Chapter 9 - Behaviorist Views of Learning

What?
Behaviorist focuses on how the environmental stimuli brings about change in people's behaviors. As teachers, these theories support the fact that how teachers teach and what they do can to acquire certain behaviors. One of the major theories that was brought up in class and in the book was the two conditioning: classical and operant.
Classical Conditioning is a form of learning in which a new response is acquired by two stimuli being presented at the same time. for example that they used in the book was of a kid who hurt himself last year playing baseball by a wild pitch from the pitcher. now every time he goes up to bat, he gets nervous. because of the on coming ball and the then the painful impact, the kid relates the bad experience with stepping up to the plate. The Stimuli equals a Response.

Operant Conditioning is the form on learning in which a response increased in frequency as a result of being followed by reinforcement. An example of this that the book gave was about a kid named mark who didn't get called on by the teacher till he waved his hand wildly in the air and around in circles. This brings the idea that when a response is strengthened and thus is more likely to occur again, when is it followed by the same reinforcement (or stimuli).

So What?
because we understand that certain behaviors can be developed by the way we teach, we can be sure to keep a consistent behavior in ourselves so the students can develop that desired behavior. by using each type of conditioning to our students, we can pattern our teaching so they are apt to learn at their highest ability. using the proper stimuli we can get the proper response.
when students understand and learn how we structure the classroom, they know what is expected of them and their behavior will changed to adapt to it.

Now What?
This chapter was great for me because i always thought that reinforcements were good things and never bad and that negative reinforcement was always bad. but after reading the chapter and discussing in class, it has more to do with how we act and what stimuli we offer the students which in turn changes their behavior. everyone knows that middle and high school is a difficult time and a lot teachers have more problems with classroom management than anything else while they are teaching. I think this can help with my classroom managament and that it is necessary to understand this and apply it to my class so that the students get the right type of behavior.