Self-Efficacy and Intervention

There are  a few things to consider when thinking about the contributions of Self-efficacy and Self-regulation to my intervention plan. The first of these is whether or not my cueing will have an effect on the students belief that the can pay attention and do their work. That is, if students perceive that they are being chastised regardless of how subtle I may attempt to be, will it harm their level of self-efficacy. Another thing to consider as it relates to self efficacy is whether or not the students possess a low self-efficacy to begin with and whether or not that plays a role in why the students were misbehaving to begin with. If it were to be determined that this was the cause then this could be a place to begin in planning an intervention strategy.

As it relates to self-regulation and intervention strategies, the teacher would want to ensure that the students had the ability and motivation to change their behavior. It is possible that the students have an issue affecting their interest in the course and this would make it difficult for them to regulate their personal change of a certain behavior. It would be necessary to relate the class to the students to allow for the students to have a reason to want to change the behavior prior to them being expected to change and regulate their behavior.

This article by Sharon Zumbrunn et. al characterizes these attribute and their contributions well: http://merc.soe.vcu.edu/Reports/Self%20Regulated%20Learning.pdf

Case Study and Learning Theories

High School Case Study

You have started to dread your fifth period history class. It is made up entirely of seniors who are counting the days until graduation and seem to care very little about learning. Most of the students are obviously members of one clique or another. Whenever they think your back is turned, they start passing notes and text messaging. Worse, three boys have started disrupting those engaged in learning. No matter what you say, they laugh at the students who present their group projects to the class. Yesterday, Tony, Jeff, and Morris started roughhousing; then all three of them refused to sit down and follow the class procedures that the classroom community agreed upon at the beginning of the year. Although you have been using a set approach to handling infractions of rules, you decide it is time to change these procedures.

In my case study, students are beginning to lose focus and act out as the majority are approaching graduation. Behaviorism would work in only two approaches here. The ways to deal with this as I see it are through cueing and talking to the students directly. Cueing is a subtle way of attempting to get the students to behave without chastising the students outright. Cueing might include simply telling the students to get out their books and not to talk as they do it or something similar. If this does not work then I could ask the students to who I identify to be the instigators to come to the hallway and I can talk to them personally. This conversation should happen privately because calling them out in class may reinforce the behavior. This gives me the chance to explain why the behaviors need to stop and allows the student to explain why they acted out.

When reading this article I learned that constructivism is helpful when the writer said, "By engaging students in novel, relevant, hands-on activities, they become fully engaged in the learning. When this happens, the need to “manage” their behavior all but evaporates." Constructivism often appears in classrooms when students are able to use their hands-on activities to construct their knowledge base. This article tells the readers that when students are engaged in this way, they do not continue to misbehave. The article goes on to say that it is not enough just to show them a movie that captures their interest, as this does not keep children from acting out only engaging them with something that they can personally experiment with helps them.

I believe that behaviorism works better in most situations as it is easier to do and speaks right to the psychological nature of students. However, in this case I believe that constructivism would work better. I believe that getting the seniors involved with a hands on activity would engage them and prevent them from acting out. The study mentions a presentation, instead maybe the student could work on a website or wiki and create it to be posted on the internet for actual use. This would incorporate technology into the classroom, provide cross-curriculum training with web-design classes, and give the students a sense of connectivity to and responsibility for their work.

PLE Post #7

I observed a lesson that involved what the teacher explained to be choice boards. I would like to modify this type of project for my class. I could see using it for many units, but for the sake of this post, I am going to say i will use it for an American history class and the main ideas of reconstruction. I think it would be good to use this for reconstruction as many history lessons and classes gloss over reconstruction and focus on the civil war or jump all the way to World War I. My Choice board would have several didn't items ranging from guided practice to independent research. The reasoning behind having such a broad choice of activities is to provide for differentiation  in the lesson plan. Lower level students would do guided work like worksheets and using the book to answer questions. Average student could use projects that require outside research, while the highest level students might have to do research and open-ended questions to consider.

The skills that are involved in this lesson would be self-regulated learning. Students would be allowed to pick their assignments which they could pick based on interest. I could help guide them to the choices that would be best for them allowing me to have some say. The choices would be fairly relaxed in requirements, meaning that the choices would allow them to pick what type of sources they use. I would hope that they could explore their interests as it relates tt these topics so that they could learn what they want to about reconstruction while still allowing them to learn the required information. This articled guided me in thinking about this, especially pages 50-53.  

http://schoolwiresold.dentonisd.org/5222085105852403/lib/5222085105852403/diffedincludeall.pdf