Research supports the underlying thesis of our problem-solving process: the heart of successful behavior management is good instruction. Effective teaching becomes an even more essential variable for managing student behavior when one or more of the following conditions is present: (a) a student has a particularly chaotic home environment, (b) a student’s learning problems are extensive and complex, or (c) a student’s behavior is especially impulsive.note: "the last 10 years"
If Carla, the fourth grader who was constantly in your office last year poses no problem in fifth grade, chances are that her teacher this year is more skillful. If you observe Carla, you are likely to see her current teacher employing teaching methods that reflect the most valid research practices. Whenever you have a teacher on your staff who is complaining that a student who posed no problems last year is now a noncompliant rule-breaker, take a close look at that teacher’s instructional methods. You may find important clues to the student’s sudden misbehavior in the quality of the teacher’s instruction.
Instructional practices derived from specific curriculum designs can also directly affect student behavior. Many of the constructivist curricular innovations of the past 10 years that were created to develop hands-on cooperative learning, and student-centered environments often produced unintended results for children who are distractible, impulsive, or less motivated toward school.
Consider the following observation notes based on a classroom observation of two sixth graders in a math class. [NOTE: the two 6th graders she mentions here are the two children having behavior problems, and for whom the behaviorists have been called in]
The students are seated five to a table. They are manipulating small blocks into patterns in order to invent a method of multiplying fractions. Only two students in the class appear to have understood the concept. Other students in the class seem confused and frustrated. The teacher is unable to assist the students who are having difficulty and still monitor the other students. The instant she pauses to provide assistance to one table of students, a craps game begins on the other side of the room with several students exchanging pennies for the blocks they are now flicking across a finish line. One of the two referred students is walking around the classroom, seemingly to avoid the assigned task; the other unmanageable student has lined up his blocks like a train.
The frustration and lack of structure engendered by this activity have created multiple, predictable triggers to unmanageable behavior. No behavior intervention plan will succeed in a classroom where the assigned task is as frustrating as this one is, and the activities are as unstructured as these activities are.
Managing Unmanageable Students: Practical Solutions for Administrators
by Elaine K. McEwan & Mary Damer
p 13-14
The book was published in 2000.
Twenty years of hands-on collaborative group learning.
A friend of mine was saying the other day that the hottest major in the college where she teaches is Communications.
I wonder if those two facts are related in any way.
CNN: 10 most popular majors
Niki Hayes on classroom discipline
Yes, this time period coincides with something I found interesting and wrote about in
ReplyDeletemy article on traditional math.
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Excerpt follows:
It is interesting therefore to learn that direct instruction and mastery learning are recommended methods of teaching for students with learning disabilities. (Rosenberg, et al., 2008)It is also interesting to note that over the past two decades, the number of students with learning disabilities has increased.In 2006, approximately 2.6 million students were identified with learning disabilities, more than three times as manyas were identified in 1976-1977.Although one reason for this growth might be better means of diagnoses of specific disorders, there has still been growth.Between 1990 and 2004, 650,000 additional students were identified with learning disabilities, representing a 31% increase at a time when the overall student population grew by only 15%.(U.S. Department of Education, 2006).
The increase in the number of students with learning disabilities raises the interesting question (if not uncomfortable for some), of whether the older way of teaching (direct instruction and mastery learning) may have had unintended benefits. According to Rosenberg, et. al. (2008), one factor associated with the identification of students with learning disabilities is the lack of access to effective instruction.Rosenberg et. al, also note that up to 50% of students with learning disabilities have been shown to overcome their learning difficulties when given high-quality instruction. Is the shift toward inquiry-based teaching resulting in more students being identified with learning disabilities?Are these students who in earlier days would have swum with the rest of the pack?
To answer this question would take a good bit of solid research.I hold it out as a research project for anyone willing to take it on, perhaps as a dissertation for a PhD.It would certainly provide some research that Sherry Fraser could cite.At the very least it might even result in helping people learn.
barry's citing "it works for me"
ReplyDelete(as i've done, more than once).
(for some reason, the link he posted
took me to the front page of wikipedia.)
Vlorbik,
ReplyDeleteThanks much. My facility with embedded links depends on Wikipedia's example of an embedded link which uses Wikipedia's URL. I always copy their embedded link into my comment and then replace the Wikipedia URL with the URL I'm trying to link to. Something obviously went awry.
Constructivism, as practiced by CMP is actually an amalgam of discovery learning, clothed in multiculturalism, with a dash of politically correct, story vignettes to 'connect' the child to real world problems. It's not that these things, in and of themselves are inappropriate, it's just that the program throws so much into a one day lesson, the math gets hijacked.
ReplyDeleteIt's not atypical for one of these vignettes to have a dark skinned blue eyed child, named Ming lee, sitting in a wheel chair, talking in Spanish to her friend Sascha from Russia. Put that in front of a child who is reading at a third grade level as an introduction to a seventh grade lesson on solving proportions, and you have the makings of a nightmare. It's very hard at times to get by the intro.
Then when you get into the lesson's problem sets it is very often the case that the problems serve up a hodge-podge;fill out a table, look for a pattern, find equivalent fractions, make a graph, and on and on. It makes my head explode sometimes and I've been doing math forever.
I understand the need to make connections and provide spaced repetition but it should never get in the way of base understanding in the topic at hand. When it does, and the paradigm is discovery/group learning, the results are not pretty.
The math gets lost in a blizzard of roadblocks around; the weird names, and how come we saw that guy in the wheel chair last year, and are trees really alive, and why is the Chinese guy speaking Spanish to a Russian, do I really have to make a table, and on and on.
You mix this altogether and it's a toxic stew for behavior because each child is hung up on a different facet of the jewel. If you can't put all these fires out fast, really fast, the third of your class that is ADHD gets going with the third of the class that is laughing at the goofy names, while the last third passes notes about the days scoop.
The math is lost. Instead of providing a structure to hang the practice and spaced reps upon, CMP rips the structure into tiny little pieces in the arcane hope that the kids will put it all together again.
So communications is a hot major these days?
ReplyDeleteCommunications majors placed 26th on this 2002 ranking of GRE scores for 28 fields of study. The only ones who scored lower were students in the fields of education and public administration.