Behaviorism is a perspective on learning that focuses on changes in individuals' observable behaviors” changes in what people say or do. At some point we all use this perspective, whether we call it “behaviorism” or something else. The first time that I drove a car, for example, I was concerned primarily with whether I could actually do the driving, not with whether I could describe or explain how to drive. For another example: when I reached the point in life where I began cooking meals for myself, I was more focused on whether I could actually produce edible food in a kitchen than with whether I could explain my recipes and cooking procedures to others. And still another example one often relevant to new teachers: when I began my first year of teaching, I was more focused on doing the job of teaching on day-to-day survival than on pausing to reflect on what I was doing.
Note that in all of these examples, focusing attention on behavior instead of on thoughts” may have been desirable at that moment, but not necessarily desirable indefinitely or all of the time. Even as a beginner, there are times when it is more important to be able to describe how to drive or to cook than to actually do these things. And there definitely are many times when reflecting on and thinking about teaching can improve teaching itself. (As a teacher-friend once said to me: “Don't just do something; stand there!”) But neither is focusing on behavior which is not necessarily less desirable than focusing on students' “inner” changes, such as gains in their knowledge or their personal attitudes. If you are teaching, you will need to attend to all forms of learning in students, whether inner or outward.
In classrooms, behaviorism is most useful for identifying relationships between specific actions by a student and the immediate precursors and consequences of the actions. It is less useful for understanding changes in students' thinking; for this purpose we need a more cognitive (or thinking-oriented) theory, like the ones described later in this chapter. This fact is not really a criticism of behaviorism as a perspective, but just a clarification of its particular strength or source of usefulness, which is to highlight observable relationships among actions, precursors and consequences. Behaviorists use particular terms (or “lingo", some might say) for these relationships. They also rely primarily on two basic images or models of behavioral learning, called respondent (or “classical”) conditioning and operant conditioning. The names are derived partly from the major learning mechanisms highlighted by each type, which I describe next.
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