Behaviour Arc and Reciprocal Determinism Model of Learning!

Nov 15^th, 2010

A few days ago in class we were introduced to what’s called a behaviour arc. I knew before that arguments or behaviours naturally escalate, but it was interesting to see it portrayed in a physical form. Here’s a picture of a behaviour arc:

 The main point I believe our instructor was making was that we need to try to deflect the situation, and not to argue with the child. It will become a behaviour if you don’t try. The behaviour will also de-escalate as surely as it escalated. The end point is when you can teach; when the child feels guilty they will be willing to listen.

In comparison, we studied a theorist named Albert Bandura, whose name reminds me of Antonio Banderas for some reason. He focuses on cognition, the social environment, and behaviour. He developed something called the Reciprocal Determinism Model of Learning. This model shows how all of those three things must be looked at together in order to understand a child’s behaviour. This is a picture of his model:

Bandura says that learning is determined by the reciprocal relationships. This means that something cannot happen in one of these three things without affecting the other two. Everything that occurs in someone’s life affects all other parts of their life, even if they try not to let it. For example, if something happens in the child’s environment, like parents arguing, that will put the child in a bad mood (personal factors), and they may behave badly because of this bad mood. This goes around both ways too; they all affect each other. So if the child is in a bad mood, the parents may argue because of it and the child may act out because of this argument. This can go around over and over again, so that’s when the behaviour arc helps, if you can stop the behaviour or find out about it afterwards, maybe you can break the cycle and the child will be in a better mood, affecting the personal factors and the environmental factors as well.

Hopefully these two models will help me deal with kids in the future; they seem like they’ll work but I guess I won’t know until I’m working.