- So, BF Skinner researched a lot of different ways for teaching behavior, and one of the procedures that he came up with is something called shaping. So, the definition for shaping is presented on the slide. It's an operant conditioning procedure in which reinforcers guide behavior towards closer and closer approximations of the desired goal. 

And that definition, I think, is a little bit tricky to fully understand. So, what we're going to do is we're going to break it apart. First, it's an operant conditioning procedure. So, we already know that it's something Skinner would have used because he's the biggest name in operant conditioning. 

And we also know, therefore, that it's going to have to involve the learner doing something, doing some sort of action, and receiving a consequence for that action. Now, as we read further in the definition, it says that this is a procedure in which reinforcers guide behavior. So now we also know that this is a procedure that only uses reinforcement. Reminder-- that means it only uses things which are rewards. So, in order to teach behavior using shaping, what you're going to need to do is reinforce the behaviors that you want to see and then just do nothing for the behaviors that you don't because there is no punishment involved in true shaping. 

And then this final portion, this closer and closer approximations of the desired behavior, I think that's where things get the trickiest. But all it means is in order to shape a really complicated behavior, you need to start somewhere, right? And so first, you reward a behavior that's even in the ballpark of the behavior you're looking for. 

Once the learner is able to master that, well, then you up the ante. Then you raise the bar, and you ask them to do a behavior that's a little bit closer to what you actually want. And you keep nudging them closer and closer and closer to what you want them to be doing fully. 

So, with shaping, you're going to reward responses that are ever closer to the desired behavior, and you're going to ignore everything else. An example of a behavior that has been shaped-- I try to think of like an extreme example. So, imagine you have a circus tiger. 

And in the circus, tigers were often trained to jump through flaming hoops. And I don't know if you've ever wondered, well, how could you get a tiger to do that because Tigers don't naturally want to approach fire even, let alone jump through a hoop that is completely on fire. In order to train a Tiger to do this, you have to use shaping. 

And so what a trainer would do is first, they would reinforce the behavior of having the Tiger even just walk through the hoop when it's on the ground not on fire. Once the tiger showed that it was comfortable doing that, then maybe they would raise the hoop up into the air. And so they'd have the Tiger have to, like, leap through it a little bit. 

At this point, they're only rewarding actually jumping through it as opposed to the Tiger doing anything else. Once the Tiger had learned how to jump through the hoop, well, then they would maybe add a little bit of fire on one part of the hoop and reward the Tiger when it could do that. And then they'd add a little bit more fire and a little bit more fire until ultimately, they're only rewarding the tiger, they're only reinforcing the tiger's behavior, of fully jumping through the hoop when it's on fire. 

We use shaping for all sorts of things. If you think of how you learn to write an essay in class, for example, you usually start with learning how to write, like, a solid sentence, like a solid thesis statement. Then you learn how to make a rough draft. 

You have five paragraphs, rough draft. Then after that, you learn how to write the final product. And I've sort of condensed the whole process, but you learn in stages. 

Sports use shaping all the time. When I coach volleyball over the summers to, like, little nuggets, I teach them how to do a lot of volleyball skills. With serving, for example, we start by teaching them how to just hit the ball to a partner. We don't worry about a net. 

We don't worry about where it's going. We just say, throw the ball in the air, and just wail away at it. Once they can do that and they can make contact with the ball, well, then we ask them to do more complicated things. Then we have them try to serve over the net from about 10 feet away. And then we move them farther back and farther back and farther back trying to get them closer and closer to ultimately serving it over the net from behind the end line.