Meeting a Behaviorist Teaching Coach

I wanted to use my post for this week to share a story from my trip over the break. I visited my boyfriend in Flagstaff, Arizona over fall break, and while I was there we ran into a family that is close to his family. The dad, Fernando, mentioned that he was a educational psychologist, and I jumped at the opportunity to hear what he had to say. He specializes in Behaviorism and goes into schools to help teachers. I sat beside him when we all went to dinner, and he explained specific situations that teachers frequently address incorrectly. He also sort of quizzed me as we were talking and it made me very nervous!

The first example he gave me was when you have a class of 22 students and, at the beginning of the year, you assign work to them to do quietly and on their own. Let's say 19 of the 22 immediately begin to quietly work on the assignment. He asked me, "Of those 22 students, which students do 99% of teachers address first?". I answered that usually the three not working would be asked to stay on task and begin their assignment. He agreed that most teachers would do the same, and those same teachers find that by a month into school those three off-task have turned into 6, by October those 6 to 10, by the end of November those 10 to 16, and by winter break the whole class could potentially be out of hand and difficult to keep on task. He said that the correct way to handle the initial 3 students would be to tell the on-task students how well they are doing and ignore the students who are misbehaving. Overtime, the students who are opting not to begin working will want to prompted by the teacher and they will realize that in order for that to happen, they have to begin their work quietly like their peers.

The other advice he gave me, also addressed students who are off-task or difficult to motivate to complete work. Let's say that whatever lesson being done had a craft that would follow. Rather than telling the students who are off-task that they will not get to participate in an activity, simply show them that they will be missing out if they fail to work on the assignment on hand. For example, plan the lesson so directly following the individual assignment students due the craft, so they would have to turn in the first assignment to get the directions for the craft. This method motivates students to stay on task because if they begin off-task then they eventually transition to being on task as they watch their classmates start the more desirable activity and want to progress to participating in it as well.

I got his card so I can talk with him more, but I am back to being on the fence about which theory I will write on. He had several valid points and his one-on-one explanation made Behaviorism more enticing.