I think that Mrs. McDonald could make more of an effort to incorporate positive reinforcement into her teaching practice. In the Socratic Seminar, for instance, she used a model where the students would have an open discussion instead of her calling on them. While this was meant to facilitate a more natural conversation, it denied her the opportunity to encourage the students after they spoke. In general, I have not noticed her thanking students for their participation in the way that we have discussed in class. I have rarely heard her praise students out loud. Perhaps she does it in other ways, like in her grading of their assignments, but students are rarely recognized for their contributions.

Mrs. McDonald attempts to incorporate punishment in her class with her phone policy. When she sees a student on their phone, she will take it and hold it at her desk for the rest of the class period. However, this is less effective than it could have been because of the lack of a consistent reinforcement schedule. Most of the time, the students are able to use their phone subtly enough that she does not notice. Instead of receiving a punishment every time they give the operant response (using their phone when they are not supposed to), the students get away with their phone use a majority of the time. The treatment is thus far less effective than it would be if the student was punished on a consistent schedule.

This week, the students were working in groups to create a UN-style document on the rights of migrants. This group work allowed for modeling to occur. Mrs. McDonald knows that in this untracked classroom, some students are going to have much more familiarity and comfort coming up with their own policy ideas and having the language to articulate them. By working in groups, the students who are uncomfortable with this style of writing get to see the work of their peers before attempting to do it for themselves. Many of the students were struggling with the way that UN documents make suggestions rather than laws. They wanted to say things like “Receiving countries must give refugees health care” rather than “Receiving countries should give refugees health care”. Mrs. McDonald also provided an example resolution that gave them another model of this language. I could see that many of the students were confused when she was describing it to them, but once they had some example text in front of them, they understood how to do it.

I would say that I lean more towards cognitivist explanations than behaviorist ones. I think the idea that the only thing worth studying is what can be directly observed is limiting and that behaviors should be just one part of a larger cognitive framework. I like that cognitivist perspectives take culture more into account. While behaviorism is certainly a useful thing to understand, taking a purely behaviorist perspective is inherently limiting.

It was a difficult week in the global studies class, although I was unable to observe the incident that I’m going to describe directly, I was there the day before it happened when the students were preparing for their discussion and the day after when there was some fallout. On Tuesday, Mrs. McDonald told me that she switched to this UN activity after the election of Donald Trump as a way to avoid her classes from debating the basic rights of immigrants in a way that would upset students from immigrant backgrounds. Because the UN’s opinions all begin with the understanding that all humans have a set of given rights, it allows the students to think about actual policy considerations with the assumption that migrants, like everyone else, deserve a certain standard of living. The students spent Tuesday doing research and writing their discussion frameworks in groups. However, on Wednesday, the day where I am out of the classroom, the group discussions went off the rails. Mrs. McDonald did not hear the comments either, but two of the boys in one of the groups began saying things about how they didn’t think countries should have to provide anything to immigrants (in even more inflammatory terms). Mrs. McDonald learned that this was happening because a student in the group whose family immigrated to the US relatively recently was upset and talked to her about it after class.

On Thursday, she tried to address the situation at the start of the class. However, she spoke in pretty vague terms about it and since most of the students were not in the group that had the issue, I could tell they didn’t know what was going on. She sent me to work with a few students to go through all of the group documents and “double-check” them (make sure that they were free of any hurtful rhetoric before they were read aloud to the class). I spoke with Mrs. McDonald after the class and I could tell that she was really disheartened. She told me that before 2016, she would do a panel discussion with this unit where immigrant students could share their stories with the class and other students could ask questions. However, she had to stop doing it after Trump’s election because immigrant students were afraid or unwilling to share personal details about their stories. She sees herself as having an important role in shaping the beliefs of her students and she works hard to make the classroom a safe space for all of them. When situations like this happen, it can be difficult to move forward. She said she was planning on pulling the two students saying the harmful thing into her office during one of her flex times to speak more to them. I hope that that will be a productive conversation and that other students in the class do not feel less comfortable being there. I am thankful that Mrs. McDonald is working to actively rectify the situation rather than just hoping it fixes itself.