Behavior modification is the traditional term for the use of behavior change techniques to increase or decrease the frequency of behaviors, such as altering an individual's behaviors and reactions to stimuli through positive and negative reinforcement of adaptive behavior and/or the reduction of behavior.
It's kind of ironic, but one of my least favorite classes in my undergraduate program at Marywood University in Scranton, Pennsylvania was, "Behavior Modification". I don't remember why exactly but I think the reason may have had something to do with the fact that at the time, I didn't have actual students to test my "techniques" on. I was lucky though, it didn't take long before I had my first classroom.I accepted my first teaching position prior to graduation. I was a summer school teacher at the Devereux Foundation in West Chester, Pennsylvania. The Devereux Foundation is a residential school for children with multiple disabilities. My students were between eight and ten years old and were dually diagnosed with intellectual disabilities and emotional disturbance. I very quickly put my newly acquired behavior modification techniques to work! Overall, the summer went well and the behavior modification program had a lot to do with both my success and my students success.
Today I have honed my skills somewhat. I have used the same student rewards program with minor variations for each group or with each new school schedule for about nine years now. I actually love all of the built in positives with this reward program. My students simply call it "points or points cards" which I guess quickly defines the program. The whole program is based on points that students collect and trade in for money at the end of each school day. The money is stored in individual money boxes. Every five weeks the students spend their earnings in "Aubin-Mart".
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The students begin with 2 points per period. If they need a warning to get back on task or for exhibiting inappropriate classroom behavior or rudeness to an adult or peer they lose a point. If a student has a melt down or is uncooperative they lose both points but...only for that period. This is the heart of this program. We all make mistakes and we all have times when we are not at our best...it's human nature! One mishap should never, ever ruin a whole day! So, every class period, the student starts anew. What's lost can now be earned. If a student had a difficult period they now have another chance to make up for it. As I've mentioned in previous blogs, second chances are allowed in my room. Also, I sporadically give out extra positive behavior, cooperation, and excellence points. This encourages student engagement and rigor. Kids love it when they earn extra points!
The beginning of each school year is always interesting when it comes to the "points" program. Students who are new to the classroom have never shopped in "Aubin-Mart" before, so they don't know what a treat this can be. I usually stay very calm during the first five weeks of school and just let the program work its course. I always have new teaching assistants who I need to train by telling them "stay the course" and not give or take away points too hastily. I also have to remind them to be patient with the new students who have not "shopped" before because until their first shopping experience and they do not fully understand the importance of earning points. It's hard to understand something without experiencing it first hand.
"Shopping" day is the best! The anticipation has mounted! All students are on their best behavior all day. We usually shop in the afternoon. The students try really hard to refrain from asking, "Is it time yet"? Finally, it is almost time. Usually right before lunch the students count their money. Yes, of course they must count their own money! Another win-win situation in this points program is the educational component! Students learn how to count money! After every student counts his or her money, it is written on a "credit card". Then the students must line up in order from who has the most to the least. It is recorded on the whiteboard from highest to lowest as to who has earned the most money! The student with the most will be allowed to shop first. This quickly turns into an "aha" moment for the new students who maybe didn't take the "points" program seriously enough! This sad student may be shopping last! This is where I gently insert the lesson: "It's not fun to go last but you will be able to buy some great things. Next time, remember the more points you earn, the higher on the list you will be." This is usually all it takes to have a believer in the points program!
While the students are at lunch. I set up "Aubin-Mart" over the years it has grown. We really do have "departments". I always love the look on the students faces when they step into the classroom and see so many things they can buy! I try to fill the store with things they are interested in and things they need. We have: Sports cards, jewelry, "Frozen" and "Minecraft" themed items, candy, hair supplies, school supplies, deodorant, hats, mittens, toys, puzzles,fishing poles and supplies, basketballs ...and the list goes on. Many items are under $1.00 although students have earned as much as $12.00. Keep in mind we aren't actually spending student money but classroom money that they have earned in school. After each purchase the students are checked out and given a shopping bag filled with their goods! Any unspent money is returned to their coin box for future purchases.
