My Final Blog!!

Dec 6^th, 2010

At the beginning of the semester, the idea of having a blog to do seemed like a huge, ominous project. I’m actually sad that it’s over though. It was a nice place to teach, learn, question, and understand the material we’ve been discussing in class. I learned a lot more than I would have, had I just been studying normally like any other class. This way, the topics are engrained into my memory, so it’s going to be very difficult to forget them. Even if I don’t do amazingly on this, it helped me retain knowledge that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise.

Today in class we were asked three questions:

1.       What is your most significant take-away learning from our class?

I hope to retain most everything that I learned, because I think I’ll use most of it. A few things that stuck in my brain were; Erik Ericksen, Operant Conditioning, and SQ4R! Erik Eriksen for no reason other than I thought it was interesting that you can split people’s lives up like that. Operant Conditioning will be extremely helpful in dealing with misbehaving children, and SQ4R will help me remember and retain what I’ve read; it will be immensely helpful for the next three and a half years.

2.       Has your thinking changed in any way? Why?

My attitudes about elementary children have changed a little bit. This doesn’t mean that I’m going to suddenly switch into elementary education, but if I have to start out there and work my way up, it won’t be the end of the world. I think this is because we’ve studied younger kids, and they don’t seem that bad.

3.       What about implications for your planned professional practice?

Well, I’ve touched on this a few times; I think that I will use a good majority of the things I’ve learned this semester. The class itself has shown me what kind of teacher I want to be and how I can plan to handle a rowdy classroom.

Well, I’ve had fun writing this! I think I have learned so much and I’m actually really sad that it’s over. I plan to continue to learn about education and children and I’ll see you all in a few years when I’m teaching! Adios!

Motivation

Dec 1^st, 2010

I have done really well in my Educational Psychology class so far, yet I have only done okay in my English class. Why is this? It’s not that I’m any better at either subject, because English is my major. Shouldn’t I be doing better in English? 

We were learning about motivation in class today. There are three orientations to motivation:

Helpless- The person feels like they can’t do it, so they don’t even try; it kills motivation.

Performance- We’re motivated because of the outcome; focused on what’s to come. However, when we don’t get what we want, we feel vulnerable

Mastery- We’re not motivated for the image of success; for the material outcome. We’re doing it for ourselves because we want to accomplish things.

I’ve had personal experience with all of these. In high school, I was not very good at math. In fact, I took Math 30 Pure three times! (I passed the first time but I wanted a better grade; I failed the second two times.) I felt like there was no point in even trying, because I was going to fail anyways. I rarely, if ever, studied for or did homework for Math. This is a prime example of the helpless orientation to motivation. 

In the English class I’m taking currently, I find it very difficult to motivate myself to do the homework. I do it, and I do it well, for the sole reason of the outcome; I want to do well in the class. If the homework I’ve been assigned wasn’t worth anything, I wouldn’t do it. I think that many of the assignments we’ve had are not beneficial to me at all; I am learning things I learned five years ago. I have about a B+ in that class right now. If the instructor gave more thrilling assignments, I might be motivated to do them, and I’d do better. This demonstrates a performance orientation to motivation.

In the Educational Psychology class I’m writing this blog for, I find it surprisingly easy to motivate myself. I feel like I will actually use most everything I’m learning in this class, so I study to learn, not because I want to do well. (Since I have an A in this class I think it’s working.)That’s not to say that I don’t want to do well; that’s always at the back of my mind, but that’s not the sole reason I study. I feel good about this; I feel like I’m doing this for me, not for my instructor. This illustrates the mastery orientation to motivation.

This motivation topic we’ve been studying really helped me to see why I’m doing so much better in Educational Psychology than in English; I like the class and the material we’re studying.

Hopefully, I can use this when I'm teaching. I will try to teach the students to learn for themselves, that knowledge is good! However, I may have to fall back on a performance orientation if my students are not motivated to do it for themselves.

