Learning in Action

Apr 05, 2023

Behaviorists had it partly right, in my opinion, though they missed the big picture. Learning, when it happens, is made visible in human behavior—bodily, functionally, linguistically, cognitively, emotionally, representationally. Surprisingly, behaviorists don’t say that learning is behavior.

Behaviorism in the classroom is a pairing of a stimulus and a response focused not so much on the response itself, that is, the behavior evoked, but on the residual of the response, the trace element left in memory or the product. When teachers do a reading rate check, they hear a student read aloud and time the reading while monitoring for accuracy. They observe the behavior not as learning, but as assessment data. How many words pronounced accurately per minute during oral reading? The interest is in the residual. The “learning” in this view is the reading rate, not the behavior that produced it.

Residuals of an individual’s school learning over time often appear in the sociocultural surround as measures of special performances or assigned artifacts—the essay, the completed worksheet, the cabinet made in shop class, the problems solved in mathematics, the test score, the report, the multimedia presentation. Observing and analyzing residuals differs categorically from observing and analyzing behaviors.

If we conceive of learning as a behavior, we cannot fail to see learning in a beginning oral reader’s self-correction. But teachers who see learning as 98% oral reading accuracy discount the learning and chalk the miscue up as a performance failure. 98% indexes the residual; self-correction addresses the behavior.

Logically speaking, learning is not an aspect of a residual, but of the maker or doer. The learning is over when learner participation stops. The writer’s behavior has become more genre savvy, more revisionist, more linguistically competent; the dancer has become physically stronger, more controlled, more fluid; the mathematician has become more intuitive, more sophisticated in approach, more persistent. Learning is behavior becoming better, not being finished. Looking at residuals has the teaching task backwards.

Academic learning is particularly prone to involve a conflation of behavior and residual. In literacy instruction, it’s become cliche to remind teachers to, say, teach the reader, not the book. Few would argue that learning can be productively viewed as increasingly more competent behavior; many would confirm the assertion that teaching intentionally targeting learning behavior is optimal.

But what counts in the deep structure of schools is the finished product. This priority could explain the never ending quest for teaching formulas.

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I’ve struggled as a teacher with the tension between learning behavior and the impact of grades on subsequent behavior. I understand that grades have multiple purposes, one of which is accountability. Research in grading practices made a convincing case long ago (see Crooks, 1988, for a literature review) that giving students “F” on assignments diminishes the likelihood that they will try to behave more competently in the future.

Indeed, “F’s” in large numbers on a child’s report card predict an academic shunning of the individual. It’s hard to see the utility in diminishing the will to try if one is interested in strengthening learning behavior. While the residual of an assignment may indeed be dismal, any opportunity to learn is diminished, any invitation to move toward more competent behavior is revoked.

The fact that much of traditional schooling is a sequence of short journeys through a curriculum, assignment by assignment, point by point, grade by grade, credit by credit, level by level, with no turning back, makes the “F” a potent driver of permanent exclusion and marginalization. This is not to say that learners do not benefit from feedback, nor that feedback must be uniformly positive, but that feedback withheld until the residual comes in is too late.

“You didn’t get that word,” says the teacher, “but I saw you look at the picture and use that information to self-correct. That was very smart behavior. Did you notice all of the letters and sounds in that word? If you go back and take just a short second to look at all the letters in a word you don’t recognize, you’ll find yourself getting faster. Looking at the picture is smart; going back and looking again at the letters is smart, too. Let’s do it now together: r…a…b…ra…b…rab…i…bit.’ We’ll talk about it again. Great work!”

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When Barack Obama became President for the first term, I was excited when I read that Linda Darling-Hammond was under consideration for Secretary of Education. I expected President Obama to take up a perspective on public schools in the spirit of W.E.B. DuBois, who placed the birth of public schools during the Reconstruction years as a strategy for building competent behavior in a democratic local community. Unfortunately, Reconstruction was violently deferred and, with it, public school. With its Race to the Top, Obama’s Secretary Arne Duncan left in play the test-driven approach of No Child Left Behind. We missed the opportunity for Darling-Hammond to influence the Common Core in a big way.

