I think in our attempt to help students differentiate between the major schools of psychology - psychoanalysis, behaviorism and humanism - we teachers and the textbooks have to simplify things. I remember leaving my Intro Psych class not being too much of a fan of Skinner. But recently while "trolling the web" as they say, I found a really interesting interview with Skinner in which he was asked about his views on education. I extracted two brief sound clips that I think are interesting. He talks about how we can teach youngsters to read and to play music in ways that they will find pleasurable. Students might be surprised to hear these kinds of ideas from Skinner. Maybe it would be an interesting exercise to have students listen to the audio clips without telling them who's talking and see if they can guess. The giveway terms would be "contrived reinforcers", but still, I think anyone who might have gotten the idea that Skinner thought that we are all robots would find themselves in agreement with him here.
On learning to read: https://soundcloud.com/thepsychfiles/b-f-skinner-on-learning-to-1 On learning to play music: https://soundcloud.com/thepsychfiles/b-f-skinner-on-learning-to Michael Michael A. Britt, Ph.D. [email protected] http://www.ThePsychFiles.com Twitter: mbritt --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=24029 or send a blank email to leave-24029-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
