Rogers (1902 - 1987) teaching as facilitator

Carl Rogers is known as the founder of 'client-centred' therapy and his promotion of counselling. He also had a keen interest in education and his therapy-oriented methods became widely adopted in education and training through coaching, mentoring and other student-centred Socratic techniques. Roger’s influence can be felt everywhere in modern learning with from open questioning techniques by tutors to counselling itself in schools and the workplace.

Teaching as facilitation

Influenced by Dewey, he emphasised the relationship between learner and facilitator. As early as 1951 Rogers had looked at 'student-centred teaching' in Client-Centered Therapy (1951), where he claimed that teaching is really ‘facilitation’ and that we must allow the learner to relax to learn and feel free from any form of threat. Freedom to Learn (1969) takes counselling principles and applies them to education. It explores facilitation and person-centred learning in schools. A collection of papers, it described preparation, creating an environment of trust and provocative input to stimulate discussion. Facilitation involved certain qualities and attitudes and realness in the facilitator of learning.

The facilitator must treat the learner with genuine respect and open up as one person genuinely communicating with another. When the mask of the professional or expert drops, facilitation is at its most effective. Facilitators must be themselves, in direct person-to-person encounters. More than this realness, is a feeling of prizing the learner, without being condescending. It is this, along with an acceptance that it’s fine to not know things, that promotes trust. Empathy, in the sense of understanding what is going on in the mind of the learner, seeing it from their perspective, is another feature of good facilitation. Learner’s need to be understood and not just judged.

Critique

However, non-directed teaching can have a debilitating effect on learners due to the lack of specific, directed feedback. It can also lead to too much reliance on the subjective reports of the learner, which are not always accurate or trustworthy. Constructive criticism can be negated by being too empathetic. Facilitated learning may benefit more from the honest dissolution of misconceptions rather than an abundance of empathy. Unfortunately, the therapy-oriented techniques aimed at troubled minds do not always apply to people who simply want to learn. Not knowing something is not an illness to be cured by therapy. Many learners also want a less moderated approach to learning. Dialogue may be more appropriate than pure empathy. In counselling, the idea that the client knew more than the counsellor became the prevalent model. Unfortunately, this extreme form of the Socratic method is difficult in learning, where by definition, the learner doesn’t have the knowledge or skill to start with.

Conclusion

Rogers's influence on therapy, counselling and education is enormous. The general tone of learning through facilitation was set by him and continues to this day in the counsellor/teacher/trainer/HR role. This has been positive, leading to a more sophisticated relationship between learner and teacher/trainer. On the negative side there is a difference between learner-centric and self-centred.

Bibliography

Rogers, C. R. (1961) On Becoming a Person. A therapist's view of psychotherapy, Boston: Houghton Mifflin (1967 - London: Constable).

Rogers, C. (1970) Encounter Groups, New York: Harper and Row; London: Penguin.

Rogers, C. R. (1980) A Way of Being, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Rogers, C. and Freiberg, H. J. (1993) Freedom to Learn (3rd edn.), New York: Merrill.

Furedi, F. (2004) Therapy Culture Routledge.

Erikson (1902 – 1994) lifelong identity crises, 8 stages

Eric Erikson a German psychoanalyst and psychologist, spent most of his working life in the US. He expanded Freud’s childhood developmental theory, well beyond the first few years of life, into a lifelong development theory of identity, with an emphasis on the adolescent ‘identity crisis’ and the role of the ego.

Eight stages

Inessence, Eriskson’s advice is that internal conflicts occur at each of his eight stages in life. If one fails to resolve the crises that arise, they can adversely affect the later stages in one’s life.

Stage 1: Trust vs. Mistrust (Oral-sensory, Birth-0-2)

The Oral Sensory Stage, requires the development of trust through the maternal relationship and if this bond is not fulfilled may lead to a sense of rejection or worthlessness.

Stage 2: Autonomy v Shame & Doubt (Muscular-Anal, 2-4)

Autonomy develops as we go through the ‘terrible two’s and we affirm our ability to defy, walk and talk, with an emphasis on toilet training. Here we overcome shame.

Stage 3: Initiative v Guilt (Locomotor-Genital, Preschool, 4-5)

Pre-school involves initiative overcoming guilt through play, imagination and mimicking adults.

Stage 4: Industry v Inferiority (Latency, 5-12)

At school, the child must develop self-identity and self-worth within the context of a new environment, through industry, to overcome a sense of inferiority. Education kicks in here as the teacher must, like the parent, engender a sense of worth.

