What Are Doug's Goals For Managing Classroom Behavior

As a teacher, one must be able to address a student’s educational needs by choosing a strategy that will best benefit that student.

In regards to Mr. McGrady’s student, Doug, he is a 7-year old boy who loves science, dinosaurs and robots, hands-on activities and playing games on the computer. He also has a fascination with Legos. However, Doug has a difficult time performing well in school, gets easily frustrated with writing assignments, and rarely starts assignments by himself; instead, he is found playing with his Legos or drawing robots. Because of Doug’s difficulties in the classroom, his teacher, Mr. McGrady, has selected two goals for Doug to achieve within the next three months: begin independent work assignments promptly and increase the number of completed assignments.

While Mr. McGrady has selected two goals for Doug to achieve, one strategy would work best for Doug; criterion-specific rewards. “Criterion-specific rewards can be used as part of a proactive intervention for managing classroom behavior” (The IRIS Center, n.d., page 10). In the case with Doug, he may earn rewards such as playing educational and science games on the computer, drawing pictures of robots and dinosaurs, and doing different hands-on activities like building with Legos, when he completes the two target behaviors Mr. McGrady selected

As Kaiser & Sklar Rasminsky state, “Positive reinforcement is a reward that follows a behavior and usually increases its frequency and intensity” (Kaiser & Sklar Rasminsky, 2012, page 182). If Mr. McGrady would use criterion-specific rewards with Doug, he would more than likely see an improvement in Doug’s classroom performance and Doug would reach the goals that were set for him by his