Virtual Teacher

Practically every day, school-age children experience a variety of troubling events and stress both at school and at home. These troublesome events may involve peers, significant adults such as teachers, and/or family members. It is widely documented in the psycho-educational literature that children’s difficulty in handling these troubling events and stressors in their lives result in emotional, behavioral, and/or physical health problems. Children feel stress when they believe that they lack the emotional and/or physical resources, or coping skills they need to handle the event successfully. The less able a child feels to cope with a troubling event, the more stress the child feels. In other words, the event is not what triggers stress in the child; stress and troubling feelings are triggered by the child’s perception, accurate or not, that she cannot cope with the event.   Forman (1993) define coping skills as sets of information and learned behaviors that the child can u...

  An expectation is a belief that some future event will happen. The cognitive literature agrees that our expectations greatly influence both the way we feel and the way we behave. Consciously or not, teachers constantly cue students as to what our behavior expectations are. We exhibit hundreds of nonverbal cues, some as subtle as tilting up the head, raising the eyebrows, head nods, the breathing rate, eye contact (or absence of eye contact), and/or the dilation of nostrils. Other cues are more obvious, including a certain tone of voice and our verbal messages, and children notice those cues and messages. Teachers’ expectations often play a major role in bringing about the behavior we expect from individual students. We transmit our higher or lower expectations to each individual student, and soon children begin to reflect the image that we have created, and may be inadvertently reinforcing in them. On most occasions, we are not even aware that we are expecting and communicating...

In our last blog, Should Teachers Give Rewards to Students for Good Behavior? A Psycho-Educational Perspective , we discussed the importance of linking rewards with behavioral goals to maximize the efficiency of our behavior management plan. Now, I want to elaborate on the technique of goal setting to regulate students’ motivation, but first, a brief description of the concept of goals: The concept of goals is at the heart of most theories of motivation. Goals are internal (within the individual), as opposed to rewards that are externally regulated, and represent something that we want to accomplish; simply put, the goal is the result or outcome that we are trying to reach. We call this mental representation or goal our aim , purpose , or objective . The concept of goal is a motivational concept that influences behavior in several ways: Goals narrow our attention to goal-relevant activities and away from what we perceive is irrelevant to the goal.   Goals guide our behavior ...

Rewarding students for good behavior is a popular classroom discipline procedure. Teachers of habitually disruptive students like using rewards because, in a well-structured reward system, they have the potential of winning students’ compliance fast. Advocates of using rewards to discipline students with habitually disruptive behaviors claim that rewards promote compliance and stop misbehavior. Opponents of rewards state that rewarding students, an externally oriented procedure (the teacher regularly administers the rewards, not the student) are a way of controlling and manipulating children’s behavior that does little to change permanently the disruptive behavior. In other words, the short-term effect of stopping misbehavior does not translate into a long-term effect of helping children grow and develop better-adjusted ways of behaving. Alfie Kohn, the author of Punished by Rewards states that rewards can be seen as punishment in the sense that rewards both manipulate behav...

In the broader sense, psycho-education refers to the education given to people who are living with emotional disturbances. The rationale behind a psycho-educational approach is that, with a clear understanding of the mental condition, and self-knowledge of own strengths, community resources, and coping skills, the individual is better equipped to deal with the problem and to contribute to his or her own emotional well-being. The core psycho-educational principle is education has a role in emotional and behavioral change . With an improved understanding of the causes and effects of the problem, psycho-education broadens the person’s perception and interpretation of the problem, and this refined view positively influences the individual’s emotions and behavior. Consequently, improved awareness of causes and effects leads to improved self-efficacy (the person believing that he is able to manage the situation), and improved self-efficacy leads to better self-control. In other words, the ...

This is my first posting. It is not going to be the last, and I hope you join me. Psycho-education is an orientation to the education of students with emotional and behavioral problems within the context of developmental and psychological theories. Blending cognitive (thoughts), affective (feelings), and behavioral components, the psycho-educational or therapeutic model gives teachers skilled management strategies to help children change dysfunctional behaviors and develop effective coping skills. With over 12 million children nationwide classified as emotionally disturbed, and millions others exhibiting habitually disruptive behaviors in the classroom, the time is now for teachers and school related personnel to develop the child guidance skills necessary to outreach and teach this challenging population. Focusing on the unique socio-emotional needs of the habitually disruptive and acting-out child, a teacher trained in psycho-education is able to develop an adult-child relations...