Behaviorism Blog Post 2

Mr. Gates is a third grade teacher.  When I observe him, he is working on reading with his students. The first thing I notice when I enter the room is his “Super Stars” chart. Every students’ name was on the chart, and next to their names were star stickers. Mr. Gates explained that a student gets one star sticker after they have finished reading one book. And after a student has finished ten books, they get to pick a prize from the treasure box. Mr. Gates is using reinforcement to promote the appropriate behavior of reading. Students receive a smaller reward, the sticker, and eventually receive a much larger award, the prize, which encourages them to read books. 

I also observe that when I student starts to act out during class, Mr. Gates first directly tells the student to be quiet. This particular student becomes encouraged by the attention he has received by Mr. Gates, and continues to disrupt the class. Mr. Gates, seeing that his first attempt did not work, then tells the child to spend a five minutes in the “Cool Down Zone”, a section of the classroom that is designed for time-outs. The Cool Down Zone is blocked off from the rest of the classroom, so students in it cannot continue to be disrupting. In this situation, Mr. Gates realized that giving attention to the student would not work, so he instead used another strategy to try and decrease the inappropriate behavior. 

When coming back from lunch and recess, the students can be rater rowdy. To deal with this, Mr. Gates turns the classroom lights off, signaling that he wants the class to sit down and quiet down. The first time he does this, he simply turns the lights off. If the students still do not quiet down, he will turn them back on and off again, this time telling the students to quiet down. Mr. Gates rarely has to do this more than once, however, because throughout the year, he has conditioned his students to associate the lights turning off with sitting down and staying quiet.