I think there are certain tools from a behaviorist view that could help with Lisa's behavior problems. Lisa is unhappy with her role in her group, and thus acts out. I would probably use positive and negative reinforcement, and negative punishment to improve her behavior. For negative punishment, I would remove her from the group and have her work all by herself. As a positive reinforcement, I would praise her for behaving and working well in her group when appropriate. As negative reinforcement, I would tell her that if the group behaves and gets along, I would assign them less work to do.
As for a cognitive or constructivist approach, I would use neither reinforcement nor punishment. I might ask her questions about the situation privately. I would ask her why she thinks these breakdowns are happening, until she comes to the conclusion that the problem is her behavior. I would then ask her what she thinks would happen if she were to change her behavior. That way she can come to conclusions on her own, and learn for herself.
I found this website about what a teacher could do instead of using punishment.
http://tigger.uic.edu/~lnucci/MoralEd/practices/practice1devries.html
It is definitely a good idea to ask her about why she is behaving that way. In my experience it is almost always better to ask a child what is going on before assuming they are being negative on purpose. I have found, through working at camp, that there is almost always a reason why the child is acting out besides what may be initially evident.
ReplyDeleteI like that you've decided to talk to the student individually. That's definitely something that is important to understand what's going on, like Liz pointed out in the comment above.
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