Stage 5: Identity v Role Confusion (Adolescence, 13-19)

The big one, where roles are confused until identity is established. The tables are turned as we have to rely on ourselves, rather than others for our identity. This can lead to idealism at the expense of realism.

Stage 6: Intimacy v Isolation (Young adulthood, 20-24, or 20-40)

We’re into adulthood where intimacy overcomes isolation through love, friendship and possibly marriage.

Stage 7: Generativity v Stagnation (Middle adulthood, 25-64, or 40-64)

One develops a career and purpose in life, as well as taking on the role of a parent and carer. One’s sense of purpose can stagnate into regret or be generative.

Stage 8: Ego Integrity v Despair (Late adulthood, 65-death)

One looks back with either a sense of disappointment, even despair, or a positive outlook with a sense of worth and wisdom, as one face s death.

Criticism

He knew Freud’s daughter Anna and took Freud’s basic theory, modified it, with more emphasis on the ‘ego’ and less on sexuality. But Erikson’s schema suffers from being primarily descriptive, with little evidence to back up the underlying pairs of conflicting forces. His evidence is loose and anecdotal, relying too much looking at the lives of a few famous people from the past. His paired conflicts have been criticised as being oversimplifications, dualist in nature, if not moralistic in tone. There is also doubt about the age ranges and whether all of this occurs in such a rigid, sequential order.

Conclusion

Erikson has been influential not only among early years’ practitioners but also among those who study adolescence. ‘Identity crisis’ has entered our language as a general term for confusion about the self. Nevertheless, in the end, it is a reframing of the Freudian concept of the ‘ego’, driven forward by dualist conflict. What Erikson does is draw attention to the different needs of people at roughly different stages of their lives. Education and learning are heavily influenced by internal conflicts and external social pressures. Whether we need Erikson’s precise staged, theoretical framework is another question.

Bibliography

Erikson E. (1950) Childhood and Society

Erikson E. (1958) Young Man Luther. A Study in Psychoanalysis and History

Erikson E. (1968) Identity: Youth and Crisis

Erikson E. (1969) Gandhi's Truth: On the Origin of Militant Nonviolence

Erikson E. Kivnick H. (1986) Vital Involvement in Old Age

Erikson E. Erikson J.M. (1987) The Life Cycle Completed

Coles, R. (1970) Erik H. Erikson: The Growth of His Work. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.

Freud (1856 – 1923) therapy culture lives despite being debunked

Freud (alongside Marx) is credited as being a theorist who practically shaped 20^th century thought. He has had a deep and lasting influence in learning, not only through his theories on childhood development but also through psychoanalysis and therapy which in turn influenced counselling, coaching and mentoring.

Freud and childhood

Although he wrote no specific text on education, childhood development is, for Freud fundamental and formative. But his theory is pathological as adults inhibit, prohibit and repress desires and instincts, especially sexuality, in the face of reality. As he said, ‘The main aim of all education is to teach the child to control its instincts.’ The danger is in neuroses, the potential harmful effect of much parenting and education. We internalise and the ego becomes education’s enabler as it battles the id. It was then, through the ever more obscure theorising of Anna Freud, Melanie Klein and Lacan, among others, that Freudian theory was related directly to education and the convolutions of ‘psychopedagogy‘.

Therapy culture

The general rise of psychoanalytic and therapeutic culture led to the public vocabulary of self-esteem, counselling and syndromes entering the learning sphere in the 80s. The state, through education, took an interest in our internal, emotional lives of students. On the one hand this led to an increase in pastoral care in schools and an increase in the interest of parenting. However, many see this pathological view of education as having led to an obsessive interest in over-bearing parenting, the over-diagnosis of certain syndromes and the overuse of drugs on children perceived to be problematic.

Unconscious

Freud’s theories largely depend on and idea he did not create, the concept of the ‘unconscious’. The idea that the learning can be forgotten but still exist and be the cause of action from the unconscious mind was not unique to Freud. What Freud did was attribute reluctance by his patients to talk about sex, and other personal memories as evidence for a whole edifice of unconscious structures and processes.

Freud debunked

Little of Freud’s theories are now used in modern psychology. Popper’s critique of his theory on philosophical grounds and for failing to satisfy even minimal scientific standards prepared the way for serious scientific critiques. On the whole they show that Freud’s theories are poorly researched, based on single cases tiny samples and his own self-analysis. They claim his theories are speculative, subjective, self-fulfilling and not scientific in the sense that Freud claimed they were. Critiques have come from Grunbaum, Frederick Crews, Macmillan and Frank Cioffi. He has also come under serious attack from feminists for reducing women to ‘castrated’, reserve players in his psycho-sexual world.

