Author Archives: Stephen Seyfer

The Value and Power of the Teacher’s Lane

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Contradictions are interesting. I see faces grimace or erupt in surprise when life contradicts their expectations. I see their eyes become furtive with side looks of uncertainty. And in response I hear them say “That is not my business. I need to stay in my lane.” I wonder if their looks and words express a fear of a wild world or an understanding of the safety of their prescribed lane. Life is not simple. Much like driving on a multi-lane, urban belt line highway when so many other drivers speed past us and swerve dramatically from one lane to another, being mindful of the lanes in our daily lives is important. We, all teachers, have a lane in this world that we need to value because it is a powerful lane.

What do we know?

We cause children to learn and, in their learning, to think and to ask questions and to inform their lives by what they learn. This is our lane. Many of us consider our teaching license to be our lane – “I teach 1st grade” or “I teach Algebra” or “… art.” However, a license only defines a subject or the grade level of children we teach. In truth, we teach children to learn, to think and to ask questions, and to apply what they learn to their living using the curriculum we are licensed to teach. We are pedagogues, first and foremost. If not, we teachers are only cloners of children in our own content knowledge images.

Teachers are masters of their teaching strategies. Our contracts narrow the subjects we teach; our pedagogy expands how we teach and cause children to learn. We are masters in using direct instruction to create knowledge, and inquiry and problem-based instruction to create context and personalization of each child’s understanding and application of knowledge. We use Bloom’s description of analysis and evaluation to teach children to dissect knowledge and better know its critical attributes. And we use Bloom’s final goal of synthesis to show children how to use their learning to create their own thinking pathways forward.

This is our lane. We teach children to think. Someday I would love to hear a colleague recognized as a wonderful pedagogue rather than a wonderful middle school teacher. We are teachers not teachers of.

What should we know about this? Teaching strategies are increasingly important.

I am mindful of a teacher’s lane these days when politics try to curtail what we teach and to define the outcomes of our public education. I read, more than is healthy to read, how political leaders and their followers display small-mindedness in calling out or suing or firing educators who do not follow their script. I see teachers at all levels, PK-12 and higher, under explicit and implicit attack personally and institutionally in attempts to narrow the scope and effects of teaching and learning. And it is appalling and it is wrong.

What they do not or cannot understand is that our professional lane is not to teach a particular point of view but to teach all children to understand point of view, to think about and evaluate point of view, and to establish their own informed point of view. We use teaching strategies based upon pure inquiry not biased inquiry. Life and its events will shape a child’s thinking and perspective. Our mission is met when children know how to apply thinking skills not in ensuring the prescribed results of their thinking. Those who would constrain public teaching try to constrain public thinking.

The Big Duh!

Public education has been and continues to be America’s best invention for building an informed citizenry. Our national Forefathers created Bill of Rights’ guardrails and due processes to protect freedoms of speech, assembly, and press. These are essential for a thinking populace. Further, they made public education a function of the states not the federal government. I appreciate this lane they created for public educators and encourage all teachers to value and pursue the wonderful opportunity the teaching lane gives us to cause all children to learn and think. Thinking children are our future’s hedge against the small-minded.

When Civics and Life Are Dissonant

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What do we tell children when what we teach does not comport with what is happening in their world? The daily news in our country hands us this dilemma. Today there is a clear dissonance between civics lessons and federal governmental actions. Thomas Paine’s words, “These are the times that try men’s souls…” apply again today. What we teach our children should clarify their point of view about current times and shape how these children live their lives in the future.

What do we know?

Let us keep it simple because there are simple truths. Our nation’s founding secured for us several basic human rights written in the first amendments to the Constitution. These are our Bill of Rights. A strange resurgent nationalism insists we teach our founding documents to all public-school children. That nationalism is hollow because many leaders of the resurgence are now primary actors in quashing the rights of their fellow citizens.

We teach children that the First Amendment to the Constitution says Congress shall not make a law prohibiting or abridging the freedom of speech, the press, the right of the people to peaceably assemble or the right to petition the government for a redress of their grievances. The Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms. The Third Amendment says a specific warrant is required for the government to search our person or home. The Fifth and Sixth Amendments assert that a person is innocent until proven guilty. I repeat, these are in the Bill of Rights for all Americans.

Our current “originalist” Justices on the Supreme Court do not equivocate on these. They tell us that the language of the Founding Fathers holds for all time, including today.

