A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
(Lao Tzu)
How can we help students take the first step? I’ve explored the underlying evidence for making desired behaviours easier (here) and suggested breaking learning into smaller steps (here), which can make learning less daunting and less cognitively challenging. But we still need students to take the first step. Here are three teachers’ formulations of the problem:
- “What do I do when students won’t do work that’s pitched perfectly for them?”
- “How can I help students who refuse to attempt tasks at the lowest possible level of challenge?”
- “I’ve lined everything up for students, but they still won’t try”.
Behavioural psychology offers many ways to encourage people to begin, but I want to stick with the theme – making things easy: how we can make the first step easier for students? Once they’ve begun, they are likely to continue – it’s like a variant of Newton’s First Law: a student at rest is likely to stay there; once in motion, they are (more) likely to continue. Once we’ve made the steps as small as possible, how can we help students begin?
1) Make the first step the easiest
To get the best out of people, we make the first thing we ask them to do the easiest. Job interviews usually begin: “Why did you apply for this role?” We’re helping respondents get points on the board, by making the first step feel manageable. We do the same in writing tests: we try to show students that they can succeed (and so should try): people perform better on an exam that begins with easy questions than an exam that begins with difficult ones, or where the order of questions is random (Aamodt and McShane, 1992). To make the first step the easiest, we can:
- Make the first question one we know every student can answer;
- Begin the lesson by asking students to tell us what they know;
- Introduce a challenging task with something students have mastered.
(Revisiting prior knowledge has many other benefits; I’m focusing solely on making things easy).
2) Make the first step (seem like) the only one
Another deterrent to starting a task is realising how much time and effort it will take. A pile of books in front of me leads me to prioritise almost any other task. I trick myself into marking by hiding the pile. I put five books on my desk and leave the rest on the shelf behind me. It feels easy: if one student was absent, two were concise, and only one requires a detailed comment I can be done in three minutes, and reach behind me for another five. This resembles what I suggested in my last post: breaking tasks down. But the trick is hiding the size of the task: recognising that, even if each step is easy, an empty page to fill or a list of instructions can feel forbidding. To make the first step (seem like) the only one, we can:
- Reveal questions, instructions and information one step at a time (for example, using powerpoint)
- Invite students, not to ‘Start writing’ or ‘Answer the question’, but to ‘Write your first sentence’ or explain ‘What will you do first?’
(This has benefits in terms of students’ attention and cognitive load, but again I’m focusing on the effect on students’ behaviour).
3) Make the first step concrete
Often, we ask students to ‘focus’, show ‘kindness’ or demonstrate a ‘growth mindset’. Abstract ideas can be interpreted in many ways: how should students start to ‘do their best’? Offering a concrete first step may be more useful: ‘Write the key points you’ll be making’, or ‘ask an interesting question’. A concrete step is easier and clearer than an abstract one – later we can help students recognise the principle underlying what they’re doing, highlighting their existing successes. To make the first step concrete, we can:
- Remove abstract terms and jargon
- Specify a visible action
3) Make the first step the second step
The first step is less of a barrier if it has already been taken. People who were given a car wash loyalty card with ten spaces, two of which had been stamped, were much more likely to complete the card than those given a card with eight spaces, none of which had been stamped (Nunes and Drze, 2006). If we show students that they have already taken the first step (or are part way there), we prove to them that they can do it again. To make the first step the second step, we can:
- Ask students to tell us what they will write – then invite them to write it;
- Ask students to complete partial solutions;
- Highlight what students have already done: “You answered a question just like this five minutes ago.”
(There’s a fine line here: students still have to decide to act; we cannot keep making it easier indefinitely).
Conclusion – building the first step up again
I’m not really advocating making it easy for students: I’m advocating helping them begin. Behavioural psychology suggests taking the first step can be unexpectedly powerful: feeling like we have begun makes it far more likely we will continue (Nunes and Drze, 2006). People who have been asked to display a three-inch sign reading ‘Be a safe driver’ are far more likely to agree to a subsequent request to display an enormous billboard across their house, reading ‘Drive carefully’: the first step, it seems, “changed the view these people had of themselves (Cialdini, 2007, pp.72-73).” Students’ small steps can change the way they see themselves: someone used to trying in maths will come to see themselves as someone who tries in maths – if we can just get them started.
Making the first step easy does not mean dumbing down: it’s only worthwhile if it leads to further steps. I’m not suggesting we settle for the first step: once students have taken it, we can challenge them to take the next immediately, can offer them feedback, can help them refine their work, bit by bit, until it is superb. Step by step, we help students to complete the task; sentence by sentence, they achieve the standard we expect of them.
Each step – easy enough for students to complete – becomes a building block for the next. Each step helps students revise their beliefs about the subject and themselves: ‘I can do it’. Their thousand miles has begun.
Checklist – if students are unwilling to get started, you could:
1) Make the first step the easiest:
- Make the first question one we know every student can answer;
- Begin the lesson by asking students to tell us what they know;
- Introduce a challenging task with something students have mastered
2) Make the first step (seem like) the only one:
- Reveal questions, instructions and information one step at a time (for example, using powerpoint)
- Invite students, not to ‘Start writing’ or ‘Answer the question’, but to ‘Write your first sentence’ or explain ‘What will you do first?
3) Make the first step concrete:
- Remove abstract terms and jargon
- Specify a visible action
4) Make the first step the second step:
- Ask students to tell us what they will write – then invite them to write it;
- Ask students to complete partial solutions;
- Highlight what students have already done: “You answered a question just like this five minutes ago.
This is a draft excerpt from Habits of success: getting every student learning. It’s available from Amazon & Routledge.
If you found this interesting…
The underlying evidence for making it easy, here.
I’ve discussed how and why we can break learning into smaller steps, here.
References
Cialdini, R. (2007) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. HarperBusiness.
Very interesting as usual Harry. It reminds me of something I heard in a therapy group once. It was that people will do things for two reasons only. Either because they want to do it or they are afraid of what would happen if they don’t do it. And you can work on either motivation.
I don’t think threats are generally very effective with demotivated people/students. But you can make it more enticing to follow a particular course of action by making it more attractive to do it rather than avoid it. Cheers, Bob
Absolutely: making something attractive is another pillar of behavioural psychology, and one to which I’ll turn in future posts…