Behavior Management in Education -- Empowerment, not Punishment

When having a conversation with an educational colleague who does not believe in the concept of behavior management for young children, one would first explain what exactly the concept of behavior management is.

Fundamentally, behavior management is an empowering educational tool by which students are rewarded for exhibiting positive and desirable behavior in the classroom towards others and in regards to their learning, and discouraged from exhibiting negative behaviors.

This is accomplished by only rewarding positive behavior examples and by punishing children not through punitive measures so much as withholding the stimulus of a reward.

The strategy of behavior modification can be employed in a variety of age-appropriate settings, varying the demonstrable reward with the child's level of intellectual and emotional maturity. The issues of age appropriateness is particularly important to the theory of behavior management because the child must comprehend, not...
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