Seek First to Understand...

Behavior isn't something to manipulate, it's something to understand.

flickr photo via kokichuelo

I have spent the better part of my teaching career to date working with kids who manifest very adverse behavior. I have received hundreds of hours of professional development related to helping these kids improve their behaviour, some of which was considered to be severe. I've been trained in behaviour management techniques designed to manage behavior, corrective techniques to correct behaviour and modification techniques to modify behaviour. What nobody ever trained me to do however, was understand behaviour.

Behaviourism is a well known school of thought relative to working with kids who display challenging behavioural tendencies. According to Wikipedia, behaviourism, sometimes referred to as the learning perspective (where any physical action is a behaviour), is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do — including acting, thinking and feeling — can and should be regarded as behaviours. Applied Behaviour Analysis  is a term used commonly in education to describe how we analyse the behaviours we see in schools. In my role as an educator working exclusively with severely behaviourally challenged kids I have participated in many functional behaviour analysis (FBA) that are designed to provide hypotheses about the relationships between specific environmental events and observed behaviours in students. I must admit, the FBA process is as close as I've ever been to actually understanding behaviour, but even this process has left me wondering, "do I really know the story behind what I'm observing when I witness adverse behavior?"

Beware Behaviorism!

 flickr photo via Kevan

I'm admittedly confused regarding the controversy in education surrounding behaviourism. Arguably, most behaviour is rewarded or punished. These punishments or rewards are often referred to as "carrots or sticks." In the context of the oft-used metaphor (someone must dangle a carrot or threaten with a stick to get the proverbial mule to do what is desired), there seems to be a suggestion that the reward or punishment must come from an extrinsic source. I don't think this is an accurate description of behaviourism.

All behaviour elicits a response, and it seems to me, this response will be a naturally occurring one relative to the subjective, or perhaps unknown purpose of the behaviour, (assuming that all behaviour is purposeful).

I'm not an operant behaviourist by any stretch... I just don't think that operant conditioning is natural or effective in nurturing positive behaviour. Let's face it, engaging classrooms lead to engaged students... in the context of behaviourism, can we not call the engaging classroom the unconditioned stimulus, and the authentic, positive teaching and learning that takes place there the unconditioned response?  If so, behaviorism is alive and well in North American schools, and thank heaven it is so.

Externally applied operant conditioning, (of which the effectiveness in schools is suspect) is using positive and negative reinforcement to 'do to' in the effort to solicit a desired response, but there is so much more to a behaviourist approach than the cliché 'carrots and sticks' that opponents of what they refer to as 'behaviourism' allude to. I would assert that there is so much more to positive and negative reinforcement in general than many people realize, (positive and negative reinforcement can be unconditioned as well- e.g. if a teacher yells at a student to stop doing something he/she isn't supposed to do, and the student stops, the unconditioned cessation of the student's undesirable behavior has negatively reinforced the teacher's yelling.)

Educators need to explore the scope and context of behaviourism within a new and collaborative mindset if we are to be considered students of our own craft, which, boiled down, is really just a very pure study of human behaviour; is it not?