Yet today we see our federal government violating these solemn truths. Spoken and written speech are punished. People gathered for a civic purpose are abused and arrested. The gun rights of an individual favoring the government are upheld, but not the rights of a person opposing the government. And government officials proclaim citizens to be guilty and treat them as guilty without any evidence but their say so.

Today’s times are very trying.

What to do!

We teach. All children need to know and understand and learn to apply their birthright freedoms. Our teaching will cause their learning and will inform their lives.

Teaching is not partisan when it sticks to the language of the Constitution. We must clearly state and define each basic right with the historic illustrations that caused the Constitution’s authors to carefully choose their words. Children need to learn these truths without prejudice or bias.

As with all teaching and learning, we will make an early assessment of what our children learn. We will test them. That is how we measure knowledge. However, it will take years or decades for us to know that children today understand the depth of their basic rights and if their understanding shapes how they live as citizens. Still, we must teach.

The Big Duh!

Government of the people, by the people, and for the people can become fixated on wielding governmental power and forget the rights of the people. History is replete with leaders who twisted their popularity into a personal pedestal of perceived power. That is when humble and correct teaching is required to remind the next generation of voters that the right to lead is a responsibility not a privilege and the first responsibility of leadership is to guarantee the freedoms that have defined our nation.

Theory into Practice: Feedback Feeds Teaching and Learning

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What should a teacher tell a student about how she is doing? About her academic work? About her classroom personality and behavior? About how she is making progress this year? Should it be praise? Critique? Reinforcement? Correction? Should it be what a student wants to hear or what a learner needs to know? Feedback is not simple.

In simple terms, at the end of the assignment or unit a teacher and the children being taught want to wind up at the same point – successful teaching causing successful learning. As a teacher gives feedback to children, the same processes of assessment pertain to the teacher’s progress in meeting teaching goals. A master teacher uses feedback to improve her own teaching.

In his highly informative study of how teacher and school behaviors affect student achievement, John Hattie assigns feedback to students a score of .79. As the average effect size is .40, feedback is one of the more powerful strategies teachers can use to move the needle of student achievement. The right feedback delivered at the right time in the right way makes a difference. If not, not so much.

John Hattie – Effect Size Study

Hattie, however, also notes that 89% of the talk in a classroom is teacher talk. He admonishes teachers to talk less and listen more. And this is a key to providing effective feedback. Listen to and watch for the moment to give a student the most effective information to affect her learning.

What is feedback?

Interestingly, there are two definitions of the word feedback that a teacher should know. The first definition is – helpful information that is given to someone to say what can be done to improve a performance or a product or their work. Feedback is relevant information. The second definition is technical yet truly fits school – an annoying and unwanted sound caused by signals being returned to an electronic sound system. Other feedback is disruptive noise.

Hattie listened to and surveyed students about feedback. His study said that 80% of the feedback a student receives comes from other students. As we consider Hattie’s findings, we nod in agreement that student-to-student talk categorized as feedback is social commentary, praise, complaint or just talk. This means that 80% of the feedback a student receives is not relevant information related to their learning achievement. It is the 20% feedback from a teacher to a student that has a potential for positively helping a student to learn.

What do we know about feedback?

In this discussion, we will consider feedback as information from a teacher to a student(s).

Feedback is categorized as either formative or summative.

  • Formative feedback is given during the learning process. Formative feedback while children are engaged in their learning should be given frequently. This is forward looking feedback. When given within their engagement, children can apply the feedback immediately.
  • Summative feedback is given after the learning process has been completed. This is backward looking feedback, usually after evaluation and a grade has been assigned. Sometimes summative feedback can help motivate a student for the next learning, but usually it is a “post-game recap.”

Feedback that feeds learning answers three questions.

  1. What is the goal and is the goal clearly understood? Once a child is engaged in the assignment, the goal often gets lost in the doing of the assignment. For example, a second-grade child may be fully engaged in completing 10 multiplication problems but not in understanding the process and logic of multiplication. Formative feedback from the teacher focuses a child on learning from the assignment not just doing the assignment. Children of all ages face this dilemma; they focus on doing all the assignments rather than what the assignment teaches them.
  2. How is the child doing in achieving the goal(s)? Feedback that confirms that a child is understanding the goal of the assignment powerfully reinforces the progression of learning. In writing a five-paragraph essay, a teacher can give feedback about the quality of the introductory paragraph that reinforces that step and sets a positive beginning for the next step. Being told that she is on the right track motivates a child to keep working.
  3. What action should the child engage in next? “Next” feedback is often a well-phrased question. “Have your considered …?” asks by asking the child to stop and think? The pause suggests there are several options. Or “Take another look at the goal and the steps in the process” alerts a child that their process is incomplete and allows a correction before ending the assignment.

