1. At first I was very confused by the statement that "negative reinforcement encourages good behavior." That took me a while because I'm so used to the word "negative" meaning decrease or discourage, or essentially just resulting in a negative. But once I read it over again I understood it.
I was surprised that the book condoned the ignoring of bad behavior (within reason, of course!) I guess I just assume that ignoring on any level is seen as the lazy or "bad" teacher's response...but in actuality, if something is effective, do it! (I can think of so many times in elementary school when teachers would use the ignoring response and their problem was solved!)
This all made a lot of sense to me, so I really don't have any questions...we learned about conditioning and reinforcement in our ecology portion of Biology senior year!
2. I would say that this theorist is right, to an extent. I think that when it comes to things which are black or white, right or wrong, yes or no, the paired associations will generally always work. But if one were to learn solely through paired associations, I think they would be missing out a lot on common sense, logic, and problem solving skills...obviously. Another argument against the only-paired-associations learning is practicality...it would be physically impossible for someone to teach another person all that they would other wise learn (and should) through conventional education (experience/classroom) through only paired associations...it would simply take too long!
I agree with what you said about how ignoring the behavior would be counterproductive since I feel like ignoring the disruptive behavior since the student would be more encouraged to keep on displaying the behavior. I feel this way because high school students are more eager to keep on being disruptive. However I feel like after a while the student would get tired and eventually give the negative behavior up; I feel like the teacher could be proactive and do something else though.
ReplyDeleteI'd be interested to hear exactly why you think that aspects of common sense, logic, and problem solving are impossible through paired association. I think you're getting at something like 'seeing something in its complexity' and learning about it in that way, from complex to basic.
ReplyDeleteIt's very important for you to determine waht your goal is for your students and then pick an appropriate strategy for teaching (this is what I mean when I want you to realize that you can make very INTENTIONAL, on purpose, kinds of choices when teaching). So, if there's something very simple that students need to learn quickly for their own safety (like the behavior of lining up quickly when the fire alarm sounds) then behaviorism might be great. Otherwise, there might be better strategies.