···
bob hintz 2015.8.19.1430
BH: I think you always have to start with the student. Is the student trying to learn something that has some perceived value with the aid of a teacher who already knows what that is or how to do it, or is the student required to learn it because the teacher or someone else says it is valuable and must be learned. From a PCT perspective, I would suppose that learning involves the acquisition of a skill in controlling some variable or type of variable or collection of variables.
RM: Yes.
BH: I have been thinking about inside/outside lately and believe that the only variables that are always controlled are those internal variables that are continuously available to our experience. Everything that exists outside my skin has meaning/value only to extent that it is relevant to the control of some internal variable.
RM: Of course. Behavior is the control of perceptions (internal) of aspects of the environment (external). Only internally perceived aspects of what is outside the skin (actually, outside the nervous system) are relevant to control.
BH: Powers started his discussion of learning with intrinsic variables and reorganization to build the hierarchy of control of external variables and never explored whether or not a similar hierarchy of internal variables might also be created in the process of interacting with other human beings rather than simply physical variables.
RM: I think that’s because there is no evidence that such a hierarchy exists.
BH: Where do feelings of contentment come from or feelings of dread. What is fear of failing a test because you can’t remember something you know you studied just last evening.
RM: Those are what we call emotions. In PCT they are perceptions of physiological side effects of control (such as the secretion of adrenalin). I think the chapter on Emotion in B:CP 2nd edition will give you a more complete answer to your question.
BH: Infants do not have tests but they learn everything they know with the help of caregivers who pay attention to what they appear to be trying to learn and offer assistance. When the infant quits trying, the caregiver usually quits assisting. If the caregiver continues doing whatever they were doing, it can no longer be called assistance because the infant is now resisting rather than trying to learn something. When teaching involves coercion, what is learned, i.e., internalized, is often quite different from what the teacher might hope it being learned.
RM:According to PCT, learning is a random trial and error process aimed at building control organizations that reduce intrinsic error.But teachers can apparently guide this process to some extent because there are certain things people have to learn in order to be able to control effectively in the world they happen to be born into.
RM: While learning is trial and error there are some things that you want children to learn without making any errors – like running into the street when there is an oncoming car (or bike). So some coercive teaching may be required in some situations, especially with young kids. But in other situations, like language learning, the learner, especially if it’s a child, desperately wants to learn to communicate so the teacher’s role is to guide the learning to a place where the child can communicate with others.
RM: I think teaching involves lots of things: providing “rote knowledge” to be memorized (as in language learning), providing experience with using this knowledge and providing a model for imitation. Another important thing about teaching is that it is not just done by teachers: parents, peers and public figures are teachers too. The people who are the “official” teachers (like my son) are formally responsible for teaching some agreed-on knowledge (and enrichment skills, like art and music, and trade skills, like computer programming now, I suppose). But most teaching surely must go on outside of classrooms, which is why I despair of politicians and policy makers in the US who “blame the teachers” for what they perceive to be the failings of education.
RM: I also think that virtually all approaches to teaching “work” in the same way that all approaches to psychotherapy work. I think what PCT can contribute to teaching is equivalent to what it contributes to psychotherapy: stripping away the superfluous and showing what is the effective common denominator in all teaching methods.
RM: Also, from a policy perspective, it’s well known that most of the variance in educational outcomes is due to the obvious things: household economic and educational level. Both of these variables are surely related to a child’s ability to be in control of their life. Which makes sense; it’s easier for children to learn to control new aspects of their world when they’ve already got the basic aspects – nutrition, safety, creature comforts – under control. So if you want to improve education at the group level, stop wasting time trying to figure out better ways to teach and work on ways to provide all families with the means to control their lives – that is, return to the economic system we had in America when I was growing up – a system where we had a large, strong middle class.And, no coincidence, the finest educational system in the world. It wasn’t because we knew how to teach better back then and forgot; it’s because a larger segment of the population – the then large middle class – was in control of their lives.
Best
Rick
bob
–
Richard S. Marken
www.mindreadings.com
Author of Doing Research on Purpose.
Now available from Amazon or Barnes & Noble
On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 10:45 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:
[From Rick Marken (2015.08.18.2040)]
RM: I get the impression you don’t like “learn this and repeat” didactic teaching. But doesn’t some memorization have to happen before a student can know what to ask?
