“THE WHOLE IS GREATER THAN ITS PARTS”

[Note:  Due to the length of this material, it will be presented over two postings:  this one and the next one which will be posted on 9/9/16.]

With descriptions of behavioral and cognitive psychologies presented over the last three postings, this posting will present, in a rudimentary fashion, a “psychology” that not all in the discipline recognize as a psychology.  That would be humanist/phenomenology psychology.  Yet despite this reluctance by fellow educational psychologists, it has had an observable influence on many teachers and curriculum developers. 

Some have called it the “third force” – another way to visualize psychological factors that affect how and what a person learns.  It is criticized as being a “soft relative” of the more “scientific” approaches to educational psychology.  The practitioners who engage in this approach’s research do not depend on sophisticated experimental designs to gather their data, but on testimonials and interviews.  The information gathered by these qualitative techniques ventures into personal accounts of what the “I” experiences are in learning and/or in handling other challenges. 

Those who adhere to this psychology place great importance on self-definition – how we view ourselves.  They see this introspective determination as highly influential in how one will function in life, generally, and in the classroom, more specifically.  This is true both for students and teachers and even administrators.  And this self-awareness, or lack of it, is not a quality that is abstracted out of one’s psyche, but instead a quality that takes in the whole person and the whole environment in which that person is situated. 

Perceptions become central:  does the person perceive him/herself as a learner, a scoundrel, a lover, a hater, a leader, a follower, an actor, or a dropout?  These are various self-inflicted titles that then evolve into illustrative behavior that manifests their meanings.  An actor will act and a self-perceived dropout will, more than likely, be a dropout in real life.  This describes the phenomenological aspect of this psychology.  And these perceptions are not of a temporal nature, but instead define the whole person – a summary of who the person is through his/her own eyes.  The longer and more established these perceptions exist, the harder they are to dislodge.

Therefore, an educator, in order to be successful, needs to be conscious of this reality, be able to plan for it and, in a humanistic way, account for it as the educator interacts with the student.  The aim, of course, is to encourage and enable a person to perceive him/herself in ways that are rewarding to the person, not debilitating or self-destructive in any way or to any degree.

With this approach, the emphasis is not on how one responds to this or that stimulus or how the brain’s structure processes information.  The emphasis is on the Gestaltic aim to see and understand the total interaction between the individual and his/her environment – less analysis and more synthesis is this psychology’s orientation.  This view is particularly sensitive to the interpersonal relations that mark a person’s space.  In this, humanistic psychology leads teachers and curriculum developers to be more attuned to communication qualities such as connotations, symbolism, and configurations of interactions among subjects of a given “field” (a field being those aspects of a space that provides any effect on an interaction).

Learning, therefore, is viewed as complex.  There are mental processes that take in what a field has to offer; the elements have to be analyzed in order to identify any problem(s); the mind has to discriminate and tease out what is important from what is not and it has to see and understand the consequential relationships among the people and things present or potentially present.  Curriculum is not seen as a set plan, but an evolving concern which is better designated by the verb, currere, than the noun, curriculum.  This is the central ideal of reconceptualism which is usually associated with more recent expressions of reconstructionist philosophy.[1]

And by referring to the people and things present, the concern is not only with the physical proximity to the situation in question, but also includes those elements that can have an influence from afar.  All of this is a dynamic reality which calls on the person to accommodate to the changes that are constantly taking place.  Nothing is set in stone, making all perceived knowledge or beliefs unreliable and subject to questioning and critique.

But what is maintained, throughout the instructional interchange, is framing the teaching effort toward addressing the whole, the whole person and the whole environment.  Truth is not only in the detail, but also in the entirety of the situation, not just in external elements (rewards and/or punishments) or in internal mental elements (the structural processes of the mind and brain), but in the whole interactive reality.  All this does not lend itself to measurement or analytic diagramming, but to “gut” senses that can get a hold on the whole (see fn 1 above).

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[1] As I described in the posting, “Formal Critique of Critical Theory,” what I named reconceptualism is a branch of critical theory, the leftist, to varying degrees Marxist construct.  Most educators who ascribe to critical theory today adhere to this line of thought.  A quip that I believe summarizes this view is to just marry Marxian thought to natural rights biases that idolize the individual, and you have reconceptualism.  With reconceptualism and its reliance on postmodernism and post structuralism, there is a call for self-referentiality and a rejection of any grand narratives or ideologies.  It is subjectivism on “steroids.”  Adherents call for a serious approach to seeking the truth through historical interpretation that relies heavily on contextualizing the information gathered and delving into subjective forces about historical characters and the researchers themselves.

THE STRUCTURE AND PROCESSES OF THE MIND (cont.)

[Note:  this essay began with the last posting (8/30/16).  In order to understand the context for what follows, I suggest you click on to that entry by using the archival feature found on the right side of this page.]

With the overall explanatory remarks found in the last posting, hopefully we at least have a feel for the processing elements of thinking described and explained by cognitive psychology; that is, we have an idea of what this concern for processing knowledge entails.  But there is a backdrop to all of this of which an educator needs to be keenly aware.  That would be the genetically determined developmental aspect of our ability to process information and knowledge. 

I think the best way to describe this aspect is to delve directly into one of several models cognitivists have formulated to describe this longitudinal process.  Let me take this opportunity to point out that there is no physical component one can point to that houses these distinguishing features between brain and mind.  An MRI will not be able to detect that portion of the brain where the mind resides.  Yes, scanning devices can detect where in the brain certain types of thinking take place, but this is mostly speculative interpretations of neurological and blood flow changes that coincide when certain types of experiences take place.  But does this reflect where or what the mind is doing as opposed to some other physiological phenomenon?  Who knows?  But what we do know is that it is convenient to describe psychological functions and activities in the ways the last posting went about it.  And so it is with this developmental or growth component of the mind. 

