LLP for Caregivers - Overview

Living & Learning with Parrots: The Fundamental Principles and Procedures of Teaching and Learning

Purpose and Objectives

This LLP Caregiver course is designed to teach participants how parrots learn. The focus is on analyzing the ways in which the caregiver’s interactions and environmental arrangements maintain existing problem behaviors and how more adaptive behaviors can be taught through the use of positive reinforcement. By understanding the fundamental principles of learning and behavior and the associated teaching technology, caregivers can facilitate successful parrot behaviors for lasting companionship.

In this introductory session, lecture topics include functional analysis/assessment, positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, shaping and chaining, and differential reinforcement of alternative behaviors. Also, briefly discussed are the common pitfalls of using extinction and time-out from positive reinforcement, and the detrimental side effects associated with the use of punishment. Your own personal history as lifelong learners and teachers has no doubt given you a lot of experience with these principles. It is hoped that by improving your specific academic knowledge of how to apply them you will have an even sharper set of tools for your teaching toolbox.

Philosophy and Scientific Underpinnings

The philosophy of behavior in this course is that parrots, like all learners, must have power to operate positively on their environment to live behaviorally healthy lives. We facilitate this power when we interact with them in such a way that they choose to do what is required for lasting companionship in our homes. The guideline followed for matching problems to solutions is to always select the most positive, least intrusive effective interventions. To change our parrot’s behavior we first change what we do. Students will quickly learn that once one has the necessary tools, a commitment to facilitate behavior rather than force it does not mean a loss of behavioral compliance.

A natural science perspective guides the information presented here which means that our challenge is to explain behavioral phenomena by identifying the physical events that produce them. Students are encouraged to focus on observable behavior and the environmental elements that support it, rather than inferences or assumptions about hypothetical mental mechanisms. The lectures rely heavily on the findings of many decades of scientific study of behavior across many different species of learners as personal recipe knowledge is not the only psychology we need to provide a high quality of life to our parrots.