Continues 3 Biblical Models for Grounding Education. Read the series so far.
2. Paul’s Model for Transformative Learning
Paul recognizes that in order for us to understand how best to educate people, we must understand what a person actually is. These days he has competition, however, as five major contemporary theories of learning all make significant assumptions about what a person is and how they are best educated.
Behaviorism focuses on the learners’ response to stimuli, and postulates that if you can control the environment through operant conditioning, then you can create change in the behavior of the learner. B.F. Skinner was convinced that the person was essentially an active organism that was conditioned to behavior. Cognitivism focuses on “the representations and processes needed to give rise to activities ranging from pattern recognition, attention, categorization, memory, reasoning, decision making, problem solving, and language.”22 Humanity is essentially a computing device, processing and acting based on schemas. As the educator assesses where the student is in Piaget’s four stages of development (sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, or formal operational),23 the educator determines what information and tasks are age-appropriate for the computer to handle next.