that if they choose to break the rules they are also choosing to accept the consequences. Students have complete control over their fate in the matter because they have control of their actions.

In summary, I don’t believe the Canter model to be ineffective, too harsh, or too controlling. I believe that criticisms to that effect are based on ineffective incorporation of program practices or misuse of the program and not on the program itself.

References:

Canter, Lee and Marlene Canter. Succeeding With Difficult Students, Santa Monica, CA: Lee Canter and Associates, 1993.

Charles, C. M., Building Classroom Discipline, New York: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1999.

My classmates have already said so much in defense of Assertive Discipline with which I agree. As Dianne Fulton said, our school district, Springfield 186 has promoted AD for years. Each teacher is required to file a classroom management plan each year, and most of the plans I have seen in our district follow Canter's model. In my own experience, I have not only used the AD model in my classroom I have also taken Lee Canter's course Succeeding With Difficult Students. I have found this to be a very clear-cut way to teach students to behave in an acceptable manner.

Evertson continued by listing several reviewers who "raise doubts about effectiveness." As Jennifer Haberkorn said, have any of these critics been in a classroom lately? Teaching while maintaining discipline is a very difficult job. Teachers have all kinds of obstacles to overcome from teaching to a wide variety of ability levels to trying to teach children who come to school ill-clothed, ill-fed, suffering from lack of sleep and lack of parental guidance. As Dr. Thomas Allen says, "The need to deal constantly with noisy, disorderly, and discourteous behavior...and the occasionally serious confrontation with defiant behavior...wears teachers down. It is to deal with these routine distractions and to reduce the likelihood for confrontations that systematic classroom control models have been developed." If a teacher is using a discipline method that is ineffective, that teacher will change to another method as a sheer matter of survival. A program that is not effective will not last long in the classroom. Todd Mickley pointed out that continual improvements have been made in response to criticisms made early on in the program. The length of time that AD has been around and the fact that it is so widely used should testify to the effectiveness of the program.

I think that the biggest reason that Prof. Evertson failed to include AD in her book is her own personal bias. She said that she doesn't "like to recommend to teachers techniques that put the burden of compliance on students without asking the question, "What is the value and quality to what I am asking them to comply with?'" In my opinion the purpose of a textbook is to give information, not make recommendations. The Professor should have included the AD model in her book along with the information that she feels are the problems with the program. By omitting the program altogether, she does a disservice to her readers. People can't make informed decisions without having all the information. I agree wholeheartedly with Rebecca Trieger when she said, "The best argument for including a discussion of Assertive Discipline is that, according to Charles (1995), the Canters program 'is the most widely used of all discipline systems.' As such, its omission from Evertson's text is problematic. A discussion of the program's techniques, popularity, efficacy, endorsement and criticism should be included." By presenting all the well-known discipline models, Evertson would have allowed her readers the opportunity to choose or combine programs as they see fit. By omitting such a widely used system, she deprives her readers of that opportunity.

References:

Canter, Lee and Marlene Canter. Succeeding With Difficult Students, Santa Monica, CA: Lee Canter and Associates, 1993.

Charles, C. M., Building Classroom Discipline, New York: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1999.

I agree with classmate, Becky Trieger, that the difference between punishment and consequences is a matter of semantics. According to the Thorndike-Barnhart Dictionary, a consequence is "the relation of a result or effect to its cause" whereas punishment is "pain, suffering, or loss for a fault or offense." Using these definitions, I much prefer to think of my management plan as one that is based on consequences of a student’s actions rather than punishment for the actions. Like most teachers in my district, I use a classroom management system based on the Canters’ Assertive Discipline model. As a part of this system, I have a list of "consequences" that are given as the result of breaking one of the classroom rules. These consequences are meant to reinforce the cause and effect relationship between breaking a rule and accepting the result of that action.

Like Kathy Leggett, I also provide time for my students to finish their homework, but this time is a direct consequence of my homework policy. My students are told on the first day of school that I expect all assignments to be turned in on time. If they don’t have their assignments done, they must stay in for recess and at lunch time until the assignments are completed. In order to enforce this rule, I have my students turn in their assignments first thing in the morning. While students are working on Racine sentences, I quickly alphabetize the papers and mark down whose papers are missing. Within the first few minutes of the day my students know if they owe me assignments. They also know that they will lose recess time until those assignments are turned in. This consequence works well to motivate 5^th graders to do their homework. Usually by the end of September I only have a handful of students that regularly don’t do their work. These are the students who need a lot of individual help anyway so their lost recess time gives me the opportunity to give them the one-on-one help they need.

