Personalizing-Comunitarian and Behavioral Teaching Model
Behavioral Educational Model
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It is personalizing because it sees each student as a unique person and focuses on helping them to become a better person not just a more knowledgeable student. This model sees school not as a group of students but as many particular individuals who study. It also promotes the personal development of teachers and staff. Although it includes techniques of personalized instruction, this is not the reason why it is personalizing but rather because it is concerned with the humanness of both students and teachers.
It is communitarian because it sees schools as genuine communities where many people besides teachers teach. All the society can be used as the school. Students can learn either with their teachers or with other members of society. Teachers can teach students about many things inside or outside school. A communitarian teaching model teaches students the skills necessary to promote a sense of community and living a communitarian lifestyle based on cooperation, equality, non-violence, sharing and caring for others.
It is behavioral because it involves the application of educational techniques derived from a science of behavior most commonly known as Behavior Analysis. It considers necessary to improve the school environment (teachers, courses, study material, buildings, etc.) in order to have better teachers and better students. It does not blame students, teachers or family for educational failures, instead it focuses on the arrangement of the whole school environment.
Philosophical bases of the Communitarian-Personalizing and Behavioral teaching model:
- Every student is a unique person and thus requires a personalized teaching according to his/her own needs and skills. Although students can study in group, they necessarily be regarded and treated as individual persons, not as a group. We need to respect students. This means treating each student as a different person. Traditional educational models see students as a group.
-It is important to teach students a love of learning. In this way they enjoy all the behaviors involved in studying, such as reading, writing, analyzing, comparing, summarizing, thinking, criticizing, creating, discovering, etc. Of course equally important is preventing students from learning to dislike studying.
- The main objective for teachers is to teach students to be reinforced by the natural consequences of their studying behaviors (natural or intrinsic reinforcement) and not only by grades, approval, prizes or privileges which are extrinsic to the behavior. By this, we are not saying extrinsic reinforcers are useless. They are useful as a step to establish studying behaviors under the control of natural consequences.Traditional education overemphasizes extrinsic reinforcement and forget to tech students a love of learning.
- For a personalizing-communitarian and behavioral educational model, if students fail, it is not their fault, nor the teacher's or their family. Nobody needs to be blamed. What we need to do is to effectively arrange the necessary conditions for the student to learn. This involves instructional design (the way courses and educational material is designed), design and implementation of motivational strategies (the arrangement of consequences students receive for their studying behaviors), etc.
- Teachers need to learn to have as their main reinforcer (motivation) for teaching, the student's learning progress.
- Everything can be taught if it is properly broken into small sequential units.
Last up-date: 2001
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