Dr. Arrastía-Chisholm: Professor Mom

It's the 5th week of school and by now we have covered behaviorism and operant conditioning in all three of the classes I teach. I teach that we reinforce productive, desirable behavior before punishing undesirable behavior, and that removal punishment (taking away a privilege or object) should be used before resorting to presentation punishment (scolding or a negative consequence). This is counterintuitive, especially because many of us were raised in environments in which corporal punishment was normative. Discussion is always freeform in my classes and comments are encouraged. I present concrete situations from real life, like my daughter drawing on the wall or a student not being able to stay seated during on-task time. Inevitably spanking comes up in these educational psychology discussions. "If you just pop them, then they will stop immediately... If I got hit, I never did the thing again... little kids are too young to understand other consequences..." As a mot...

Being a professor can often be rewarding. This isn't to say that the salary is high or that the thank you notes pile up every day. It's all about the small victories and the change overtime. This past week I have had both! The small victory included a student coming into my office and exclaiming that they changed their major to education! This is the same student that had come in earlier in the semester having trouble applying educational psychology to her field. Instead, she just changed her field to education... More importantly, this week I have gotten to be apart of some change overtime. Over the past few months I have made it a mission to connect with the Valdosta community. This involved volunteering for the attendance matters campaign at Maceo Horne Learning Center (the alternative school in town), participating in Family Fun Night with my counselor education students at Pinevale Elementary, and working with Valdosta City Schools on their social emotional learning init...

I am writing as my students take their first exam. Out of five exams, I drop the lowest grade in this class; I make sure to remind students of this policy before they begin. Some exclaimed that I'd probably be dropping this exam for many students because they didn't know what they were getting themselves into. We can ll relate to the jitters that accompany the first exam in any class. It isn't until after the first exam that you learn the assessment style of that particular instructor. I'm looking through the exam just now and realized that I left two answers from the answer key on the exam. So the grades will definitely be inflated. This is my first time giving an exam in class since starting at VSU. Before this semester I opted to give online tests, but decided to switch it up this semester and compare the results. I had forgotten all the details that go into a traditional paper and pencil test... Test anxiety as the first test comes around, scantrons, accommoda...