On Role Models
Growing up, most children may have looked up to their parents, teachers, or famous people as their role models. I remember when I was a kid, I looked up to my parents as role models. In my teenage years, I had celebrities as role models and eventually wanted to become a pop artist myself. n college, I looked up to prominent people in my field of discipline and hoping to follow their footsteps. But when I got older and have become relatively more mature and experienced, I seem to have greater admiration for my mother (as I shared in one of our course activities in Module 4). Why do people’s preferences change insofar as role models are concerned? What influences these changes? What propels them to have such admiration for people and have them as role models?
In our new module on Social Learning, we looked into Bandura’s concept of social learning underscoring that people do not just learn intellectually but also socially. Moreover, his Social Learning Theory states that people, in a social context and in a dynamic and reciprocal manner, learn behavior from their environment through observation, imitation, and modeling. It seems that while there is an interplay between cognition, behavior, and environment, there is also a process of acquiring the characteristics of the role “model”. It suggests that much of the development in human cognition compromises of factors such as a) cognitive, affective, and biological events, b) personal characteristics, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and c) environmental events (external social stimuli). To keep it simple, three one-word factors are interplaying here — cognition, behavior, and environment.
It’s quite interesting that acquisition of new behaviors are “mediated” by the following mental (cognitive) processes: attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation (McLeod, 2016; Cherry, 2019). When applied, this is displayed when learners attentively watch how older people behave, how they recall specific actions, mimic them, and more often than not, strive to do the same should they be convinced that such is appropriate. I also learned that certain factors affect observational learning and performance such as developmental status, prestige and competence, vicarious consequences, outcome expectations, goal setting, values, and self-efficacy. (Schunk, D.H., 2012).
It makes sense when I apply it to my personal experience as learner — from youngster to teenager to a young professional. It can’t be denied that personal beliefs about my capabilities, both positive and negative, somehow influenced by the people in my environment. Social learning occurs that way. From a kid who does what his parents do or attentively observes what his/her teachers do, to a teenager whose values are influenced by what he/she sees on TV or social media, to young professionals who work with a number of colleagues and consciously or unconsciously adopt a certain work culture. Whether it is observation and modeling (watching and imitation) as in the case of many children, vicarious learning (observing consequences and adjust own behavior accordingly), or other concepts related to social learning, we actually do this as we learn in life. It’s just quite interesting that in the realm of educational psychology, there are specific names for these kinds of practices. As educators, I find it useful to learn and apply albeit quite challenging to remember all of them.
By the way, on the topic of role models, I would like to share this link - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AjLeshGIo46XIkjRY7sbpKTbpIIQRLL7/view?usp=sharing
References
Bandura, Albert (1971). "Social Learning Theory"
Cherry, K. 2019. How Social Learning Theory Works. https://www.verywellmind.com/social-learning-theory-2795074
McLeod, S. 2016. Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory. https://www.simplypsychology.org/bandura.html
Schunk, D.H. 2012. Chapter 4. Social Cognitive Theory. In Learning theories: An educational perspective (6th ed., pp. 117-162). MA: Pearson.
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