גישה ללמידה - ד"ר הנרי שלינגר

I think teachers and parents as well and maybe many other people in the culture assume that the differences we see between individual children are fundamentally genetic differences or inherent differences if you look at kids when they’re newborns you find very few differences between them as they grow older if the differences magnify I would argue that those differences are differences in their environment because as I mentioned earlier the environment is all of the stimuli that affect behavior at a given moment and no two individuals can have the same environment so you have different rates of growth of behavioral development because there are different environments that impact different kids so so the first the first tool that behavior analyst can offer educators is a philosophy about kids and about learning and the first part of that philosophy is that all kids are potentially capable of learning anything we throw at them they’re all capable of mastering everything now you understand why that philosophy is not held by most people because that doesn’t happen in schools not all kids master what we wanted to learn so is it easier to to throw the blame or the responsibility onto the kid or onto the educational system well in our culture it’s much easier to throw the responsibility to the end to that to the kid if a kid doesn’t learn something it’s not my fault as a teacher or an educator or or in this principal or a school a superintendent it’s the child’s responsible and there’s something with the child the child is incapable of doing that so a behavior analytic approach first offers the philosophy that all kids are equal in what they can learn secondly behavior analysts then offers the tools with which teachers can more effectively teach kids and I think you need to talk about the word teach because frequently people say you know I’m a teacher or you know what I’m going to teach today and they make those claims without looking whether the kids are actually learning so if the kids aren’t learning then you’re not teaching so I think that that people need to re-evaluate what what the word teaching means the tools that behavior analysts can offer teachers in addition to the philosophy are specific methods by which to allow children to achieve that mastery BF Skinner mentioned mentioned four general guidelines that I think are really important too remember the first one is be clear about what is to be taught so for example if you ask a math teacher what do you want your kids to learn and they say math well that’s not it that’s not very clear there are a lot of things that comprise what math is so by being clear what is to be taught you have to specify the exact behavior and the exact environmental circumstance that you want just to give you an extremely simplistic example if you want to teach a child to say for to the question 2 + 2 well 2 + 2 is the stimulus that’s the that’s what we would call a discriminative stimulus and we want a correct answer to that stimulus now if a child can do that we don’t necessarily say the child knows math but the more the child can do things like that the more we might say the child can do math the second guideline that Skinner suggests is to teach first things first and this is often a mistake that educators make first we need to start where the kids are at you can’t assume that all kids have mastered the same level of material so you have to start where an individual kid is at and then you have to teach first things first everything that we teach in school whether it’s whether it’s arithmetic or reading or spelling or writing or science there’s always a first step there’s a first thing that kids need to learn so after we’ve been clear about what we want to teach them then we have to specify exactly what the steps are okay now once those two guidelines have been met the third one which perhaps is the most important one is that we need to stop making all kids progress at the same rate and skinner has suggested that this one change alone could revolutionize American education because we all know that when we get a you know when kids go to first grade or a third grade or whatever you have a group of 30 or 40 kids and the teacher tries to teach all of them and they’re all supposed to move the same rate and we all know the reality the reality is they don’t all move at the same rate some move much more quickly and sometimes we give them names like gifted and some move much more slowly and we also have names for them which are not generally too flattering and then there’s some in the middle who all move around the same rate so if we could stop making children all progress at the same rate that would revolutionize American education it presents legit ethical problems because right now we have an overcrowded educational system so we have one teacher for 30 or 40 kids which is definitely not an ideal learning environment for anybody if you stop making all kids move at the same rate and you allow them to progress at their own rate while still making sure they master the material then you have to reorganize and restructure the the educational setting because one teacher can’t do that now there’s a there’s a method called direct instruction which is basically scripted learning and the teacher reads a script and so in that sense you don’t really need a qualified credential teacher to do that because anybody can read the script and teach the kids teachers have a problem with that because they go to school and their credential disty Jers and they don’t like the notion they’re feel threatened by the notion that somebody else could come in and just read a script and have that and have that you know teach the kid but the point is that if you if you allow kids to move with their own rate you have to restructure the classroom so that kids can do that and there are a number of different ways you can do that just in considering that the other tools that behavior analysts can offer and this is the fourth guideline that Skinner suggests and that is program program that material and what that means is you break down complex subjects into stepwise components because let’s face it any complex intellectual task that you want to learn if it’s whether it’s algebra or critical thinking or spelling or writing it’s all it’s composed of smaller components or constituents so if you break down the complex behavior into its smaller component parts and then teach those individually and make sure reinforcement is contingent on each of those then you have programmed the material and you’re more likely for the child to have mastered the content that you want them to master and so just to summarize in the educational system the way we have it now not all children master the material and yet we passed them through grade after grade an educational system that is designed by behavior analysts would make sure that all children master the material but that they do it at different rates and it’s okay if somebody does it faster that’s fine if somebody does it slower that’s fine but they all learn the same material and then they’re able to move on to the next phase .