Behavior in the classroom

Teaching Self-Control: A Curriculum for Responsible Behavior

Martin Henley is a professor at Westfield State College in Massachusetts.  He created  a curriculum for teaching students self control in the classroom. Martin and a team of elementary and secondary level teachers collaborated together and launched the Preventive Discipline Project in the early 90's.  They researched and collected data for nearly 4 years.
 Martin wrote a book, Teaching Self-Control A curriculum for Responsible Behavior.

They found that self control consists of 20 separate social skills.  This curriculum provides a practical way for teachers to  assess their students.  It supplies you with a  Self -Control Inventory that teachers can use to score individual students, and students use the self-report-forms to critique their own abilities.   Teachers are teaching self control every day with students.  Asking students to please be quiet, or sit in their seats, stop talking, etc...  Some may call this classroom management, or discipline.  Now a days it is called positive behavior support.   

I enjoyed reading this article and when I have time I would like to purchase his book. I found it interesting that in order to have responsible behavior, students to have self-control in the classroom.  This to me seems simple and practical.  I like having different teaching strategies to calm a student down or prevent them from becoming agitated.

He mentions in the article about substitute teaching and how the students act one way for the teacher and another for the sub.  So true!!  I have feel each year I am improving on skills, strategies, and classroom management. 

Hopkins, G. (2005). Teaching Self-Control: A Curriculum for Responsible Behavior. Education World

Intellectual Disabilities

Changing Instruction to Increase Achievement for Students With Moderate to Severe Intellectual Disabilities

This article was informative and useful.  This was a completely practical article with effective enrichments to help the students succeed.  The content was about assisting two students achieve success with math fractions.  The elementary teacher was struggling with how to provide her students with better instruction so they would be able to master the skills of fractions.  They were so close to completing the 8 steps, but then began to regress and act out during class.  A few suggestions that were offered to improve student achievement were as follows: use smart boards, i pads, using a cookie sheet with magnetic strips.  These simple visual instructional aides can make a world of difference when the goal is to improve student achievement.   I have always been a visual learner and love when I am able to use technology or hands on manipulatives to help student performance.

Shawnee Wakeman, Meagan Karvonen, and Audra Ahumada (2013). Changing Instruction to Increase Achievement for Students With Moderate to Severe Intellectual Disabilities. TEACHING Exceptional Children, Vol. 46, No.2 pp.6-13

SPED 524 Learning Disabilities

Andrew I Hashey and Skip Stahl (2014) Making Online Learning Accessible for Students With Disabilities

     TEACHING Exceptional Children, vol.46, No.5, pp.70-78

In this Article they discuss the ability for children to attend school using an on-line curriculum for students with learning disabilites.  I feel this type of schooling would not be conducive for students with moderate to severe learning disabilities.  Currently, 31 states offer statewide full time virtual schools, enrolling an estimated 275,000 students(Watson,Murin, Vashaw, Gemin, & Rapp, 2012).  For online classes to be successful depends on the teacher and materials choosen.  The educator must be aware of all the accessibilites that are needed for their students,  for example, if you have a hearing impaired student does the software offer a device for that child to learn?  Although, this may sound like a great alternative for some students, to me seems like a real disadvantage.  When you are hands on teaching you are able to make the appropiate adjustments and accomadations for your students daily, weekly, or monthly.  I feel the barrier  is too high for this virtual learning for students with LD and does not seem practical for most.  Today's education is moving in the direction of universal design for learning with audio, video, smart boards, computers, i pads etc...  I prefer having the accessibility to converse with a student face to face.  I feel this article was useful to me as it has offered a lot of resources, websites, and educational tools that I made need to use in the future.