Week 6 Behaviorism

1) I think contiguity learning, for me, outside of school would have to be the ice cream man. Not that I ever got any ice cream but I learned that when I heard the song the Entertainer that the ice cream man was coming. That was the song that the ice cream truck played in my neighborhood. When I thing of stimulus response inside of school I think of my teacher raising his hand or standing silent in the center of the room. These were two events that motivated a response and for both the response was silence and attention. Attention getters are used in various forms by various people and like most things take some training but after it has been learned once it can be generalized for more than one teacher. For one teacher silence might come by turning the lights on and off, for another by raising their hand but once it is learned once it can be generalized.

2) One effective reinforcement that I remember as a child was losing privileges when I got in trouble. Especially the privilege of going to my friend's house. TV was a loss too but it was not as big for me as a child than not getting to go play was. I generally did not repeat an offense too soon because I didn't want to stay in the house the rest of my life. In school I remember the teachers giving praise a lot. And if one person got attention everyone wanted it and that generally made everyone work hard so that they could get praised as well.

3) One thing that I have heard a lot in class from more than one teacher is the importance of conditioning your students or "training the troops." A reinforcement schedule helps to do that. In using one you are able to teach acceptable and unacceptable behavior and the consequences of each choice. Soon, the students learn that with ever choice comes a consequence whether it is good or bad depends on their choice, and if your schedule is effective then the students learn to make good choices and your classroom runs more smoothly.

4) When I think of gospel principals and behaviorism I think of the Young Women's theme and choice and accountability. Learning that you are accountable for your actions or choices, both good and bad. But, we all have our agency. We all have the ability to chose which we are going to do. We cannot chose the consequences but we can chose the actions we take that leads to them and the action we take depends on how we use our agency. I think that there are certain connections between them but I also think that there is something more to agency than just choice and consequences and conditioned response. If that where the way that we learned everything we would be nothing more than animals. Animals can learn and adapt too but there is more to the choices that we make in life than just conditioned responses. people go against their conditioning all the time. I think in some ways it is an argument of natural vs spiritual man.