We do know we develop in discernable ways and we do know we don’t learn how to do it.  It just takes place.  But studying the patterns that people tend to experience and by using some creativity, cognitive psychologists have developed models that trace the development over the years in which the process takes place.  I will in this posting share two of these models: that of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg.

Probably the most famous one is the one provided by Jean Piaget – have you heard the name?  Piaget’s model gained notoriety in the US in the 1950s and ‘60s.  Like other such efforts, his model identifies stages that begin at birth and go on until death.  They are the sensorimotor stage, the preoperational stage, the concrete operation stage, and the formal operation stage.

Let’s look briefly at how each stage manifests itself:

1) Sensorimotor stage (birth to two years of age) in which the young child learns to consciously react to surroundings, as opposed to reflexive reaction which characterizes his/her initial behavior.  Also, the infant to toddler period teaches the young one that things have permanence; if you store something, for example, it will be there in the future. 

2) Preoperational stage (two to seven years old) in which the child places conceptual or symbolic qualities onto things (clothes are for wearing; crayons are for coloring).  This conceptualization includes the rudimentary ability to attach attributes and categorization qualities to common sets of things. 

3) Concrete operation stage (seven to eleven years old) in which the child is beginning to make more complex and logical relationships among objects and even ideas.  The level of complexity is still relatively low, but complexity is beginning to characterize mental relationships as long as the child is dealing with familiar things or ideas.  So, for example, he or she can figure out, especially in the physical realm, reversibility and reciprocal relations in the physical world (water, if chilled sufficiently, will turn to ice, and ice, if heated, will turn to liquid and, if heated more, will evaporate or, in another conceptual relation, he/she understands that a long, thin glass can hold as much water as a short, wide one). 

4) Formal operation (11 years old to death) in which the person can begin and continue the ability to understand, apply, and develop ideas of ever more sophistication and complexity.  These ideas can, as the years and education advance, be of increasing abstraction.  This progression also leans toward the universal, as opposed to the parochial.  Learning no longer depends on direct experience but on knowledge derived from instruction and reading and other exposure to communication outlets.  The nature of the learning process takes on more formal forms such as the adoption of rules governing logical argumentation.

While these are the developmental stages identified by Piaget, an individual’s progression will be influenced by many factors.  Some are inborn, but many are environmental.  This reflects the nature/nurture debate which is still very much a part of scholarly and popular discussion over such matters.  “Nurture” factors include the quality of parent/child relations, the quality of household conversations including the topics family members address and the assumptions such discussions develop and promote, the quality of the schooling that a subject experiences, the opportunities presented (either planned for or occurring by chance), the presence and quality of any mentors a subject encounters, and the like.

The other developmental model I will review is one I have referred to in this blog several times.  That is the model offered by Lawrence Kohlberg.  Highly influenced by Piaget, Kohlberg developed a moral developmental model.  His model consists of the following: 

1) Pre-conventional level in which behavior is simply judged to be good or evil based on, first, whether it elicits punishment (observed as the bad) and then, whether it elicits rewards (observed as the good).  I still remember the first time my son confronted the bad at this level – he was not happy. 

2) Conventional level in which good and evil are dependent on what others (mostly parents) think of the child, as a person.  This is likely to take the form of, first, being considered nice (observed as the good) or considered not nice (observed as the bad) and then, later, whether the person lives by the rules (observed as the good) or does not act in accordance with the rules (observed as the bad). 

3)Post-conventional level in which ideals of morality are generally based, at least initially, on what other people feel or on perceptions of who or what has authority (parent, schools and churches, police, government officials, one’s own conscience).  This is followed by a concern or determination to obey contractual provisions (observed as the good) or not obey contractual provisions (observed as the bad) and then, at the highest level of moral thinking and feeling, abiding by one’s own accepted principles of morality (observed as the good) or not abiding by those principles (observed as the bad) and ultimately by one’s own principles of conscience which are self-defined principles or accepted, universal principles (such as those contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).  Again, the progression is toward the abstract and the universal.

Of course, not all of us get to the upper levels.  Often, the examples of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King are given as two individuals who made the complete progression as outlined by Kohlberg’s model.  One can either agree or disagree with these examples, but I am sure that it is generally accepted that only very few people will have advanced through these three stages or six hierarchical dimensions of moral thinking and living.

Other names associated with cognitive psychology are John Dewey (of course), Jerome Bruner, Lev Vygotsky (an interesting example to look up), Howard Gardner (multiple intelligences), and Daniel Goleman (emotional intelligence).  An offshoot of cognitive psychology is constructivism which focuses on the processes by which “knowledge” is formed.  The term, “construct,” which has been used extensively in this blog, is derived from this perspective.  Let me quote Ornstein and Hunkins on this view’s take about understanding the world:

Meaning is imposed on the world by those who reflect, those who think about the world.  Meaning does not exist in the world independent of us.  It is we who structure the world, as we construct reality so as to comprehend it.  In other words, learners do not simply “bank” knowledge from the external world into their memories. They do not receive understanding as a gift.  They do not arrive at knowing as a prize received for persistent practice.  Rather, they must engage in conjecture, question themselves and their views, contemplate projections of their held views, then formulate interpretations of the world shaped by their past experiences and interactions with the world.  They must bring into their cognitive processes their “world knowledge.”  They must draw on their perceptions of context, present and past.  Reflecting on contexts relevant to their learning results in the emergent formulation of understanding.[1]

Excuse the length of this citation, but I think that in relatively few words, its authors capture not only the essence of constructionism, but also all of cognitive psychology.  Before I was exposed to this fancy language, I realized that if you wanted students to learn something – whatever that meant – they had to reflect upon it.  Otherwise, it would not be much better than short-term memory.  Oh, there were those students with good memories who would retain the material for the weekly test and get their good grades.  In most schools, they are still the ones honored on the dean’s list and other designations.  But they are not necessarily the ones who later on will excel in the professional world.  It will be those students who learn to reflect or had at least an intuitive sense for what Ornstein and Hunkins describe above.

