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You will remember near the beginning of
the first unit of this module, we asked you about the influences
of your own teachers on you as an educator. One of the reasons
we asked you to think about this was to illustrate the influence
of educator’s behaviour on their learners. Learners
sit in classrooms for at least twelve years during their school
careers, and they spend a great deal of that time observing
others – watching their educators and their peers. This
is an important aspect of learning often neglected by educators
when they think about learners’ learning. We so often
forget that what we do as well as what we say may have an
important impact on our learners. This is something seldom
thought about by parents as well – as illustrated in
the following drawing.
Figure 1
In Figure 1, the parents are trying to stop
their children from fighting physically with one another.
But how are they punishing the children? That’s right
– by beating them. In other words they are giving their
children the message: “Don’t fight with each other
by using physical violence, but when you are an adult, you
can use physical violence to discipline your children!”
This is very confusing to children, and is more likely to
make them turn to physical punishment of others, more than
any other means of solving a conflict, because they have not
observed any other way of dealing with anger. I’m sure
as educators, this is very important for you to think about
since corporal punishment is banned in our schools, but we
too may not have learnt other approaches. You will read more
about this in Reading 1.4: “We need an alternative to
the pain and fear of corporal punishment”. We will come
back to this issue after the section on Behaviourism.
Some psychologists studying people’s
behaviour concluded that people can acquire new behaviours
from simply observing and imitating (or copying) others. This
is referred to as modelling. This theory was originally referred
to as social learning theory, but increasingly cognitive processes
to explain learning have been included in the theory; hence
the name social cognitive theory.
It is important for us to remember the influence
models have on learners’ behaviour. A model is not only
a person who is employed to show off the latest fashions at
a store. In the case of this theory, a model is anyone whose
behaviour may be copied or imitated by others. A learner may
learn how to solve a mathematical problem using long division,
by observing the teacher work out the procedure on the chalkboard
and listening to the teacher’s explanation. The teacher
is then modelling the approach. How often have you heard the expression,
‘children learn by example’? Learners may learn
how to serve a ball in tennis by observing the coach demonstrate
the technique. When you study adolescent development, you
will begin to see the influence peers have on the behaviour
of adolescents. They may learn inappropriate behaviours from
their friends like using bad language or cheating in a test.
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