Chapter 10 - Social Cognitive Views

What?

Social Cognitivism is a theory that is a combination of cognitivism and behaviorism. It defines learning as a process that may or may not lead to a behavior change. Basically it is that people learn by observing others. Within social congnitivism, we learned about modeling, self-regulation, self-efficacy, and vicarious reinforcement/punishment.

So What?

So why is this important? I think that the main way anybody learns is by watching others around them. Along with the vicarious reinforcement/punishment, we really do learn from other successes and failures and will change our behavior when we see the outcome of other's behaviors. This is important to us as teachers because through the reinforcement of 1 student the behavior of your entire class can change. The previous example also has to do with modeling. If we model things with our students they will be able to better perform their tasks. What i really liked was the congnitive modeling. It involves bemonstrating how to thing about the task adn how to do the task. Basically the teacher talking aloud about the mental process they follow as they complete a task. One more thing that i wanted to touch on was self-regulation. This is so important because when a student learns to self-regulate they have taken the learning into their own hands. They can set goals for themselves and they are able to reinforce and reward themselves. This is a crucial skill for students to learn because they won't always have somebody there reinforcing their behavior or their work, so learning to do that by themselves will help them to be a better student and help them prepare for that time when they don't have a boss, a mom, or a teacher reinforcing their work.

Now What?

Anyone can see why the points of social cognitivism would be so important to a teacher, but the thing is, is that you actually have to implement it in your classroom. Without even realizing it, the students automatically learn by modeling and by vicarioius reinforcement. One thing though that we will mentally have to make sure we as teacher do is that the modeling and example that we are showing is a positive one and that we are always using correct behavior. We also have to make sure that we are taking the time to do the cognitive modeling and building students' self-efficacy because that will help our students to be more self-reliant and to be better students and learners.