ABSTRACT
Five years ago one could write with confidence that few British teachers really knew what the behavioural approach to teaching entailed, but this is no longer strictly true. Many more of the teachers I meet these days have some passing acquaintance with, or superficial appreciation of, behavioural methods and growing numbers are going out of their way to find out more about their use in the classroom. Of course, this is partly the result of an increasing awareness of what the behavioural approach is not. Once British teachers and educationists were disabused of the notion that behavioural methods were necessarily dependent upon the apparent penchants of American behaviourists for electric shocks and Smarties, many rapidly began to take notice. (We will return to this point later.) They realized that the behavioural approach was, quite simply, good teaching practice systematized into a clear and coherent framework. Knowing a good thing when they saw one, many British teachers quickly came to see that positive, non-punitive behavioural methods were preferable to aversive methods of classroom control. Some of these aversive methods, in any case, were being outlawed as schools and LEAs (and Parliament) attempted to grapple with the implications of the European Court’s ruling against the use of corporal punishment in school.
