Karrah Smith SCOPE

2d: Managing Student Behavior


As an education candidate, I understand the importance of managing student behavior in an appropriate manner. Within my classroom, we use different reward aspects included in the whole brain teaching framework. In the first picture, you can see our mighty oh yeah and mighty groan tally scoreboard. Within this aspect, students take group accountability and responsibility for earning points. When the class as a whole does something positive and productive we give them a mighty oh yeah point. If they do something negative we give them a mighty groan point and they have to collectively explain why they got the mighty groan point. At the end of certain round times within the day, if students have more might oh yeah points than mighty groan points the teacher helper for the day will roll the foam dice, and if the number matches the number or one of the numbers beside the round then everyone in the class gets a point on the super improver wall. Due to this aspect of group accountability, students take an active role in monitoring their own behavior and that of other students. This monitoring of student behavior is subtle and does not point out any specific student or students for misbehavior. Using the super improver wall has helped students see the success of achieving goals, following rules, and being kind to others. The students are able to see the successes of their classmates and continuously encourage and build each other up. When student misbehavior must be addressed individually, we pull aside students and allow them to take a breather and collect their thoughts. We then discuss the problem at hand and the reasons why it is a problem. We let the students tell us what they did so that they are truthful and hold self accountability for their actions while fluently communicating their feelings. This allows for a sensitive response to student misbehavior based on individual student needs while still respecting their dignity. These types of positive and negative reinforcements go along with B.F. Skinner's Behaviorism theory. This theory states that positive reinforcement pushes a student more toward the praised behavior and that negative reinforcement pushes the student more away from repeating the negative behavior.