Gretchen Halasi-Kun noted that "punishment works with kids who are not chronic behavior problems." I feel this is true because children who have been taught to respect the rules naturally want to avoid breaking those rules. They respond to punishment because the punishment reminds them that they did something wrong. This makes them feel bad which is something they want to avoid. The students who habitually misbehave don’t respond to punishment because they already feel bad about themselves and/or their lives. To them the punishment means nothing because it changes nothing.

Sources:

Thorndike-Barnhart Dictionary, 1991.

Websites:

I had never thought of myself as similar to an orchestra conductor, but I must say that the analogy appeals to me. Each day I stand or sit on a tall stool in front of my "orchestra" in order to be able to see and make eye contact with each musician. I wait until I have the attention of everyone, and when we are all ready we begin playing the "lesson symphony." During practice if someone plays a sour note, I must go back and correct that person to make sure he/she gets it right the next time. I have to be constantly alert in order to make sure that everyone is playing on the same page and that no disruptions interrupt the musicians while they are playing. At times during the piece individuals or groups of instruments will need to play very different parts. It is my responsibility to make sure that each part goes smoothly and that the entire orchestra comes back together at the appropriate time. When we finish playing each movement of the symphony, I have to make sure that we transition to the next movement smoothly.

Unfortunately, there are certain parts of this metaphor that just don’t hold up. If my class were an orchestra then each person would be there for the love of music. They would take my direction because they are eager to improve. They would know how important it is that everyone in the group work together and work hard to achieve that unity. They would always come to practice with their instruments and music and be ready to start playing as soon as I give them their cue. In reality, my students don’t come to school for the love of learning. They are there because they have to be, and they don’t want to do any more than they absolutely have to. They frequently come to school without their supplies or their assignments and they daydream or play with things in their desks in order to avoid getting down to work.

I think that being a teacher is a lot like being a parent to a large family that lives in a small house. In addition to having to keep track of where everyone is and what they are doing, you also have to schedule simple things like whose turn it is to use the bathroom. You have to keep track of all the important family papers. You must make sure that everyone gets along, even though no one has any personal space to retreat to. The entire family lives with non-stop togetherness all day. You have to nurture each child and make him feel special, but you can’t have favorites. Everyone has to be treated fairly, which to them means being treated the same, even though you know they have different needs that have to be treated differently. At the same time that you are watching over the family, you have to be and do everything for each individual while trying to teach them how to do for themselves independently. Bottom line is that you are overworked, under-appreciated, and yet completely indispensable, but you do it all for the love of your family and your concern for their future.

References:

Charles, C. M. Building Classroom Discipline. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999.

Personal experiences as a teacher and mother of 4 boys, 1982-present.

Websites:

According to Bruning et al, an information bottleneck occurs in both sensory and short-term memory. This means that "only a small amount of information can be processed at one time." In order to work around these bottlenecks, we need to narrow our focus at any given time. We do this by focusing on what we deem to be the most important information and remove or ignore the rest. If we try to focus on too much information at one time, we become overloaded and unable to process any of the information at all.

One bottleneck that I can think of is when we are doing research for a report. We have a topic in mind, but we know that we cannot possibly cover every facet of that topic in depth. So we limit our focus to a few subtopics that we deem to be most important for our purposes. At that point we begin looking through a wide variety of materials on our topic, but there is no need for us to read these materials completely. Through the use of indexes, chapter headings, etc. in the research materials we are able to focus on only the parts we need for our report. Then we can scan through those parts looking for the pertinent information that we seek. If we weren’t able to limit our focus in this way, report writing would quickly become an overwhelming and impossible task.

A bottleneck that I have frequently found to be difficult to get around is trying to grade papers while my class is in the room. I find that even when the whole class is working quietly at their seats, the task of monitoring my students takes all my available attention. I simply cannot know where everyone is, what they are doing, who is off task, and who needs help while trying to read papers, determine the accuracy of each part of the papers, and assign grades to the papers at the same time. I find that even when no one in the class has any immediate need for me, I still cannot focus on anything but monitoring them.

Another instance of a bottleneck that I run into all the time is the vast amount of things I have to do and remember each day. With 4 children, a full time job, and several volunteer activities, I frequently find my schedule to be overwhelming. In order to make it through my memory bottleneck, I find myself frequently making "to do" lists. Once that is done I can focus my energies on whatever it is that I need to do right away because I know I can look at the list later to recall the rest.

References:

Bruning, Roger H., Gregory J. Schraw, and Royce R. Ronning. Cognitive Psychology and Instruction. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999.

Personal Experiences

When I was younger, I used to pride myself on my excellent memory. But as I get older it seems that more and more things compete for my attention, and my memory doesn’t seem to be as good as it once was. According to Rita MacDonald, "A primary cause of "forgetting" is that the material was never really learned in the first place. To be able to recall something you must first have paid attention to it, made it meaningful in some way, and stored it in your memory in a retrievable way." Apparently my memory is not so good any more because I’m not paying the kind of attention to things that I used to.

