In 2012, 16 percent of private sector workers in their twenties were paying into a pension; in 2017 the figure was 63 percent. What caused this sudden change of heart?
- Did the 2050s suddenly seem much nearer?
- Did they calculate future benefits and decided to forego current pleasures?
- Did they give up on ever buying a house?
In 2012, the government introduced auto-enrollment in pensions. Individuals’ rights were unchanged: they could save for a pension or not (employers’ duties did change). But the default had changed: now, instead of choosing to save, they had to choose not to save.
People usually go with the flow. The default – what happens unless we actively choose otherwise – requires the least mental effort and is, we assume, acceptable. To give another striking example, in European countries where people must choose to become an organ donor, around 15% register; in countries where people must opt out, it’s around 98% (Bertrand, Mullainathan and Shafir, 2006). What do defaults look like in the classroom?
Say we’re asking students to do a challenging task and have prepared a sheet of additional guidance. If, by default, we give every student the sheet, most will use it. Is this the default we want? Does it encourage dependence? If students are doing well, we might instead mention that sheets will be at the front, and leave students to collect them. The same support is available, the choice has been framed differently. (This is just an example: if students are unwilling to request help, we may choose a different default). How else can we use defaults?
Defaults to maximise benefits
The default should be the choice most likely to benefit students. Having discovered the research which suggested that grades diminish students’ effort and motivation (Butler, 1988), I was concerned that the default (students receiving grades on their work) was harmful. Yet students insisted they wanted to know their grades. So, I changed the default: I no longer wrote grades in students books. To get their grade, students had to:
1) Return during a break or lunch
2) Tell me what they needed to do to improve
Then, I was happy to give them their grade (because I had confidence they had understood my feedback); students were happy too, because they knew how to improve. When I stopped writing grades in books, most students insisted they were essential, but it was unusual for more than one student per class to feel strongly enough to return during break. A changed default affected how students engaged with feedback dramatically.
Defaults and habits
To change defaults, we must first identify the existing defaults which have emerged, by accident or design. For example, if all feedback/support/challenge come from the teacher, the default suggests that only we are responsible for students improving their work. We may wish to break this habit, and encourage students to improve their own work, by creating new defaults, for example:
- Placing support we expect students to use, like phonics mats, on desks before the lesson
- Asking students to complete a checklist to catch simple errors (more here)
- Returning work to students if it contains problems we know they can solve
Identifying existing defaults can help us recognise why students are not reaching the standards we expect. I concluded that students depended on me too much, so tried different defaults, such as:
- Not repeating anything, to ensure students listened first time
- Not doing anything for students they could do for themselves
Both caused frustration initially; both led students to become more focused and independent.
Defaults and encouraging student choice
How can we reconcile defaults with student choice? Often, students’ choices aren’t in their best interests. Students can be poor judges of their current understanding (Kirschner and van Merriënboer, 2013) and may work contentedly on unchallenging tasks. How can we balance encouraging student choice with ensuring student learning? If we set a default which will benefit the group, we can encourage individual students to justify deviating from it. In reviewing a test, the default might be that students to revise their answers, beginning with the simplest question they got wrong. A default approach might be:
- Reread your notes
- Examine a model
- Complete another problem testing the same skill.
If students want to focus on other questions or take a different approach, they can, provided they justify their choice to us. The default ensures student learning; encouragement to choose thoughtfully promotes metacognitive awareness: students monitoring their learning and choosing ways to learn better.
Conclusion
Stephen Lockyer found students requested tissues frequently. He moved the tissues to the back of the classroom, out of students’ immediate sight: students requested tissues less often. Changing defaults can be that simple, and that effective. Attending to defaults encourages us to ask ‘What about the situation is encouraging students to behave as they do, and how we might change it?’ To change students’ responses to a situation, I ask myself:
- What is the existing default?
- How do students know it’s the default?
- What does the existing default encourage?
- What do I want to encourage/discourage?
- What default would promote this?
- How can I make the default clear?
- How can I encourage student responsibility?
My answers – tailored for groups and individuals – provide a powerful way to help students reach the high standards for which I hope.
These posts have focused on making desired behaviour easier for students: breaking it into steps, making the first step easier and changing the default. The limitations of making desired behaviour easier are the subject of a future post.
This is a draft excerpt from Habits of success: getting every student learning. It’s available from Amazon & Routledge.
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A discussion about breaking learning into smaller steps, here.
Ways to encourage students to take the first step, here.