Behaviorist Teaching

        Good teaching meets the needs of every individual student while accomplishing the goals of education. Formerly, a teacher was the conveyor of information. Today, the teacher is as much a facilitator of learning experiences. Many teachers, for example, have found the facilitating role comfortable in high technology classrooms when they find that students know as much or more about various technologies as they do. The demand for excellence in recent years has heaped more and more pressure on teachers to perform.  

The Behaviorist Teacher

Behaviorist teaching is the oldest and most widespread technique and has some definite advantages plus a track record of success. Students who perform well for a behaviorist teacher are "sponges" who consume huge amounts of information and details. They are able to reproduce facts and information precisely on a test. These students do well in mastering factual information and on true/false tests or multiple choice items. They can reproduce the ideas of the teacher in an essay as well as the ideas they have read in texts or other prescribed reading materials. 

Behaviorist teachers often come under attack for concentrating on building "surface learning" of facts rather than building thinkers or problem solvers. They may be accused of having so much interest in the mastery of content that "process" tools of learning ("how to learn" skills) are neglected. Student learning styles may be ignored as the amount to be learned increases.

The behaviorist teacher generally:

•  Relies on lecture and textbooks as staples of teaching and learning.
• Is in control of the learning environment. 
• Takes the role of "sage on the stage." 
• Understands the ideas of goals and objectives, careful formulation of activities to achieve the objectives, and testing to match the objectives. 
• Is concerned with delivering a prescribed amount of content to students and expecting them to master it. 
• Uses testing to determine mastery or lack thereof and grades based on expected mastery.

All of us have encountered behaviorist teachers. We can not deny that some of them are extremely competent in helping learners master content. But there are also those who abuse this perspective of teaching. As the pressure to make students achieve increases, the behaviorist teacher tends to exert more and more control and may increase expectations, raise the amount of homework expected, and seek to increase the amount of content given per time unit. The teacher may also use drill and practice plus repeatable exercises, seeking to maximize the memorization of material connected to a particular discipline.