Feedback is about the learning process not the details within the process. For example, a teacher may see child needs assistance organizing a written assignment and at the same time see mistakes in spelling or capitalization in the written answer. Feedback should focus on key issues before minor issues. Corrective feedback should address the bigger issue of organization before addressing the smaller issue of mechanics.

Feedback is learning goal-oriented and praise is person-oriented. Constructive feedback always is information that focuses on the learning goal and assignments to achieve the goals. Praise or criticism is usually not academic but personal. “You are really smart today” or “… looking good today” is nice for a child to hear but does not inform their learning.

Lastly, feedback is like fertilizer on a lawn – applied at the right time, it causes growth. But overly applied, it can burn out the grass. Children need time to process teacher feedback. Give it and then listen and watch for its effects.

Feedback fed right.

Madeline Hunter told us that teaching is a million decisions about what to do, why to do it, and how to do it to cause learning. Giving feedback is one of those decisions, because if teacher talk is not purposeful it falls into that category of classroom noise.

As a checklist, consider these points in your feedback strategy. Remember, feedback feeds what a child needs to hear to be a successful learner and is not what a teacher just wants to say to a child.

  • Is it goal-oriented?
  • Does it lead to student action?
  • Is it process not person focused?
  • Does it provide reinforcement as well as clarification/correction?
  • Is it timely in the learning process?
  • Is it chunked and not too much or too little?
  • Is it formative or summative?
  • Is it proximal to the child’s learning curve?
  • Will it make a difference in learning outcomes?
  • Does it lead the child to be self-assessing in the future?

If you have affirmative checks on any or some of these, give the feedback.

Feedback is targeted to what a child needs to hear not what a class needs to hear. When a teacher decides that the entire class or a large group of students need the same feedback. Whole class or large group information is a lesson or a tier-two intervention not feedback.

And now that you know what feedback, you also know that feedback is not delivered with a red pen.

The Big Duh!

Feedback is part of a teacher’s total instructional design. Once a teacher launches a lesson, the teacher is not an impartial observer. As a shepherd herds sheep toward home, a teacher uses feedback to ensure that all children reach their learning destination successfully. Every child engaged in the process of a lesson can profit from a teacher’s feedback, not just the lost sheep. Some feedback causes a child to succeed in the lesson and other feedback causes a child to really succeed – all children can use a teacher’s good feedback.

Theory into Practice: Blooming the Curriculum with One Word – “So…”

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Tested practices created from research-based theories give teachers the best instructional opportunities to cause all children to learn.

It is easy to think of teaching and learning as linear. We teach and children learn one thing then another and another. Learning is an additive like train cars on a railroad line running through a classroom. Each car arrives with facts and skills to be taught and learned before it leaves the classroom/station, and the next train car of facts and skills arrives. There is more truth in this analogy that teachers want to admit. We change this perception with one word – “so.” All a teacher needs to do to move teaching and learning from a linear to a geometric design is to ask “So, what can/will/should you …” and teaching and learning launch vertically from children waiting for the next lesson to children doing higher orders of cognition with what they have already learned. It is blooming wonderfully!

What do we know?

The names of historic education and psychology theoreticians are fixed in our teacher preparation programs. Their names appear in texts and as footnote references. Piaget, Dewey, Vygotsky, Montessori, Skinner, Bruner, et al. Teacher licensing candidates learn to pair a name with a concept the historic person developed, take a test or write a paper acknowledging that person’s name and concept, and then allow the forgetting curve to move the name and theory into their memory fog. Who was that? What theory?

Stop doing this! Teaching and learning theories matter because theories give us road maps for how to transform schooling from linear – learn to test- to geometric – learn to think and do.

Benjamin Bloom, psychologist and pedagogue, gave us a systematic template to describe, assess, and classify educational goals. Bloom published his Taxonomy in 1956 and for decades teacher preparation schools taught Bloom’s cognitive domain, and six levels of cognition often called higher order thinking skills. Seventy years later, Bloom is still the go-to resource for describing and detailing levels of cognitive goals.

“So,” elevates your teaching and student learning.

