Behavior Analysis for Effective Teaching

Julie S. Vargas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429809484
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Behavior Analysis for Effective Teaching is a clear, comprehensive book on the integration of non-aversive behavior analysis principles into classrooms and other school settings. Carefully revised and updated throughout, this third edition includes new content on precision teaching and a new chapter on how teachers can provide appropriate education for students with special disabilities who are included in their classrooms. Focused on merging behavior management with effective student instruction and illustrated with examples from real teachers' experiences, the book is an ideal primary resource for undergraduate and graduate courses in teacher education, special education, school psychology, and school counseling, as well as for preparation toward the BACB Credentialing Exam.

1

Adding Science to the Art of Teaching

Education … marks the most perfect and intimate union of science and art conceivable in human experience.

John Dewey

Overview

What is teaching? This chapter looks at what teaching consists of and how teachers can benefit from science as well as from their own experience.

Objectives

By the end of this chapter you should be able to:

1. Identify definitions of teaching consistent with behavior analysis.
2. Select features of behavior analysis as it is applied to teaching.
3. Complete definitions of “operant” and “contingencies” by supplying critical words.
4. Describe the different kinds of consequences you can use.

The Importance of Teachers

If you were asked “What is the most important resource of a country?” what would you answer? It’s not uranium or oil. It’s not water or timber. It’s not diamonds, or coal, or natural gas. The most critical resource of a country is its people, particularly its youth. The way the next generation behaves will determine a country’s future more than any other resource within its borders. In the United States, the responsibility for producing the academic and social skills of the next generation of workers and leaders rests on its educational system. Even at a local level, it is an awesome responsibility. Teachers can rescue a child from a life of misery, help students learn to handle conflict, and inspire them to accomplish things they never dreamed possible. On the other hand, a careless action by a teacher can make a student hate a subject or dislike education in general. Whatever teachers do affects student lives, often in significant ways.

The skills that students need in the twenty-first century differ from those needed in the past. Manufacturing jobs are going the way of agricultural jobs. In the eighteenth century, over ninety percent of working Americans were farmers. Today that number is below three percent. With the outsourcing of routine manufacturing jobs overseas, along with the increase in productivity per person and the replacement of assembly line workers with robotic systems, fewer Americans are needed to produce products. Increasingly, good jobs demand higher levels of literacy and technical skills. The burden of producing those skills falls on the schools, especially on teachers.

At the same time that teachers are expected to teach more, they are receiving students who are more difficult to teach. Today’s teachers encounter students who do not speak English, who have special needs, or who arrive at school hungry or sleep deprived, or even high on drugs. Then, too, the twenty-first century presents new challenges. Several years ago, I visited an inner city elementary school in Chicago. When I arrived for my appointment, the teacher hurriedly suggested I look around the classroom, saying she had to leave for a “special activity.” After a few moments, I looked out into the hallway to see what this “special activity” was. To my right the entire school was lined up from the playground doors to a table where two teachers sat. They were going through student backpacks. Other teachers stood around watching. To my left, a very young policeman surveyed the scene. When I asked him what was going on, he replied in a bored voice, “They’re checking for firearms.” So that was the “special activity”! Later, I was told that the teachers did find a gun. In an elementary school, no less! Teachers today are asked to look out for potential violence as well as to teach academic skills and appropriate social behavior. That is a very big job.

What Teaching Is and Is Not

Most people think of teaching as presenting information. This came home to me when I was teaching an undergraduate teacher education course in a major state university. It was a large course of nearly 500 prospective teachers. Early in the semester, each student was asked to teach a five-minute lesson to the other twenty or so students in his or her weekly section meetings. The students were asked to teach as if their peers were in the grade for which their lesson was designed. The other students were to act at the appropriate age level (though not to take the role of troublemakers). The students took the assignment seriously. They appeared nicely dressed, a bit nervous about their teaching. They gave lessons on elementary science, high school algebra, English literature, and an amazing variety of subjects that might be taught in a school system. The content of each lesson differed. But the way they “taught” did not. All but one of these future teachers lectured their entire five minutes. Teaching to them was presenting information.

If only it were that simple! Unfortunately, presenting is not teaching. It is not teaching even with adding moving graphics or videos illustrating actual procedures. A brilliant lecture could be presented to an empty room (see Figure 1.1). Inspiring internet videos could float in cyberspace with no one accessing them. Explaining and demonstrating is usually part of the teaching process, but without an effect on students, presenting is not teaching. That isn’t to say that lectures can’t have an impact on listeners. But what do your students gain from attendance? You don’t even know whether students shown a movie are awake. Many students catch up on sleep during videos. Former generations did not have today’s cell-phones or tablets or computers. What do you think is more appealing – attending to what a lecturer is presenting, or texting a friend or playing on-line games? Without checking on what your students have gained from a presentation, you cannot tell what, if anything, you have taught.

