B-day: Session 3

Affect:

Having unsuccessfully attempted to teach a lesson on the commutative, associative, and distributive properties for two consecutive session, I decided that creating another lesson focusing on the foundation skills for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing fractions. 

Once again, I felt confident in my ability to teach this information effectively to my tutee.  Having already implemented a similar lesson to both an ELL student and struggling math learner, I felt like these experiences prepared me for situations such as this one.  My hopes were that by understanding the terms, factor, multiple, lowest common denominator, and least common multiple, Destiny would become more confident in her algebra skills and therefore be more successful in Module F.

Behavior:

My assigned B-day tutee Destiny was absent today, so I worked with a student named Portia.  Right away I realized that the student would most likely be an verbal/auditory learner, as she was extremely sociable.  I was going to begin our session making flashcards for the terms, factor, multiple, LCD, and LCM, however Portia explained that she had already learned the material.  So we spend the remainder of the class period completing her homework covering ratios. 

As the lesson progressed it was clear that Portia’s social tendencies were presenting issues.  She attempted to have conversations with her peers sitting close to her, interrupting both of our sessions.  However, after a few re-directions she was back on task.  In order to engage her in solving her homework problems, I let the student write out her work on my portable white boards.  This small gesture made her extremely happy.  Towards the end of our session, Portia became board with her work once again and attempted texting on her cell phone.  After numerous attempts to keep her doing this, I offered her my cell phone to play a math game covering fractions, once again satiating her off-task behavior.

Content:

As taught and discussed in a course on applied behavior analysis, the behavior Portia demonstrated could be described as an escape behavior (attempting escape from a given task through off-task behavior).  After speaking with the student she explained that her cause for escape was the number or problems presented in her homework assignment.  Through observations throughout the session, this explanation was proven correct as Portia often attempted off-task behaviors after two or three problems were completed.  I believe that small brain breaks provided after every three successfully completed problem would have been beneficial for the student’s overall productivity.