Over on Precision Teaching Rick Kubina has added another podcast to his published collection: It’s an interview with Hank Pennypacker (from 31 January 2009). Professor Pennypacker has been teaching about the appropriate analysis of behavior for many years, influencing many folks in positive ways. When you take the opportunity to jump over to Precision Teaching and look at the list of interviews, you may want to snag others, too.
Archive for the 'Understanding' Category
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People, including B. F. Skinner, often talk about the philosophical proposition that operant principles reduce humans to animals whose behavior is determined by features of the environment, denying the be-loved construct of free will. For a variety of reasons (just one here: Read Dan Wegner’s excellent The Illusion of Conscious Will), I am pretty well convinced that those principles of stimulus control, reinforcement, punishment, shaping, and etc. explain great deal—even virtually all—of human behavior.
Mayhaps in another series of posts, I’ll write about the freedom-determinism question, but in this post I’m going into a simpler concern about freedom: Allowing children the freedom to do things on their own. If children are denied the opportunity to function in free-operant situations (i.e., those enviroinments where many different behaviors may occur and repeated), it will be very difficult for them to learn contingencies that exist in those environments.
Continue reading ‘Freed kids and behavior mod’
As a result of prowling around the Internet for a while, I’ve been assembling resources about applications of behavioral principles to problems relevant to the content of this blog. Of course, one of the foremost areas of application is improving the lives of individuals with autism. Indeed, applied behavior analysis (ABA) is sometimes misunderstood as a synonym for the discrete trial training procedures associated most closely with the work of Ivar Lovaas and his colleagues. Although they shouldn’t be considered synonymous, there is a great deal of communality.
But, that’s a topic for another post. This post is just an opportunity to list a few of the blogs that one can follow and learn about the application of behavior analysis to autism.
Continue reading ‘Some resources’
Over on Another Brick in the Wall, Donna posted an entry about the term “classroom control.” It got me thinking about the concepts of control, management, and teaching. Here’s her lead
Teachers use the term “classroom control” for classroom management techniques. I have also used those terms. Lately I have been thinking about how much control makes sense and if the goal is to keep children simply controlled or to change their behavior in a more lasting way. Change is a process that takes place inside the child before you see it in the behavior.
Continue reading ‘Reflections on control’
Over on Snail-Snail, snail_snail has a couple of posts that illustrate fundamentals for behavior management. The recommendations, in the form of a list one should ask oneself, provide the basic background that should be in place before one attempts to employ more formal behavior modification procedures.
Under the titles “Onaway Elementary/Day N,” snail_snail raises questions such as “Are the teacher’s directions usually clear?” and “Is the teacher consistent? Are the rules in force for all students? every day?” Most of the items on the list of questions should serve as reminders about basic teaching practices.
Continue reading ‘Baseline practices’
Some time ago, blogger Doug Belshaw had a post providing guidance about managing behavior that I just discovered. In the post Mr. Belshaw gives tips about classroom management that are worth repeating. Although there are 10 items in his list, I’ll just illustrate them using a couple here:
Continue reading ‘Mr. Belshaw’s tips’