Let me end with an anecdote:  It came to be when I taught high school students that I got to know a young lady quite well.  She graduated from the high school where I taught back in the 1990s.  She was not my student but was dating another student to which I was quite close – a family connection.  She graduated with top honors, just about a straight A student.  She went on to matriculate in an undergraduate program at one of the state universities and graduated cum laude with only one grade below an A – reflecting some foul-up in which she was deprived of the higher grade due to some arbitrary act by an unreasonable prof.  She then signed up, at another state university, in a psychology doctoral program.  She couldn’t finish that program. 

During that time, we talked and what I could figure out was that in all of her preparation for this last schooling challenge, she had not been taught how to think; most of her experience consisted of seeing knowledge as something you memorize, and now she was being asked to construct knowledge.  Unfortunately, in terms of getting through the doctoral program – which entailed a hefty investment in funds, by the way – she was simply not prepared and had to eventually drop out. 

She is presently doing fine, has a good job in the financial world and lives in the D.C. area.  I guess her experiences, as opposed to her formal education, taught her how to reflect and appropriately engage System 2 thinking in order to do her job and to do it well.

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[1] Ornstein, A. C. and Hunkins, F. P.  (2004).  Curriculum:  Foundations, principles, and issues.  Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon, p. 117.

THE STRUCTURE AND PROCESSES OF THE MIND

[Note:  Due to the length of this essay, I will submit it over two postings.]

Continuing with a review of the different psychological schools of thought that have had an influence on education, cognitive psychology is the next approach I will address.  Whereas most school teachers and administrators are behaviorists by inclination, this next approach probably enjoys the second most favored position among those educators.  Not that any significant number of teachers and administrators wake up in the morning consciously thinking they are cognitivists, but given the general ideas attributed to this approach, I would suppose cognitive ideas probably have a fairly wide acceptance among them.

What are those ideas?  To begin with, more committed cognitivists are heavily concerned with the issues of growth or development, as opposed to learning, per se.  With this emphasis, they make a conscious differentiation between brain and mind.  With this distinction firmly established – which I will describe shortly – they contextualize the difference between development and learning.  Development is wired into the human make up; it’s a genetic trait, although it varies, in terms of its pace and its qualitative aspects, among people.  In regard to this concern, there have been famous models developed (no pun intended) by famous psychologists; that is, their names are somewhat commonly known and I will in this review describe the work of two of them.

But before we take a look at representative models (a topic for the next posting), let’s review this distinction between brain and mind.  In common parlance, many of us interchange these two terms.  But cognitivists, when they are speaking seriously about their field of study, make a distinction.  Let me describe this by using an analogy.  If you think of a radio or TV, you might think of a plastic casing in whose insides are filled with wires, transistors, and the like.  This constitutes these items’ physical attributes.  This, in the analogy, is akin to the brain.  The brain is the organ in a person’s head that takes up the relatively large area situated behind a person’s eyes, within the skull.  I’m sure we have all seen extracted brains of deceased people. 

What exactly is included and excluded from what is considered the brain might vary among those who talk about the brain, but generally we all know to what the term refers.  The brain provides the physically required mechanism by which thinking can take place.  There are portions of the brain that are associated with certain types of thinking – knowledge, beliefs, and emotions – and this passing reference is a good place to point out that cognitivists have no qualms about going inside the brain to try to figure out why we think and behave the way we do (remember, I pointed out the reluctance of behaviorists to do so).[1]

But we don’t buy radios and TVs to marvel at this complex amalgamation of wires and transistors.  Instead, we buy these appliances to be informed and entertained.  That is, spewing out of a radio or TV is programming which has its own order and logic.  This aspect of these devices is what is akin to the mind.  The mind is the sum total of all the “content” of our thinking.  The mind is also organized with structured content.  This content is not all consciously “observed” by a person; some of it is subconscious and nonconscious.  For example, we are not conscious of how the mind is genetically geared to develop at its own pace (more on this below).  Of course, all of these mind activities are dependent upon a functioning brain and we can observe in people what happens when portions of the brain are damaged and how such injuries affect thinking and, therefore, the mind.

So, cognitivists are very interested in all of this; they study how the mind organizes its thinking and the knowledge it holds and processes.  They spend a lot of time thinking about how the mind structures that knowledge and what actions it takes to hold and expand that knowledge.  Such mental processes, such as organizing, storing, discovering, creating, evaluating, and implementing content, are central to their study of psychology.  This, by necessity, expands their interest into not only the quantity of knowledge, but also the quality of knowledge.  That is, how does certain knowledge and how it is structured affect further thinking?  For example, how does something surprising or challenging to present knowledge that spurs an individual to become curious or creative or apt to solve a problem that is contained within that which the mind is considering? 

Note the avoidance of using the term stimulus – its use is not taboo, but it harkens back to those other psychologists about whom we just learned.  I might be imposing this distinction here, but my experience with this issue is that behaviorists are concerned with what is external to the mind; that is, what is the stimulus, while the cognitivists’ concern is centered on what is internal by analyzing, as best they can, the structures and processes of the mind.

The other area of concern that cognitivists are drawn to is memory.  Here, a very important distinction is made between short-term memory and long-term memory.  Short-term memory is the immediate sort of images, thoughts, connections (to prior stored information), and proclivities (such as the influence that framing has) in which the mind engages.  Much of this thinking, using short-term memory, is automatic and much of its content is a product of genetic factors.  For example, if I, out of the blue, offer you a gambling opportunity in which you put up $100 to win $150 with an 80% chance of success, you, if you are like most people, will decline the bet, not because it’s logical or reasonable to decline it, but because that’s just the way most of us are.  We are, automatically, a risk averse species.[2]  Yes, there are some who are not so averse to such bets; you know who they are, but most of us firmly believe the adage – “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” – as too chancy a proposition.  This proclivity is not learned; it’s just there and cognitivists can tell you what part of the brain “lights” up when considering this bet and this bias.  And short-term operations based on short-term memory deal with all of this.  It is mostly what Daniel Kahneman considers effortless thinking.[3]

He calls it System 1 thinking, but there is also System 2 thinking which is effortful.  That is, a person delves into long-term memory, the memory that is composed of knowledge that is retained for more than thirty seconds (as it is with short-term memory) and is available to apply to new situations confronting a person. 

There is something about these kinds of situations that spurs the mind to mull over what is being perceived and brings to bear memorized information that can assist in meeting what the situation calls for.  It could be a problem, a delight, a curiosity, or an emotionally inducing image.  In all such cases, at least initially, there is a surprise element to it, something a person did not expect.  The point is that whatever such an occurrence substantively contains, the person is willing to move into System 2 thinking which is, by its nature, lazy and unwilling to be activated.  Apparently, System 2 needs prodding to get going.  Generally, it is activated so as to arrive at a satisfying result that “resolves” the situation in question.  That is, it solves the problem, understands the delight, quells the curiosity, or handles the emotion so as to be satisfied with what happens next.  At least, that is what System 2 sets out to accomplish. 

Why is System 2 reluctant?  We know it is tiring to use it.  Studies show that such thinking physically eats up energy (noted by the quantities of sugar that blood carries to the brain when System 2 gets activated).  Therefore, it calls for effort.  It rummages through long-term memory and finds, understands, and figures out how to apply those memories to the challenge presented by the situation at hand.  Sometimes that’s relatively easy to do; at other times it is not. 

People who are good at this sort of thing, who have learned (through instruction and/or experience) to find such thinking enjoyable, and, as a result are good at problem solving or creatively dealing with emotional material, can command, usually, a hefty salary.  We hope our doctor is that sort of person; we hope our political and government leaders are, and we hope our teachers are. 

My experience is, though, that most are not.  But so it goes.  How to rummage and how to enjoy rummaging through our long-term memory are important aspects of education and some educators are conscious of the challenge to fill that memory with important “stuff” and to teach students to diligently, analytically, creatively retrieve and process those memories so they are able to do important and rewarding things in life.

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[1] This intrusion into the brain is by the means of scanning devices.

[2] There are evolutionary reasons for this bias.

[3] Kahneman, D.  (2011).  Thinking, fast, and slow.  New York, NY:  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

THE S-R CONNECTION

A thing of horror, or perhaps science fiction, was an early image of behaviorism; well, not held by everyone, but among many in the general population.  This disturbing perception of this psychology was promulgated by a vision of what its practitioners could do, at least by reputation.  By manipulating a person’s immediate environment, an evil psychologist could get that person to do whatever the psychologist wanted.  This view was even satirized in an early 1970s movie, Clockwork Orange.  In that film, the behavior modification technique attributed to behaviorism was performed on a criminal who had engaged in and was treated for sadistic offenses.  Of course, the effort goes awry – after all, humans aren’t machines.  Those were the days of the Communist threat; a threat from an enemy that was adept at mind control and other mind altering procedures.  At least that was the image our propaganda foisted upon us.  If you are too young to know about this or, perhaps, to appreciate the eeriness of it, let me fill in some of the blanks[1] – I emphasize “some” since the amount of information one can gather concerning behaviorism can fill many a cavernous hole.

To begin, the simplest illustrative image of behaviorism at work is the classic Pavlovian experiments.  Ivan Pavlov, a Russian (of course) psychologist, is best known for inducing dogs to salivate.  He could make a dog drip with saliva just by ringing a bell.  No, he couldn’t do it upon meeting a particular dog; the dog would have to be “taught” to do this trick.  Pavlov, over time, would simply ring a bell as he presented food to a dog.  The sight of the food would cause the dog to salivate, a natural reaction to seeing the food – I do it every evening at about six o’clock.  Eventually, the dog would experience the sound of the bell without the food and, sure enough, the animal would salivate on cue.  The trick is that by repeatedly presenting the two, the food and the ringing of the bell, the connection between them is reinforced and the dog associates the sound of the bell with the food. 

From those modest beginnings sprang an entire school of psychology and eventually ideas of being able to get animals and humans to do whatever one wanted followed.  Again, this dehumanizing view was basically accomplished by teaching people to associate a stimulus (bell) with a desired response (a moistened mouth or whatever the desired behavior might be).  What the ensuing years wrought is the understanding that humans and even animals are more complicated than this simple experiment indicated, but that did not completely debunk behaviorism.  Instead, the challenge was to work through the complications with further experiments and theorizing; such work would get at exactly the way associations and connections are made so that a person can successfully learn a skill.  How?  By experimentally working with different animals, different stimuli, different reinforcement protocols, and different sought-after responses.

Needless to say, the obvious connection to education was quickly appreciated and established.  In the psychology field, a list of pioneering work was to follow and much of it would be applied to educational challenges.  Among those who labored to advance our understanding of how stimuli (S) and responses (R) were connected, the names of Edward Thorndike (founder of behavioral psychology), James Watson, and B. F. Skinner are prominent.  In this short space, I will not attempt to review all of this work.  Instead, I will describe the major challenges with which this run of research has tangled.  I will also highlight the work of two behaviorists who have had major influences on education:  Skinner and Robert Gagne.

One of these challenges is to deal with how specific or general associations or connections are between stimuli and responses.  That is:  does the power of a stimulus only extend to specific responses or does the human’s (and perhaps to a more limited degree, the animal’s) mind make connections to categories of things?  Can connections be made – “taught” – across conceptual linkages?  Are human capacities to learn stagnant or do they change over time?  Following the lead of Thorndike, behaviorists ask whether a subject is only able to learn an association when the preparatory conditions are met or can it be made more fluidly under various conditions? These are the types of questions behaviorists and those who applied behaviorist principles wanted – and still want – answered.

Two developments affected the advance of behaviorism during the twentieth century.  One was the development of two sorts of conditioning:  classical conditioning and operant conditioning.  The classical variety occurs when responses can be traced to identifiable stimuli; operant occurs when they cannot be traced to identifiable stimuli.  This discovery is attributed to Skinner.  Working with mice and pigeons, Skinner studied the responses and identified two types or categories:  elicited and emitted. 

Elicited are responses that are observed from identifiable stimuli.  Emitted are those observed from unidentifiable stimuli.  Elicited responses are called respondents; emitted responses are called operant.  Skinner’s work led to insights revealing that the effects of stimuli are, by their nature, less definite.  He also discovered it helpful to rank reinforcers as being primary, secondary, or general.  Primary reinforcers refer to “teaching” techniques that assist in the satisfaction of basic drives (food, water, sex); secondary reinforcers are those that depend on human or animal wants not directly associated with basic drives (social approval, money, awards); and general reinforcers are those that are secondary but are chosen from a variety of options.  Teachers have such varieties of reinforcers as they attempt to teach – reinforce – a given skill. 

The other attribute of all of this research is focused not on what a subject is thinking or concerned with changing what a subject is thinking – these concerns were believed to be beyond observation and measurement and therefore unscientific.  What was sought after and what was measurable was behavior; hence the name of this psychology.

The other behaviorist I want to highlight is Robert Gagne.  As an aside, I once shared an elevator with this distinguished educational psychologist.  It occurred at Florida State University where Gagne spent a significant number of years during his professional career.  I was a graduate student.  I think our conversation consisted of the in-depth inquiry which was communicated by one of us saying:  “floor?”  Who asked the question, I don’t remember, nor do I remember the answer.  But beyond that interlude, Gagne was highly productive. 

He developed a significant model that was useful and highly used around the world in the work of instructional development.  The model identifies a hierarchical taxonomy of learning in which each stage of the model identifies what has to be learned or mastered before the higher stage can be addressed and successfully accomplished.  The model has eight stages.  The first five stages can be described as pure behavioral associations; the next two are a combination of behavioral and cognitive (internal brain/mental operations), and the last one is only cognitive. 

The eight are:

1.      Signal learning – learning a simple response to an identifiable stimulus; an example would be fear of a rat (classical conditioning)

2.     Stimulus response (S-R) – learning a response to a given stimulus; an example would be a response to a command by someone in authority (operant conditioning because one cannot be sure what exactly is the stimulus)

3.     Motor chain – the linking of two or more S-R connections; an example would be doing housework

4.     Verbal association – the linking of two or more concepts or notions; an example would be identifying valid synonyms and antonyms of a word

5.     Multiple discriminations – demonstrating different responses to different cases of a given set; an example would be distinguishing different types of vehicles (taxis, passenger cars, school buses)

6.     Concepts – demonstrating the ability to form abstract responses to a stimulus; an example would be correctly using categories such as vehicles, sports, academic subjects

7.     Rules – demonstrating the ability to chain two or more stimuli or ideas; an example would be discovering it’s safer to look left than right (in the US) before crossing a street

8.     Problem solving – demonstrating the ability to combine rules and/or principles in order to solve problems; an example would be figuring out the optimal arrangement of floor space in developing an architectural plan

These eight stages are clearly described and explained in Gagne’s classic text, The Conditions of Learning.[2]  The use of this model has had an enormous effect on the field of programming instruction.  With its use, designers are led to think of detailed sequences of instructional activities that are known for their minute character – nothing, it seems, is taken for granted.  They are heavy users of such tools as flow charts that take on intricate forms.

In everyday classrooms, I would judge the average teacher is a behaviorist, perhaps without even knowing it.  Stated another way, the average teacher manipulates the time-honored practice of issuing rewards (smiles, pleasant decisions, good grades, humor) to elicit desired behaviors from his/her students or punishments (frowns, unpleasant decisions, poor grades, scorn) to discourage unwanted behaviors.  These techniques were used way before Pavlov acquired his first dog.  They might be exposed to more sophisticated models of disciplinary strategies – I’ve been exposed in my teaching career to varying behaviorally inspired, in-service training.  What I would point out is that the behavioral view of learning, while still very much in place among the learning and instructional approaches utilized in professional training programs, has been modified by the influence of more cognitive approaches. 

Clockwork Orange, I suspect, would seem foreign to most audiences today.  One field outside of teaching that seems to have melded the behavioral and cognitive perspectives is behavioral economics.  For those so interested, the Great Courses has a course on behavioral economics.  While that course is geared toward business leaders, many of its insights can be translated to address many of the challenges teachers and school administrators face.  As for cognitive psychology, that will be my next topic.

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[1] Again, I will base most of the factual accounts of this psychology on the work of Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins.  See Ornstein, A. C. and Hunkins, F. P.  (2004).  Curriculum:  Foundations, principles, and issues.  Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon.

[2] Gagne, R. M. (1987).  The conditions of learning.  New York, NY:  Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

LEARNING IS A MENTAL PROCESS

What does one need to know if he or she takes it upon him/herself to seek change in a local school, school district, or at the state level?[1]  Given the resources necessary to influence public policy, I would suggest that any effort to institute change by average citizens would probably be limited to local targets, for example, at a particular school or a school district.  And when one is talking about effective curricular changes, irrespective of one’s resources, one has to penetrate the psyches of a particular school’s staff, comprised of the professionals who will actually effectuate the change effort.  This blog has addressed how difficult such an effort is, especially if one is considering change beyond minor modifications; that is, any meaningful curricular change such as changing the scope of a particular subject that calls for transformational change. 

My focus of late in this blog has been to look at some of the factors that would be important to such a potential or actual change process.  To date, I have addressed curricular philosophies and approaches.  My next topic, psychology, is a central concern to all of education, for after all, learning is a mental process.  In this posting, I want to make a few introductory remarks that provide an overview for what is to come.  I warn you:  my comments on the relationship between psychology and education will be cursory at best – volumes have been published in this field.  My aim, as with philosophy and approaches, is to give you a set of parameters and bits of language that you, as a change agent, are apt to encounter.

 Assuming one is seeking curricular changes that result in students learning important material, the psychological factor is obviously important.  Teachers are constantly making psychological assumptions about their students and the parents and administrators with which they deal.  Some of those assumptions are well ensconced within their individual world views.  If they are certified by the state, they have had college level courses in developmental psychology and in various learning theories.  Mix that knowledge with the individual biases anyone brings to a social setting and you have the particular assumptions and beliefs any particular teacher might have about his/her professional responsibilities.  The viewpoints held by those who attempt to design and implement change and of those teachers and school staff members affected by any change effort will be crucial in their attempts.  Unfortunately, the less sophisticated aspects of such beliefs – the intuitive component – often prove to be misguided.  These beliefs are often highly influenced by cultural biases, both generally or those particular to a social environment such as a school site or, more specifically, a classroom.  That is, in order to be effective, one cannot neglect all sorts of biases and misconceptions any group of school personnel, either individually or collectively, might have. 

While this blog cannot address all these possibilities, it can look at what generally these teachers have been taught concerning learning theories.  This should give the potential or actual change agent a starting point by which to assess the psychological parameters those individuals at the school or school district share.  I deem this as useful knowledge for it gives one an insight into the language one is likely to encounter among teachers when they discuss instruction and/or other social interactions that typify school life.

Along these lines, Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins offer the following questions that a curricular specialist would ask in order to do his/her job:

Why do learners respond as they do to the efforts of the teachers?  What are the impacts of cultural experiences on students’ learning?  How should curriculum be organized to enhance learning?  What impact does the school culture have on students’ learning?  What is the optimal level of student participation in learning the various contents of the curriculum?[2]

As with any similarly broad concerns, it is inevitable that different people will arrive at different answers to these questions.  Since ultimately psychology is a study of humans and such study has proven deficient in being able to predict human behavior, there have developed different schools of thought concerning learning and other school related activities.  This variety will also parallel what this blog has already reviewed in terms of both curricular philosophies and curricular approaches.  That is, as we look at the major groups of psychological theories, you will be able to discern how the various philosophies and approaches rely on how learning is variously described and explained by these different schools of thought.

Before reviewing these groups of theories, let me make a comment about the state of psychological research.  Current efforts at advancing our understanding of how we think, make decisions, learn, and carry out other mental functions are being assisted by very exciting, new technologies.  Many learning theories and other explanations originated from a time when these newer research tools were not available – I will attempt to point out how this deficiency affected early conclusions and viewpoints.  These technological advancements are the various resonating machines that allow us to look inside the brain as it is stimulated by different types of information and other sensations.  Specifically, these machines include computerized tomography or CT (originally called CAT) which utilizes X-rays that scan cross sections of the brain; positron-emission tomography (PET) which traces how sugar in the blood flows in the brain; and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) which, with the use of radio waves, gives a researcher insight on how the brain analyzes information and how blood flows correlate with different brain activities.  While all of this does not indicate what the mind is thinking – we can’t “read” what a person’s thoughts are – it does give suggested information as to what sort of thinking is being stimulated by being able to see what sections of the brain are “lit” up with varying stimuli.  These sections are then matched with certain types of thinking and feeling, such as analysis, fear, or happiness.  Surely, such research is based on interpretation, but it does give researchers tools that advance knowledge appreciably from what was possible before these technologies were available.[3]

But even before these machines were introduced, there was the recognition that psychology should be central to our study of curriculum.  Two scholars who gave this aspect of learning a prominent place in their works were Ralph Tyler and Jerome Bruner, who recently passed away, four months short of his 101^st birthday.  Tyler, in his curriculum development model, identified a developer’s view of psychological factors as one of his “screens” that will have an effect on the sequence of the learning experiences his curricular plans propose.  Bruner associated thinking styles with the demands of various academic subjects such as, for example, distinguishing between when analytic thinking is prominent as opposed to creative thinking.  These styles are influential in the resulting structure of knowledge that the various disciplines have developed.  In short, psychology plays a central role in curricular development both in terms of content and process.[4]

So what are these various schools of thought?  Ornstein and Hunkins list three groups of psychological theories that have had influence on curricular development.  They are behaviorist or association theories, cognitive-information processing theories, and phenomenological and humanistic theories.  I would also add psychoanalytic theories.  In the upcoming postings, I will describe these groups and point out the distinguishing emphasis each of these has.  For example, behaviorist theories highlight the effects that reinforcements and rewards have on learning and motivation.  This emphasis can be distinguished from cognitive information theories’ emphasis on developmental aspects of learning and motivation.  Each of these groups has provided meaningful insights as to what needs to be taken into account when curriculum and instructional decisions and activities are carried out.  In turn, changes in curriculum, in order to be viable, need to take into account the relevant psychology that affects accomplishing the learning outcomes being sought.

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[1] By way of context, this is how our school system is divided administratively.  There is an added layer, the US Department of Education, but that level is mostly advisory and supplemental.  Our federal system places squarely on the states the obligation of providing a public school system and the responsibility of regulating all educational efforts, public and private, within a state.

[2] Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins.  See Ornstein, A. C. and Hunkins, F. P.  (2004).  Curriculum:  Foundations, principles, and issues.  Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon, p. 99.

[3] Sousa, D. A. (2001).  How the brain learns, 2^nd ed.  Thousand Oaks, CA:  Corwin Press.

[4] Op cit., Ornstein and Hunkins.

ON THE LEFT END

On the spectrum of potential approaches to curriculum, farthest from the technical end of the continuum lies the reconceptualist approach.  It is so far down that conceptual road that some curricular scholars don’t consider it an approach at all.  But for our purposes, it is.  Other scholars, according to Ornstein and Hunkins,[1] view it as an extension of the humanistic approach.  The reason some curricular experts dismiss this approach lies mostly in the fact that it does not address curricular development issues; it’s solely into content.  The curricular workers who adopt it shy away from technical matters associated with development.  Initially, then, this approach engenders some controversy.

The argument that holds it to be an approach has been based on the claim that it addresses the social, economic, and political aspects of education – not just curriculum – and its focus is not limited to schools, but all of society.  As such, its advocates emulate those who follow the academic approach in that they concentrate their subject on the abstract and shun the more practical side of curricular work.  This steers their attention away from curricular development, per se.  The effect for those who toil in the fields of education, away from the halls of academia, is that they are prone to see such study as impractical.  Their challenges are to design, maintain, and evaluate curricular components at actual school sites, not to ponder the social conditions of the day.  But to those who do deal in theory, the contributions of the reconceptualists are much appreciated, especially among other reconceptualists.  Hence, there is a divide in the education world between practitioners and theorists – a divide, I might add, not limited to the affairs of education.

But reconceptualists do have their supporters among the practicing minions.  They tend to take a postmodern perspective when going about their jobs.  They argue that curricular work demands a new consciousness.  To them, there is no one way to view curriculum development and they, along with their fellow practitioners, need to embrace a more open and interactive perspective.  They tend to emphasize that development should be the product of communal efforts, not limited to the work of specialists.  And here we encounter our initial aim in this review of approaches; that is, curriculum work should be transformed from what it generally tends to be.  Those other approaches, reviewed over the last five postings, are to varying degrees more technical.  Instead of striving for well-managed processes in which the authorized specialists run through their preconceived processes and logical sequential steps – a favorite target here is Tyler’s model of curriculum development previously described under my treatment of the behavioral approach – curriculum workers should not only allow, but also encourage chaos.  More specifically, they should invite all the stakeholders – students, parents, teachers, administrators, other members of the community, academia, etc. – into the process and let them thrash out a strategic plan for a school.  The postmodern eye looks for open systems, not closed ones; it appreciates inclusiveness and representation, not special expertise that always seems to have hidden agendas.  For many, this will seem uncomfortable and reconceptualists would recommend that such discomfort emanates from limited mindsets.  Some might add that these are mindsets springing from interests not necessarily limited to the concerns of educating youth in the most viable, productive way and in the interests of the students and of the community.

And this leads one to that segment of reconceptualist thought that tends toward the political.  For these pedagogues, the aim is emancipation from the norms, conceptualizations, and ruling interests that are in place to protect the powerful, be they in an economic, political, or any other realm of authority, such as the spiritual.  This calls not only for change, but for transformative change.  Oppressive power relations are not just a matter of brute authoritarian controls, but also of subtle sociological and psychological controls.  Those in power control the mechanisms of socialization and with them, the modes of communicating what the powerful deem to be prudent and moral.  To break such control from cases that are overt to cases that are tacit and shrouded, emancipating education has to be transformative; that is, not only changing what is known and believed by students, but what they end up believing should be.  The assumption among reconceptualists is that what exists in our schools mirrors what exists in our society:  a static and oppressive reality.  Want to hear an expression of this view?  Review the rhetoric of the Bernie Sanders’ candidacy for president.  Such a review will give you a sense of what it would be like to feel the “Bern” in terms of running our schools.

Pioneers in this tradition were George S. Counts, Harold O. Rugg, and Harold Benjamin.  They started curricular work that among their followers has been noted for their more emotionally charged arguments.  These arguments have been organized and they compose a fairly discernable ideology – to varying degrees, among its adherents, following the ideas of Karl Marx – and, as such, the ideology attacks inequality and discrimination based on class, gender, race, religion, nationality, age, and sexual preferences.  The adherents target what they see and define as miseducation and oppression.  To their critics, many reconceptualists suffer from myopia in that they oversimplify and overgeneralize oppressive aspects of any society and underappreciate meaningful policies that address them.