Figure 1.1 Lecturer delivering a brilliant lecture – to an empty room

Copyright 2008 Dean [email protected]. Printed by permission.

Preliminary Definition of Teaching

Any definition of teaching must include the effect on student behavior. Otherwise, all any of us would need in order to teach would be expertise in a subject matter. But knowing your subject is only a small part of teaching. In fact, you can define teaching without referring to content at all. When one person’s actions affect what another person does or can do, teaching has occurred. Teaching consists of designing circumstances that change the way other individuals feel and behave.

Teaching is enabling students to acquire behaviors more efficiently than they would on their own.

Teaching deals with behavior. All behavior. Do you have students who disrupt class, making it difficult to teach others? Do you have students who complete work accurately and rapidly? Do some students come into class eager to learn while others slump in their seats as if to say, “See if you can get me to do anything”? However your students enter your class, you are expected to provide an environment in which they acquire skills or interests that will be useful for their later life. Society places many demands on teachers, but until recently has not provided teachers with the tools to achieve them. Those tools come from the science of behavior.

The Science of Behavior

All science investigates relationships to find out how the world works. Science assumes that basic processes are orderly; that is, they do not operate one way in a New York laboratory, but a different way in a California supermarket. The principles that science reveals operate today the same way they did a thousand years ago. Science begins with description: Objects or phenomena are classified according to their properties. Not all properties are equally useful. Classifying elements by how they look, for example, does not help to tell you how they function in the world. Chemistry as a science originated when elements were identified according to atomic weight instead of by wetness, temperature, lightness or color. Science does more than describe, of course. It enables us to find out how certain properties relate to each other, and thus to predict. In physics, calculations from Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation enabled a French astronomer, Le Verrier, to predict the presence in the solar system of an object that no one had ever seen. He wrote to a fellow astronomer telling him where the object should be found. On September 23, 1846, the day of receiving Le Verrier’s letter, Johann Gottfried Galle saw the planet that would be named Neptune.¹ He found it almost exactly where Le Verrier had predicted it should be visible.

The third aspect of science is control. Not all sciences try to change how the objects under study behave: Astronomers do not try to change Neptune’s orbit. But many sciences have control as a goal. Newton’s laws describing the relation between gravitational pull and centrifugal force made it possible to launch satellites that stay in orbit, and to land robotic rovers on Mars after eight months of traveling through space. That’s an amazing feat!

Science is the systematic study of relations between phenomena, and the formulation of those relations into scientific laws that explain when and why events occur.

We live in three worlds, the physical world, the biological world, and the behavioral world. Each has its own science. Physics came first. By the seventeenth century, Galileo had, in addition to work in astronomy, conducted extensive experiments about motion. Even with Galileo’s impressive law of “uniform motion”² and with the most advanced physics of today, physics cannot explain how biological species came about or how they evolve. That is a field that physics does not address. It is the provenance of biology. Biology, in turn, even with the latest in genetic research and brain-imaging techniques, will never be able to explain why one of your students walks over to the window instead of to the door when the lunch bell rings, or why a student wears a red shirt to school, or even such an important aspect of behavior as the language he or she speaks. For that, you need the science of behavior (see Chapter 3).

Of course, the phenomena the three sciences address are not independent. Physical properties of our world, like pollution, affect both biology and behavior. Similarly, genetic endowment determines much of what people do, such as moving on two limbs instead of four or communicating by talking rather than with chemical scent (see Chapter 2 for the role of genetics). Interactions between different aspects of our universe are the rule, not the exception. They do not invalidate the scientific principles within each arena.

Two Kinds of Behavior

The science of behavior began with the work of Pavlov. Using dogs, Pavlov showed that physical reflexes like salivation, could be “conditioned.”³ That is, by pairing a clear “stimulus,” such as the tick of a metronome with presentation of food, the dog would then salivate to the metronome alone. Any dog owner is familiar with the drooling resulting from the sound of a package of food being opened. That is Pavlovian conditioning.

Pavlov worked with reflexes and “respondent conditioning.” Most human behavior, however, is not an automatic response to a stimulus. At the beginning of the twentieth century, people explained all behavior by looking at what comes just before an action. That applies to reflexes, but most human behavior is not a reaction to a stimulus. There is another kind of behavior, one that works in a different way. In the 1930s, B. F. Skinner discovered behavior that did not fit into Pavlov’s respondent conditioning. The behavior he saw was not reflexive. It changed when the immediate consequences of actions were altered. The postcedents of individual actions, not their antecedents, determined how likely it was that an action would be repeated.

This kind of behavior differed from the reflex behavior that Pavlov documented. Skinner called it “operant” and the process “operant conditioning.” What you teach is almost all operant behavior. Reading, writing, and arithmetic; all are examples of operant behavior. So is talking and thinking. Most of what you do today is operant, from dressing to driving to shopping. You may find yourself or your students also engaging in respondent behavior. Respondent conditioning enters into emotional behavior. The two...