Digital Nation and Multi-tasking

Nov 22^nd 2010

As I write this, I have facebook open, I’m listening to music, I’m texting on my phone, and I’m reading my notes. Obviously, these four things cannot be done simultaneously, but I’m doing them in conjunction with one another. I’ll write a few sentences, and then reply to a text on my phone. I’ll write a few more sentences, and then change the song that’s playing. After that maybe I’ll check facebook then I’ll get an idea from my notes. I know from personal experience and from a video we watched in class that multitasking is not an efficient way to go about things; it actually makes the tasks take longer. This is because it takes extra time to switch back and forth between tasks rather than just doing them in succession with one another. People, especially students, believe that they are great multitaskers, when in fact they are not doing nearly as well as they could because they’re so distracted with technology. In the video Digital Nation, an MIT professor gave a test that was very straightforward; all of the students should have gotten 100%. The average score was 75%. According to this professor, multitaskers are distractible, have a poor memory, and it may be creating people who are less intelligent. For myself, I knew that I wasn’t the greatest multitasker, even now as I write this, I’m having trouble ignoring everything that’s happening around me. I want to text, I want to look at facebook, and I don’t like the song that’s playing! It’s very difficult to just focus on one thing at a time because as a society we’re used to being bombarded with information all at once. In my English class during the past few days, we’ve been discussing the effect of technology on society and how it shortens our attention spans and makes us want to do multiple things at once! According to Neil Postman, the average television news story is only forty-five seconds long. How can these newscasters present us with information that is apparently life-changing and world shattering in only forty-five seconds? If this story is so important, why don’t they devote more time to it? The answer is because people would get bored; they can only put up with only one thing going on for so long, they want a change.

The video we watched in Educational Psychology also discussed how some schools are integrating technology into their everyday learning. They argue that students “need to be fluent in technology”. I agree with this to an extent. It is important for children to understand how to work a computer, because the future of the world revolves around computers.  However, I do not think that they need to be using computers for every little menial task just because the computers are available. When I become a teacher, I expect technology will become even more prevalent than it is now, and I will most likely have to use a lot of technology in my classroom. I’m not completely opposed to it, because let’s face it, I love my iPod, my laptop and my cell phone; however,  I hope that it’s not going to be the most important strategy for teaching.

SQ4R!

November 18^th, 2010

 Our instructor taught us a quick studying/ reading strategy called SQ4R. What does SQ4R stand for you might ask? (Yes, it is an acronym)

Survey-This means look through the chapter you’re reading; look at the table of contents, headings, diagrams, definitions, and the summary.

Question-The next task is to formulate questions for yourself, although one would probably have questions just from reading headings and such.

Read-Simply, read the chapter.

Recite-Say it out loud, it helps you find another “pathway” to remember things.

Relate-Relate new information to things you already know. In Piaget-speak, assimilate it into your memory.

Review-Do the survey process again, in order to reiterate the things you just read.

This can also be broken down into prereading, reading, and postreading.

Coincidentally, shortly after learning that, a friend was having trouble studying for a test. He was saying that he reads things over and over again but he never remembers what he’s just read. I decided to put my educational psychology learning to the test, and I taught him SQ4R. Another friend was sitting with us and he said that it sounded like it would probably work. We decided that the next time we all read a chapter in a textbook, we would try it this way. It actually works, and really well at that! Later that day I was reading a chapter in my sociology textbook and I did everything SQ4R tells you to do; I aced the quiz on that chapter! Even if I can’t pass this on to my students, it was still very helpful to me with my own studies. I’ll be using this method of reading things for the rest of my schooling.

Behaviour Arc and Reciprocal Determinism Model of Learning!

Nov 15^th, 2010

A few days ago in class we were introduced to what’s called a behaviour arc. I knew before that arguments or behaviours naturally escalate, but it was interesting to see it portrayed in a physical form. Here’s a picture of a behaviour arc:

 The main point I believe our instructor was making was that we need to try to deflect the situation, and not to argue with the child. It will become a behaviour if you don’t try. The behaviour will also de-escalate as surely as it escalated. The end point is when you can teach; when the child feels guilty they will be willing to listen.

In comparison, we studied a theorist named Albert Bandura, whose name reminds me of Antonio Banderas for some reason. He focuses on cognition, the social environment, and behaviour. He developed something called the Reciprocal Determinism Model of Learning. This model shows how all of those three things must be looked at together in order to understand a child’s behaviour. This is a picture of his model:

Bandura says that learning is determined by the reciprocal relationships. This means that something cannot happen in one of these three things without affecting the other two. Everything that occurs in someone’s life affects all other parts of their life, even if they try not to let it. For example, if something happens in the child’s environment, like parents arguing, that will put the child in a bad mood (personal factors), and they may behave badly because of this bad mood. This goes around both ways too; they all affect each other. So if the child is in a bad mood, the parents may argue because of it and the child may act out because of this argument. This can go around over and over again, so that’s when the behaviour arc helps, if you can stop the behaviour or find out about it afterwards, maybe you can break the cycle and the child will be in a better mood, affecting the personal factors and the environmental factors as well.