Freud’s methods were far from science and at times downright dangerous. Emma Eckstein a bone surgically removed from her nose which led to suppuration for days. Another surgeon found that a gauze had been left in the wound and its removal almost killed the patient. Freud had diagnosed her as having a ‘nasal neurosis’ based on excessive masturbation and when he heard about her reaction to her months of pain and misery diagnosed this behaviour as hysteria.

In fact the scale of the debunking is astonishing. Little, if any, of Freud’s work has survived the scrutiny of later research. Macmillan in Freud Evaluated and many other texts have knocked off the theories one by one. The list of debunked theories include: Freudian slips, Free association, Id, Ego Superego, Repression, Regression, Projection, Sublimation, Denial, Transference (and counter-transference), Penis envy, Oedipus complex and Infantile sexuality.

Conclusion

Grayling puts his vast appeal down to his writing talent, the sense that readers are having deep secrets revealed, its appearance as a theory of human nature and, above all his focus on the taboo subject of sex.  However the Id, Ego and Superego hypotheses have, like most Freudian psychological concepts, been abandoned by serious, scientific psychology. It turned out to be a non-scientific  mess (despite Freud’s belief that it was science) which built a theoretical structure that was hugely speculative. It over-reached itself so far that little was salvageable other than a recognition that important processes do lie beneath consciousness, something that was not a Freudian discovery.

 Bibliography

Freud, S (1977). On sexuality: Three essays on the theory of sexuality and other works. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Freud, S. (1952). Totem and taboo: Some points of agreement between the mental lives of savages and neurotics. New York: Norton

Freud, S. (2004). Civilization and its discontents. London: Penguin.

Freud, S (1965). New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. New York: Norton.

Popper, K. R. (1966). The open society and its enemies. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.

Macmillan, M. (1997).Freud evaluated: The completed arc. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press

Crews, F. C. (1995).The memory wars: Freud's legacy in dispute. New York: New York Review of Books

Cioffi, F. (1998).Freud and the question of pseudoscience. Chicago: Open Court

Furedi, F. (2004) Therapy Culture. Routledge.

Grayling A.C. Scientist or storyteller?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/jun/22/socialsciences.gender

Bandura (1925 - ) – Bobo dolls, aggression, mirror neurons & video

Albert Bandura is a Canadian psychologist who marked a sea-change in psychology, towards cognitive investigation. Although steeped in, and influenced by, behaviourism, his theories transcend traditional behaviourism into what was called ‘Social Learning Theory’, although he now calls it ‘Social Cognitive Theory. The dropping of the word ‘learning’ is significant. Bandura’s awareness of the personal factors in learning, especially motivation, differentiates him from traditional behaviourism. He also forms a link to those theorists who emphasise social learning, such as Vygotsky.

Learn by observation

Bandura has often been seen as a bridge between behaviourism and cognitive psychology as he moves us beyond classical and operant conditioning, claiming that we also learn by observation. Bandura sees learning as the acquisition of behaviours. We see others and model our behaviour on this observation. Learning by watching involves the observation of a model, which is then duplicated. This may involve no teaching at all. Observational learning is influenced by:

1. Attention – you must be attentive to learn

2. Code, store and retain the patterns so they can be retrieved

3. Motor reproduction - kinaesthetic and neuromuscular patterns are practiced until the model's behaviour is learnt

4. Motivation and reinforcement – to push the learner to practice and retain knowledge and skills

Note that this is not to say that we learn violent behaviour from observation or exposure to violence, as we may acquire the behaviour but not perform that behaviour. We may not perform because we know the consequences.

Modelling theory

Modelling Theory operates in three steps:

1. Observe a model

2. Imitate the model's actions

3. Get a consequence

But there’s far more to the theory than this suggests. The content of the learner’s perceptions of the learning are also important. Learning may also involve the active coding of the learnt behaviour into words, diagrams or images. Learners are also more motivated to learn behaviours they admire and value.

Self-efficacy and feedback

Learners have views on their own competence and capability. It is important that learners adopt optimal strategies, based on judgments of effort, not ability, to acquire knowledge and skills. This is important and helped shape powerful recommendations on feedback from Black and Williams on effective strategies for both the learner and teacher. It could be summed up by saying, ‘Don’t praise the child, praise their effort’.

TV, video games & aggression

The Bobo-doll experiments, on child aggression, in 1961 and 1963made his name. Children were exposed to adults being aggressive towards a Bobo-doll, then observed for learned aggressive behavior, physical and verbal, based on their observations. He concluded that aggression was a socially learned behavior, especially among males. The experiment has been extensively criticized for its weak methodology and the possibility that the subjects were reacting to expectations and dolls that were deigned to be bashed. He also failed to factor out dispositions such as genetics.

