Designing Teaching Strategies

An Applied Behavior Analysis Systems Approach

R. Douglas Greer

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780080491110
• Topic: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Subtopic: Allevamento di animali

The US Dept. of Education, in conjunction with the US Dept. of Health and Human Services, recently unveiled a $50 million effort to expand research on early childhood cognitive development. A key issue identified requiring more information and research was the education and professional development of educators. Along these lines, Doug Greer has prepared a book discussing how best to teach, how to design functional curricula, and how to support teachers in using state-of-the-art science instruction materials. The book provides important information both to trainers of future teachers, current teachers, and to supervisors and policy makers in education. To trainers there is information on how to motivate, mentor, and instruct in-service teachers to use the best scientifically based teaching strategies and tactics. To in-service teachers, there is information on how to provide individualized instruction in classrooms with multiple learning and behavior problems, school interventions to help prevent vandalism and truancy, and how curricula and instruction can be designed to teach functional repetoirs rather than inert ideas. To policy makers and supervisors, the book discusses how to determine the effectiveness of curricular innitiatives toward meeting mandated standards in national assessments.Doug Greer was recently awarded the Fred S. Keller Award for Distinguished Contributions to Education by APA for the research and application of the material covered in this book. School programs incorporating the material used in this book have produced 4-7 times more learning outcomes for students than control and baseline educational programs (see www.cabas.com)The book provides research-based and field-tested procedures for: * Teaching students of all ability levels ranging from preschool to secondary school* How to teach special education students in the context of a regular classroom* Best practices for all teachers to teach more effectively* Means of monitoring and motivating teachers' practices* A comprehensive and system-wide science of teaching—post modern-postmodern!* Tested procedures that result in four to seven times more learning for allstudents* Tested procedures for supervisors to use with teachers that result insignificant student learning* Tested procedures for providing the highest accountability* A systems approach for schooling problems that provide solutions ratherthan blame* Parent approved and parent requested educational practices* Means for psychologists to work with teachers and students to solvebehavior and learning problems* A comprehensive systems science of schooling* An advanced and sophisticated science of pedagogy and curriculum design* Students who are not being served with traditional education can meet orexceed the performance of their more fortunate peers, * Supervisors can mentor teachers and therapists to provide state of thescience instruction* Parent education can create a professional setting for parents, educators, and therapists to work together in the best interests of the student, * Teachers and supervisors who measure as they teach produce significantlybetter outcomes for students, * Systemic solutions to instructional and behavioral problems involvingteachers, parents, supervisors provide means to pursue problems to theirsolution, * A science of teaching, as opposed to an art of teaching, can provide aneducational system that treats the students and the parents as the clients.

PART I

Advanced Applications of Applied Behavior Analysis to Teaching

CHAPTER 1 Teaching as Applied Behavior Analysis: A Professional Difference

TERMS AND CONSTRUCTS TO MASTER

• Natural selection extended to behavior analysis
• Teaching as applied behavior analysis—The professional difference
• Prescientific and postscientific perspectives on student learning problems
• Pedagogy
• Teaching as environmental design
• Functional relationship between teaching and student learning
• Nine characteristics of teaching as applied behavior analysis
• Teaching expertise and financial rewards
• Science of the behavior of the individual

TOPICS

A Definition of Teaching and Pedagogy

Teaching As A Scientifically Based Profession

Characteristic Practices of Teaching As Applied Behavior Analysis

A DEFINITION OF TEACHING AND PEDAGOGY

Pedagogy is the traditional term for the study of the methods of teaching. While the word pedagogy is seldom used in descriptions of the methods of teaching in normative educational courses anymore, it is an accurate term and the activities of pedagogy are critical to expert teaching. Pedagogy is that component of teaching that comprises interventions used by a teacher to bring about student learning—in short, interventions that occasion learning. Our definition of pedagogy will incorporate what we know about the behavior of the individual with particular relevance to how the individual learns. In our enlarged definition, pedagogy refers to the instructional operations performed by a teacher or by an automated teaching device that result in a student learning a behavior, a response class, and a repertoire. The learning must have occurred as a function (that is as a “cause”) of, or a correlate of, the instructional operations performed by the teacher. The teaching operations were either sufficient or necessary to the learning. Without them the student would not learn.

