Behaviorism

As I have mentioned before learning for me is growing, improving, expanding and refining.  One of the great frustrations of teaching is having a student who’s learning is slowed by either an I can’t, or I don’t care attitude.  Sometimes the right stimuli and reinforcement can help motivate a student to try, and in the process discover they can, which can change their perspective and attitude.

Behaviorism methods like environment, stimuli, and reinforcements can sometimes be enough to get a less than confident or less than motivated student to try something otherwise they would not.  I hope this example I share is not too simplistic, but I think it does illustrate some Behaviorist ideas.   Just a couple of weeks ago, I asked my students to memorize something for class.  It was nothing too difficult, but it would take some time, most every student with a concentrated effort could get it memorized in twenty minutes.  Most went to work memorizing, some didn’t.  “I can’t memorize, I don’t have the mind for it”, a couple in each class would say.  One or two more wouldn’t do it just because.  Here is where the Behaviorism part comes in.

Every couple of weeks I do what I call a learning activity, the students like them because they see them as games without realizing all that they learn in the process.  Anyway, because they are so popular I have begun using them as a positive reinforcement for other assignments, task, etc.—like the memorization assignment above.  To encourage each student to memorize I made the learning activity I had planned for that week contingent on everyone in the class memorizing what I had asked them to.  Suddenly, students who didn’t have the mind for memorizing were busy memorizing, and surprising themselves in the process.  “I didn’t think I could do it.”  Additionally, the not so motivated, became motivated when they knew that the class was counting on them to memorize, especially as class members reminded them that they expected them to do it.

That day I had all but two of 148 students memorize what I had asked them to.  The two that didn’t do it didn’t because they thought I would proceed with the activity regardless.  So, it was time for a little reinforcement removal.  That week each class, but the one that these two students were in, had the scheduled learning activity.  A couple of weeks later when I asked my classes to complete another task in order to participate in that week’s learning activity these same two students were the first in their class to complete the task.