This week I have been reading James Clears’ Atomic Habits. I could not recommend it enough and it’s made waves already in the teaching community. Its ‘Four Laws’ set out a road map for implementing and embedding habits – their inversions spell out a recipe for how to break bad habits. With the increased focus in education communities on how we can free up cognitive space to allow for learning, the investment in creating habitualised behaviours is intriguing and So this next series of blog posts will be dedicated to exploring in detail how Clears’ ideas relate to classrooms.

The First Law – Make It Obvious

The Habits We Do Not See

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

– Karl Jung

Many classrooms already make use of cued habits. What I have not thought about before is the unconscious cues that already exist. There must be a whole range of cued behaviours that are present in classrooms that are not devised by the teacher. They have been unconsciously built. Some of these cued behaviours pupils bring in from home, some have developed from other classrooms and some may have arisen from pupils trying to make sense of how to navigate their world.

Here are just some that I have noticed;

• Some pupils just take things from others when they want them.
• Speak politely to teachers but not to maids or teaching assistants
• What they do if their pencil needs sharpening. Go to the bin to sharpen it or take a new one from the pencil pot.

Some of these are not problematic. Some are almost certainly planned habitualised behaviours from other teachers which have been bought into my class. Others might be more important to break.

But it is useful to be aware of them nonetheless. These nonconcious habits shape a large portion of our pupils behaviours and they guide the way they work.

What We Can Do

1. Create a list of the less obvious habits in your class. Consider whether they need to be addressed.
2. Your classes will naturally develop habits whether you guide them or not. If you do not give pupils a clearly explained and practiced expectation, they will create their own habits.
3. Senior leaders should consider the habitualised behaviours they want to see across the school. If these habits are consistent, and don’t need to be broken and relearnt every year, we free up time for other learning.