Mr. DuBe tends to use positive reinforcement to try and elicit desired behaviors from his students. Most of the teaching that Mr. DuBe does comes in the form of lecturing to the class about what it is that they are learning that day, but he structures his lessons around having lots of opportunities for student engagement. When he was teaching the students about verbs on Monday, for example, he would put up sentences and have the students offer their own verbs to complete the sentences in a way that made sense. When students would share something that worked, Mr. DuBe would say something along the lines of “awesome, that’s a perfect choice for this sentence” or “yeah, that should work here!” His responses were generally enthusiastic, always supportive, and were also age appropriate: he didn’t act as though the students had discovered god’s gift to the sentence, but he made it clear that he was excited they had shared and that they had shared something correct.

When students shared something that was not correct, or was not quite what he was looking for, Mr. DuBe would not put the students down in any way, but he would also not respond with the same enthusiasm he had when they shared something more along the lines of what he had in mind. He tended to say things like “Okay, that’s a good idea, but not quite” or “that’s definitely  on the right track… anyone else?” He was careful to not give a reward for sharing answers that weren’t correct, but he was also careful to give feedback in a way that critiqued what the student shared, not the student or the fact that they shared in the first place. I don’t know to what extent Mr. DuBe’s explicit understanding of teaching hinges on behaviorism and its principles, but he seems to have a firm grasp over how his words and behaviors impact the future actions of his students.

One example of negative reinforcement in Mr. DuBe’s class came when a student named Landon asked if he could go to the nurse to get his medication. When Price was walking him to the nurse’s office, Landon split and ran away from price and left school. I am quite sure that, from now on, Landon will lose the privilege to go to the bathroom during class time even if he promises not to leave. Other students, like Wren, who asked to go to the bathroom later that day, maintain the privilege of being allowed to go to the bathroom during class. While I haven’t seen it in action, this is a good example of a time where Mr. DuBe could use negative reinforcement to motivate positive behavior: because he knows that Wren will come back to class after she uses the bathroom, Mr. DuBe removes the rule that would keep her from going to the bathroom as long as she continues to exhibit good behavior.

As far as I feel about student learning, I would say that I am a behaviorist. I think a lot in my everyday life and my interactions with those around me about how what I do and say impacts the feelings of others, and therefore impacts their future behaviors whether they are around me or not. I think having this as a general understanding of my social interactions leads me to naturally apply it to the realm of education and learning, so while I have very little experience with teaching and the application of these theories, I definitely lean towards behaviorism. While I am unable to recall too many specific instances of receiving positive reinforcement or negative feedback when I was in school, I wholeheartedly buy into the concept that our interactions with others, and especially authority figures (like teachers), shape how we feel about the environments we operate within and who we become as a person. It makes a lot of sense to me that someone would be shaped by the people around them growing up, and it also gives me a lot of hope to think that, even if only from an idyllic standpoint, I will be able to positively shape future students.

I thoroughly enjoyed this week of tutoring, as I was able to really help some students who were having a difficult time with their work. On Monday I helped two students figure out their paper proposals and to get a grasp of thesis statements, and while this was very challenging it felt good to see the students develop and get better at what we were doing over the course of the class. On Wednesday, I worked with a student named Yohmi on her outline for the upcoming paper, and we spent a lot of time nailing topic sentences: what they are, how they work, and what it actually feels like to develop three of them in conjunction with the thesis. Working with Yohmi was exciting and also a challenge to work with because she has learned English as a second language, and while she is certainly fluent, she seems to do most of her thinking in Spanish (she communicated this to me multiple times). I let her know that I would be happy to help her think about topic sentences in general in Spanish and then we could work together to write the sentences in English, but she didn’t seem to be too interested in that, so we didn’t speak any Spanish together. Explaining topic sentences to Yohmi posed a distinct challenge because, unlike some other students who were simply unable to grasp concepts, her difficulties lay in working with the sentences in another language.

We managed to work through her barriers to understanding, and by the end of class she seemed to have a really firm grasp over the content we had been working on. It was very rewarding to go through a complete process like this, and also for her to leave class with an end result that she was proud of.