Dawn's Blog

 Today was a pretty cool day at Youth Villages - Inner Harbour Campus. This morning we had the end of our tutor training, where we learned about how to manage young people's behavior in the classroom.  I thought that our speaker had a lot of good things to say and she was very knowledgeable, but she might have wanted to add one more thing to her list of classroom management techniques. As she demonstrated her positive reinforcement methods to us as if we were a classroom of kids (giving us candy when we were paying attention, praising those who asked her questoins), our behavior basically turned into that of junior high kids. Several of us started doodling, some people were making comments to each other from across the room, and we had a really hard time organizing ourselves into two groups.

So what did I really learn today? Well, first of all, that if I write my name on my paper like I'm told, I will get a KitKat. But more importantly, I learned that people often behave in accordance with how you treat them and expect them to behave. And that's something worth knowing.