Should We Condition? - Weeknotes for 2023-01-23

Published: 2023-01-27 12:00 |

Category: Journal | Tags: notes, weekly, collection, interesting, comment


Here are some interesting things and half-formed thoughts from this week:

Shorts

  • I'm trying to use Helix as a main editor. There is some growing pain.
  • My team did a workshop this week and I realized that I've been looking at my leadership role with a skewed lens. I need to do some more processing of what it looks like to lead a group of people.

A litte longer

I'm taking a graduate course this semester on the psychology of learning. The class just started, so we're doing some basic psych on methods of learning and some research background. Last night, I was reading on some of the early research, much of it focused on classical conditioning. In my notes, I wrote:

Conditioning is often presented as a way to achieve behaviors automatically. If those behaviors are things like self-regulation and awareness, is that a bad thing?

If we condition students to calm themselves at a sound (like the meditation bowl thing) have they learned self-regulation? Or are they simply responding to a stimulus out of habit?

Am I interested in forming habits which take over in specific situations or forming students who are aware of themselves and then choose the habits they want to develop?

I have a lot of thoughts floating around that I need to consolidate. This is a difficult subject. Here's the note in context.

Comments are always open. You can get in touch by sending me an email at brian@ohheybrian.com