Hopefully these two models will help me deal with kids in the future; they seem like they’ll work but I guess I won’t know until I’m working.

A Functional Approach

Nov 10^th, 2010

I’ve gone back to being a kid again; I’m learning my ABC’s! My Educational Psychology ABC’s! We were discussing a functional approach to classroom behaviour. This means that teachers need to examine a student’s inappropriate  behaviour, as well as its antecedents (what comes before), and its consequences (what happens after) to determine a function. The ABC’s, then, are:

Antecedents

Behaviour

Consequences

In a classroom setting, I think this is a good to a point. If a teacher were to go too far with this, the student may get the impression after a while that everyone in his/her life is going to understand how they’re feeling and take that into perspective. For small children that maybe aren’t conditioned in controlling their emotions, this could be a very positive thing. However, if a student gets used too used to this, they may expect that this will happen in a middle school, high school, or college setting. This reasoning is probably why we were provided with a way to provide positive behaviour support. We were told that after identifying the source of the behaviour, we need to provide alternate ways for the students to act, or alternate ways to release the frustration. Hopefully as a teacher I can help my students learn to take out their frustration out in different, more positive ways. I admit it may be hard to take into perspective what’s been happening in a child’s life if they’re coming into my high school classroom and throwing things around; so this functional approach may be easier to implement with an elementary classroom.

Operant Conditioning

Nov 8^th, 2010

When I was little, my mother would always get me to do something by taking away something, or offering me something. I’m not sure she knew that what she was doing would be something I would study in college! The process of taking something away or giving something for a desired outcome is called operant conditioning. It sounds cruel but it’s a way to “condition” or train a child to do what you want them to do. Operant conditioning is used by teachers for teaching children behaviour and classroom management. There are four ways to do this:

Positive Reinforcement: a teacher would give something, to reinforce a good behaviour that is happening.

Negative Reinforcement: a teacher would take something negative away to reinforce good behaviour.

Positive Punishment: a teacher would give something negative in order to get less of certain behaviour.

Negative Punishment: a teacher takes away something positive in order to get less of certain behaviour.

See a pattern? Whenever something is “positive”, something is being given, whether it’s a wanted or not. When something is “negative”, something is being taken away, whether it’s a good or bad thing. When something is being “reinforced”, the teacher wants to create more of this behaviour. When someone is “punished”, the teacher wants to create less of this behaviour. Make sense? I didn’t think so either, so I’m going to show the examples I came up with in class.

Positive Reinforcement: A child answers a difficult question, teacher gives a gold star. The teacher is giving something to get more of the good behaviour.

Negative Reinforcement: If a teacher is monitoring a child in class and then the child starts doing better, you can monitor less and less. The teacher takes away something unwanted that is already there in order to create more of the good behaviour.

Positive Punishment: A child is talking in class frequently, so the teacher gives more homework. The teacher is giving something in order to get less of a certain behaviour.

Negative Punishment: A child is bullying other children, so the teacher takes away recess time. The teacher takes away something the child likes in order to get less of a certain behaviour.

I’ve been told that teaching something is the best way to learn it, so hopefully that will help me retain this!

In my opinion, I think they’re all very good ways to have a child behave properly, but I think it would differ from elementary to high school. Positive reinforcement and negative punishment would probably work the best on younger kids, and negative reinforcement and positive punishment would probably work the best on high school students. Younger children are more focused on pleasing a teacher, and most of them really enjoy school and want to be there, so I think the two that the student would receive praise or lose something they enjoy doing would result in the best behaviour. A lot of high school students really don’t want to be at school, and they’re only going because they have to; therefore, I think the two that mean they lose out on social time, have to do something extra, or aren’t being watched so much would be the most effective.

I’m actually really glad we learned this; I always thought there was a theory behind what my mother was using on me, and now I can use it on my future students to have them behave properly!