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Geneva: We do not create these behaviors and in most cases do not support them.

Cynthia: MANY FACTORS ... CONTRIBUTE TO BEHAVIORS

Connie: I don't see how the behaviorists can actually change a student's behavior.

Saroja: it is extremly important to control the undesirable behavior in the class room.

Cleat: What to do...what to do???...Much of what I do instinctively, or unconsciously

Margaret:I wonder about the difference in expectations when culture in taken into consideration?

Tiffany : my theory on THEIR BEHAVIOR was rooted in MY BEHAVIOR. So I now am now questioning how my behavior determines their behavior.

Julie? : it is impossible to use a script for every child's problems....However, some classes need a little more (or a lot more) direction.

Teresa : The majority of the children respond quite well to being the decision maker for their choice of behaviors.

Judith: The afternoon session seemed to go back to the idea that we must look at behavior problems as just that, behavior problems!!!...Trying to control things that we have no control over can be the behavior that we must change.

Antoinette: Im fighting tooth, and nail against the behavorilaist approach to learning and education, it seems to take personal responsibility and individuality.

Here's what Anne learned from Kim:

• developmental psychologists don't know much about how change happens; they have no idea, for instance, how kids make the shift from thinking that others know what they know, to realizing that they may be thinking differently

• Robert Siegler has studied these sorts of changes; his theory is one of "overlapping waves" (=just because you are given a new, more efficient strategy doesn't mean you will use it all the time; CHANGE IS GRADUAL)

• reinforcement is anything that will increase the likelihood of a behavior; it is not a property of anything; it is not linear or predictable; it can be positive (adding something to the situation) or negative (taking something away)

• you have to know what your group finds reinforcing (and teachers are not very good at predicting what is reinforcing for a younger generation)

• "extinction" is taking away the reinforcer ("there can be no weak-hearted people here!")

• "rebound" is to be expected: the behavior will "spike" before it ceases

• punishment is the opposite of reinforcement; it means actively decreasing the frequency of a behavior (and can be negative--taking something away--or positive--adding something)

• the problem w/ punishment is the failure to replace it with something else; it works better in smaller amounts, if the consequences are "natural" to the misbehavior, and within the right time frame (small kids have very short event horizons, and many kids in our society expect immediate feedback)

And these are Anne's questions:

• WHY is change gradual? do/can we know something about the priming of neural pathways that would help to explain the slow pace? and what makes change sudden sometimes?

• when is reflecting useful? not useful? when is it more efficient to be less (or more) deliberate?

• how do "overlapping waves" and "behaviorism" jive (or not) with what today's guest once called "The Harvard Law of Animal Behavior: under carefully controlled experimental circumstances, an animal will behave as it damned well pleases"? In other words, how does behaviorism deal with all that intrinsic variability some of us were learning about during the Institute on Brain and Behavior?

• and how do they address a phenomenon Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote about in Notes from Underground in 1864: ....science itself will teach man... that he himself is something of the nature of a piano-key or the stop of an organ... so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature....even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point.... the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key!

  Paul....? Any (more) ideas...?

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