In terms of change, there is a lot to derive from the reconceptualists.  Their call for transformational change is welcome.  Along with this type of change, their call for inclusion is seen as supportive of the efforts many change agents exert.  It should be pointed out, though, that not all curricular workers who call for transformational change are reconceptualists.  One can say that reconceptualists are transformational change advocates with an attitude.  This might be overstating the case a bit, but one can detect this strident tendency when one attends their gatherings and listens to their speakers.  Of course, one should not over generalize or dismiss what reconceptualists have to offer due to the belligerence of some (many) of their spokespersons and followers.  In terms of finding reconceptualists in your local school, perhaps you will find one or two of them holding teaching positions, but do not be surprised if you do not find any.

This ends my review of the educational approaches Ornstein and Hunkins offer.  The approaches have been the behavioral, the managerial, the systems, the academic, the humanist, and the reconceptualist approaches.  This one and the last five postings have provided a description of each of them.  The aim is to arm potential change agents with a bit of knowledge as to the potential, curricular biases among educators they might encounter at the school site or the district office.

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[1]  Again, I will base most of the factual accounts of these approaches on the work of Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins.  See Ornstein, A. C. and Hunkins, F. P.  (2004).  Curriculum:  Foundations, principles, and issues.  Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon.

THE ELUSIVE “AUNTIE MAME” FACTOR

In my current review of the various approaches to curriculum,[1] with the last approach, the academic, you might have sensed a shift from the previous three approaches.  That is, the academic, with its philosophic bent, is quite a bit less technical than the three approaches that preceded it:  the behavioral, managerial, and the systems approaches.  With this posting, I will describe an approach that is the most artistic of them all, the humanistic.  As such, this approach can be considered the least rigid and technocratic.  Here, the attempt is one in which there is a much higher level of concern with what is personal and with how the person interacts socially.  The approach is more of a reaction to what its proponents see as curriculum workers neglecting the artistic and cultural elements that a sound curriculum should not only encompass, but upon which it should focus.  By so doing, those involved, from curriculum worker to student, can address the need to be self-reflective and to progress toward self-actualization.  In order to do this, this approach takes into account, to a much more heightened level, the socio-psychological environment of the classroom and of the school in which the curriculum is to function.

As with many of the approaches considered, this one has its origins in the work of John Dewey and his days at the University of Chicago.  There, the works of Charles Judd and Francis Parker are of note.  It gained impetus when Dewey moved to the Teachers College at Columbia University.  Other names associated with this approach at Columbia include Frederick Bosner, Hollis Caswell, L. Thomas Hopkins, William Kilpatrick, and Harold Rugg.  The stretch of time between the development in Chicago to New York stretched from the 1920s to the 1950s.  The later years were influenced by advancements in child psychology and humanistic psychology.  Insights into ego, valuing, mental health, and personal growth and fulfillment were incorporated into the work of these educators.

Probably the area of pedagogy most affected by the developments of these curricular workers was in elementary education.  Such instructional techniques as group games, artistic endeavors, and field trips were devised with the overall aim of having students engage in life simulating activities and activities that reflected socially dynamic aspects of learning such as creative problem solving and active participation within, when possible, school-wide or even community settings.  All of this had a strong dose of progressive thinking behind it.

There was a strong input from developmental psychologists Robert J. Havighurst, Erik Erikson, and Abraham Maslow.  Child-centered instructional innovations by German educator Frederick Foebel, Swiss educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and Scottish educator A. S. Neill were incorporated.  In addition, what I believe to be a very important development was the attention these educators brought to what was labeled the informal and hidden curriculum – those aspects of schooling that are not identified or necessarily addressed by the other approaches.  To cite a simple example, this approach looks at the effect of having those bells ringing every hour or so to indicate the “learning” period either beginning or ending.  How do such practices define what we consider education to be and, in turn, how artificial is that definition?  As part of this new viewpoint, educators were encouraged to take into account the whole child – emotions as well as cognitive and behavioral factors – in how and why a child is educated.  This added such areas of concern as music, health education, literature, and the other humanities to the content and were considered just as important as the STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering, and math.

From all of this work, various instructional practices were added to the repertoire of teachers.  These included cooperative learning, small-group learning and other practices that emphasized more of the cooperative rather than the competitive nature of learning.  It also strongly suggested that curriculum planning and implementation take on a more social character where parents and other community representatives could be included.  There should be, according to the proponents, more collegiality and mentoring going on at the schoolhouse and, in turn, participation should be considered a duty by other members of the community.  The addition of curriculum committees would promote a more bottom up view as opposed to the managerial perspective of a top down approach to curriculum development and implementation.  This whole perspective probably hit its apogee during the 1970s.  But it is my impression that while a lot of this is given lip service, with mandatory committees being instituted, the whole approach never took much of a hold as its proponents hoped.  While a faculty of any size would probably have one or two teachers – the creative ones – the bulk of instruction in that school does not follow the humanistic approach.  The missing element is the necessary transformational change such a dynamic and all-encompassing shift demands.  That is, to fully implement these ideas, teachers, administrators, parents, students, and other community members have to have an emotional commitment that is simply not there, at least not to the degree that one would need in order to secure the displacement of what I believe is prominent in our schools – the managerial approach.  Perhaps such a change is unrealistic and utopian, but I do believe our schools can more meaningfully apply what this approach strives to implement.  What seems to be missing is a more realistic view of what change encompasses – hence, the need for more well-informed and skilled change agents.

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[1] Again, I will base most of the factual accounts of these approaches on the work of Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins.  See Ornstein, A. C. and Hunkins, F. P.  (2004).  Curriculum:  Foundations, principles, and issues.  Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon.