MGMT Blog #4

 Reward systems are particularly interesting to me, as I work with similar systems almost every day of the week for my current job. Right now, I work as a registered behavior technician within direct in-home settings for clients with autism and ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder). To be short, this is the hardest job I have ever had. Essentially, my position is to complete programs with clients that reinforce the extinction of maldaptive, or undesirable, behaviors. This relies so heavily on reinforcement and reward systems, so it was intriguing to generalize some things that I already know into the setting of a classroom and bring in new thoughts from Gus' video and the Kovalik and Anderman articles. 

To be upfront, I still do not feel confident on my exact approach to reward systems in my future classroom. In fact, I actually have incredibly mixed feelings regarding them. As of now, I lean towards the idea that reward systems will not be something I rely on for classroom management because my personal philosophy leads me to believe that intrinsic motivation is inherently valuable in a student's life. By using rewards frequently, especially in a controlling context (as described in Anderman's article), students develop motivation for reasons that do not promote efficacy. I plan on asking myself the question, "Does this motivate my students to learn and explore, or to achieve ________?". 

In contrast, I have seen positive and negative reinforcement used in ways that do, in my opinion, increase the kind of desirable learning we are seeking from students. Anderman describes positive reinforcement sometimes as a reward, but does not describe rewards as reinforcement. I plan on using reinforcement, mostly informational praise, as my primary way to manage a classroom. I disagree with Anderman's opinion on praise needing to be infrequent. I would argue that as long as praise is credible and genuine, it should be used whenever applicable! Gus and Kovalik discuss the importance of the LifeSkills vocabulary, which is a something I also plan on relying on. I have personally seen this done in a classroom before and I absolutely loved it. It is my hope that my students will retreat from the desire to build themselves up in order to lift up their peers every day. Lastly, I want to express my thoughts on the idea of using a practical "money/currency" system in upper elementary. This is something that I remember having in my own fifth grade classroom. I am interested in this idea, as I see it's practicality in every day life. I feel like fifth grade is a great time to begin teaching students how to appropriately budget and deal with money. I would like to do more research regarding this topic.