Picture this.
Your sitting in a child sized chair, there is 19 kids buzzing around the small classroom. Your sitting at a table with Snap-cube blocks. There are 5 kids sitting with you building towers as tall as they possibly can. Suddenly one student is crying, and the other 
student is adding her blocks to his tower. He keeps taking blocks right out of your hands and from other students just to make his tower taller. He continues to do this again and again, and you are supposed to use positive reinforcement! What would you do in this situation?
Well when I was faced with this situation, I had to ask myself “Does positive reinforcement really work?
What do the experts say?
According to research, positive reinforcement can help students be more on task and behave better if you use it correctly. In another article I read , it stated that reinforcing the positive behavior helps increase the likelihood that the behavior will be repeated in the future, but I did not find research that helped me handle the situation I was provided with. I also spoke with my mentor teacher about the situation. She has been teaching a very long time and is extremely knowledgeable about this age group of students. She told me that in situations where a child does not respond to positive reinforcement she uses a different strategy to keep her students safe. She also uses time out when it is appropriate for students.
Difference Between Positive and Negative Reinforcement
Overview of reinforcement and its subtypes! Check us out on Facebook for DAILY FREE REVIEW QUESTIONS and updates! (https://www.facebook.com/medschoolmad…) …
Reflection:
In this situation, I had to do something that was not positive reinforcement because the student would not listen to me. I asked for him to give the blocks back multiple times and he continued to rip them away from other students, so I asked the lead teacher for help since I did not know how to handle the situation. The student was not behaving appropriately and should not have been allowed to continue to take things from other students. I reminded him to make a good choice so many times, but enough is enough. She carried him to the calm down chair (where he decided to throw things at me from the calm down kit) and he had to talk to one of the teachers about his actions before he was allowed to come back to playing. In my research I found that there really isn’t a way to use positive reinforcement to help behavior in the moment, only beforehand. I plan on continuing my research and using positive reinforcement to help students increase their behaviors overall!
Resources:
Reames, Heather1, heathermarie417@gmail.co., and Cynthia F. 2.cdicar2@lsu.ed. DiCarlo. “Using Positive Reinforcement to Increase Attentive Behavior and Correct Task Performance in Preschoolers during Extra Curricular Activities.” Journal of Teacher Action Research, vol. 4, no. 2, Spring 2018, pp. 1–9. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=sso&db=eue&AN=128943466&site=ehost-live&scope=site.