week three module #3

This week in Woolfolk we have been reading about classical conditioning and operant conditioning. As a psychology major I am familiar with Pavlovian but by no means an expert. There are also respondents that go along with classical conditioning (p.248) which are reactions to the condition. An example of classical conditioning is when my daughter ate cheddar cheese flavored crackers that she had eaten many times before but this time after she ate them she woke up later that night vomiting. Later that week week she was diagnosed with the stomach flu but she is convinced the cheese crackers made her sick and caused her to wake up that night feeling sick. Now when she smells the crackers she get nauseous (which is the response to the smell that she believes made her sick before p. 248).
With operant conditioning people learn something due to their environment (Woolfolk p. 250) which in some cases there can be a reinforcer one example would be if a student who is rewarded with praise when her/she raises their hand as opposed to shouting out an answer. A negative reinforcer would be when a student is caught with a cell phone in class and it is taken away from the student until the end of the day (p. 251).

In chapter thirteen we read about culturally responsive management (p. 501)this is something that if I had been not seen for myself I might have thought was incorrect or maybe even bias. In the classroom observation with Ms. Martinez I saw first hand how an educator culturally responded to her students. Ms. Martinez was not rude or disrespectful by any means but just the words she uses are not how the teachers in other school speak to their students who are majority white. She says things such as "quit playin' I don't have time for all that mess" or "quit actin' a fool we have work to do" the students respond with a chuckle and say "ok Ms. Martinez we gonna quit". In my daughters classroom we hear our teachers say things like "Ok class today we have to really take the time to get through this lesson it is very important" or "that behavior is unacceptable" the students in this class respond. Ms. Martinez says when she began teaching she had no idea what to expect and her students had no respect for her and never responded to her she says she needed to change the way she thought and reacted to certain things as well. She basically needed to talk to them in a way they knew how to respond so she could reach them. over the years this has become much better and she can maintain better relationships where the students do not feel as if she is just there to judge them as an outsider.