Parents or teachers mistakenly think that if they are
not giving rewards or consequences, but merely
modeling appropriate replacement behavior or language they are using ' gentle
or positive discipline and certainly not being ' behaviorist'.
The Self Determination Theory - SDT
teaches that if kids needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness are being
met , kids become committed , intrinsically motivated , competent and caring people.
Teaching replacement behaviors by modeling
as Alfie Kohn shows below ignores the whole child – autonomy , the context of
the behavior and values- relatedness.
CPS – collaborative problem solving does
not focus on behaviors but on the
concerns of kids in the context of unsolved problems. Teaching replacement
behaviors instead of focusing on concerns and problems , the context, fails to
address the kid's need for competence.
Here are 2 excepts from Alfie Kohn on
Modeling behavior
It’s widely accepted that, in order for
children to learn to be good people, they should be shown how to act. Parents in particular
try to set an example by the way they treat others. And, indeed, some studies
suggest that children are more likely to donate to charity if they’ve watched
someone else do so. On the other hand, modeling doesn’t always work on its own.
In fact, there is evidence that “exposure to paragons of helpfulness may
undermine the intrinsic motivation to help.”[3] Young adults who watched highly
helpful people came to view themselves as less altruistic.
Part of the
problem is that modeling is a concept rooted in behaviorism. It began as a
refinement of the principles of operant and classical conditioning. Those
principles couldn’t account for the fact that people sometimes learn from what
they’ve observed, acting in ways for which they themselves received no
reinforcement. But modeling, like reinforcing, is just another technique for
getting someone to behave in a particular way; it doesn’t necessarily promote a
dedication to, or an understanding of, that behavior. Because mere imitation
doesn’t achieve those more ambitious goals, we need to supplement the showing
with telling — the precise inverse of what I’ve proposed for academic instruction
in classrooms.
It may make sense
not only to use explanation as a separate strategy alongside modeling, but to
combine the two approaches into what might be called “deep modeling.” Here, we
not only set an example for children but try to make it clear to them what
we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Verbalizing is a familiar strategy to many
of us, from self-talk therapies to the technique known as “think aloud” that’s
intended to help students comprehend more of what they read. Deep modeling is
different in that the narration is coming from someone else.
Consider the challenge of real-world
ethical conundrums. It’s fine for parents to try to model honesty and
compassion for their children, but what happens when those two values seem to
pull in opposite directions – for example, when telling the truth may hurt
someone’s feelings? Similarly, it’s easy to say that kids should look out for
other people’s interests, but to what extent must they give up something they
enjoy so that someone else will benefit?
We can let
children know how we think (and feel) our way through
similar dilemmas by describing to them the factors that we consider in making
such decisions: the relevance of our previous experiences, the principles from
which we’re operating, and all the thoughts and emotions that we take into
account. From watching and listening to us, kids not only learn more about how
we try to live a moral life; they also figure out that morality is rarely
cut-and-dried.
Deep modeling
might be thought of as a way of taking children “backstage.” To that extent,
it’s very much like writing — or conducting an authentic science experiment —
in front of them. They’re able to experience what happens before (or behind or
beneath) the ethical decisions that adults make, the essays they publish, and
the scientific principles they discover — all of which are usually presented to
children as so many faits accomplis.
But any time educators (or parents) frame
the issue in terms of the need to change a child's behavior, they are unwittingly
buying into a larger theory, one that excludes what many of us would argue are
the things that really matter: the child's thoughts and feelings, needs and
perspectives, motives and values -- the things, in short, that result in
certain behaviors. The behavior is only what's on the surface; what matters is
the person who does the
behaving... and why she does so.
Here are two
students in two different classrooms, each of whom just gave half his lunch to
someone else. The first student did so in the hope that the teacher would
notice this and praise him: "Isn't that a nice thing to do! I'm so proud
of you! I really appreciate your sharing like that!" The second student
did so without knowing or caring whether the teacher saw him: He was simply
concerned that the kid sitting next to him might go hungry.
The two behaviors
are identical. What matters are the reasons and feelings that lie beneath.
Discipline programs can (temporarily) change behavior, but they cannot help
people to grow. The latter requires a very different orientation in the
classroom: the ability to look "through" a given action in order that
we can understand the motives that gave rise to it as well as figuring out how
to have some effect on those motives.
Consider, then, a
very specific contrast between two ways of responding to a child who shared his
lunch. The teacher who is preoccupied with the behavior -- and who seeks, in
this case, to produce more of it -- would probably resort to praise. A different
approach, derived from Martin Hoffman's work on "inductive
discipline," would be to help the child attend tto how his decision to
share has affected someone else (in this case, the recipient of his food).
"Boy, would you look at Jaime's face! He is one happy guy now that he has
enough to eat, isn't he?"
The message of praise
is: I [the person with the power] approve of what you did, so you should do it
again. It is a way of reinforcing a behavior and, in the process,
probably strengthening the child's dependence on adult approval. "Look at
Jaime's face," on the other hand, is concerned with helping the sharer to
experience the effects of sharing and to come to see himself as the kind of
person who wants to make other people feel good -- irrespective of verbal
rewards.
Even when this
particular response isn't used, our goal should be nothing less than assisting
children in constructing an image of themselves as decent people. Programs or
practices that focus on behaviors -- even on promoting "positive"
behaviors -- can't achieve that goal. In fact, they make that result less
likely, partly because of how rewards tend to undermine people's interest in
whatever they had to do to snag the reward, and partly because a behavioral
focus in itself is both limited and limiting.
-- adapted from Beyond Discipline: From Compliance
to Co
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