I have noticed both classical and operant conditioning while observing Mr. Wiebe’s 9th grade chemistry class. Every morning, before class begins, he is always sitting at his desk: talking with students, working on powerpoints, etc. However, when class starts, he always gets up from his desk to the front of the room to get his students’ attention. When he stands up at the front lab table and says his signature “Good morning, everybody!”, all the students immediately stop talking and settle into their desks. This is a prominent example of classical conditioning in his classroom, as it occurs at the beginning of every class period without fail. This conditioning lets the students know that class is beginning. The sudden change in Mr. Wiebe’s place in the classroom indicates that something different is happening, which is their signal to quiet down and listen.

Operant conditioning isn’t nearly as obvious as this classical conditioning, as it is responsive and varies from class to class. However, I was able to witness a great example while in the class this week. Mr. Wiebe projected a few questions on the board, asking them to think about the answers independently and write them down. This was intended to help students gauge where they were and how well they understood the content so far. However, one student misunderstood the directions and blurted out the answer when Mr. Wiebe read the first prompt out loud. This behavior could have been punished, as it was distracting and it took away from the other students’ abilities to recall information independently. Instead of punishing the student, Mr. Wiebe, after a moment’s hesitation, positively reinforced the student’s vocal participation. He repeated what the student said, explaining why the response was correct, and then very clearly told the students to do the rest by themselves. Vocal participation does not occur frequently in this classroom, so I understand why Mr. Wiebe chose to reinforce rather than punish this behavior. But after reinforcing the behavior, he realized where the directions may have been confusing and repeated them clearly. After he repeated the expectations, all of the students were able to complete the rest of the prompts independently without distraction. I think this is an interesting way to balance classroom needs; participation should be reinforced, but it was not allowed to dominate over the independent work needed to measure retention of content.

Along with these behavioral approaches, I have noticed that there are more complex factors at play, such as self-efficacy, presence of role models, and social interactions. All of these factors seem to impact students’ internal processes, but I am not entirely sure how. However, I have observed some general patterns. There are some students whose learning is highly influenced by their self-efficacy, both those who are confident with chemistry concepts as well as those who seriously doubt their own abilities. In previous blogs, I have written about a certain student who claims he is [r-slur], which is one of the most extreme ways to express your self-efficacy. This student rarely engages in class and spends most of class time trying to distract neighbors. He seems to be more interested in positive peer interactions than positive interactions with the teacher. However, he does respect the teacher to a certain extent. Mr. Wiebe is a big role model for these students, especially those who tend to screw around during class. He is able to connect to these students really well, persuading them to do even a little bit of work. Although the student may not always be doing work, he does tend to listen when Mr. Wiebe speaks directly to him in a private and casual manner. It is not always as straightforward as behaviorists like to believe. I can see the influence of self-efficacy, role models, and social interactions as they interact with each other.

Because of this, I think I am more of a cognitivist. My inner scientist yearns for behaviorism, as it is more empirical and can be measured. It would be much easier if people were predictable and could be  studied simply by behavior. However, I think humans are far too complex to be fully explained by behaviorism. There are so many internal processes that we still cannot explain, which makes me lean more towards cognitivism.

This is not directly correlated to the discussion of behaviorism and cognitivism, but I noticed something that reminded me of our discussion of Piaget. While waiting for class to begin, as students were filing in, one student in particular stood out. He sped into the classroom as if on wheels. And sure enough, I looked down at his feet and there were wheel attachments to his shoes. He was clearly excited about these wheels, buzzing around the classroom, showing them to the teacher and to other students. I remember being in elementary school when Heelys- a similar shoe style with wheels installed in the sole- were popular. This was very similar and it made me smile to see a high schooler so excited about wheels on shoes. It was a good reminder of how childish these 9th graders still are, and I don’t mean childish as a degrading comment. In fact, it was refreshing to see such unbridled joy, despite the odd looks he got from a few classmates. This student was 14 years old and enjoying his Heelys with joy I associate with much younger children. I think that high schoolers like to act a lot older than they really are, but this student certainly did not care. It made me think of Piaget’s views on children, specifically in that after the age of 11, all thinking was synonymous. I don’t know whether this student is formally operational or not, but I do know that his thinking is far different than my own, even though Piaget groups us together in the same cognitive developmental stage. That is not to say that his thinking is worse, but just completely different. It was a good reminder of how young these kids really are. I see a lot of similarities between myself and them, but this moment was a clear example of the 6 years difference in age.