Educational Psychology

In my field work, I see a lot of growth mindset being demonstrated. We are constantly telling kids, good work, you worked so hard, thanks for trying, etc... This is very important in an Autism classroom, as these students need the extra motivation. We try to stay away from telling kids they are wrong and instead just tell them to try again.  When students answer a question incorrectly, we don't give a lot of praise, but still say good trying, or thanks for trying, lets do it again though, and then continue with the activity and when they get an answer correct, you would give more excited sounds praise and saying things like, you did it, good work, your working so hard, awesome lets try again!  We have a lot of extrinsic motivators in our class, in preschool those are pretty easy to have, just a high five can be extremely motivating for the students, but we also have a lot of simple toys that the students are able to choose what they want to work for before beginning a l...

I think that in my field work class the children in the class are facing a few psychological crises. Trust vs. Mistrust being the biggest one. The kids are 3-5 years old mostly functioning well below that age level in a lot of areas of their life. The come to school everyday and have to leave their parents, who they trust the most to stay with us for multiple hours at a time. If the students weren’t able to trust the teachers in the classroom, they wouldn’t be able to learn. As teachers they have to teach the students trust by having them stick to a schedule so that the kids always know what is happening next. In my classroom, the teacher uses visual schedules, and we always do the same activity at the end of the day while we wait for parents to pick them up. And same with at drop off, the kids know the schedule and know right what they will start doing as soon as they are dropped off in class. I would say that we have a good mix of students in the identity diffusion and foreclosu...

In my field experience classroom, the teacher uses a lot of way to focus the students attention. First of all she will give focused attention to the student she is working with. They will go sit at a table in the corner away from all other students so she and the student are both able to focus on one another better. She also is careful to give plenty of wait time between asking a student to do a task before she goes into helping them with the task. She will give up to 30 seconds depending on the student. She will start out with a simple and recognizable task, and then slowly move into something more difficult.  (Chinking). She uses meaningful lessons to relate the new tasks to things that the students already know or are interested in which makes them more memorable for the students. She will have the students use maintenance rehearsal to repeat the task many times and in many settings for a long period of time (distributed practice) before declaring that they are able to functiona...

In my field experience, rather than just throw something new at the kids, the teacher tries to make the information fun. She tries to relate it back to something that they enjoy, for example, one students really struggles with colors, and he gets upset while working on them, so we assigned each color to a super hero, which he loves, and that helps him to assimilate the colors with the super heros which makes it so he has less disequilibrium about working on colors and we are able to work on them for longer periods of time before he decides he is uncompliant with them. I am struggling to relate this to accommodation though I know there is a relation, I think it would be where before super heros were just super heros and colors were just colors, but now they are a combined thing rather than two separate things. I think that in the classroom I am in most all of the kids are still in the sensorimotor stage, though their age says they would be in the preoperational stage. We do have a ...