ABSTRACT
A century is such a long time, especially in educational development and thinking; the following words, written by John Watson, echo ominously around giving behaviourism an air of narrowness, authoritarian and threatening dogmatism:
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specifi ed world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and the race of his ancestors. (1928: 82)
Classical conditioning began this story but radical behaviourism saw the development of behaviour modifi cation procedures that underpinned much pedagogy in the middle phases of the last century. At the height of the behaviourists’ infl uence on pedagogy, the educational establishment became more conscious of the role of the social and the understanding of the biology of the
brain; constructivist and cognitivist ideas started to dominate the pedagogy. The new millennium can see the return of pedagogy based upon behaviourism and principles tried and tested decades before. From those principles of learning, considered in detail earlier, and rooted in reported practice in the classroom, there emerges a set of strategies. We do not always knowingly design a learning activity that is based on the underlying principles; we do the planning by instinct and from a standpoint of experience of what we know works well. As teachers, we look to pragmatic ways of encouraging and ensuring learning, and in this chapter we will consider some of those strategies and give some illustrations of the principles of behaviourism in practice.
