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.