Chpt. 6 Response to: Behavioral Views of Learning

The comment you made about working with the family of a child with significant behavior issues definitely caught my attention. I think it is important to work with the family of a child, but what happens when this isn’t a priority to the family. I fear we may face this a lot in our years as teachers and my concern is what to do if the family doesn’t care. I experienced this with the child I worked with. His mother was not willing to work with me in an effective manner. She wanted us to come up with a different reward system every time her son was no longer interested in the current one; which happened every week. She wasn’t willing to talk to him about his behavior at school. It made it a frustrating situation for everyone involved and did not benefit the student in any way.

The comparison to working as an adult for free intrigued me. I have never thought about that and I have to agree, most, if not all people would not work for free. I have loved my jobs I held in the past, but I would not work there if I did not get paid. I agree that intrinsic motivation is important for everyone because when you do get older, you do not get rewards or compliments for every little thing you do. I think it is important to help your students develop this motivation, but there does need to be other strategies used, especially with younger kids who do need that instant gratification sometimes (not all kids, but some).

I thought it was interesting that we both commented on self-management skills. I see how the lack of these would cause academic struggles because without setting goals, there is no motivation to accomplish things. If there is that motivation, maybe they do not know how to monitor their progress and as a result they do not complete what needs to be done, on time. Therefore these students would not be successful.