Rachel’s students don’t care about the things she most wants them to care about.  Rachel recently took responsibility for the Personal, Social and Health Education curriculum in her school.  She’s excited to teach her students to stay safe and to thrive, but she has two big concerns.  First, the subject isn’t valued: most students are sceptical about what school can teach them about life, and older students are increasingly cynical.  Second, what students learn in the classroom doesn’t seem to influence how they behave: students know smoking is dangerous, for example, but they are still tempted to try it.

This is one of a series of worked example situations demonstrating the application of behavioural psychology to common classroom challenges. Rachel follows a five-step approach:

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

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

Rachel realises that the curriculum suffers from vague diffuse aims. The big goals include teaching safe behaviour, good citizenship and global awareness; the contribution of individual lessons to thees goals is not always clear. Rachel encapsulates the purpose of each unit in a single scenario and the behaviour she hopes students will adopt if they face it, for example, if they are…

  • Offered drugs or cigarettes, they refuse
  • Concerned about a peer’s health, they tell a trusted adult
  • In a dangerous situation, they leave it

This allows Rachel to focus each lesson on providing students either knowledge, insight, experience or practice which prepares them to meet the scenario.

Step 2) Inspire and motivate students to value the change

Rachel wants to convince students what they are learning in the subject matters. Many students see their lessons as irrelevant or as less important than academic subjects: the students who need the lessons most seem the least inclined to accept advice from their teachers. Clear goals for each lesson and unit help; Rachel shows these situations and decisions matter by:

Creating a need: Rachel tries to help students recognise that each unit focuses on genuine problems faced by students like them. Sometimes she describes her rationale – telling students the prevalence of specific risks like hospitalisation after excessive drinking, for example – but she knows these risks feel remote: “It’ll never happen to me.” So Rachel begins each unit by introducing true stories in which students face dilemmas or challenges, like problematic relationships or peer pressure to smoke. Highlighting the decisions they face make the situations seem more vivid and compelling; this approach also engenders students’ curiosity: they only discover each individual’s response, and the consequences, at the end of the unit, once they know more about the topic.

Framing: One reason why students’ don’t take these situations seriously is that they worry more about immediate costs and benefits (like their friends’ approval) and less about distant ones (like possible future health consequences). Rachel highlights immediate costs, where they exist: smoking makes you less fit immediately, for example; and tries to downplay immediate benefits (friends’ disapproval may be fleeting). Rachel tries to show students how to reframe situations around these frames, thinking more about immediate costs and distant benefits. She also emphasises the immediate benefits of lessons: each lesson concludes by inviting students to explain what they now know and the value it has. Rachel’s third framing approach is to encourage students to make better choices, not just abstain: to ‘get fit’, not to ‘not smoke’, to ‘have a passion’, not just to ‘avoid anti-social behaviour’. Rachel hopes that this will offer students worthwhile goals and reduce the temptation of the behaviours she hope they will avoid.

Highlighting role models: Rachel wants to provide students with convincing, relatable role models. She introduces role models in three ways:

  • She revisits her case study situations to provide role models in future units: “Think about how Khadija responded when she was under pressure in the last unit – what do you think she would do in this situation?”
  • She highlights the behaviour of ‘heroes’: historical figures who demonstrated the behaviours she is encouraging under pressure, encouraging students to show the determination and persistence of Civil Rights protesters, for example.
  • She tries to help students see themselves as potential role models: at the end of each unit, she asks them to offer advice to a younger student about the target situation: she plans to use this in future lessons (“Here is some advice from older students about how to respond”) but she also hopes this will help students see themselves as capable of desirable responses.

Emphasising social norms: Rachel worries that social norms – and students’ inaccurate perceptions of prevalent behaviour – may lead students astray. For example, she knows her students overestimate how many of their peers are drinking and having sex. She shares statistics with them – “Nationally, 87% of students don’t touch drugs” – and particularly emphasises changing trends: “Fewer and fewer under-sixteens have ever drunk alcohol..” She hopes this will convince students that the behaviours she is encouraging are normal and socially acceptable.

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

Once she has convinced students that the scenarios she is advocating matter, Rachel helps students plan how their responses. Near the end of each unit, students write an implementation intention: they are offered specific scenarios, such as “A friend asks you to look after a package for them for a few days, and not to open it” and asked to plan what they would do or say, and when. Encouraging students to plan how they would like to act and what they would like to say makes it more likely they will do so when they are under pressure.

Step 4) Initiate action: make starting easy

Rachel knows she needs to get beyond abstract plans if students are to act on their intentions under pressure: she uses two kinds of practice to help students master their responses. She uses Forum Theatre, in which the class observe a small group role play, pausing the action and sometimes rewinding, to explore the options individuals have and the consequences of their words and actions. She also prepares deliberate practice of the scenarios students planned implementation intentions for, so students get to test, refine and become confident in their responses.

Step 5) Follow up: help students maintain change

Rachel does everything she can to track students’ responses. She has a confidential post box outsider her office, in which students can post notes describing situations they have experienced and their responses. Each term, she asks students to complete an anonymous survey asking how them to assess their confidence in handling specific situations about the situations they have encountered. When this is positive, Rachel uses the information to feed back to students: “three quarters of you told me you were confident to respond appropriately if you were concerned about the behaviour of a family member”; she also uses the information she gains to design new scenarios and to make units more realistic and relevant. Rachel tries to offer feedback which builds students’ identities as resilient, independent and reflective – “The way Michael responded to that scenario exemplifies the calm confidence we hope you’ll show” and to highlight the school as an supportive community: “I’m really glad that so many of you are happy to tell your peers when you’re struggling.”.

Conclusion

Rachel recognises the limits of her influence. However, by clarifying what she wants students to do and emphasising why it matters, she hopes to show students the choices they have and the consequences of those choices. She hopes that this will help colleagues and parents to support students’ decision making too. Finally, Rachel believes that – if students see why situations matter – they are more likely to approach them thoughtfully, even if they don’t act as she would hope.

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

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I’ve discussed other situations in which behavioural psychology may help us face common challenges: