Let’s say you’ve found an effective way to influence others’ actions. You wanted Year 4 to listen, or Year 9 to work independently, or colleagues to ask better questions. You succeeded: you hit upon the perfect combination of influences; Year 4 now listen. Your colleagues want their classes to listen to – they ask what they should do.
Conveying your approach is likely to prove tricky. It will be hard to identify everything you did, hard to discern which strategies made a difference, and hard to communicate them clearly enough for your colleagues to try them. We face this problem whenever we wish to learn from attempts to influence people’s behaviour (I’m currently wrestling with it while seeking to identify effective professional development). This post examines the problem, and a possible solution.
The problem: “A well-specified intervention is essential…”
Two things make it hard to share an effective approach to changing behaviour. First, it’s difficult to know what’s working. Second, it’s hard to explain what’s working to others.
It’s hard to know what’s working because any intervention has many components. For example, a professional development programme may include training days, coaching and online support. The coach may offer feedback, set goals, offer models and provide emotional support. Often, we imitate approaches which have worked in other departments, schools, or countries. But our imitations won’t work unless we know what caused the original approach to succeed. We must know what the coach did (for example), and we must know which actions (or what combination of actions) made a difference. We must be able to identify the “active, effective” components of the intervention (Michie et al., 2013). Otherwise, we risk missing crucial ingredients, and copying redundant ones.
We lack meaningful terms to describe these active, effective components: this makes it hard to identify what’s working, and hard to share it with others. We often use general terms: we talk about ‘trust’, ‘support’, ‘culture’ and ‘collaboration’. These are powerful influences, but uninformative terms. If a successful coach “built a collaborative culture,” what should we do to create the same culture? We must know what collaboration looks like, and how to encourage it: we must know exactly what the coach did, and what they asked teachers to do. A coach can share their approach with one colleague by having that colleague shadow them. But they cannot share their approach with a dozen colleagues, or multiple schools, in the same way. We need terms which explain their actions.
As Susan Michie and her colleagues put it:
A well-specified intervention is essential before evaluation of effectiveness is worth undertaking: an under-specified intervention cannot be delivered with fidelity and, if evaluated, could not be replicated.”
Michie et al. (2013)
To ‘specify’ an intervention, we need shared terms which precisely describe the behaviour change techniques being used. Precise terms permit analysis: to continue the coaching example, they allow us to identify what effective coaches do that builds a collaborative culture – and what less effective coaches are doing differently when pursuing the same goal. Precise terms also allow us to share approaches more easily. They provide a shorthand, saving time, emphasising our purpose, and helping us to interpret what we see (Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi, 2012, pp. 66-7). Where can we find precise terms for the active, effective techniques leading people to change their behaviour?
A solution: the Behaviour Change Taxonomy
Michie and her colleagues have addressed this problem by creating a taxonomy of behaviour change techniques. A behaviour change technique is an:
“Observable, replicable and irreducible component of an intervention designed to alter or redirect causal processes that regulate behavior; that is, a technique is proposed to be an ‘active ingredient’.”
Michie et al. (2013)
Michie assembled a team of experts, who reviewed the existing evidence – theoretical and practical – and listed every technique they could find tested or suggested to change behaviour; 93, in all, organised into sixteen groups, such as ‘social support’, and ‘goals and planning’ (the full list and definitions are here).
To avoid ambiguity, the team described each technique meticulously. For example, what’s the difference between making a plan and setting a goal? The Behaviour Change Taxonomy distinguishes between behavioural goals (going for a run) and outcome goals (losing weight). And it distinguishes between goals and action plans, because the latter must mention (at least one of) the “context, frequency, duration and intensity” of action: running at 6pm, daily, for thirty minutes, for example. Similarly, the taxonomy distinguishes between many forms of feedback: praise, feedback about behaviour, feedback about outcomes, feedback highlighting discrepancies between goals and behaviour, and so on.
Why it matters
This addresses both the problems I described initially. Precise terms allow us to define what’s happening in an intervention or programme. In turn, this allows us to analyse which mechanisms (or combinations of mechanisms) make a difference to people’s behaviour. And they allow us to share our findings sufficiently clearly that others can learn from us (while reducing the chance of lethal mutations).
We are using this taxonomy as part of our systematic review of professional development (described here). We hope to identify techniques which help teachers to change. We want to offer fresh insights: to get beyond ‘collaboration’ and ‘trust’ and explain how to build both, for example. This means adapting the taxonomy: some techniques help change health behaviour, but don’t apply in schools (giving medication, using Fitbits). Other techniques promote learning, but aren’t fully accounted for in the taxonomy (minimising cognitive load to make understanding and retention easier, for example).
But this approach could be used just as well when looking at encouraging students to change their behaviour: we can specify, analyse and share effective ways to encourage independent work and positive behaviour.
Conclusion
Years ago, when writing about helping my students write better essays, I quoted Orwell:
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.”
Politics and the English Language
It’s easy to be vague about how we are promoting change. It’s particularly easy if the terms available to us permit and encourage vagueness. I’m excited about this taxonomy, not because it’s perfect, but because the specificity it offers will help us to clarify what we are doing, identify what makes a difference, and share what we learn with others.
We can start using this now. Whether you’re a teacher, a school leader, a teacher educator or a researcher, the key message is specify precisely what you are doing when you try to influence others. Don’t ask students to “make a plan:” ask them to spell out what they will do, when, and for how long. Don’t encourage teachers to offer one another support during team meetings: clarify whether the focus should be on practical or emotional support (or both). And – when you want to learn from others – encourage them to do the same.
“The process is reversible.” Specific terms clarify our actions. They allow us to identify what makes a difference. And they let us learn from one another.
If you found this interesting…
This work is part of an Education Endowment Foundation-funded review of the evidence around professional development.
- I described the project’s purpose and aims here.
- Sam Sims and I discussed the value of examining mechanisms (and forms and programmes) in professional development here (page 78).
Lotss of truth here. “Don’t ask students to “make a plan:” ask them to spell out what they will do, when, and for how long.”
This is the basis behind SMART goals right?
Makes sense!