We use the term “normative” as a generic term for the prevalent view in education that “teaching is an art.” We do not wish to characterize that view in a pejorative manner. Rather, we use it to help the reader differentiate prescientific approaches to pedagogy with a thoroughgoing scientific approach found in teaching as applied behavior analysis. In the practice of normative education eclecticism is considered desirable. Because normative education is so eclectic in nature it is difficult if not impossible to characterize the intellectual beliefs or epistemology associated with it. However, it is probably accurate to say that normative approaches to education are not tied to a view of teaching as a thoroughgoing strategic science. Hence we use the terms prescientific pedagogy and normative education interchangeably.

In our view, the presentation of material, as in a lecture or reading assignment, is not an instance of pedagogy, any more than having students watch a videotape is necessarily an activity that results in learning. The latter activity may set the stage for pedagogical activities by the teacher with the student that may, indeed, lead the student to learn from such presentations. However, pedagogy begins when the student responds to teacher presentations and continues when the teacher responds, in turn, to the student’s response in ways that produce the desired outcome. Moreover, what the student learns under true pedagogical operations is what the teacher sets out to teach. When the student learns the correct response or chain of responses (e.g., a problem-solving task) as a result of the teacher’s responding to the student’s behavior, we say pedagogy has occurred (Greer, 1996).

Acts of pedagogy result in students learning that which they could not do before as a function of or as a correlation with the activities of pedagogy. Pedagogy comes fully into play only when the student is responding. It includes the teacher activities that occasion the student’s response and teacher responses to the student’s effort. If the student continues to learn simply by encountering the materials for which no special program of instruction was necessary, the student is learning but little teaching occurs. In the latter case the student may continue to learn as a result of prior learning and which in turn can be a result of prior pedagogy, not just chance.

Of course, maintaining conditions to motivate learning are also part of teaching. Teaching, as an act of pedagogy, takes place when the student encounters difficulty or when the teacher provides procedures or uses an automated device such that the student can perform that which he could not do before the intervention. When the student is not motivated, acts of pedagogy create motivation.

Our definition of pedagogy incorporates the design of how the student will encounter situations and stimuli to which he will respond and the differential consequences to the student’s particular response in such a way that the student responds effectively (i.e., correctly) or more closely approximates effective responding to the situation. What we have described is superb individualized instruction. It is the kind of instruction that one seeks when one pays for a private tutor. Of course, private tutoring is not necessarily individualized, but the conditions of one-to-one tutoring are more likely to occasion individualized instruction. The application of the sciences of pedagogy and schooling can provide for frequent occurrences of individualization regardless of the ratio of students to teachers, provided that the students have the necessary prerequisites and teachers are strategic scientists of pedagogy.

Just as expert teaching requires optimum teacher interventions, it also requires not intervening. One of the goals of teaching is to teach students to be their own teacher. The sequence of experiences that students receive and the pedagogical operations associated with those experiences determines the students’ attainment of self-instructional repertoires. The pedagogical acts and the curriculum that leads the student to self-teaching and self-discipline and the repertoires that allow the student to learn independently of the teacher are critical components of the expertise that we shall present.

Dynamic Nature of Teaching

Teaching is a dynamic interaction among four components: (a) the student, (b) the teacher, (c) the curriculum (or what is being taught), and (d) the learned repertoire (how to use it and when to use it). The study and development of teaching as behavior analysis provide in-depth treatment of the dynamic interaction of teaching. Applied behavior analysis is a strategic science. By strategic, we mean that specific findings and methods of the science are used differentially based on the moment-to-moment progress of the student. Thus, it is dynamic by nature. In a broad sense, the curriculum is the environment in which we want the student to be a part. That is not to say that the students “construct” their environments, but the part of the environment that affects or “controls” the students’ behaviors is the unique world of environmental controls that exist for each student individually. For example, if the student does not speak the language that is being used, the controls for her behavior are not the same as those for an individual who speaks and responds to the language. When the student learns the language, she becomes part of that environment.