An example of this lack of attention would be this typical evening at my house. I am cooking dinner with the television on, while rehashing my day in my mind. My youngest son asks me to help him with his homework. While we are working on his assignment another son asks me for advice on something, and my oldest son tells me he’s going to a friend’s house as he breezes out the door. Later, when my oldest son returns, I ask him where he has been, and he gets irritated with me for never listening to him. He swears he told me, but I have absolutely no memory of it. Apparently I haven’t actually forgotten what he said because I never paid attention to it, made it meaningful, or stored it in my memory in the first place. I’m not guilty of forgetfulness as much as I am suffering from short-term memory overload. So many things were going on at once that I couldn’t possibly process them all. As a result, some things were lost before I could actually register them in my memory.

In order for me to correct my "forgetfulness" I need to reduce the number of things I’m paying attention to at one time. If I put dinner on hold for a few minutes, turn off the television, and help my 2 sons one at a time, I would have enough attention left to notice my oldest one going out the door and hear what he was saying. I would be able to process his words to mean that I know where he is and store it in my memory for later recall. If I can perfect this process, I might not feel so "old" and forgetful all the time!

References:

Bruning, Roger H., Gregory J. Schraw, and Royce R. Ronning. Cognitive Psychology and Instruction. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999.

Personal Experiences

Website:

I believe the theory that procedural knowledge often starts our as declarative knowledge to be quite accurate. I am comfortable with this theory mostly because of the use of the word "often." Like in English grammar, every rule has an exception, but that does not mean that the rule in general is not useful. If you think long and hard enough, it is quite possible to think of examples of procedural knowledge that seem unconnected to any declarative knowledge. But if you take those examples and break them down into component parts, you will find that quite often that procedure begins with some sort of declarative knowledge.

Whether or not the learner remembers the declarative knowledge after the procedural knowledge becomes automated makes no difference. The connection between the two types of knowledge is undeniable. An example of this connection can be found in the unconscious acts of driving your car home. This task becomes so automated that we frequently forget parts of this trip because our minds are elsewhere. Prior to automation we had to learn which streets to take, which way to turn, and where to stop. Before learning those things we had to be exposed to them in the form of declarative knowledge. The act of driving itself can be broken down into declarative parts. Things like adjusting the mirrors or watching the traffic may be automatic now, but at one time someone had to tell us to do these things.

In my fifth grade class I teach my students research skills. Researching a topic and creating some sort of product using the information is very definitely procedural knowledge, but the information used is all declarative. My students must learn how to take notes, how to organize the information, how to cite their sources, and how to create the final product. Each of these procedures has to be broken down into steps that I teach to my students. Each of these steps is an example of declarative knowledge. If my students have trouble understanding the verbal explanations I give, I also give plenty of visual examples. These images are also declarative knowledge. (Tom Anderson) Once students have learned what the steps are, they can synthesize these steps into the procedural knowledge necessary to perform the tasks. As Rebecca Trieger states, "even though it is impossible to articulate the actual mechanical process necessary for procedural learning, the prior declarative knowledge consciously or unconsciously learned is necessary for a particular skill to be mastered." One does not need to be able to state the declarative knowledge once that knowledge has been synthesized into procedural knowledge.

I am convinced that most, if not all, procedural knowledge can be broken down into declarative parts. It doesn’t matter if the person performing the procedure can verbalize the parts at that particular time or not. A baby can’t verbalize how to crawl simply because he can’t verbalize anything yet. But there will be a time in the future when that baby can verbalize the act of crawling. On the opposite side of the coin, a gymnast my not be able to verbalize how to do a back flip because the procedure is so automatic that she no longer thinks about it. But there was a time when that gymnast’s coach had to tell her how to do it. That is declarative knowledge.

References:

Bruning, Roger H., Gregory J. Schraw, and Royce R. Ronning. Cognitive Psychology and Instruction. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999.

Personal Experiences, 1995 - present.

Websites:

***********************.

Canter, Lee and Marlene Canter. Succeeding With Difficult Students, Santa Monica, CA: Lee Canter and Associates, 1993.

Charles, C. M., Building Classroom Discipline, New York: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1999.

Bruning, Roger H., Gregory J. Schraw, and Royce R. Ronning. Cognitive Psychology and Instruction. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999.

Thorndike-Barnhart Dictionary, 1991.

Personal observations:

Personal experiences with behavior contracts in 1979, 1995, and 2001

Personal experiences with spiders, particularly in 1961 and 1973.

Discussion with my mother, 1973.

Personal experiences as a teacher and mother of 4 boys, 1982-present.

Personal experiences with bottlenecks in short term memory

Personal experiences in teaching research skills, 1995 - present.