I had one faulty somehow dysfunctional computer in the classroom I was teaching and would give it to the student who had misbehaved the previous day. The rest of the students would get well-functioning laptops for the day. The behaviors that I wanted to reinforce included being attentive in class and not disturbing others. However, I unintentionally reinforced the behavior of creativity among the students because students who received the faulty computer would try innovative ways of working with it. It reached a point where students no longer cared about getting the faulty computer because their focus had now turned to finding creative ways of working with it.
This reinforcement paved the way for a situation whereby students would intentionally misbehave in order to be assigned the hard-to-work-with computer during the next lesson. The students competed to make noise and attract my attention while doing so. The class became chaotic and I eventually noticed that the punishment I had been administering was no longer working to produce the intended results. Rather, it was producing the opposite of what I had intended it to.
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The desired behavior in this situation was to encourage students to be attentive in class, including refraining from disturbing others and making noise when I am teaching. One way I can bring about this behavior differently is through a positive, rather than negative reinforcer. The specific reinforcement that I would involve having the whole class sing a praise song for the student who maintained the greatest composure and attention in the class every week. During the same time, the student would be rewarded with candies.
