Reinforcements And Punishments In Education: What Are They And How Are They Used?
All the things we do, we do because they have worked for us before. That is to say, if I am a person who yells at others, it is because at some point I learned that I can obtain some benefit from yelling. On the contrary, if I am a passive person, tending to avoid conflict, it will be because at some point I will have learned that shouting It does not provide me benefits, or it provides me with greater harm
However, the behaviors that have always provided me with benefits may stop doing so when the context changes. For example, it may have worked in my high school class to treat my classmates aggressively because that’s how they did my homework, but maybe I’ll run into other types of people when I get to university, less vulnerable to my aggressiveness (or more aggressive). In that case, I will have a serious problem, since I will have been left without behavioral resources to function in that aspect of my life.
For all these reasons, for an educator it is vitally important pay close attention to what you are and are not reinforcing since early behaviors will evolve over time and, without adequate guidance in growth (which will not always exist), we can find adults who respond “like children” to their social situations.
First of all, it is worth clarifying the importance of the contingencies between behaviors and consequences especially at very early ages, in which basic mental processes such as thinking, memory or language are in early stages of development and, therefore, will not be as effective as an educational tool.
Organisms establish behavioral patterns through the consequences that follow them. If the result of a behavior makes it easier for that behavior to be repeated in the future, it will be called reinforcement and, on the contrary, its probability of appearance decreases, we will call this consequence: punishment.
From this we deduce that the same consequence, in different people, may or may not be a reinforcement or a punishment. For example, taking away television time may be a punishment for one child, but not for another. Sending a child to her room can be a reinforcement if what is in the room pleases the child (toys, video game consoles…), and a congratulation or a smile of approval may be enough reinforcement (or it may not be).
The need for coherence between school and society
We must know our audience very well, and exercise a good contingency between the behaviors displayed and the consequences we administer. And in that sense, we must be very careful depending on what behavior we are interested in establishing. Congratulations are a social reinforcer for most children and when, for example, we instinctively say “Very good!” to a child for anything he or she does, we can fall into not reinforcing both the child’s activity and the call for attention.
This can lead to an association between self-esteem and social reinforcement, which can lead to seeking that self-esteem in the approval of our physical appearance, economic level, likes on Instagram and other banalities that society tends to reinforce (through fiction, advertising, etc.).
Another example occurs in the case of “snitches.” In a society that increasingly promotes social responsibility and encourages us to get involved in cases of gender violence (calling the police when we hear screams next door) or fraud (whether by a company or an individual), class culture remains , on many occasions, to sanction the snitch when he tells us that So-and-so has copied or Menganita has hit Zutanita.
The importance of encouraging appropriate behaviors
Without going into which social model is the most appropriate, what is striking is the incoherence between a society that, through school, educates in a value (silence) that is not considered desirable in the society into which its children are going to join. infants, and that will try to modify through campaigns, etc.
Reinforcements and punishments operate continuously in the educational context and it is vitally important to detect which behaviors we are reinforcing and which we are not, as well as what it means to reinforce these behaviors in the face of the society to which these citizens in training are going to join, because whether we like it or not, childhood and adulthood are not They are more than arbitrary conventions, and from the time we are born to the time we die, we are but developing people.
