Describe a teaching and learning situation from your experience in which you think behaviorism applies. What inputs trigger the behavior? What are the results? Critique your example, what aspects of the teaching and learning situation are not explained by a behaviorist approach?
Sep 1, 2016 Sep 1 at 7:50am
Prior to doing the reading, I penned this last week. It's raw but I believe illustrative of commonly practiced behaviorism. The first example involved "learning" by punishment of yours truly when I was a young Army recruit at Ft. Leonard Wood. The second was my application of a reward for a conditioned response, volunteerism, as I began teaching English to university students in Changzhou, China. I'll bullet the negative (NEG) & positive (POS) experiences under their respective sections.
Learning/teaching situation
NEG - As initial entry training (IET) privates, young soldiers were not allowed to smoke.
POS - As a new teacher in China, I found it difficult to persuade intimidated college freshmen to raise their hands & speak.
Triggers
NEG - Severe penalties, including physical fitness punishments (like hundreds of push ups, of course) were given to privates violating the no-smoking regulations. As a cocky & careless young GI, I was caught smoking. On a frigid, snowy Missouri evening in January, for my punishment I was required to move a yards of firewood - stacked three to four feet high - from one side of the long barracks building to other. I worked from around five in the evening until I collapsed just after midnight.
POS - As prompted by one of the veteran English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teachers at the Changzhou Textile Garment Institute of University City, I offered Hershey's Kisses (authentic American chocolates being a rare & expensive treat in the People's Republic of China!) for students' contributions - one chocolate for simply raising their hands; two for using full sentences; & three Kisses for English that was laughable (hopefully correct), entertaining and/or profound enough to spur additional students' responses.
Results
NEG - Very few soldiers were caught sneaking a cigarette - regardless of how many some of our drill instructors smoked. After witnessing my punishment - fellow recruits were able to see my labor of shame from the warmth of the barracks bay window - young soldiers were even more surreptitious of their own smoking habits. I was never caught smoking again. What do you know?! It worked.
POS - After the initial blushing & feigned indignance, Chinese college kids engaged in more hand-raising; students tried to surpass simple one-word answers & build complete, grammatical sentences in response to my questions; public speaking fear was reduced; & the practice created an environment of friendly competition & playful English retorts.
Critique
NEG - The Non-commissioned officers (NCOs) doling out these punishments have no idea what's going on in the young recruits' minds. Perhaps the soldier being punished might be thinking, "Hmm, I really deserve this. Must be more disciplined . . . somehow!" Or, just maybe, the shamed recruit might be planning a way to get even with this old guy, or the whole Army, for such unjust treatment somewhere down the long dirty road. Yes, in my case, the unwanted behavior was curbed. It certainly wasn't permanent & only increased my guarded-ness of the prohibited habit. I'm not sure it would work at all on some of the "thicker," stubborn young soldiers with which I have had the pleasure of serving.
POS - Of course, I really had no idea what was going on in these Chinese kids minds. Was I truly embarrassing them but their weakness for chocolate overcame their shame of accepting candy from a veritable stranger? If I suddenly ran out of chocolates, would students cease the behavior (when I inevitably did, I would promise to bring more next time - which didn't always happen)? And then, it didn't work on all students. Some students had no desire for the chocolates & appeared to snub other freshmen for behaving immaturely - performing tricks for food.
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| Changzhou Textile Garment Institute - September 2007, Changzhou, People's Republic of China |
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