Good habits and bad habits - implications for how we start the School year

If education is about nothing else, it’s about instilling and encouraging habits and attributes that will support our tamariki for success in life. At the start of a new year, many adults are realising just how hard the adoption of new habits can be - letting go of old habits that no longer serve us and embracing new habits that will benefit us over the longer term.

As we all know, a new habit can take several weeks to replace an old one - since our students have been away from school for 6 weeks, this is a great time to recalibrate habits, purpose and behaviours around teaching and learning.

When we commit to going to the gym, for example, it’s something we may not want to do - how many reasons do we have not do it? And we are fully formed adults and fully functioning pre-frontal cortex!

One of the biggest challenges with new, good habits is that they can feel hard now but easy later. This is partly because the dopamine reward comes at the end of a good habit (e.g., going to the gym), not at the start (when you bite into that pie that you don’t need!)…. So, how do we as adults implement a new habit? Here are some strategies:

• Habit stacking - Organise your gym gear beforehand, put an alarm away from the bed to ensure movement, and go to bed early the night before

• Social angle - meet your mate at the gym

• Timing - go at the start of the day, before other excuses get in the way

• Reward - pick up a nice coffee on the way to work after your workout

Because, as we know, our commitments to new habits and to do better become highly vulnerable when we experience “HALT”:

• Hungry

• Angry

• Lonely

• Tired

So, how often in the life of a typical teacher do we experience these emotions (while trying to further improve our practice)? And how do we address these situations?

So, how often in the life of a typical Student (while trying to lift themselves out of a state of “educational depression”) do they experience these emotions? And how do we address these situations?

What happens when relapse kicks in - who notices? For Teachers, it can be relapsing back to old teaching habits - for students, it can be giving up on themselves and feeling “dumb”.

Bad habits are much easier to acquire and embed because the dopamine reward comes at the start of the behaviour, not at the end - at the end, however, there is often regret and sadness. How often do we see this in our classrooms - eg too much student choice or too much warmth and not enough “demanding”. “Busy Work” that focuses more on task completion rather than learning.

So, as we start a new year, rather than thinking about “New Year’s resolutions” around teaching and learning, how about we frame them as “New Term’s resolutions”? At Learning First, we encourage our schools to go device-free for all or part of term one and focus instead on Routines, Relationships and Station Rotations. This strategy brings our students into a safe but challenging classroom environment that encourages them to leave behind who they were and start to explore who they could be.

Feel free to contact Martin if you’d like to learn more about our strategies that reduce teacher stress and burnout whilst boosting student outcomes.