Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Critiques of student engagement
Essays on behaviorism theory
Essays on behaviorism theory
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Critiques of student engagement
Lou Anne Johnson is a pop culture teacher played by Michelle Pfeiffer in the movie Dangerous Minds. Dangerous Minds was definitely a Hollywood movie, but still had some important character ideas serving relevance to what 21st century educators should still resemble today. The premise of the movie depicts that inner city schools often have students who are behind, (not exclusively, but primarily minorities), but with true passion, understanding, compassionate effort, these students can rise to astonishing levels of success. “Passion and motivation is the fuel that propels the human spirit and this is at the core of student achievement” (Balls, Eury, & King, 2011).
Witnessed throughout the movie are several instructional strategies for promoting student motivation. The teacher begins the class by informing all students that they are starting with an A; all they have to do is try to keep it. In the book, Tools for Teaching, Barbara Davis, would support this motivational method because of her belief of de-emphasizing grades and promoting learning for learning’s sake. One of her motivational strategies states, “Ensure opportunities for students’ by assigning tasks that are neither too easy nor too difficult.” It is evident in the movie that the students could care less what the teacher knows until they are certain she cares about them. Not only is the teacher extremely patient while waiting to earn the respect of her students, but also maintains a positive and determined attitude toward them.
The teacher’s role as an educator can compare directly to the philosophical aspects of behaviorism. According to the behaviorist, teachers have many rewards or other incentives prepared and ready when the need for motivating students...
... middle of paper ...
...specially relevant to the outside world! In Dangerous Minds, however; a genuine effort for connection to the students is a powerful agent in helping students recover their desire to learn and excel.
References
Balls, J.D., Eury, D.A., King, J.C. (2011). Rethink, rebuild, rebound. City, State: Pearson Learning Solutions.
Bass, R., (1995) Dangerous Minds. Hollywood, CA: Hollywood Pictures.
Karp, Stan. (2011). Taking teacher quality seriously: A collaborative approach to teacher evaluation. Retrieved xxMonth20xx http://rethinkingschoolsblog.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/taking-teacher-quality-seriously-a-collaborative-approach-to-teacher-evaluation/
Ozmon, H.A. (2012). Philosophical Foundations of Education: Ninth Edition. City, State: Pearson Education, Inc.
If you quote a line from a movie, you must provide the source for it here.
In 2010, Charlotte Danielson wrote an article, “Evaluations That Help Teachers”, for the magazine The Effective Educator. The purpose of this article was to explain how a teacher evaluation system, such as her own Framework for Teaching, should and can actually foster teacher learning rather than just measure teacher competence, which is what most other teacher evaluation systems do. This topic is especially critical to decision-making school leaders. Many of the popular teacher evaluation systems fail to help schools link teacher performance with meaningful opportunities for the teachers to reflect on and learn from in order to grow professionally. With the increased attention on the need for more rigorous student standards, this then is an enormous opportunity missed. Students can only achieve such rigorous expectations if their teachers can effectively teach them, and research has shown that teachers who are evaluated by systems that hold them to accountability and provide them for continuous support and growth will actually teach more effectively.
Meichenbaum, D. H., Bowers, K. S., & Ross, R. R. (1969). A behavioral analysis of teacher
Webber, Karl. “A Nation Still At Risk.” Waiting for Superman: How We Can Save Save America’s Failing Public Schools. Ed. Carl Weber. New York: PublicAffairs. 2010. 3-10. Print.
Behaviorism revolves around the measurable and observable characteristics of human behavior, and is based off of the principle that behavior is a result of stimulus-response associations. The purpose of this learning theory is using conditioning in order to acquire a desired behavior. Once understood, the use of behaviorism can be an effective tool in the classroom for educators to use.
Reece & Walker states the behaviourism is teacher centred and relies upon the expectation of the provision of a stimulus to produce a response however, ‘students are often seen as passive’. Therefore, without a stimulus there would be no response and is only visible externally. The teacher provides the stimulus for a response to occur, resulting in a change of behaviour that can be measured.
Standridge, M.. (2002). Behaviorism. In M. Orey (Ed.), Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology. Retrieved May 9, 2012 from http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/
Ravitch, Diane. Viteritti, Joseph.A new vision for city schools. Public Interest. (122): 3- 16. 1996 Winter
In order to understand how teacher evaluations can be positive, we need to look at their purpose and how districts do teachers evaluations. According to different articles written by Education Leadership, reformers many times neglect teacher evaluations as a tool to improve student learning, this is because most schools lack credible systems of measuring the quality of
According to the video entitled Behaviorism: A general overview of behaviorist learning theory, this approach to learning rejects the emphasis on the conscious and unconscious mind and focuses on the observable behavior of the subject. The principle of the behaviorism theory is that there is a direct association between a stimulus and the response an individual makes, the change in an individual’s behavior indicates that learning has occurred, and that individuals are not born with disposition to act in particular ways (Ormrod, 2012). In classrooms where the behavioral technique is used, there are often behavior modification and token reward systems in place (Campana, 2011).
The qualities that made Ms. Johnson superior, was that she went beyond the scope of her job in order to show her students that she didn’t just see them as students, but as people whose company she really enjoyed. Ms. Johnson gained their respect, when she went out of her way to go visit them at their house/job in order to encourage them to keep trying in school, and to see for herself the type of environment they lived in, since the students would comment “Come and live in my
Toch, T. (n.d.). Membership. educational leadership :expecting excellence: fixing teacher evaluation. Retrieved November 8, 2013, from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/oct08/vol66/num02/Fixing-Teacher-Evaluation.aspx
Behaviorism is defined as a school of psychology that takes the objective evidence of behavior (as measured responses to stimuli) as the only concern of its research and the only basis of its theory without reference to conscious experience (Merriam-Webster). B.F skinner, Ivan Pavlov and John B. Watson are known as the fathers’ of behaviorism. They all had a different prospective on what makes someone learn, the one thing they had in common is reinforcement methods. Their experiments did have enough true findings to spark others to want to explore how behaviorism affects learning. Behaviorists often look at learning as a characteristic of conditioning and will promote a system of prizes and targets in education.
My goal as an educator is to continually learn, reflect and change my practices in order to ensure all students learn at high levels. As I stated earlier, my initial educational philosophy was behavioral. I was somewhat surprised to find that I still scored the highest in this category on my self-assessment. However, after further reflection and reading B.F. Skinner, I believe that behavioral aspects still have an important role in education today. As an educator I have a moral responsibility to help students learn how to function as members of a classroom community. Skinner believes that the environment of a classroom and school should be as “conducive as possible to students’ learning”. Positive Behavior Interventions & Supports is a model I truly believe in and have used with success with children. Through PBIS, expected behaviors...
This paper will identify different definitions of an effective teacher, along with how to assess teachers for being effective. Teacher Effectiveness: Characteristics and Skills of an Effective Teacher. Teacher effectiveness has generated different definitions depending on how it is viewed. Jupp and Education (2009) define effectiveness as “the practical outputs of teachers”. These outputs take place in two different forms, quantitative and qualitative.
The behavior of the teacher can be detrimental or beneficial to a child’s motivational process. A study conducted by Patrick, Hisley, and Kempler (2000) from Goucher College proved that teacher enthusiasm does affect student intrinsic motivation. In the analysis, the level of teacher eagerness was manipulated to observe the participant’s motivation and interest after a brief lecture. The changes in the address included tone of voice, hand gestures, and facial expressions. Participants that heard the more energetic l...