Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021

Principle 2: Habits accelerate learning
Five themes: Mental models and purposeful execution

One corollary of the fact that working memory is both powerful and limited is the realization that every task you can manage to do with a minimal load on working memory allows you to use the remaining capacity for something more important. Fluent reading is perhaps the most important example of this. When students can read with fluency, their working memory is freed to think deeply about the text and their comprehension and ability to analyze increases.

This also explains why forming habits is so critical to learning. Making common, everyday activities familiar enough that we can do them without having to think about them makes it easier for us to do them—and therefore more likely that we will—and means we can free our minds up to think more deeply while doing them.

Your alarm goes off in the predawn darkness and your hand slaps the snooze button. You are in a half-waking state but soon standing at the sink, toothpaste on your brush; now the shower is running. Likely you are operating based on habit as your brain sleepily struggles to engage the new day. You do what you do because that's what you do. Your actions would happen more slowly and require more willpower and working memory (or might not happen at all) if they were not a habit. A familiar routine allows you to save your willpower for something else. Interestingly, research suggests that willpower is indeed finite in this way. Most of us can use it up. The term “ego depletion”¹⁰ describes this effect.

But something more happens as a result of habits. Likely some of the freest and widest ranging thoughts you will have today will occur while you are doing things you do out of habit: brushing your teeth; standing in the shower; perhaps driving to work. Your mind can do these things at very little cost to working memory; suddenly it is free to roam. Before you know it, you are thinking about where to put the couch so the living room makes sense or what the best question is to unlock last night's reading for your students.

Think about that in classroom terms. When you ask your students to write in response to something you've been reading or discussing, the more the process is established as a habit—“get out your Reader Response Journal and begin writing”—the more working memory is left over to think about the novel. You can see that play out in a sequence from Jessica Bracey's fifth-grade classroom in Newark, New Jersey, in the video Jessica Bracey: Keystone. Jessica says: “Tent your books. Question 87 in your Reader Response Journals. You have evidence in the text. Go!” Less than three seconds later, every pencil in the room is moving and, more importantly, every student is thinking deeply about the book. Compare that to Ms. Bracey's counterpart down the hall, Ms. Yecarb. Her classroom is the opposite of Ms. Bracey's. She thinks students get bored doing things the same way every day, so she often improvises new ways to make familiar tasks interesting. “Take a few minutes to write down your thoughts about why Maddie does what she does,” Ms. Yecarb says. “Write this down in sentences?” one student asks. “Yes,” says Ms. Yecarb. “On what?” another student asks. “Anything will do; scrap paper or your notes. Use a big purple crayon if you have one! Just try to think deeply,” Ms. Yecarb responds. “Is this OK?” asks one, holding up her notebook. “I can't find a piece of paper,” says another student. “Hey!” says a third. Her deskmate has been looking for a pencil in his backpack and has unsettled her desk.

It's not just that time has been wasted, though it clearly has. It's that continuity has been lost and focus squandered. By the time her students begin writing they will remember less about the text. Ideas that were beginning to develop a few seconds before have been driven out of working memory by the demands of getting pencil and paper. Their insights will be scattered on the wind. And as they write, some part of them will be thinking about mundane aspects of task completion—Am I writing enough? Are other people writing more?—because responding in writing is not yet a habit. Ironically, in an effort to make it “interesting,” Ms. Yecarb focuses more attention on the task of writing and less on the book itself.

In Jessica's class, however, the ideas are flowing right away because there is both habit and procedure. There's a journal in everyone's folder; the folder is on everyone's desk, and pencils are in the trays. They have done this, her narrative reveals, eighty-seven times already, and so it is the equivalent to them of brushing their teeth. They can do it not just quickly but with their minds on bigger things—the book, in this case. Jessica's students are likely to think more deeply and creatively specifically because she's made the logistics of responding in writing a habit. You can see the benefits of this in the rest of the video. What you do out of habit takes less willpower—so every student is writing the whole time. What you do out of habit allows your working memory to be on things of substance—so students have engaged Jessica's questions in thoughtful and reflective ways. No surprise then that when she prompts them, every child's hand goes up eagerly. She has built a setting in which it is easy for their minds to engage and they have responded.