Have I mentioned lately how much I appreciate my students? They are thoughtful and kind. Often, instead of buying things for themselves, they buy gifts for family members. Last year, a girl bought a doll for her younger sister who had just had surgery. One boy bought nail polish for his sister, another a necklace for his stepmom. They buy things that they need, like pencil boxes and deodorant. These kids amaze me every day. It is my hope that our classroom point program and store teaches my students the bigger lesson that hard work does pay-off. I hope they learn that with diligence, honor, respect, and generosity, they can be successful not only in our classroom, but in life.
Educator Links:
1o Best TEDTalks of 2014 for Educators
http://www.edudemic.com/10-best-ted-talks-of-2014-for-educators/?
We Do Listen
https://wedolisten.org/
Interactive Digital Taxonomy Wheel and Knowledge Dimension
http://www.parapal-online.co.uk/elearning/2014/02/interactive-blooms-taxonomy-with-activities/
Parent Links:
We Do Listen
https://wedolisten.org/
If I Need Help
https://twitter.com/QRCodeiD1
Mitt Aubin's Book Review : I just love the:"Adventures in Colonial America" series. The Winter at Valley Forge. is written like a diary or journal.The illustrated sketches by George Guzzi makes the journal look authentic. Having lived in the Philadelphia/Valley Forge area for nearly twenty-five years, I appreciate the author's use of real towns that are in Pennsylvania that General George Washington's troops would have travelled through. The book is accurate, as winters in Pennsylvania really are cold and the Schuylkill River that Washington's troops crossed into Gulph Mills really does freeze. Having personally spent many days in Valley Forge Park, I can attest to the fact that the small wooden cabins sketched in the book look like those still standing in Valley Forge today. This book would be an excellent accompaniment to a history lesson on the Revolutionary War.
One might question how much learning is involved in planning, making, and participating in a Thanksgiving feast. So let me tell you where this saga began....
It began about a month ago in life skills class. We were studying nutrition. We spent several days discussing the importance of proper nutrition and fitness. Soon after, again in Life Skills class, we read a passage about the proper way to set a table and then we practiced how to do this. With the holidays soon approaching, I thought "Hmm...how great would it be if we could plan a feast and in the process learn how to plan a meal, budget for it, shop for it, cook it using the proper units of capacity and learn how to read the directions, learn table manners, and incorporate a history lesson in it by studying the Mayflower voyage and First Thanksgiving?" After all, the Plymouth Colony and the Mayflower Voyage are part of the unit of study in the social studies curriculum. There are two things I love in planning sound lessons: first, cross-curricular studies and second, hands on learning to make the learning memorable. With this thought and sound lessons in mind, our feast was in motion! Science even came into play because we did a unit on weather and coincidentally, the Mayflower was originally headed for Jamestown, Virginia but a storm filled the Mayflower's sails with wind tossing it off course sending the Pilgrims to Cape Cod, 150 miles off track!
Over the next couple of weeks during life skills we prepared for our feast. We collected recipes, we read them. We practiced capacity and fractions by using measuring cups and spoons. We read over the flyers from Shaws Supermarket to plan our grocery lists. We used calculators to add the prices of items we wanted to purchase. We estimated how much money we thought we would need. In Social studies class we compared a modern thanksgiving feast to the first thanksgiving feast to see how it has changed. Did you know that since eels were abundant in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the Pilgrims Pilgrims and the Wampanoag ate cooked eels at the first thanksgiving! My students decided that they did not want eels on our menu! Like the pilgrims we decided to invite another group to our feast. In all we had 18 students and 6 adults.
Finally the big day came! We went on our field trip to the super market. We divided the list into four groups insuring that each group had to get items from every department. Everyone had a job! When we were finished we met at the checkout to pay for and bag our groceries. We bought one frivolous item...tootsie pops to celebrate our excellent skill at grocery shopping!