Prior to learning the language, she was oblivious to the function of the communication. The contingencies of experience and instruction bring her and the environment into contact such that her repertoire expands and her contribution, in turn, changes the environment. Thus, effective instruction or pedagogy is never static. Specific findings of the science must be applied to the student as the performance of the student dictates. Future chapters will provide scientific descriptors of this dynamic property of pedagogy. In the terminology of the science of the behavior of the individual, we refer to this as the vocabulary of the science. The use of these descriptors by someone identifying components of the science in moment-to-moment action is referred to as scientific tacts (i.e., the teacher makes verbal contacts with the teaching activities using the scientific terminology). Indeed, it is this dynamic property of our science and its application that prompts our use throughout this text of the terms strategic science and strategic applied behavior analysis. The postbehavior analysis perspective is simply different from the prescientific one. Table I presents two different ways of characterizing the performance of students. The postscientific or behavior analytic view provides solutions to instruction, rather than categorization.

Table 1
Characterization of Learning Problems from Pre­ and Postscientiflc Perspectives

Prescientific teachers: Normative education	Postbehavior analysis teachers: teaching as applied behavior analysis
The student is unmotivated.	The reinforcement or establishing operations are inadequate for the student.
The student has a learning disability.	Perquisite repertoires are not mastered or fluent and must be taught.
The child is incorrigible.	The instruction is inadequate in terms of the learn unit presentations; the controlling variables for behavior need to be shifted.
The child requires a multisensory approach.	The child is learning the wrong operant.
The problem is in the home.	Instruction in the school is the responsibility of individuals with pedagogical expertise and the school professionals are responsible for fixing the problem and assisting parents.

There are several sciences that contribute to teaching as applied behavior analysis that we also call a strategic science of instruction. First, there is the laboratory basis of the science, often termed the experimental analysis of behavior. Next, there is applied behavior analysis that encompasses applications of behavior analysis not only to education but also to medicine, business, manufacturing, therapy, parenting, and a host of other applied professions. In addition, the strategic science of teaching draws on a particular philosophy of science called behavior selection. The methodology of behavior analysis allows applications of any research findings in educational settings whenever they are relevant (e.g., findings in cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, psychophysics). In summary, the strategic science of pedagogy and its extension to the management of schooling is a science that builds on and contributes, in turn, to each of these sciences in a consistent and coherent manner driven by the individual needs of the student.

TEACHING AS A SCIENTIFICALLY BASED PROFESSION

Teaching is a common form of activity, both for our species and for that of many others. Because it is so common we often fail to appreciate its importance and its complexity. Yet the expertise of a teacher who can function as a strategic scientist of instruction is vastly different from the level of expertise demonstrated during untutored teaching interactions that occur between parents and children. Learning occurs much more frequently than instances of teaching, which is why inexpert teaching does not result in poor learning outcomes for children who are raised in privileged settings and who have no disabilities. Organisms (yes, that means we Homo sapiens, too) learn constantly from their environment regardless of the presence or absence of teaching by fellow organisms. Organisms learn because the consequences of behavior select adaptive repertoires of behavior for individuals (Donahoe, Burgos, & Palmer, 1993). Behaviors that work for the individual in a given set of circumstances become part of that organism’s repertoire.

Learning has been researched extensively, while teaching as it is typically conceptualized has received relatively little attention. However, if teaching is defined as the identification and arrangement of optimum learning environments for each individual, the definition used in this book, a great deal is known about the activities of effective teaching as instructional operations and principles for individualized instruction.

The act of teaching must have represented a critical step in the evolution of our species. One can imagine a situation where it was critical to the survival of a group for one individual to teach others to perform some act, such as flushing game or planting seeds. Teaching must have been integrally related to the development of communicative behavior and, hence, language. While one may teach by example without speaking a word, the communicative act is inextricably tied to teaching, even when the communication is by example. Later we will highlight the relationship between teaching and communicative behaviors even more closely.

Great teachers are admired, but usually only posthumously. We are rarely given evidence of th...