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.