However, this was to spark off experimentation into various hypotheses concerning media and aggression. Initially this was on exposure to TV but more recently, video games. The TV evidence produced inconclusive, similarly with video games, where some proved inconclusive, others claiming a cathartic effect and others a significant effect. Interestingly, if one does learn aggression from video games one could also conclude that one can learn other things.

E-learning, mirror neurons & video

Bandura’s work has also had a revival around the discovery of ‘mirror neurons’ in monkeys in the early 1990s, that seem to facilitate learning from others. Learning from expert models, either live or from video, works because we can imitate but also infer intention, even leading to mental simulation. However, an interesting debate exists around the flow of video and animation that may overload working memory, limiting encoding. In any case, it does suggest that video be limited in length. It has also been suggested that video and animation woks better for human movement i.e. surgery, procedures such as origami and sport. More speculatively, mirror neurons may play a role in cognitive tasks, such as maths, giving demonstrative videos, such as those used by the Khan Academy and Sebastian Thrun, some potency.

Conclusion

In training Bandura has been responsible for the emphasis on behaviour modeling and self-regulation in learning. This was widely used in video learning and training programmes but also in other training delivery channels. His theories go some way towards explaining violent behaviour and responses to advertising and Bandura has explored these experimentally. The theory is still essentially behaviourist, with some motivational and social dimensions which means that it underplays other more participative forms of learning.

Bibliography

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: W.H. Freeman.

Bandura, A. (1986). Social Foundations of Thought and Action. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Bandura, A. (1973). Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Bandura, A. (1977). Social Learning Theory. New York: General Learning Press.

Bandura, A. (1969). Principles of Behavior Modification. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Bandura, A. & Walters, R. (1963). Social Learning and Personality Development. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Bandura, A. (1962). Social learning through imitation. In M. Jones (Ed.), Nebraska symposium on motivation (pp. 211-269). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Bandura, A., Ross, D., & Ross, S. A. (1961). Transmission of aggression through imitation of aggressive models. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63, 575-582.

Isom, M.D. (1998). Albert Bandura: The Social Learning Theory.

:http://www.criminology.fsu.edu/crimtheory/bandura.htm

Van Gog, T., Paas, F., Marcus, N., Ayres, P., & Sweller, J. (2009) The Mirror-Neuron System and Observational Learning http://dspace.learningnetworks.org/bitstream/1820/1858/1/VanGog-etal_EPR_2009.pdf

http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/bandurabio.html

Excellent biography.

Skinner (1904-1990) – radical behaviourism, teaching machines & pigeon guided missile

B.F. Skinner, the American psychologist, promoted pure  or radical (his term) behaviourism. Only observable phenomena are allowed as evidence, in this case stimuli and their behavioural responses. No mental events were to be considered admissible, as they were unobservable. His experimental work concentrated on animals and the famous Skinner Box, where rats had to press levers to get food.

Although he was not averse to human experimentation, the claim that he raised his daughter in a "Skinner box" and that she sued her father ultimately committing suicide, is an urban myth. However, he did construct an ‘air-crib’ for his baby daughter, jokingly called ‘heir conditioning’, which was manufactured by several companies. His most bizarre invention is surely the pigeon guided missile, where a pigeon, encased in the nose cone with a screen, would peck at the target on the screen and guide the missile to its destination. It was never used.

Operant conditioning

Learning, for Skinner was the ability of an organism to learn to operate in its environment (operant conditioning). If a behaviour is reinforced through repeated stimuli it is more likely to be repeated. An important facet of this theory is that positive reinforcement is more powerful than negative reinforcement i.e. carrots are better than sticks. A problem with relying just on observable behaviour is that what one takes as evidence of reinforcement is the repeated behaviour itself. The evidence is therefore self-fulfilling. Withdrawing a reinforced behaviour also leads to the extinction of the behaviour.

Teaching machines and Programmed Instruction

Skinner was profoundly affected when he witnessed poor teaching in his daughter’s maths class. The teacher, he thought, was violating almost everything we know about learning. Rather than adapting to the ability of the child, they were being forced through sheets of problems with no immediate feedback on each problem. The teacher was clearly not shaping  the behaviour of any of the children in the class. They clearly required help in reinforcement.

