Woolfolk Chapter 7 and 13

During chapter seven, Woolfolk talked about reinforcing. She defines reinforcement as "Use of consequences to strengthen behavior" (p. 267). A reinforcer is considered as being an action that makes to behavior increase. When someone observes a behavior being increased over time, you can make an assumption of the fact the consequences of the behavior are being the reinforcer (p. 267).  "Whether the consequences of any action are reinforcing probably depends on the individual's perception of the event and the meaning it holds for her or him" (p. 267). An example she used was if a student gets sent to the principal's office. If a student does continuously get sent to the principal's office, this event could be reinforcing a specific behavior (p. 267). She then does go on to talking about two kinds of reinforcement. Positive reinforcement happens when a behavior or response to a behavior creates an appearance to a stimulus that is new. Sometimes positive reinforcement could be a response to a negative behavior. When you remove the stimulus, you are creating a negative reinforcement. If a student is continuously getting sick before a presentation this leads to the student getting sent to the nurse's office. The negative part is the student being removed from what is causing them getting sick, and the reinforcement is the behavior is being increased in the future.

During my job, we always talk about positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. For some of my students, they do know what they can get away with and what they cannot. If a teacher is seeing a behavior is increased, such as going to the bathroom every time they have to do some kind of work, we called this a negative reinforcement. The student feels the need to go to the bathroom is the negative part, and the reinforcement is because it does happen all of the time. We also have students who do seek our attention. One of our students likes to consistently touch us to seek our attention. We do react to this student which does lead to the behavior to increase. We talked about this being a positive reinforcement. The positive part being the reaction to the behavior, and the reinforcement part being the increase of the behavior. I and my co-workers always talk about the students' behavior and what kind of behavior we want to stop or which behavior we want to increase. It depends on the student and the behavior they are showing.

In chapter 13, Woolfolk does talk about how you should arrange your seats. Personal territory is a territory that is your own. These seats are usually assigned. If a student does sit in front of the class, they will participate more. If a student is seating in the back of the classroom, they tend to be the ones who participate less and will not listen at all (p. 518-519). C.S Weinstein and Romano do suggest a teacher should be walking around the room as much as possible. A teacher should also make eye contact with the students in the back and ask those students questions. They should also change the seating to give the students who are sitting in the back a chance to sit in the front (P. 519). Woolfolk also talks about three different kinds of seating arrangments. Horizontal rows are good for independent work and teacher and student presentations, especially media presentations. This also does help the students to be able to work in pairs. The downside to this kind of seating is when you are trying to do a big class discussion. For student interaction, clusters of four or circle are better. This is good for discussions and also does allow the students to be able to do classroom work. The downside to this is classroom management may be difficult and also presentations. The last arrangement which is discussed is fishbowl or stacked. This means students are near the focus of attention. This arrangement should only be used for short periods. The reason for this is because this one could lead to problems when it comes to discipline. The positive side to this one is it can make a group cohesion feeling. It also can help with a demonstration, come up with ideas for class problems, and tiny visual aid (P. 519).

In my honest opinion, how you arrange your seats is key to successful classroom management. You might have to figure out how to arrange your seats based on the kind of class you have. This could mean waiting until the first week of school is over, but this will help you be successful. For my work, we do not have the traditional chairs and tables you would most commonly see in a classroom. For us, we have big tables and chairs to slide underneath them. If we are doing one to one work, we will separate the tables so that a student does not get distracted by another student. If we are doing cooking group, we have all of the big tables pushed together since we need more of a collaborative style. In one of the math classes, I work in, two of the students need to be separated from the group. On a bad day, sometimes we have to separate three students. We move the big tables to separate corners of the room. This mostly helps with privacy for the student. This privacy does help the students to focus on the task at hand. There are also times where a student wants to run. two rows are going vertically and we have the student sit in the middle of the front row. We then have two teachers sitting both sides of the student. This helps with making the student stay in one spot.

Another concept Woolfolk talks about is how prevention of the problem is always the best solution. If you prevent the problem first, you will then have more to teach your students (P. 522). " In a classic study, Jacob Kounin (1970) examined classroom management by comparing effective teachers, whose classes were relatively free of problems, with ineffective teachers, whose classes were continually plagued by chaos and disruption" (p. 522-523). When looking at the two different groups Kounin was surprised that there was not a difference with the way the discipline was handled after the problem happened. The ones who were effective teachers just did a better job of preventing the problem from even starting to happen. They first got the students' attention and then kept the engagement of the students because they kept the work at the level of the students. The teachers also did well in four different kinds of prevention strategies: 'withitness', overlapping activities, group focusing,  and movement management (p. 523). Withitness is defined as telling the students you are aware of what is going on in the classroom. They do not just focus on a few students. The focus on the whole class so there is not any students who wander.  These teachers make sure the minor problem does not become a bigger problem. They are also aware of who caused the disruption and make sure they talk to that student. The teacher just takes care of the major problem before the minor problem when two different problems are caused in the classroom. (p. 523-524). "Overlapping means keeping track of and supervising several activities at the same time" (p. 524). This could mean the teacher has to look at a single student's work, while also teaching a class, and also stopping a disruption from happening. The definition of a group focus is keeping as many students as possible focused on a specific activity. This also does mean not just focusing on one or two students (p. 524). Movement management is defined as keeping the class moving at an appropriate pace, transitions are smooth, and there is a variety (p. 524). Teaching students about social and emotional self-regulation is a great way to help prevent problems from occurring. During a short time, teachers can teach and show what these skills could look like. They can also give students feedback and have them practice these skills (p. 524). "Over the long term, teachers can help to change attitudes that value aggression over cooperation and compromise (M. J. Elias &Schwab, 2006)" (p. 524).

One thing that everyone I work with has to be good at is withitness. We have to be aware of what is happening in the classroom because you never know what is going to happen. We have students who do throw objects, so we have to be aware of what is getting put in front of the students. Sometimes the objects are getting put in front of the student by other students. We also do have students who hit. We always need to be aware of who is near that student, especially if it is another student. Overlapping you do not really see as much in the classrooms I work in. This is mainly because there are one main teacher and three TAs in a room together. If the teacher is teaching and something is happening within the classroom, the TA is usually the one who goes and takes care of it. The teachers I work with do a really good job at movement management. When they are teaching a lesson, they have to keep going and make sure there is no time for a student to get up to something. They do move at a good pace and also make sure the students are understanding the material which is being presented to them. There are times, though, they might have to stop a lesson because of a student or students being distracted. This does lead to the teacher ending the lesson because it gets to a point where they are not able to continue the lesson. The reason for the teacher not continuing the lesson is because it does get to a point where more than three students are distracted and are not paying attention.