Over the next two days we cooked. We went to our classes but still made time for preparing our feast. Everyone from both classrooms helped. We chopped, peeled, boiled, and baked! We learned how to put our measuring skills to use. We fluted homemade pies, peeled hard boiled eggs, and chopped onions and celery for Mrs.F's delicious stuffing! Mrs.G. wowed us with her homemade cranberry sauce recipe made by the students. Mrs. A almost wowed us with homemade chocolate mousse pies made with a student;'s Mom's recipe!
The feast was awesome. We teased the students and teachers in our school as the aroma from our turkey roasting permeated throughout our school! We were proud of all we had accomplished! We left school with a great appreciation of all of the skills that are needed to prepare a proper feast and with very full bellies! Just so you know, Mrs. A's pies were good and appreciated, but the student honestly admitted that his mom's were better. This is always as it should be, nobody can cook better than Mom! Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Educator Links:
Indian Country
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/
The First Thanksgiving
http://www.scholastic.com/scholastic_thanksgiving/feast/
Parent Links:
"Holiday Tips" for your Family member Impacted by Autism
http://www.autismillinois.org/uncategorized/holiday-tips-for-your-family-member-impacted-by-autism/
How Do I Get My Kid Motivated For School?
http://brainstermom.com/how-do-i-get-my-kids-motivated-for-school-supplement-to-brainster-tv-episode/
Mitt Aubin's Book Review:
I am currently using the book, "You Wouldn't Want to Sail on the Mayflower: A Trip That Took Entirely Too Long" by Peter Cook, along with the students text book and "If You Sailed on the Mayflower" by Ann McGovern. I love using picture books that have accurate historical content along with the student's textbook to give the students a more complete picture of what it was like during the time period we are studying. My student's really enjoyed the picture of the Mayflower with the cutout that shows them exactly how crowded the Mayflower was. The Mayflower was not a passenger ship, but was a cargo ship, which made the Pilgrim's journey very uncomfortable. Amazingly during the 66 day voyage only one person died, young William Butten, the surgeon's helper. He died only three days before the Pilgrim's made landfall. One child was born on the voyage, Oceanus Hopkins. Cook's text gives the student's details of the Mayflower voyage and their first days in Plymouth that are not mentioned in their textbook. Also included is a vocabulary section and tools used by early navigators, and a time line. My student's were able to take a picture of the timeline with their chromebooks and then print it out for perfect note taking! Cook's book is a great companion to go along with a unit of study on the Plymouth Colony and the Mayflower voyage.
Across America, literacy frustrations are a daily event and a reality in classrooms. Teachers ask, "How can we plan successful lessons when kids struggle to read?" One tip for teachers is to continue to teach reading comprehension explicitly beginning with early readers and continuing throughout high school. Even though many children are able to decode words and read seemingly fluently when in third grade, this does not mean that their comprehension level increases as they age. reading is not a technical skill that a child learns once and then has it! Rather, it is a developmental process that continues to expand and becomes more refined as a student continues to engage in various types of text over a complete lifetime.
Today, every teacher needs to be a teacher who supports literacy. This doesn't mean that a math teacher doesn't teach math, that would be absurd! It simply means that no matter what subject a teacher specializes in in grades k-12 that s/he must be cognizant of the reading and writing process. There are many things that teachers of all levels and subjects can do to promote literacy. Also every educator needs to help ensure that every child that graduates is able to read and comprehend material that s/he will be presented with in life.
The last place that educators can guide students to become proficient readers and writers is in high school. Hopefully by high school, most students are proficient in reading and writing, but just in case they are not, there are strategies that teachers can use for everyone that do not single out individual kids as non-readers Today I will go into detail about five important, yet easily administered strategies.