That same afternoon he built his ‘teaching machine’, allowing learners to practice already learnt skills. Within three years he had developed programmed instruction, which broke material down into small steps, and as performance improved, less and less support was provided. As this was before the age of computers, most of this was produced in books. His article Teaching Machines published in Science (1958) is still a relevant read today and in 1968 he published The Technology of Teaching, a collection of writings on technology and education. His analysis of what sequencing and feedback was required was way ahead of his time and technology.

Behaviourism and social engineering

One consequence of his strict behaviourism was the development of the technology of conditioning; "teaching machines" and other techniques to shape human behaviour on contraception and so on. Walden Two (1961) was an attempt to describe and prescribe this behaviourist utopia in the form of a novel, interestingly, this was to creep into parenting manuals and other forms of social engineering. It is worryingly fascist. There are still elements of this in social engineering policies and techniques practiced by governments today. All attempts to put Walden Two into practice failed.

Conclusion

‘That was great for you, how was it for me?’ said the behaviourist after sex. So goes the famous joke but it shows the core weakness of behaviourism. Obsessively ignoring all internal, cognitive mental events led to a relevant, but narrow account of learning. Its over-dependence on external stimuli along with a tendency to take animal experiments and extend them to humans led to a suffocating, straightjacketed view of psychology. In The Behaviour of Organisms, only two were mentioned; rats and pigeons. This reliance on animal experimentation was far too narrow. To ignore the brain and internal events was to ignore the vast amount of evidence now available to experimental psychologists. We have motivation, emotions, instincts, beliefs, memory and many other facets of the brain which show that it is far from being a blank slate, etched by the environment. Skinner’s behaviourism was seriously rejected, initially by Chomsky, who showed that behaviourism could not account for language learning but by many other cognitive psychologists. Chomsky's review of Verbal Behavior, is widely regarded as a turning point in psychology, shifting emphasis from hard behaviourism to cognitive approaches. However its modern form, associatism, a learning theory used by most neural network theorists, lives on.

Bibliography

Skinner, B. (1938). The Behavior of Organisms

Skinner, B. (1953). Science and human behavior. New York: MacMillan.

Skinner, B. (1957). Verbal Behaviour

Skinner, B. (1961, repr. 1976). Walden Two

Skinner, B. (1968). TheTechnology of Teaching. New York: Appleton-Crofts.

Skinner, B. (1971). Beyond Freedom and Dignity

Skinner, B. (1974). About Behaviorism

http://www.bfskinner.org/index.asp

Skinner Foundation

http://www.snopes.com/science/skinner.asp

Urban myth about Skinner’s box.

Thorndike (1874 – 1949) – experimental rigour, transfer and why Latin is a waste of time

Edward Thorndike deserves much more attention than he gets in the history of educational psychology. Inspired by William James, he was an assiduous experimenter, who revolutionised experimental psychology by introducing scientific rigour into his work. This led to ground-breaking work in important learning topics, such as ‘transfer’.

Experimental method
Children were the subject of his early experimental research but Harvard stopped him from using human subjects, so he moved to chickens and cats. In fact his earliest work, ‘Animal Intelligence’ (1898), made his name as a psychologist, as much for its scientific method than the results which these methods revealed. His method included the now familiar: representative samples, clear explanations of the experimental method so that it could be reproduced, comparative groups under the same controlled conditions and clear quantitative measurement. Educational psychology up to that point, and to be frank beyond, had been conducted in a non-scientific, if not misleading manner, Freud being a good example.


Two laws of learning
His animal experimental work led to the formulation of two laws, based on the behaviourist Stimulus-Response model, which in his view, governed all learning, even in humans. First the Law of Effect; that consequences, either rewards or punishments are a necessary condition for learning. Second the Law of Exercise; that learned behaviour fades without practice and is strengthened with practice. The driver, behind this is instinct. This focus on rewards, punishment and repeated practice was to dominate behaviourist psychology, and research into learning, for decades.

Transfer
An important early finding was his work (with Woodworth) on transfer in 1901, namely the degree to which learning transfers to actual performance in the real world. This is still a contentious and often ignored issue in education and training. Learning is largely (not always) a means to an end, namely the application of that knowledge or skills. Yet few educators know or care much about transfer. Thorndike showed that transfer depends on the similarity of the situations or domains. This has had a lasting impact on simulations. This principle of ‘identical elements’ led him to recommend problem solving and practice in real-world contexts, so that the learning tasks and context matched the real world.

Latin
To take a still current example, one still hears claims that Latin helps one learn other Romance languages or improve performance in other subjects, Thorndike predicted that this is unlikely as there are significant differences in grammar. In Search of the Benefits of Latin by Haas and Stern (2003) in the Journal of Educational Psychology (incidentally founded by Thorndike) revealed that Thorndike “did not find any differences in science and maths in students who learned Latin at school and those who did not”. And in the Haag and Stern (2000) follow up study, two groups of comparable German students, where one studied Latin, the other English, were assessed after two years, “No differences were found in either verbal or non-verbal IQ or grades in German or Maths”. This had been predicted by Thorndike decades before, namely that transfer needs common ground in the source and target.

