OPERANT CONDITIONING
Introduction
Classroom behavior refers to the way students and teachers interact with each other in the classroom. Students’ behavior may vary from time to time. They may decide not to cooperate for no good reasons at all. Teachers may experience a difficult time when dealing with passive students. To make it worse, the teachers may perform poorly in their evaluation if the assessor comes in at a time when students are quiet and uncooperative. Students who are uncooperative in class are also unlikely to complete their assignments. This classroom behavior may vary with the age of the students.Different forms of behavior For instance, students aged between 13 years to 15 years may exhibit some arrogance due to their energy from this adolescent age. Such students will express decreased goal orientation due to the disturbance of this particular stage in life. A teacher dealing with such students need to have a great understanding of this fact for him or her to cope with the decline in morale. Such a class will, therefore, be characterized by many rebellions because the students will not care much about what the teacher says. On the other hand, the teacher may get agitated especially if he is not experienced, and this may result in a disruptive classroom behavior which means a decline in the overall performance of the class. In addition, such students will also be highly anxious. The anxiety may negatively affect their confidence which will hamper them from performing well in class (Gatbonton, 2008).
Changing students’ behavior One way of dealing with such group of students would be through teaching them classroom rules. The teacher should involve the students in making the rules so that they can easily follow them. In case one breaks the rules, he will be in for punishment from the rules which he helped in formulating (Luiselli, Putnam, Handler & Feinberg, 2005). To reinforce the rules, the teacher can put them in both print and visual formats. The teacher should also be creative and go beyond the norm to teach the rules where least expected such as in the dining hall or the school bus when students are going home. The rules will be most effective if they are timely. For instance, rules taught during the beginning of the year are most likely to sink better compared to those made late in the year (Lewis, 2008). The second method would be by use of instilling a positive classroom discipline. The teacher should ensure that students interact freely with minimized punishments.
Research has shown that extreme punitive environments are unconducive to students and may promote withdrawal of students. The teacher can avoid such by applying workable techniques such as increasing positive statements that encourage students. This will make the students change their attitude towards school and slowly stop their bad behavior. On the same note, the teacher should encourage the participation of the students. He can even decide to award the most active students so as to challenge the …