- Schema or Activation of Prior Knowledge: Schemata is comprised of all the information and experience stored in a person's memory. Each person's schema includes the total for all previous thoughts and actions toward a certain topic. Given the fact that schema is everything in a person's background knowledge, it helps to connect new information with the old. A visual representation or an over view works particularly well when activating prior knowledge. It helps to influence the interpretations of new text. Learning makes sense for students when they can connect to something they already know that is familiar to them. When students connect the new with the old they have that "aha" moment that makes learning meaningful. Activating prior knowledge is a key component when a student uses context clues to define an unknown word. In this situation, the student uses surrounding words and sentences to "define" or make meaning of the unknown word in the text.
- Metacognition: Metacognition is an awareness or actual control over the skills necessary to understand the knowledge that has been gained. Metacognition is taking into account all aspects of a given topic and making inferences, connections, and adjustments to process understanding. A teacher can coach a students metacognition with guiding questions and probes that help students to make valid conclusions and connections. Think alouds work especially well when modeling metacognition.
- Scaffolding to the Zone of Proximal Development: Just like construction workers and those who use scaffolding in architectural situations, educational leaders use scaffolding too. Scaffolding is a series of lessons designed to explicitly teach and model instruction by guided practice to help the students become more independent learners. Instruction that supports students as they gain proficiency and then gradually disappears as they become proficient is called: scaffolding. Teachers use activities designed to incrementally build upon each other until success is gained and the students are independent. The Zone of Proximal Development is the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help. The ultimate goal is to gradually release the scaffolds so that the learner becomes responsible for his/her own learning.
- Bloom's Taxonomy of Questions:In 1956, Benjamin Bloom, as most of us know, and a team of psychologists devised Bloom's Taxonomy. Bloom's Taxonomy is a great way to activate and determine a student's reading comprehension level. One way I have used Bloom's is to have students ask and then answer a question from each of the six domain areas: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation after reading a selection. I of course provide students with visuals of Bloom's Taxonomy and sample questions and common verbs for each domain. Eventually given modeling and persistence even my struggling readers are able to use Bloom's taxonomy to improve their reading comprehension.
- Summary Writing: Initially summary writing after reading text is quite difficult for students. I use graphic organizers to activate knowledge of what the students have read. Giving students a visual helps them to organize the facts prior to writing. The purpose of summary writing is to get students thinking about what they have read. This improves comprehension by reinforcing what they have read with writing. I have two graphic organizers that I rely quite heavily on. There are many graphic organizers but I like to remain consistent so that my students can quickly activate their prior knowledge to have a mental image of the graphic organizer. One is for writing paragraphs. The second, is for three paragraph essays. Once the graph organizers are complete, writing the summary is a snap!
Once students move from elementary school to middle school they must adjust to an increasingly departmentalized school program. Often teachers focus on content, but using a few, sound comprehension strategies will benefit all students even those who are proficient in reading fluency and comprehension. Since reading comprehension is a developmental skill, all learners will be benefited by reading strategy instruction in the content areas.
Educator Links:
Tips for Composing Teachers Comments on report Cards
http://gazette.teachers.net/gazette/wordpress/leah-davies/tips-for-teacher-comments-on-report-cards/
Edcamps: The New Professional Development
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/finding_common_ground/2012/09/edcamps_the_new_professional_development.html
Parent Links:
Just the Facts: ADHD and Dyslexia
http://www.interdys.org/ewebeditpro5/upload/ADHDandDyslexia.pdf
How to Get Kids To Listen Without Yelling:
http://www.positiveparentingconnection.net/how-to-get-kids-to-listen-without-yelling/
Mitt Aubin"s Book Review:
David Adler's picture book, Fraction Fun is an awesome book to introduce fractions to young students.Fractions are such a difficult concept. Adler teaches them in a common sense, logical way that make sense to kids. He even introduces the terms numerator and denominator. Kids like this book because it is colorful, fun, and they get it! Fraction Fun is a great book for educators and parents alike!
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