The baseline of Bloom’s Taxonomy is the teaching and learning of background knowledge and a basic understanding of that knowledge. All children need to learn words that name and describe things in their world. So, we teach them to read and listen and build working vocabularies. Bloom categorizes the first goals of learning as level 1 – remembering and level 2 – understanding. A great deal of PreK-, 4K, and kindergarten involves experientially exposing children to words and facts and remembering and understanding.

In his research for his studies, Bloom saw that most classroom instruction at many grade levels was at level 1 and level 2 goals. Teachers used direct instruction to teach information for children to remember and describe. Teachers tested children, recorded learning scores, and began teaching the next lesson of information to be learned. Teaching and learning bobbled back and forth between remembering and understanding.

Bloom changed the goals of learning by interjecting “so what” into teaching. “So, what can you do with this information?” “So, how is this information like or unlike other information?” “So, which is a better choice in the use of this information?” And “So, what could you create from this information that is new and different?” Each of these questions is indicative of a higher level of cognition requiring children to think differently to answer the question. Bloom labeled these questions and placed them in a roster of unique learning goals.

Bloom’s Taxonomy: Each is a different category of learning goals needing distinct kinds of cognitive thinking. The goal is to –

  • Remember
  • Understand
  • Apply
  • Analyze
  • Evaluate
  • Create.

These goals are not sequential as in a continuum. The first two goals – remembering and understanding are goals for creating background knowledge – necessary for all learning to follow. Later learning builds upon the breadth and depth of a child’s foundational background knowledge. This tells us why children in the primary grades receive extensive direct instruction in reading, ELA, math, science, and social studies. And why direct instruction of required information fills the first chapters and units of middle school and high school instruction. Knowing things is necessary for the later goals of thinking about and working with that knowledge.

To build the goal of remembering, teachers use questions like –

  • Identification – What is the capital of Wisconsin? Of France?
  • Definition – What is the meaning of the word precipitation?
  • Listing – List the three branches of the US federal government?
  • Recall – When did the Civil War take place? When did the first man walk on the moon?
  • Recognition – Which of these formulas is correct for the area of a square?

The work of identifying, defining, listing, recalling, and recognizing words expands a child’s working vocabulary in their seeing, hearing, writing, speaking, and imaging more new words. Each question requires a child to write or speak a word in a different way that builds memory. Five to seven uses of the word reinforce short-term memory, and 15 to 17 different uses reinforce long-term memory.

Parallel to remembering words is understanding – the ways that people talk about and use words. The traditional model for remembering and then understanding is to “Say the word, spell the word, and use the word in a sentence.”

To build the goal of understanding, teachers use questions like –

  • Classify – Tell me the kinds of animals eat meat? … eat plants?
  • Describe – Describe what a Green Bay Packer would see standing in the middle of Lambeau Field just before the start of an NFL game.
  • Discuss – Tell me why World War Two is labeled a world war.
  • Translate – Rewrite this word problem into a mathematical equation.

Understanding requires definition of a word and opens a child to word families of synonyms, antonyms, and homonyms. Typical five-year olds have a vocabulary of 10,000 words. Once in school, their vocabulary grows by 3,000 to 5,000 words each year. The rate of vocabulary growth continues until typical high school students know about 50,000 words. The next learning goals give power the words a child knows and understands.

It is important to remember that, although application, analysis, evaluation, and synthesis goals are not sequential, a child’s experience in one will have tangential benefit to the others.

After securing children in meeting the goals of remembering and understanding, a teacher can instruct them in exploring what a person can do with the information learned. This goal is application. True application happens when children use the information or skill or rule to answer a question or solve problem they have not seen before – application requires new contexts.

To build the goal of application, teachers use questions like –

  • Solving – If the hypotenuse is three, what are the lengths of the sides of the triangle.
  • Stimulating – If you were an actor on stage, how would you react to applause after you deliver your lines? Or after the end of the play?
  • Demonstrating – What are examples that show this rule works in the real world?
  • Implementing – If you only had two tools – a scissors and a stapler – and a sheet of cardboard, show us how you would construct a box.

The goal of application is to produce something – a performance, an explanation, a diagram, or a product. A teacher can present children with a “messy” problem or a mystery that includes the words “what if.” These words invite the child to use all they know to solve, react, prove, or implement what they know and to produce something in a new situation. Often the product is an answer on a test requiring a child to consider what they know in an unanticipated word problem. In a real-world context, the ability to apply is the goal of most adult work life problems.

