Prompt: Application Exercise Prompt: Based on your reading, would you consider your current instruction style more behaviorist, cognitivist, or constructivist? Elaborate with your specific mindset and examples.

Based on the three styles provided, I feel that my instructing style more closely represents the behaviorist style. The reason that I am a behaviorist is mainly influenced by how my upbringing is closely related to sports and the mentality that the continual practice and repetition of skills/actions is what leads to mastery. The greatest example I have from when I first developed this style stems from my time playing water polo. From this time, I had multiple coaches who while very different people all had the same thing to say about how to grow as a player: Practice, practice, practice. I used to underestimate this statement as it’s hard to see exactly how much you gain without anything to compare it to as it can feel as the practice you do becomes repetitive and meaningless. However, this changes once you’re able to put the practice into action. An example of this is when I played against a team who I felt was completely above me in every degree, there was then a four month span where I went off and just trained and practiced my skills. In this time of just training/practicing I was never sure how much I was actually gaining skill wise, but once I played another game against that particular team I could clearly tell that the time practicing I had put in was paying off. I was no longer lagging behind in skill and had matched their pace if not exceeding some of the players who once overpowered me in every degree. It was from this moment mixed with all my coaches teaching that I truly adopted the behaviorist style for instruction.

Moving forward a couple years, I have long retired from playing water polo/ coordinated sports and have begun to take up rock climbing where I find that I still maintain the behaviorist mentality. Switching from a water to land sport and from team to individual sport had literally made me a “fish out of water” in a sense. I found myself continually falling off the wall and struggling to climb at times. My answer to this was like how my coaches had told me “practice, practice, practice”, recognizing where I am falling and continually working on that part until I am able to surpass the wall I have created for myself. If there comes a time in my life where I take up coaching; be it for whatever sport/activity, I am definitely going to do as my coaches before me and use a behaviorist style of instruction to guide my students to progress further.