PicturesSource: https://www.edgalaxy.com/journal/2019/11/4/a-teachers-guide-to-blooms-taxonomy
This week we were asked to review the work of B.F. Skinner. I did so from the point of view of the language teacher:
Strengths
From the point of view of the language teacher, the overall strength of Skinner's (Skinner, 1953) work is as a foundation for making the understanding of both normal and aberrant human behaviour less of a field for the charlatan and the superstitious and giving it a more scientific basis and thus professionalizing the field of Psychology. We can say that his theories were strong since they still form many of the bases for current practice in language acquisition, and teaching still used today. With the work of researchers like Skinner, these areas are seen as more credible if they are based on scientific research and help eliminate 'intuition' and 'experience' accepted knowledge about effective pedagogy. In other words, Skinner’s concepts of operant conditioning (learning can be aided by the use of rewards and punishments) and classical conditioning (we learn by associating events) were the blueprints for evidence-based applications in behaviorism. This was a departure from the idea that we learned language chiefly via a language learning node in our brains and encouraged us to think of language acquisition and development as something that can be influenced by teachers and learners. Hence, teachers' application of behaviourist methods involves teacher-centered presenting information, asking questions, providing positive reinforcement for correct answers and repetition. Teachers adopting a behaviorist mindset see curricula as a teaching guideline, where text-based exercises of increasing difficulty are regularly repeated and reviewed. This is reflected in the work of behaviourists such as Bloom (1956) and Gagné (1965), whose work is also still dominant in education.
Limitations
As already mentioned above, from the language teacher's perspective, Skinner's theories when applied to pedagogy focuses too much on the 'nurture' side of the nature/nurture debate. It could lead to the conclusion that all behaviour is learned but cognitive and biological elements have been proven to also affect learning. Hence 'readiness' is also a big factor in learning and reminds us that learning cannot always be 'forced'. Nature accounts for why adults are not able to acquire language as easily and deeply as children, for example. Some other limitations are that behaviouism can only be taken so far. Not all behaviours are observable. Behaviourism It can never account for all learning or all behaviours in a learning context. . If we believed that as teachers and acted accordingly, did, it could be deemed immoral - condoning extreme punishments and treating people like robots. Behaviorism doesn’t clearly Explain how we Learn through Social Interaction and critical thinking is recognised or encouraged.
Predictions / Implications
As hinted above, humans are not robots and Skinner's theories could be interpreted to be going that way if applied in the wrong way. However, could it be that in the future we will be able to hack into the human mind and 'improve' learning a la Skinner - programming humans behave in set ways to certain stimuli? One thing some would argue can be predicted is that many of the pedagogical practices inspired by Skinner will still be present in 10-20 years' time. We can predict this based on some of the research we are aware of now. Research by (Murtonena, Gruber, and Lehtinen, 2017), for example, found that behaviourist tradition is still evident in 21st-century learning outcomes studies; 40% of articles studied referred uncritically to the behaviouristic epistemology and only 8% of the articles were critical towards the behaviourist tradition.
