Professional Stance

Pre-Strategy	Post-Strategy
PBIS (Positive Behavior Intervention System) school where positive behaviors are cherished and negative behaviors are ignored at the beginning but expectations are re-taught over and over until enough modeling and practice changes the situation.	Effective socializer-As suggested by Brophy. I interacted in different scenarios to gain social attractiveness.
Great personal relationships with the students.	Have firm but flexible limits when ignoring negative behavior while I re-taught, modeled and practiced class expectations.
Use humor in class.	Project positive expectations during class and other student-teacher interactions.
Understood why Mohammed acted the way he did. (Avoid tasks, ability/skill related and peer attention seeking)	Very difficult to stay positive while obvious problem behaviors were occurring in my class.
	Calmer, projecting positive expectations, modeling more.
	I accept Mohammed as an individual but not all of his behavior.  Separate the behavior from the student.
	More aware of teaching approaches and positive to negative interaction ratios.

 I had to keep reminding myself that it is a learning process and it takes a long time to correct a behavior that was learned in a certain way. I also noticed that by trying to give more positive specific reinforcement to Mohammed, I also gave more feedback to the rest of my class.

I wish I had more ego strength as mentioned in Brophy’s book. It is sometimes difficult to not take these behaviors as a personal offense and walk away from the situation and come back with a better plan on how to deal with the behavior. This is particularly true for me with defiance. When Mohammed bluntly said “no” to my request, I felt very disrespected and it was difficult to contain myself (although I had to manage so I did!)

When feeling challenged, I think one of attributes from Brophy’s list that are not present in my stance is ego strength. It is difficult to move away from the room authority figure when a student is being defiant. We need to avoid power struggles with students, because no one wins in this situation.  I also see a lack of firm but flexible limits with the rules with Mohammed in particular. He did not want to follow the rules, and at the beginning I wasn’t sure I taught them explicitly enough to him.