Linda Darling-Hammond, in my opinion, would have been the perfect person to be Education Secretary at the perfect time. She has been a driving force in professionalizing teaching for decades. In 1989 Darling-Hammond published an essay titled “Accountability for Professional Practice1” and described the state of accountability as dismal despite heightened concern for the quality of American schools:

Many policymakers…equate accountability with…the monitoring of student test scores…. Some believe that accountability can be enacted by statutes prescribing management procedures, tests, or curricula, [which] [u]nfortunately, …leave the student, the parent, the teacher, and the educational process entirely out of the equation. The production of a test score or a management scheme does not touch the issue of whether a student’s educational interests are being well served. p.60)

In this piece Darling-Hammond defined a professional as an individual working with a consumer wherein “…the technology of the work is uniquely determined by individual client needs and a complex and changing base of knowledge” (p.61), an apt way of saying that professionals of all stripes are accountable to the individual they serve, that professionals are responsible for assessing the client’s needs, that professionals must develop and sustain an expert and changing knowledge base. The professional teacher—not the test, not the curriculum pacing guide, not the administrator—is in charge: “For occupations that require discretion and judgment in meeting the unique needs of clients, the profession guarantees the competence of members in exchange for the privilege of professional control over work structure and standards of practice” (p.67). How do we get professional accountability?

“…[G]overnments may create professional bodies and structures to ensure competence and appropriate practice in occupations that serve the public and may delegate certain decisions about occupational membership, standards, and practices to these bodies” (p.61)

In 2002 I had the opportunity to participate on a team of educators charged with creating a performance assessment for California teacher certification inspired and led by Linda Darling-Hammond and her colleagues. Consonant with her insistence on authenticity in classroom assignments and assessments, the performance task at the center of the assessment was deliberately designed by experts in teacher education to evaluate whether a teacher credential candidate behaved in ways consistent with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions valued in the professional community. How the candidates behaved during the act of teaching was viewed as their learning.

The idea was to assign each candidate the task of carrying out a “teaching event” in a clinical setting and documenting their thoughts and actions in a portfolio. The portfolio structure and accompanying rubrics defined sophisticated aspects of planning and implementing learning activities and assessments central to effective professional teaching as scholarly research has theorized it, including accommodating the identities, cultural and linguistic resources, competence and willingness to participate, and interests of the learners as individuals. For accountability purposes the portfolios would be scored by professional peers to determine whether the candidate behaved with enough competence to handle the responsibility of teaching children. A full account of this assessment is beyond the scope but would repay your time exploring it2.

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Falk and Darling-Hammond (2010) discussed a qualitative approach to classroom assessment in professional communities of practice that includes but goes well beyond portfolios in an article titled “Documentation and Democratic Education” (see citation below). In this article they discussed documentation as support for democratic education within a professional organization of education in the following ways: “1) documentation practices foster an inquiry approach to teaching; 2) documentation informs teaching and enhances professional learning; 3) documentation extends learning; and 4) documentation offers alternatives in assessment” (p. 3).

Note that all of these supports are linked to documentation, a behavior (learning), not to residuals of learning. As part of this discussion, the authors point out that teachers need to be trained in documentation techniques—observation techniques as practiced in the development of an ethnographic field record, interview techniques, inquiry designs, and more. Reaching back in time to the observational studies carried out by Vygotsky and Piaget, they emphasize the ways in which these giants of learning theory learned through carefully nurtured scientific observational protocols as guides to their documenting behaviors. They learned to observe.

Legitimate participation (sincerely invited into the community to teach and learn) in teaching events customized for a particular group of students at a particular time and place is learning for teacher and student. Novice behaviors become more competent, more confident, more complex, more sophisticated through teachers’ responsive scaffolding designed through careful expert observation and expert knowledge.

Lave and Wenger’s (1991) model of movement from the periphery to the center of expertise in a community, a literacy community in a classroom, say, draws the teacher’s eyes and ears to how students behave (participate), which gets documented, and evokes reflective analysis drawing on professional knowledge to fashion new opportunities for participation with the promise of improvement in the learners’ future participation. Nobody fails. No child is left behind.

Learning to Read, Reading to Learn

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