Shaping


Most students need reinforcement along the way. When you guide students toward goals by reinforcing the many steps that lead to success, you are using a technique called shaping. The term shaping is used in behavioral learning theories to refer to the teaching of new skills or behaviors by reinforcing learners for approaching the desired final behavior (Alberto & Troutman, 2013; Scheuermann & Hall, 2016). For example, in teaching children to tie their shoelaces, we would not simply show them how it is done and then wait to reinforce them until they do the whole job themselves. Rather, we would first reinforce them for tying the first knot, then for making the loops, and so on, until they can do the entire task. In this way we would be shaping the children’s behavior by reinforcing all those steps that lead toward the final goal. Shaping is an important tool in classroom instruction. Let’s say we want students to be able to write paragraphs with a topic sentence, three supporting details, and a concluding sentence. This task has many parts: being able to recognize and then produce topic sentences, supporting details, and concluding sentences; being able to write complete sentences using capitalization, punctuation, and grammar correctly; and being able to spell. If you taught a lesson on all these skills and then asked students to write paragraphs, scoring them on content, grammar, punctuation, and spelling, most students would fail and would probably learn little from the exercise. Instead, you might teach the skills step by step, gradually shaping the final skill. Students might be taught how to write first topic sentences, then supporting details, then concluding sentences. Early on, they might be held responsible only for paragraph content. Later, the requirement for reinforcement might be increased to include grammar and punctuation. Finally, spelling might be added as a criterion for success. At each stage, students would have a good chance to be reinforced because the criterion for reinforcement would be within their grasp. The principle here is that students should be reinforced for behaviors that are within their current capabilities but that also stretch them toward new skills. (Recall from Chapter 2 that Vygotsky expressed the same idea as teaching in the proximal zone of development.)



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