The Technology of Teaching
by B. F. Skinner
On This Page
Description
Skinner called Verbal Behavior his most important book. It took him over twenty years to complete it. The book extends his laboratory-based research on selection-by-consequences to the behavior of talking, writing, gesturing, and even thinking. These verbal actions differ from other behavior, he explains, because they do not operate on the environment directly, but rather through the behavior of a verbal community. Skinner illustrates his analysis with examples from literature, the arts, and show more the sciences, as well as from his own verbal behavior and that of his colleagues and children. Today, teachers and parents who work with children or adults lacking verbal skills will find Skinner's analysis key to teaching others to communicate effectively.This Extended Edition includes three of Skinner's articles published after his 1957 original book: "A Lecture on Having a Poem" (1971), "The Evolution of Verbal Behavior" (1986), and "The Behavior of the Listener" (1988). They address creativity, how verbal behavior arose, and the role that listeners play in his analysis. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
A classic
This is a book that I go back and re-read from time to time. The collection of essays presented continue to be relevant to today’s issues and offer thought and guidance on how the technology of teaching can and should be used to “right the ship” of an education system gone far off course.
This is a book that I go back and re-read from time to time. The collection of essays presented continue to be relevant to today’s issues and offer thought and guidance on how the technology of teaching can and should be used to “right the ship” of an education system gone far off course.
Ratings
Members
- Recently Added By
Author Information
55+ Works 4,939 Members
B. F. Skinner, an American behavioral psychologist, is known for his many contributions to learning theory. His Behavior of Organisms (1938) reports his experiments with the study of reflexes. Walden Two (1949), a utopian novel, describes a planned community in which positive rather than negative reinforcers serve to maintain appropriate behavior; show more the novel stimulated the founding of some experimental communities. In Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), Skinner attempted to show that only what he called a technology of behavior could save democracy from the many individual and social problems that plague it. (An early example of this technology is the so-called Skinner box for conditioning a human child.) A teacher at Harvard University from 1948 until his retirement, Skinner was for some the model of the objective scientist, for others the epitome of the heartless behaviorist who would turn people into automatons. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 83
- Popularity
- 384,768
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.70)
- Languages
- English, Spanish, Swedish
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 9
- ASINs
- 1