RM: Depends on class size and content. But I think I required some memorization (but not much since I’m so lousy at it myself) and tried to get them to ask questions.
RM: I don’t know what it would mean to deliberately include PCT. If it means giving a class on PCT, I’ve done that, with mixed success. If it means including my understanding of PCT in my teaching, I think the only PCT wisdom I applied was something I knew already; not everyone will want to learn what you have to teach.
RM: I didn’t know that. I thought Ed’s program was called “responsible thinking”, not “responsible learning” and that it addressed classroom discipline, not learning.
RM: I had no idea Ed wrote about pedagogy. I’d appreciate it if you could give a brief description of what he said about it. All I know is the RTP approach to dealing with discipline problems, which is quite good.
RM: I don’t really see what the problem is with the “world-way or the byway” approach to teaching. Don’t you have to learn what is considered the best current knowledge before you can be intelligently skeptical about it. Einstein had to have learned Newtonian physics pretty well (which surely involved a great deal of rote memorization as well as problem solving) before he was able to come up with relativity.
RM: It’s not just rote memorization, is it? They have to be able to use the knowledge to solve problems. My son is a math teacher and he emphasizes to the students that they are learning this math stuff, not because they will be called on to solve differential equations in their future career but because they are learning how use tools (which they’ve memorized) to solve problems (which cannot be done by rote).
RM: I’m in the same boat. Don’t know much about pedagogy; don’t know much epistemology; don’t know much about a science book; don’t know much about the French I took. But I do know that I love you. And I know that if you love me too, what a wonderful world this world be! 
Best
Rick
–
Richard S. Marken
www.mindreadings.com
Author of Doing Research on Purpose.
–
Richard S. Marken
www.mindreadings.com
Author of Doing Research on Purpose.
Now available from Amazon or Barnes & Noble
John Kirkland (2015.08.19 0915 NZT)–
JK: Recently I’ve been pondering over students who are required to “learn-by-heart”. The content may be selected religious texts, the times’ tables, nervous system labels, pi to 10 places, the first 10 elements of the periodic table, or whatever. In most of these situations the dominating theme is “learn-this-and-repeat, ASAP”; didactic teaching at its worst. In such contexts students have no choice. Well, they could buck the system, which is unlikely because of adverse consequences. They certainly don’t have any opportunities to ask questions, or to play and mess about with trying this and that by testing and experimenting.
JK: I would hazard a guess many readers on this forum have at one time or another been formal, institutional teachers as well as students. This topic possibly has a personal aspect: so, as a teacher how did you present curriculum content for subsequent student assessment?
JK: If there was a text book, that’s a give-away since “bundled knowledge” was therefore acknowledged. I’d especially like to hear from those teachers who managed to include PCT deliberately.
JK: I understand Ed Ford’s responsible learning makes an important contribution to pedagogy.
JK: But, it may not avoid the, “there is stuff that’s called knowledge and it may be assessed and students will be graded accordingly” ideology which I summarise as, it’s this world-way or the byway. Yes, I do appreciate the investigative themes percolating through Ed’s contributions, which typifies “discovery learning” and its condiments.
JK: By way of some background to this conundrum, I have been revisiting the Bloom/Anderson taxa which are foundation documents for most national educational curricula. From my observations, one consistent theme for pretty well all educational objective taxa is the notion that there is a recognised body of knowledge; it exists and may be pointed at and discussed and parsed into curriculum segments which are then transferred to students via teachers’ guidance to become student-cloned memories for facts, concepts and procedures. Internationally, the dominant teaching method is still didactic. And students are therefore locked into show evidence of “learn this by heart”, which is where this topic started.
JK: Comments and suggestions welcomed. I continue to be astounded at the gaps in my understanding of pedagogy and epistemology.
Kind regards
JohnK
On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 7:12 AM, Tracy Harms csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:
[from Tracy Harms (2015.08.18.15:11)]
Boris,
I wrote about my reaction to the present thread, not to the broader discussions on this list nor to the personalities of participants. Bill is not posting to this thread, naturally. For what it is worth, I don’t see in this thread the deviation you claim. I’m not interested in entering the dispute you appear to be pursuing.
Tracy Harms
Now available from Amazon or Barnes & Noble