Now for the bad news: in language learning Latin makes it worse. The problem with understanding Latin is that you need to pay close attention to word endings; case markers on nouns and time markers on verbs. But in English and Romance languages word order and prepositions are more important, endings play a minor role. What Haag and Stern found, predictably, based on Thorndike’s research, was that students who had learned one Romance language first, found it easier to learn another Romance language , that those who had learned Latin. But it gets worse, as Latin caused incorrect transfer, such as the omission of prepositions and auxiliary verbs in Romance languages. In other words, learning Latin was detrimental to the learning of the new language.


Testing
Thorndike took a particular interest in testing, developing intelligence and subject-specific tests. This was also to have a long-lasting effect on education, not always positive. Cyril Burt, and English psychologist, the first non-American to win the Thorndike Award by the American Psychological Association, went on to impose a regime of standardised tests, such as the 11+ (still used in some parts of the UK). Burt turned out to be a fraud and a cheat, as he falsified data and even the existence of co-workers.

Conclusion
Thorndike laid down methods for the scientific measurement of behaviour that were to be used by an entire school of psychology, the behaviourists, people like Watson and Skinner. Establishing scientific rigour in experimental psychology was just one of his lasting achievements. His work on transfer was long-lasting, although conveniently ignored, even today.

Bibliography
Thorndike, E. L. (1898). Animal intelligence: An experimental study of the associative processes in animals. New York and London: Macmillan Co.

Thorndike, E. L. (1906). The principles of teaching: Based on psychology. New York: Seiler

Thorndike, E. L., & Columbia University. (1927). The measurement of intelligence. New York: Bureau of Publications, Teacher's College, Columbia University

Thorndike, E. L. (1901). The influence of improvement in one mental function upon the efficiency of other functions. N.Y: MacMillan.

Pavlov (1849-1936) education goes to the dogs & the dark side

Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, won the Nobel Prize for his work on digestion in 1904. The father of behaviourism, he identified conditioned reflexes in dogs using pouches that collected their saliva. This physiological response to external stimuli (Conditioned reflexes) was to shape the study of learning for most of the early and middle 20^th century. Positively, it resulted in the detailed study of innate and conditioned stumulus-led behaviour. Negatively, it relied too much on animal studies and ignored the importance of mental events and an over-simplistic model of learning shaped by control through conditioning..

Classical conditioning

Observing that dogs salivate as soon as they see their feeder or food, or smell the food, Pavlov speculated on whether a natural stimulus could be associated with another unrelated stimulus, eliciting the same response. The experiment starts with an ‘unconditioned stimulus’ (UCS) that causes a natural response, namely the sight or smell of food that causes the dog to salivate, the ‘unconditioned response’ (UCR). If we then ring a bell, immediately followed by food, repeated several times, after a time, the dog will salivate, a ‘conditioned response’ (CR) at just the sound of the bell, the ‘conditioned stimulus’ (CS). The dog has now associated the bell with food. If the experiment is reversed and no food accompanies the bell, the response eventually disappears, this is called extinction.

In an interesting aside, Pavlov killed off 30 dogs before getting his surgical procedure right for these experiments and got his dogs from thieves who routinely included collared pets in their supposed round ups of street dogs.

Dark side of Pavlov’s research

Few know of Pavolov’s later research into the deliberate use of disorientation in humans to create disordered states. As a behaviourist Pavlov was supported by the Communists and fuelled research into control mechanisms, as their aim was mind control on a global scale.

(Some argue that capitalism did and does the same through advertising.) He concentrated on conflicting stimuli, forcing the subject choose. This would be familiar to anyone involved in psychological warfare and torture.

Some have argued that Pavlov’s later research influenced the German psychologist, Kurt Lewin, who moved to the US in1933, and influenced Dewey, leading to ‘whole-word’ teaching of literacy, now regarded as having had a massive negative effect on literacy. So although Pavlov’s work had no real direct bearing on education and training, indirectly its impact was huge. He had set in motion a school of psychology that was to dominate psychology for decades – behaviourism, and still has strong vestigial effects.

Mager, Gagne & Kirkpatrick

Behaviourism lives on in Mager’s ‘performance objectives’ and Gagne’s recommendation that ‘learning objectives’ be placed at the start of every course. It is also the basis of end-point evaluation in the Kirkpatrick model. Ultimately, however, it was dealt a serious blow by Chomsky in 1959 and the fresher approaches of cognitive psychology.