A different goal for learning is analysis. As the goal of application is to produce something in a new context, the goal of analysis is to dissect information looking for patterns, the relationships between parts, and hidden meanings.

To build the goal of analysis, teachers ask questions like –

  • Relationships – What is the connection between global warming and the strength and patterns of hurricanes?
  • Evidence – Which parts of this answer are based upon facts, and which parts are based upon opinion?
  • Categorizing – How would you classify these statements as causes or outcomes from the American Revolution?
  • Deconstructing – Separate this poem into its elements.

Analysis teaches children to be critical thinkers and to question and inquire into the nature of information. Teachers show children how to use charts, diagrams, and tables to show, organize, and rationalize similarities and differences. Children think and reason like historians and scientists. They study an event for its underlying causes and later effects. They guess how the absence of an underlying cause or sparking event may have changed history. Children chart and map chemical reactions to understand how elements relate and react to each other. They chart and map climatic events to understand forecasting. As application creates products, analysis dissects information into its critical attributes.

Educators gave an acronym to Bloom’s categorization of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis goals. They ar labeled as HOTS – higher order thinking skills. Ironically, HOTS should be the dominant goals of secondary education, but the curricular calendar relegates them to specific upper-level courses and a fraction of the school year. Best practice is for children at all grade levels, even 4K-primary, to be given goals in evaluative thinking. Teachers give children a rule or a “yardstick” and ask them to make a evaluation of information. For example, “Our rules say that you will quietly form a single file line when it’s time to come into the building after outdoor recess. What kind of behaviors would not be appropriate for your being “quiet” and in a “single file line?” Young children can do analysis.

Evaluation is making a critical judgment based upon evidence. The key to teaching children to evaluate is giving them a rule or a measurement against which they can make a judgment and provide evidence to support their decision.

To build the goal of evaluation, teachers ask questions like –

  • Judging – Based on First Amendments Rights, should this writer be banned from publishing opinions in the local newspaper?
  • Defending – Do you agree with the historical proposition that a “man’s home is his castle” and justifies the use of deadly force?
  • Prioritizing – Given that your school has limited finances, which of these curricular programs should be exempted from budget reductions?
  • Critiquing – Looking at the past list of Booker Award winners, which of these books has the best likelihood of winning the next award?

Evaluation requires understanding and analysis. Evaluation is not asking for opinions. “Do you like this abstract drawing of a barnyard?” asks for an opinion. Saying “This is an abstract painting of a barnyard. How and how well has the painter used elements of abstraction to tell you the subject of the painting is a barnyard?” asks for judgment with supporting evidence. To make this judgment, children must first understand the vocabulary of art. They must understand the definition of abstract art, and they must understand the critical attributes of abstraction. Then, they must be able to examine and dissect a piece of art by identifying the specific attributes of abstraction exhibited in the art. Finally, they must put their judgment and evidence in a coherent explanation. This is HOTS.

An evaluative assignment takes more time to prepare, more time and consideration for children to complete, and significant time for a teacher to assess and respond to a child’s supported judgment. In addition, every child may make a valid judgment with differing evidence resulting in all children succeeding in an assignment that took a lot of time. And this explains why children have limited lessons pursuing the goal of evaluation. HOTS take time and the curricular calendar has limited time.

The goal of creating also requires assimilation of other learning goals. Creation requires children to examine their knowledge of information, their analysis of critical attributes, and their evaluation of the qualities of what needs to be created to engage in creation. Creating is not just applying in a new situation but the making of something new from what is known to fit a given situation. Creating also is using evaluation to determine the “best” elements for the new creation.

To build the goal of creating, teachers ask questions like –

  • Design – Design a family home for five persons that would survive fire, hurricane, and criminal intrusion. The home will be in California or South Carolina near the ocean and surrounded by woods. You are not limited by cost or material selection.
  • Construct – Given toothpicks and a bottle of Elmer’s Glue, build a bridge that will support a five-pound weight.
  • Reorganize – How would you reorganize the baseball, softball, football, and soccer fields on our campus to require 20% less square feet of area?
  • Develop – Create a story board depicting how five children stranded on an island would create rules for their survival until they could be rescued one week later.

Lessons requiring the goal of creation attach easily to STEM curriculum, technology education, and career development. They also are precursors to real world applications of school-based education.

The Big Duh!

Benjamin Bloom gave us a structure for teaching children to develop different kinds of thinking, of cognition. His taxonomy is a scaffold we can use to ensure that all children learn more than just a recall of information. Using his scaffold of goals, we can cause children to “think and do”. Bloom is worth remembering and his theory of learning goals is a tool for optimizing every child’s education.

I encourage and challenge every teacher to analyze and evaluate their annual curriculum to ensure the teaching of HOTS at all grade levels and in all subjects.

Theory into Practice – Behaviorism is a Good Teaching Method Until It Is Not

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When I drive away from home, I often am plagued with uncertainty. Did I close the garage door? Closing the garage door is a matter of pushing the button in my car that automatically moves the door down to a closed position. My garage door and I have reached a state of automaticity – an action without thinking. Entering and leaving the garage requires the same action and I do it so often that I am not aware of doing it. No thinking needed.

This is behaviorism. I have taught myself that when I take an action, I can cause a desired something to happen. Stimulus and response. I push a button, and the door opens or closes. It is a learned behavior, because in an earlier life I needed to physically raise or lower the garage door. Instead, I learned to use an electronic device to move the door. Voila! A learned behavior that is so automatic that today I do not have to think to do it.

What do we know.

Educators are in the business of shaping thinking and behavior in the children we teach. We often are stimulus/response workers personified. Read the mission statement of your school district to understand the desired results of our behavior shaping. And consider the statement with a behaviorist mindset.

“(School district name), in partnership with family and community, will ensure excellence in educating every child to become a responsible citizen who is service minded and empathetic and can contribute to our interconnected world.

We are driven for excellence in academics, activities, arts, and athletics. We provide learning environments with instructional best practices that promote social, emotional, physical, and intellectual growth.”

Using this example, we teach an academic curriculum necessary for children to be informed, “service minded,” and “responsible” citizens. Children are to be “empathetic” and “contributors” in their world. We want their “academic, arts, activities, and athletics” performances to be “excellent.” And we will prepare children for their future “social, emotional, physical, and intellectual growth.” I highlight what this school district believes to be critical educational outcomes of a public education.

Individual teachers in a school district are clinical shapers and molders of children. A kindergarten teacher clinically shapes early childhood children into school and educational ready students, and a teacher of AP Math clinically challenges and refines student abilities to resolve complex math problems. In between, a child is taught more than 30 courses of academic curriculum by 20+ teachers, each teacher clinically shaping a child in the academic goals of specific grade levels and courses.

We seldom stop to analyze the mechanistic delivery of a 4K-12 education. We seldom break down the building block and lock-step organization of schooling, but building block and lockstep is what it is. Each grade level and course respectively fits into an architecture for creating graduates who will achieve their community’s prescription for an educated citizen. John Dewey lives!

Behaviorism shapes children into…

The mechanics of shaping behavior are classical conditioning or operant conditioning. These two theories of psychology are taught in teacher preparation programs and always seem very academic to the teacher candidate. Candidates think, “What do they really have to do with daily teaching?” That is until the theories are carefully examined in practice. Psychological conditioning is behavior shaping. Teachers use classical or operant strategies depending on the nature of the learning goal. Teachers use classical and operant strategies all the time without conscious labeling of what they are doing – they consider it teaching with very precise goals. But they truly are shaping child behaviors.

Classical conditioning teaches children to respond to a specific stimulus with a specific thought or action. Teachers teach stimulus-response for every school rule or process that requires a quick, automatic response. Thinking is not needed. Bell systems are a stimulus sound that denotes the start and end of the school day or of a class period. A fire alarm causes children to evacuate the school according to a practiced plan. When a teacher claps her hands, it is a signal for students to stop what they are doing and listen to what the teacher says. Whistles in sports start or stop athletes. The sound of a starting pistol begins a race, and a bell sound announces the last lap of a race. Schools use signs with a slash mark to signal “not here,” such as a no smoking sign. Children are surrounded with visual and audio stimuli in school used to create automatic responses.

Differently, operant conditioning connects behaviors with rewards and punishments. Whereas, classical conditioning creates automatic, singular responses, operant conditioning relates choices with outcomes, some being favorable and others not so favorable. Teachers commonly use four forms of operant conditioning.

  • Token economies. Effort is linked to outcome. Students earn points for good behavior or achievement, and points can be traded for prizes or privileges. Much of our culture today practices token rewards to mold adult behavior.
  • Shaping. Reinforcing improvement. As a student’s behavior or achievement gets closer to the desired level the reward is increased. Because the incremental reward is always less than a 100% reward for a fully successful behavior or achievement, the student’s semi-reward spurs them to work harder the next time. Silver medal winners still want the gold medal. Children are taught “I can do better” as a reinforcing stimulus for persistence.
  • Skill and Drill. The power of immediate feedback. We want children to memorize math facts. To build automaticity, we use flashcards requiring an immediate response. Children then get immediate feedback on their accuracy and speed. No mistakes for automatic responses are the endgame. Like in gaming theory, feedback intrinsically challenges children to try repeatedly until their responses are correct and automatic.
  • Behavior Contracts. If/then propositions. Most often these are if/then agreements between a student and teacher, though they also apply to groups or a class. Students and teachers agree that “if students act/achieve to meet a goal, then they will receive a desired reward.”

Behaviorists know how to use rewards and punishments. Reinforcement causes and reinforces desired behaviors. Positive reinforcements, like token or grades, provide value for desired behavior or achievement. Negative reinforcements, like “no homework tonight, if…” take away something students view as undesirable if they behave or achieve positively. On the other hand, positive punishments correctly positively align a punishment with poor behavior and negative punishments take away what children want or value due to poor behavior or poor achievement.

Consider how schools reward attendance and honor rolls and treat truancy and failing grades. Operant conditioning is rampant in schools. A cynic may say that teachers are puppet master using conditioning strings to make children act like puppets.

Oops. When not to be behaviorist.

It is relatively easy to teach behaviorally, and I know teachers who are behaviorists 24/7. It is their go-to teaching method. “I do/you do/we do” is a strategy for teaching children specific learning outcomes within classical or operant conditioning. Accuracy or inaccuracy of replication and repetition are reinforced or punished and wanted behaviors or learning is refined. Teachers plan a “teach/test” calendar of classroom lessons to achieve student rote knowledge and learning of skills.

Additionally, the curriculum is directed by the tests children take at the end of chapters, units, and semesters. As behaviorists, these teachers quash disruptive behaviors with reward/punish mechanisms and have only minor disciplinary problems. The lack of discipline problems and strong allegiance to testing protocols leads principals to view behaviorists as good and adequate teachers.

However, behaviorism has its limits. If we use Bloom’s Taxonomy to consider teaching methods, behavioral strategies are effective for teaching knowledge and recall/understanding of facts. Skill and drill lessons effectively teach phonics-based reading and math facts, the Periodic Table, and safety procedures for using a table saw. However, as Bloom shows, behaviorist strategies do not cause children to organize, analyze, apply, evaluate, or synthesize complex information. And they do not lead children to use their background knowledge and experiences to create their own solutions.

This leads to the other teaching tools in a teacher’s toolbox. Cognitivist and constructivist teaching methods effectively teach children to learn and think and solve problems at the higher levels of the Taxonomy.

What to do.

There are places and times for behaviorist teaching in schools; knowing when and how to be a behaviorist is critical teaching.

Declare when you are being a behaviorist. Best practice is when a teacher matches teaching strategies with learning outcomes. Telling students the strategy you will use sounds mechanistic, but it is not. As Madeline Hunter taught us, telling children the learning goals and purpose of their lessons motivates them to engage in learning. Say “we are going to use teach/drill/test to ensure that all of you can …” clearly prepares children for what they will do and why they will do it.

Teach modeling. The “I do/we do/you do” sequence ensures accuracy of what they are to replicate. Accurate modeling is essential in drill/skill strategies.

Be a real behaviorist. Behaviorism works because lack of deviation in knowledge and skills learning is the educational goal. When you want children to achieve automaticity teach behaviorally.

Then change teaching tools. Use cognitivism and constructivism to teach children to organize, evaluate, and work with complex information, critical thinking, inquiry- and problem-based learning, and social-emotional growth. Behaviorism is the wrong teaching method for curriculum that requires intrinsic motivation, deeper investigation, and active not passive engagement.

The Big Duh!

Teaching for learning ia a purposeful and intentional process. When a teacher considers and selects the best teaching method for obtaining a wanted educational outcome for children, the teacher is exercising high professional problem solving and decision making. We all fall into the trap of grabbing familiar tools for the work at hand. A hammer is a hammer, but it is not the best tool for tightening a screw or creating a policy for resolving world hunger. Behaviorism, like a hammer, is the right tool for a small set of learning goals. It becomes the wrong tool when applied to all learning goals. Choose teaching tools wisely and keep each tool sharp.