The conception of learning, what it is and what it aims to achieve are the underpinning directives for planning and enabling learning as an educator. ‘Is learning the acquisition of knowledge and skills? Social participation in knowledge construction? A natural process of making sense of the world? Reflection on and adaptation to experience? ’ (Kerka, S, 2002) Theories and principles of learning cover over 80 potential schools of thought that seek to answer and support arguments for such questions. They can be applied differently to all types of learning and learner group.
The four key schools of thought for analysis in adult education in this paper include behaviourist, cognitivist, social and humanist. They each have key theorists to underpin and support their principles. The behaviourist theory centres on control over learning coming from the environment in a stimulus and response conditioning style. Learning is expressed as observable behaviour by memorising given information and responding accordingly.
Its purpose in education is to produce learning in a desired direction with the educator's role being to arrange the environment to elicit desired responses.Behaviourism as a psychological construct was founded by John Watson in 1913 and further developed in a purely educational context by Skinner. Skinners research focuses on continual reinforcement through positive and negative experiences to increase the rate of learning. (Learner Theories Knowledgebase, 2012) The cognitivist theory suggests that the control of the learning lies with the individual learner and how they process information, rather than being directly fed from the educator.The educator’s role is to structure the basic content of learning activity, with the purpose of education in this theory being to develop capacity and skills to learn better. Key theorists in cognitive development are Piaget and Vygotsky who ‘emphasise the role of active learning in which the learner makes full use of their information-processing capabilities by actively engaging with learning material rather than passively receiving it’.
(Jarvis, M, 2005, pg 4) The Humanist theory focuses on learning from the perspective of the unlimited potential for human growth.Its purpose in education is for learners to become autonomous and the educator’s role is to relinquish a great deal of control and become a facilitator for that autonomous development. This school of thought is associated with theorists like Maslow, whose ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ puts self-actualisation needs at the top of a set of defined human needs for growth and development. (Maslow, A, 1987)The humanist theory sits strongly within the field of adult education as discussed by Cervero and Wilson (1999) when examining characteristics of learner centred education. At the heart of practise is the adult learner.
.. The highest professional and moral principle for adult educators is to involve learners in identifying their needs. ’ (pg 29) The social theory centres on the belief that people learn from observing and interacting with others. Communication has considerable importance and it is the interaction of many factors that result in learning. The social theory is often seen as a bridge between behaviourist and cognitive learning theories because it encompasses attention, memory, and motivation.
The educator’s role is to establish communities of practice between learners in which learning can be achieved through conversation, observation, imitation and modelling of others. Albert Bandura is a key theorist in this field who analyses ‘observational’ learning through the perspective that people learn within a social context. (Bandura, A, 1976) In the planning and delivery of any specialist subject area all learning theories need to be evaluated and the most appropriate applied. It is in my opinion that the greatest theoretical impact for my specialist subject area comes from the behaviourist school of thought.The specialist subject area in question is adult learners, ranging in age from 16 upwards (no capped limit), who have varying degrees of special educational needs. Thus, they are known as SENs learners.
The programme of education delivered to them is called ‘Education 4 Learning’ and it aims to engage learners with understanding society and progressing within it as independently as possible into work. The learning capabilities of SENs learners are lower than that of general adult education classes so the approach to the planning and delivery of lessons for this subject specialism is very different.For many of the learners they are still learning elements of reading and writing, and more importantly, social behaviours that are normally comprehended in infant education. It is for this reason that the learning has to be incredibly rigid and structured by the tutor, with little room for any form of autonomy for the learner. The learner needs to be continually ‘guided’ in the direction of their learning and achievement with a path set out appropriately for them by the teacher at the onset of a programme of learning.
The learning theory that best fits this requirement for ‘teacher-led’ learning is the behaviourist theory. Behaviourism stems from early work by Pavlov, a psychologist who worked on stimulus-response theories with animals in its most basic form. The notion was developed educationally by Skinner who entertained the idea of conditioning through positive and negative reinforcement. This focus took the theory away from base animalistic instincts and developed it into an approach for ‘controlled’ education for directed and measurable learning.Reece and Walker (1997) discuss the behaviourist theory as thus; Such a theory stresses the active role of the teacher with the student often seen as passive.