Conclusion

Pavlov was an excellent physiologist but physiology is not the same as psychology. His work led to a rather mechanistic view of psychology, relying too much on animal experiments, ultimately ignoring the sophistication of the brain and organism. Behaviourism tried to cope with this and modified theories, known as S-O-R theories (Stimulus-Organism-Response), recognised that the person's motivation and other dispositions need to be taken into account. However, it remained limited by its narrow definitions of what constituted evidence – observed behaviour, a strictly positivist definition of evidence around behaviour. In human terms we can see that his work accounts for learning by association.

Bandura and others showed that this was a very much more complex affair than simple reflexes.

Bibliography

Pavlov, I. P. (1927). Conditioned reflexes. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul

Boakes, R. A. (1984). From Darwin to behaviourism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Luria A. L. (1932) The Nature of Human Conflicts

http://www.ivanpavlov.com/default.htm

Biography and lectures online

http://nobelprize.org/medicine/educational/pavlov/

Interactive Pavlov’s dog learning game

Bruner (1915-2016 ) constructivist scaffolder

Jerome Bruner, a key player in the US Head Start initiative, has long been in favour of educational reform. The Process of Education (1960) laid out his general views on the subject, Bruner came to see that culture played an important part in learning, in The Culture of Education (1997), which makes an appeal for a broad based culture of learning beyond the narrow confines of traditional schooling.

Constructivist

His introduction to Vygotsky’s Thought and Language was written in in 1962 and, influenced by Vygotsky, he emphasises the role of the teacher, language and instruction. He thought that different processes were used by learners in problem solving and that these vary from person to person and that social interaction lay at the root of good learning. The background to his theories on instruction is based on a social constructivist view of development based on the gradual exposure to socially mediated narratives and explanations.

Jerome Bruner is a social constructivist, in the sense that he sees learning as a dynamic process where learners construct or build knowledge, based on their existing knowledge. This is an active process of selection, construction and decision-making that builds on existing mental models. It is this that brings meaning to the new knowledge allowing the learner to move beyond their existing structures.

Bruner builds on the Socratic tradition of learning through dialogue, encouraging the learner to come to enlighten themselves through reflection. Careful curriculum design is essential so that one area builds upon the other.

Four principles

His theory of instruction addresses four principles:

1.       Readiness. The learner must have a predisposition to learn and so their experiences and context must be considered.

2.       Structure. The content must be structured so that it can be grasped by the learner.

3.       Sequence. Material must be presented in the most effective sequences.

4.       Generation. Good learning should encourage extrapolation, manipulation and a filling in the gaps, just beyond the learners existing knowledge.

Scaffolding

Bruner also gave us this word in educational theory and the recognition that learners need to be either self-aware or helped to build on existing knowledge is certainly a useful device, albeit a little hazy. The problem with these constructivist generalisations is that they immediately beg more detailed questions about what we mean by ‘structure’, ‘sequence’ and ‘scaffolding’.

Conclusion

Bruner, like Vygotsky, focuses on the social and cultural aspects of learning but can also be seen as a cognitive psychologist. He suggests that people learn with meaning and personal significance in mind, not just through attention to the facts. Knowledge and memory are therefore constructed. Learning must therefore be a process of discovery where learners build their own knowledge, with the active dialogue of teachers, building on their existing knowledge. However, social constructivism is sometimes in danger of producing a vocabulary that is used without much reference to actual practice and detail.

It has proven more fruitful to focus on how different types of memory work in terms of their limitations, elaboration, storage, reinforcement and recall. The endless, general theorizing in ‘social’ context rarely identifies practical issues that determine actual remembered recall of knowledge and skills. His three ‘modes of representation’ action, image and language are reasonable matches to action, episodic and semantic memory. Where it is useful is in developmental psychology where one can progress from action to image to language. His ‘spiral curriculum’ where one repeatedly revisits knowledge and skills, but at a higher level each time, has much to recommend, as it is compatible with other areas in the psychology of learning.

Bibliography

Bruner, J. (1960). The Process of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bruner, J. (1966). Toward a Theory of Instruction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bruner, J. (1973). Going Beyond the Information Given. New York: Norton.

Bruner, J. (1986). Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bruner, J. (1996). The Culture of Education, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Vygotsky (1896-1934) - social construction, mediation, ZPD, language, play & special needs

Lev Vygotsky, the Russian psychologist, died young at 37 in 1934, but is as influential as any living educational psychologist. In 'Thought and Language' and 'Mind in Society', along with several other texts, he presents a psychology rooted in Marxist social theory and dialectical materialism. Development is a result two phenomena and their interaction, the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’, a sort of early nature and nurture theory.

