I was somewhat fortunate, and had a fantastic cooperating teacher during my state-mandated student teaching time (and 2 years in-class experience prior to it).
Others are not so fortunate, and have to jump into something feet first with nothing more than the curricular indoctrination of their education professors. Full disclosure: I had some fantastic professors during my graduate work, and I had some less than fantastic ones as well. My frustration lies with those who were not only less than astounding, but also so full of themselves that they can't see beyond the method that worked for them when they were in a specific classroom at a specific time. Short-sightedness is infuriating, to be sure, but even more so when future educators are evaluated by the criteria of lousy foresight.
One of my courses in particular focused on instructional theory.
This is an extremely varied field of study, and for the life of me, I wish we had been able to investigate it further. Unfortunately, the professor I had subscribed to a specific theory whose foundations were firmly laid in the studies of socio-economic pressures and societal influences. This particular professor had a history in the classroom in a lower socio-economic status area of San Francisco and dealt with very specific ethnic and social problems within the context of the classroom. By approaching most of the lessons from this perspective, she was able to do some amazing work with these students.
I'm not trying to denigrate her accomplishments, by any means. But frankly, what's appropriate in the mid 1980s in San Francisco isn't necessarily going to be effective in Texas in the year 2010. God forbid that you mention that, though. Anyone who wrote a paper with the audacity to question the validity of these methods in this particular setting was struck down with a failing grade and the instruction to rewrite the paper. If you fell into lockstep with her ideals . . . guess what?
Yeah, right there, I became somewhat disillusioned with this professor.
One of the theories that we were supposed to investigate, though, was that of behaviorism. My wife could probably tell you more about it than I could, as she's the one with a degree in psychology, but I'll do my best to sum up. The behaviorist model of education was primarily developed by psychologist B.F. Skinner. For those who have some background in psychology, yes, that is the Skinner whose experiments focused on the conditioning of rats.
Rats. Kids. Same difference.
Skinner's ideas stem from a few basic assumptions, only one of which I want to look at right now. Simply put, it states: "Environment influences behavior".
Do I take issue with this claim? No. Do I think that we are often influenced by our environment? Yes. Of course. Violence in a home typically begets further violence, abuse begets abuse, and so on. However, what bothers me is the strictest application of this theory in the classroom. Teachers are taught a concept called the "locus of control" wherein the responsibility for a student's successes and failures is placed on either the student or the teacher. Teachers who maintain an internal locus of control seek to adjust their behavior and teaching in order to insure student success. Teachers without this specific locus like to place blame on their students (three guesses which one would cause a teacher to grade a paper down for disagreeing with a specific theory).
My personal take on it is that teaching and learning is a contractual obligation that both student and teacher enter into - a professional relationship, if you will. But that's a post for another day.
The real question is this: how does locus of control apply to classroom management, which is itself primarily influenced by student behavior? If Skinner is to be believed, then the environment (which is primarily under the control of the teacher) is the greatest influence on behavior. I respectfully disagree.
Teachers definitely have a responsibility to provide the safest and most productive environment possible for the student. However, for me, that environment is developed through respect and an adherence to an action-consequence model. Every action has a consequence, and every consequence is a logical extension of the action taken.
How does this compare to Skinner's idea? One could argue that this is the environment influencing the students' behavior, but I believe that is an unfair generalization. Environment and behavior should influence one another in a fluid (albeit well established) way. By establishing an environment in which consequence follows action, the student is now granted a modicum of power to influence his/her own environment.
I like to call this a duplication of loci. The teacher maintains the locus of control by establishing the rules (some teachers may seek to involve the students in this process, and I don't disagree), and the students are given a locus of their own by being handed the power to affect their environment. In my classroom, a student is the primary influence on his environment within the constructs of the rules. You want life to be easy? You want to have fun? You can.
How often do you suppose this can be specifically applied outside of the classroom? If we as a people were to take control of our responses, how might it alter our environment?
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