Creating a culture of achievement: how can Alan get students to want to try hard in lessons?

How can we encourage, motivate and support our students to change? I’ve developed a five-step method to apply behavioural psychology and support change in the classroom:

• Specify the habit to form or the steps to take
• Inspire and motivate students to value the change
• Plan change: ask students to commit when and how they will act
• Initiate action: make starting easier
• Follow up: help students maintain change

In a series of posts on dilemmas teachers face, I’m developing worked examples to show how this approach works in practice. Each one is a real situation (slightly amended to preserve anonymity): in this case, Alan is trying to move students from a culture of compliance to a culture of achievement…

The situation

All the basics are in place at Alan’s school: students feel safe and they do as they are asked, more or less.  However, Alan is concerned that what the school has achieved is a culture of compliance.  He wants students to work hard and do their best of their own accord, but only a minority of students seem to do so, or to value achievement for its own sake. Alan is a head of year: eventually, he wants to create this culture across his year group and the school. However, he knows that asking his colleagues to change makes his task much more complex, so he begins in his own classroom.

Step 1) Specify the habit to form or the steps to take

Alan knows what a ‘culture of achievement’ feels like, but he needs to define it if he is to ask students to act and teachers to encourage them.  He’s also conscious that generic exhortations or vague general requests are unlikely to be successful: asking students to “Do your best” won’t work, because every student and every teacher interprets “best” slightly differently; telling students to value hard work does not clarify what they should be doing. So Alan tries to define the changes he wants.  In a year team meeting, he asks his colleagues to identify the components of a culture of achievement: they suggest persistence, curiosity, pride and attention to detail.  Then, Alan challenges the team to define unambiguous habits which embody each component. Eventually, they agree on:

• Persistence – During independent work, always either be working or waiting for help with your hand up.
• Attention to detail – Always check your work against a checklist before handing it in.
• Curiosity – Every day, ask at least one question you’re curious about: record the answer in your planner.
• Pride – Each week, write at least one thing you’re proud of doing in your planner.

These are clear and measurable: Alan can check students’ planners for their daily question, for example, and tutors can ask students to share what they are proud of each Monday tutor time.  Four new behaviours may prove overwhelming for students however, so Alan introduces one each half term, giving them time to make each a habit.

Step 2) Inspire and motivate students to value the change

Alan tries to show students the value of each habit when he introduces it.  He recognises that just telling them that something is a good idea – or demanding they do it – is unlikely to convince students to act. Instead, he offers role models, both positive and negative: for example, when asking students to use checklists, he describes how airlines and surgeons use them to avoid errors and how getting small details wrong can cause major issues, through the story of the Mars Climate Orbiter, which crashed because one laboratory used imperial measurements, another used metric, and no one caught the error.  Alan also emphasises social norms – people expect to read documents which are correct and accurate – and highlights immediate benefits: students may not save a space probe, but each lesson he asks two or three students to describe an error they’ve avoided using a checklist, and how the error would have affected what readers understood.

Step 3) Plan change: ask students to commit when and how they will act

Alan helps students plan when and how they will begin each new behaviour. He knows that relying on their good intentions alone is insufficient: students may mean to ask their question each day, but that doesn’t mean they’ll remember to do so. He helps them select a good time to act: for example, identifying the best opportunities to ask question in lessons and ways to overcome barriers, like writing their question down so they remember it in case they can’t ask it immediately. Alan also involves others to reinforce students’ plans: for example, he invites parents to discuss their children’s questions, the answers and students thoughts about them.

4) Initiate action: make starting easy

Alan tries to make each new action easy for students. Building up students’ motivation is of little use if small barriers get in the way, like not having checklists easily accessible. He does this by building on existing routines: for example, students are used to working quietly; he extends this to working consistently. Introducing checklists, he sets a default that students must hand in work with the checklist they have used attached to it and gives students the chance to practise, by correcting an error-strewn piece of work Alan has written.

5) Follow up: help students maintain change

Alan needs to know whether students are adopting the new habits if he is to offer appropriate feedback and support. He avoids relying on what he notices alone as he knows this can be misleading: inevitably, he focuses on some students more than others, and what he sees may not reflect overall progress accurately. Instead, he plans what he will monitor for each new habit; for example, checking six students’ planners each day for their questions and what they’re proud of, which allows him to see everyone’s planner once a week. He also monitors the impact the habits have: he checks whether students are actually doing more work as a result of being encouraged to persist independently, for example. This allows him to celebrate students successes: he asks them to count how many errors they’ve avoided using checklists, for example. It also allows him to modify habits: he realises the checklists are overcomplicated, and aren’t always necessary, so he simplifies them and only uses them for key pieces of work. He tries to reward progress, for example, by instituting a ‘Question of the week’ competition: he asks teachers to nominate the most thought-provoking question they have been asked, then has the questioner repeat the question and the teacher answer at the year group assembly. Likewise, students who use checklists most consistently are awarded a badge and their job becomes that of double-checking their peers’ work.

Conclusion

Alan’s approach makes his expectations clear, and enables him to encourage, plan and support change managably. Once he has refined his approach sufficiently to be sure the fundamentals are in place, he feels ready to encourage his colleagues to use them.

Thanks to Carrie Swan and Kate Mason for their suggestions – what else would you do?

This is a draft excerpt from Habits of success: getting every student learning.  It’s available from Amazon & Routledge.

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Solutions to previous teacher dilemmas are here:

• How can Mark get his class to begin learning independently, without nagging or reminders?
• How can Lucia get her students to act on their good intentions to do homework and revision?