The Parent Teacher Organization

Those who attended the Parent Teacher Organization both promoted two contrasting plans for intervening in the very negative and harmful behavior that is occurring within the school. The behaviors being focused on are stealing, bullying and theft. One group of parents suggested to use consequences that are intended to be punishments on the negative, while the other group hopes to focus solely on reinforcing the student’s positive behaviors. Both groups of parents seem to have forgotten everything that they have learned in their Learning and Conditioning course, or they were simply passively listening to their professor because both of their proposals have numerous faults that deem their plans inadequate. Each plan could be detrimental, in differing ways, to the student population that they are attempting to improve.
The group of parents that believe that going the strict, disciplinarian approach are attempting to negate the student’s harmful behaviors head on through means of public humiliation, suspension and police intervention, and thankfully not through the means of corporal punishment by the schools. The use of humiliation should be initially ruled out for a variety of reasons. The humiliation could be potentially classically condition the student to have high anxiety in social situations if the student is humiliated numerous times or the student’s behavior could be positively reinforced if the student’s motivation for acting out is gaining attention from their peers and the faculty at the school. The parents intend on decreasing the likelihood of these behaviors to occur again in the future by their proposed punishments. But what the parents must realize is that simply punishing the behaviors only suppresses or restrains the...

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...g, H., et al., 1970). The parents must also be aware that their desired reinforcements and punishments will be be only effective when the discriminative stimuli that were present during learning are present. The teachers must communicate how they are dealing with the children at the school, so that the parents can continue to enact the same consequences for the behaviors that the students are displaying. The parents should also look to partially reinforce their children’s acceptable behavior, this will allow the behavior to recur without having to reinforce the behavior every time (Abad, M.J.F., et al., 2009). The teachers must be aware that the aggression and theft will most likely increase dramatically initially, but the behavior will then decrease to an acceptable level if the forms of consequences that teachers select are successful (Lerman, D.C., et al., 1999).