Although the student is responsible for the responses, it is the teacher who controls the stimuli, who chooses the ‘correct’ response and who rewards it appropriately’ (pg 102) This statement cements the behaviourist theory as the most applicable for my subject specialism, where, as previously mentioned, the learning also incorporates basic and early child levels of reading and writing. The lessons need to be structured by the tutor to guide the learner with very little autonomy.SENs learners learn better with direction and set conditioning. Guffey and Rampp (1997) solidify the significance of teacher-led learning in children (whose learning pillars are more similar to SENs adult learners that any other learner group) in their statement, ‘Children must first be taught to read, compute, communicate, and socialise before they can become involved in deciding their future learning activities’. (Guffey and Rampp, 1997, in Kerka, S, 2002) The most dynamically opposed theory to behaviourism is the humanist theory.
The humanist school of psychology was developed as a reaction against behaviourism with key theorist Rogers feeling the need ‘to place the student at the centre of the learning process through active self discovery rather than having to respond to stimuli’. (Reece and Walker, 1997, pg 109) Whilst the humanist theory is generally the most applied theory when planning and delivering teaching for adult learning, where students are more aware than in infant stages of what they want to learn and the purpose of achievement, it is not applicable for SENs adult learners.The direct opposition of the theories is appropriately put by Reece and Walker (1997); ‘The behaviourists see the need to structure and control the learning whereas the humanists see it as essential to trust the learners to follow their own learning programme at their own pace and direction’. (pg 109) This statement highlights the key reasons why humanism is the most appropriate theory for teaching SENs adult learners and behaviourism is directly opposing. Learners with special educational needs are often not fully aware of what they want to learn, they have a general idea but require an awful lot of guidance.
Structuring their own learning through fully autonomous goal setting is not appropriate either as they need continual prompting and encouragement to achieve learning in any area. SENs learners engage with learning and retain information through continual positive reinforcement and stimulus-response, as applied through the behaviourist theory. The principles of the behaviourist theory impact on the planning and delivering of teaching for SENs learners for myself and other teachers in numerous ways.They encourage teachers to think and plan in detailed, specific terms which structures lessons to the minute and encourages focus, and therefore repetition, for learning objectives.
In the introduction to lessons teachers should list and tell the learners exactly what they want them to learn by the end of lesson. Following detailed lessons plans they should arrange the objective to be learned in a series of defined steps and provide feedback to each of the steps so that the correct responses will be reinforced following the key stimulus-response element of the theory.The impact of humanist theory principles on planning and delivering teaching contrast greatly to those of the behaviourist theory. Application of the humanist theory on teaching centres on allowing learners to make choices and to manage their own learning, and planning ‘loose’ lesson plans where discussion and development is key and can go in any direction which cannot be pre-planned.
The key difference in planning and delivering teaching in this way is the reduced structure, which would not be appropriate for adult SENs learners.Whilst the behaviourist theory is undeniably the most appropriate and applicable learning theory for my subject specialism for the reasons outlined, it is difficult to apply fully to my own practice and professional development without some thought to moral obligations. I find it hard to apply behaviourist principles in the planning and delivery of my teaching 100%, as although SENs learners requirements are more like that of infant learners needing direction and conditioning, they are in fact adults, many of whom with certain independence levels and they should be treated as such with a more humanistic approach.In my own practice I try to incorporate some elements of humanism by using role-play and simulation exercises to allow some freedom for individual interpretation and development and encourage continual use of learning goals, even if they are heavily aided and structured by myself.
Following a very structured lesson planning process and delivering lessons accordingly using repeated stimulus-response and conditioning adheres to the behaviourist theory and is my key theoretical input, but some small elements of humanistic theory are included to more directly cater the approach to SENs learners.SENs is, after all, a very difficult to define learner area and cannot be treated as transparently as adult or infant learner categories. Having said this, following thorough evaluation of learning theories and schools of thought, I am firmly of the belief that the behaviourist theory is the most applicable to my subject specialism to encourage to best learning and development.
