This past year, I've become a professional at binging Schitt's Creek episodes on rainy days, making just enough coffee to make it through the school day, giving my dog his anxiety pill every morning, and calling my parents every week. Crushed it!
While I thought it was just practice and intention, I've recently discovered there's a word for this learning: operant conditioning. My high school AP Psychology class covered Pavlov's salivating dogs but understanding the evolution of behaviorism has further helped me understand how and why we learn.
Watching David learn to ride a bike and PT Barnum learning about how his actions affected others made me reflect on behaviorism from a third-party perspective. More often than not, we think about ourselves, our students, our friends and try to justify or rationalize their behavior. How did my friend lose so much weight? Why are my students not understanding fractions? Why do I remember to drink coffee but not water? As I reflected on my behavior and those around me, I realized how much we learn through operant conditioning, specifically the reinforcements.
In the classroom we're constantly reinforcing student behavior with prizes (our school offers "Falcon feathers'' as school currency), words, referrals, and other consequences influencing how students (continue to) act in school. Miller (2020) emphasizes how both positive and negative reinforcements strengthen and influence how students behave. But when we come across a student who has already developed negative habits (i.e. ripping up a test because it's too hard), Miller further explains and references Edwin Gutherie's theory on how we can help alter this negative behavior we don't want and replace it with coping strategies instead. We must focus on the student's threshold, their fatigue, and identify a more compatible response (Schunk, 2016).
Regardless of the behavior, we must respond. As teachers educating and preparing the youth toward becoming productive contributors to society, we must support their learning with both positive and negative reinforcements acting on cues we notice and can influence the behavior we want to see inside and outside the classroom.
Same goes for training my dog, Bear. When Bear was a puppy, I struggled with consistency and reinforcing, instead of punishing. At the time, it was easier and more natural to punish my dog for negative behavior (i.e. time out), but Cherry (2019) analyzes Skinner's various reinforcement schedules focusing on timing and frequency to reinforce new behaviors and modify negative behaviors. Whether I decided to follow a fixed-interval schedule or fixed-ratio schedule to train Bear, I needed to be consistent. He and I both know when he goes to the back door, it is his way of communicating that he needs to go out because he knows he will be punished if he has an accident in the house. Similarly, through operant conditioning, he now scratches the bottom of his water bowl to inform me he is out of water, I refill his bowl, and he is satisfied. It's mind blowing how effective and regularly we're conditioned and sometimes don't even recognize it's happening.
Becoming aware and being intentional about how and why we're conditioning our students, dogs, or selves is critical once we identify the desired end result. Consistency and frequency are also key factors when it comes to understanding behaviorism and analyzing observable behavior. It is my new goal, by following a fixed-interval schedule, to replace coffee and couch time with drinking 90 ounces of water and walking 12,000 steps per day; the positive reinforcement of feeling healthier mentally and physically over time sounds like quite the reward if you ask me.
Resources:
Cherry, K. (2019, September 5). What is operant conditioning and how does it work?. Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/operant-conditioning-a2-2794863.
Lim, A. (2020, July 2). Partial reinforcement schedules. [Photograph]. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/schedules-of-reinforcement.html
Miller, K. D. (2020, March 25). Operant conditioning theory: Examples for effective habit formation. Positive Psychology. https://positivepsychology.com/operant-conditioning-theory/
Schunk, D. (2016). Learning theories: An educational perspective. Pearson.