Social constructivism

Ultimately the strength of Vygotsky’s learning theory stands or falls on his social constructivism, the idea that learning is fundamentally a socially mediated and constructed activity. This is a detailed recasting of Marxist theory of social consciousness applied to education. Psychology becomes sociology as all psychological phenomena are seen as social constructs. In one sense he pre-empts the rigidity of Piaget’s bad science by positing a theory of development that is more flexible in terms of how and when child development takes place and less dependent on internal natural development and more on mediation.

Mediation

This is the cardinal idea in his psychology of education, that knowledge is constructed through mediation, yet it is not entirely clear what mediation entails and what he means by the ‘tools’ that we use in mediation. In many contexts, it simply seems like a synonym for discussion between teacher and learner. However he does focus on being aware of the learner’s needs, so that they can ‘construct’ their own learning experience and changes the focus of teaching towards guidance and facilitation, as learners are not so much ‘educated’ by teachers as helped to construct their own learning.

Language and learning

In particular, it was his focus on the role of language, and the way it shapes our learning and thought, that defined his social psychology and learning theory. Behaviour is shaped by the context of a culture and schools reflect that culture. He goes further driving social influence right down to the level of interpersonal interactions. Then even further, as these interpersonal interactions mediate the development of children’s higher mental functions, such as thinking, reasoning, problem solving, memory, and language. Here he took larger dialectical themes and applied them to interpersonal communication and learning.

However, Vygotsky has a pre-Chomsky view of language, where language is acquired entirely from others in a social context. We now know that this is wrong, and that we are, to a degree, hard-wired for the acquisition of language. Much of his observations on how language is acquired and shapes thought is therefore out of date. The role, for example, of ‘inner speech’ in language and thought development is of little real relevance in modern psycholinguistics. Habermas and others, provide much more relevant ideas on the role of language in learning.

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

He prescribes a method of instruction that keeps the learner in the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), an idea that was neither original to him nor even fully developed in his work. The ZPD is the difference between what the learner knows and what the learner is capable of knowing or doing with mediated assistance. To progress, one must interact with peers who are ahead of the game through social interaction, a dialectical process between learner and peer. Bruner though the concept was contradictory in that you don’t know what don’t  yet know. And if it simply means not pushing learners too far through complexity or cognitive overload, then the observation, or concept, seems rather obvious. One could even conclude that Vygotsky’s conclusion about mediation through teaching is false. Teaching, or peer mediation, is not a necessary condition for learning. A great deal is made of social performance being ahead of individual performance in the ZPD but there is no real evidence that this is the case. Bruner, as stated, was to point out the weakness of this idea and replace it with the much more practical and useful concept of ‘scaffolding’.

Special needs

He had a specific interest in what we now call ‘special needs’ and was sympathetic to most of these students being taught in mainstream education but not necessarily with the same curriculum and in the same classes. However, his simplistic identification of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ defects is crude  and the use the term ‘defectology’ and the ‘defect’ or ‘deficit’ model it entails, is way out of line with modern language and thinking.

Play

At around 3, when the faculty of imagination develops, children use imaginative play to deal with acts they cannot physically perform. Objects can be mentally transformed into concepts, a doll a real person, the stick a rifle. They internalise these ‘pivots’ so that the imagination can ‘play’ and therefore learn how to deal with the world through thought and thought experiments. Rules and roles are also rehearsed through play, so that behaviour becomes self-regulated. This is interesting but by no means original.

Conclusion

The oft-quoted, rarely read Vygotsky appeals to those who see instruction, and teaching, as a necessary condition for learning and sociologists who see social phenomena as the primary determinant factor in learning. As a pre-Chomsky linguist, his theories of language are dated and much of his thought is rooted in now discredited dialectical materialism. For Vygotsky, psychology becomes sociology as all psychological phenomena are seen as social constructs, so he is firmly in the Marxist tradition of learning theory. One could conclude by saying that Vygostsky has become ‘fashionable’ but not as relevant as his reputation would suggest.

Bibliography

Vygotsky, L.S. (1962). Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wertsch, J.V. (1985). Cultural, Communication, and Cognition: Vygotskian Perspectives. Cambridge University Press.

Van der Veer, R., & Valsiner, J. (1991). Understanding Vygotsky: A Quest for Synthesis. Oxford: Blackwell.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/index.htm

Archive including downloadable translated texts.