I am quite sure throughout by career, I have use both learning theories in developing instructional materials, strategies and techniques in teaching my students. The behaviorist position that learning is observable and the environment shapes behavior, and the principles of contiguity and reinforcement are essential in explaining the learning process. I have used reinforcement when teaching, by rewarding my students when they do well whether it was through high grades or stickers on test results that were over 75%.
I understood Kerr's statement about how he feel about the isms. From my experience, I too feel there are to many isms associated with students' learning. However, what are we to think about how our students learn. Should we accept the behaviorist position that students learning comes from stimuli in environment and that learning is reinforce by positive reward/reinforcement and take a cognitivist's position that states students learning is similar to how a computer work. The cognitivist believe from reading the Kerr, Drownes, and Kapp blogs that learning occurs internally.
In my field we are responsible for teaching our students soft skills as well as hard skills. No matter what subject I am teaching I focus on helping my students develop affective skills through the use of rewarding the appropriate behavior, and effective skill though using a cognitive approach. I adhere to the principle that students learn through input, processing, and output. I believe the input comes for visual
or audio perspective and the processing is when the students either use prior knowledge, experience, reconstruction or organization of the data in such a way that they come up with the desire output. The is preagated definitely on my instructional design for the particular lesson. Since I have been teaching computer concepts for so many years I disagree with Kerr's statement that "the mind is not like a computer, at least, not like most any computer we've build, and depicting the mind as analagous to (and governed by the rules governing) symbol system processors is to misrepresent it in a fundamental way" (Kerr 2007).I have seem over the years how students process information and have notice they take in input from either the broad, the textbooks, and lectures and reorganize the informaiton in order to render a response in the form of output.
I also agree with with Kerr's when he said that “learning” is not one thing…it is a multi-layered word that tends to get treated as if it were just one thing…and it’s not. It is multi-facetted and that is why developing new models for “learning” is so difficult…there are too many levels for one school of thought or one model to do it all (Kerr 2007).
Link to a video on behaviorism and cognitivism.
YouTube - behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism part1
Link to Kerr's, Drownes, and Kapp blogs
http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2007/01/isms-as-filter-not-blinker.html
http://karlkapp.blogspot.com/2007/01/out-and-about-discussion-on-educational.html
Good post. I agree there are too many isms. We have to focus on our students learning and building their skills. As I teach and watch my students I have found that through visual and repeating the processes; the more that you do it, the quicker that you learn it. You cannot just pick it up in class; you got to study when you get home. You got to practice when you get home. It takes more than a classroom.
ReplyDeleteHi Vickie
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comments. Vickie our students learn through reward and recognition of their work. Given the isms, I believe students learn best with a combination of behaviorism and cognitivism. I think that because we are teaching everyday, we don't think about the isms on a conscious level, we just developing learning strategies and instructional techniques we know that have been worked for our students. We are probably incorporating both isms into our instruction.