Service Learning Reflection

Service-Learning through the CAP Program I am an Elementary Education major, and I would someday like to become a 4-6th grade teacher. Because of this, I chose to mentor a student for the EDU 223 service-learning project. I became a CAP mentor very late in the semester, but the three-hour training session taught me a lot about the way that students interact with themselves, their peers, and the authority figures in their lives. I have met with my 5th grade CAP student three times now, and I can see some of the topics of this class in the way that she behaves during our sessions. One of the kinds of development that I have seen while working with my student is cognitive. She is incredible at memory games, but struggles with spelling. She can

She and two of her classmates were hanging classwork on the bulletin board outside of the classroom. One student was spacing the papers out evenly across the bulletin board to begin with, and then realized that there wasn’t enough room on the board to put several inches between the papers. The other classmate began to take the papers off of the board and move them closer. When she saw this, my student started to help her classmate. This kind of observation of others leading to a change in behavior is an example of social cognitive theory. The classmates acted as models for my student, as they do every day during class. It is important to recognize when students are observing others who may be acting in a way that is not appropriate for the classroom. When this happens, teachers should take advantage of vicarious punishment by punishing the student who is acting out. This will, in turn, decrease the unwanted behavior in the other students in the class because they observed someone get punished for the behavior. The students will begin to expect that this behavior will be punished, even if they themselves have not been punished. In my classroom, I can use social cognitive theory to increase helpful and positive behavior by rewarding a few model students; the rest of the class will observe these rewards and connect them to the behavior by subconsciously recognizing the response-consequence contingency. Then, my students will begin to show those positive, wanted behaviors more often in the hope that they will also be rewarded. In doing this, I can to some extent control the behaviors that I see in my