In this case, I would guess that the chosen students dislike being singled out as different from their peers, and thus go over the top to prove that they are the same as their gang of friends.

What is a positive reinforcement is determined by the person receiving the reinforcer, not by the person giving it.

Is this true? I thought that it would be more that too little postive reinforcement as a kid would set you up for an unhappy adulthood where you tolerate an abusive environment. I understand that children who have been badly abused are statistically more likely to wind up in abusive relationships in adulthood than children who had decent parents. People who grow up in abusive environments tend to regard those sorts of horrible situations as normal, and inescapable.

my approach to classroom management is a lot like mr. k’s, except, i’m not at the point where i’m figuring out what it is that didn’t work / how to change it next time. probably part of it is that i’ve spent my (short) career split between high school and middle school, which are galaxies apart in terms of the kinds of behavioral issues (and hygiene).

another question. anybody else out there in an immersion school? or beyond that, a bilingual immersion school, which is where i am. how would you deal with admin telling you to not allow a whiff of mother tongue in school? so far my approach is to claim that i can’t tell mandarin chinese – allowed – apart from cantonese chinese – not allowed. but the kids know the truth, that i have a rudimentary understanding of handful of both dialects…

It seems that just as we name a student of the class, that student starts to do really dumb things, getting into trouble, dropping their grades, not coming to school. Any explanation for that phenomenon? I’ve always believed in positive reinforcement, but sometimes we are adverse to naming a student for fear of ruining them.

I’m just glad to see that so many (at least in their online personas) are moving beyond the, “Do something bad and I will make something bad happen to you,” mentality. This gets us nowhere.

The thing where somewhere isn’t yelling at you is known as “negative reinforcement” or avoidance conditioning. It’s the removal of an adverse stimulus, and in and of itself, a reinforcer. Much of the prevailing motivation for schooling functions on this model. Do well and you won’t…

…get yelled at
…get detention
…make your parents mad/sad
…fail in life
…end up homeless

It ceases to function when the adverse stimuli being negatively reinforced are not terribly adverse or are so far removed from the understanding of the individual, so as to be unfelt and not understood. In other words, it fails all the time.

I know, I know – we need to have “intrinsic motivation” but once in a while it’s nice to be explicitly told you’re doing a good job. I don’t tend to infer that I’m doing a good job from no feedback at all….