Habits, Charles Duhigg tells us in The Power of Habit, are the brain's way of saving energy, or allocating its energy to other more pressing things and they are just as important for teachers as they are for students. According to a study by social psychologist Wendy Wood and colleagues at Duke University, up to 45 percent of our daily behaviors are automatic.¹¹ These make it easier to operate—thinking is hard work and the brain is always trying to conserve energy and focus for when it really needs it. You can't plan your lesson if you're thinking about brushing your teeth. But there are also habits you develop to help you think more deeply about what you're doing, like your process for lesson preparation. “I always prepare my lessons the same way,” Sarah Wright told me. The morning of the beautiful lesson in her Keystone video, in which she is so compellingly responsive to her students and seems to make every decision right, she “did the lesson as if I was a student, thinking it through from their perspective and writing out the answers I hoped I'd get.” Teachers like Sarah use a familiar and productive habit to prepare. That it's a routine means that she isn't thinking about how to get ready, but rather about what a good student answer looks like.

It's the same for students. We want to optimize their use of their thinking by filling their school days with two kinds of habits: (1) having a way of doing relatively unimportant things quickly and easily and (2) having a way of doing important things well and in a way that channels the greatest amount of attention, awareness and reflection on the content. It's obvious that we want consistent habits for the trivial stuff, in other words, but it's less obvious that we want consistent habits for the most important tasks. True, there are useful habits like how to come into a classroom and how to pass out materials. But academic habits—how to hold a discussion and how to write in response to text—are even more critical. What we do frequently benefits most from being done consistently, so building habits around paying attention well (Habits of Attention) and listening and building community during discussions (Habits of Discussion) pay massive dividends, as do consistent routines for different ways of participating (Turn and Talk, Silent Solo), not to mention expectations like putting hands up to answer (there's nothing worse than interrupting a student who makes a good comment to ask the student who shouted out—again—to desist from shouting out) and down when others are talking (see technique 29, All Hands).

So build your classroom around procedures that become habits. Education writer Tom Bennett describes the shared habits that become a routine in a good classroom as being like a “superpower.” Habits, he writes, become part of students: “They behave the way they need to behave, without thinking. And that means … time and head space to think about the things you want them to think about—the learning. Routines are the foundation of good behaviour. They take time to communicate and imbed. But nothing is worth your time more.” Tom's right, of course. And what he says of positive behavior is even more true of thinking behaviors and academic habits. Ironically this often makes students happy because they take comfort—and sometimes pride—in knowing how to do things quickly and well. But either way, you will be transferring the focus of their working memory from how to do a task to the significance of the question. So a classroom infused with strong habits is usually a happy and scholarly place too.

There's a third, more subtle aspect of habit building that's worth thinking about, and a story from my visit to London's Michaela Community School, which serves students from some of the poorest sections of London, will help to explain why. At Michaela—which was recently the top-scoring school in England on at least one math exam—students at the school stand up at lunch each day and give thanks. I saw this myself on a visit in 2016.

After eating, the pupils were offered the chance to stand and express gratitude in front of half the school. Their hands shot into the air. All of them. Everyone wanted to be chosen to say thanks.

Students thanked their classmates for helping them study. They thanked their teachers for expecting a lot and helping them. One student thanked the lunchroom staff for cooking for them (incidentally, cafeteria food in the UK is far superior to that in the United States and much more likely to involve on-site cooking). And still the hands shot up into the air. A student thanked his mother for everything she did to provide for him. He was perhaps thirteen years old and shared his appreciation in front of perhaps a hundred other teenaged boys, speaking haltingly but honestly about how grateful he was for how hard she worked and the sacrifices she made. You don't see that every day. The gratitude seemed to be endless and came pouring out of them until the teacher in charge said it was time to go back to class.

I found myself wondering about it for a while afterwards. Here were kids from some of the poorest sections of the city, kids who might have faced difficulty at home and on their way to school. Many had left (or even lived still) in places racked by violence and difficulty. But at Michaela, their days were punctuated not by someone reminding them that they had suffered or been neglected by society, but by the assumption that they would want to show their gratitude to the world around them.

What did this mean? Well, first of all, it gave rise to a culture of thoughtfulness. Everywhere I looked students did things for one another. In one class a student noticed another without a pencil and gave her one without being asked. In the hallway a student dropped some books and suddenly three or four students were squatting to pick them up. When students left a classroom they said, “Thank you” to their teacher.

Maybe thanking makes behavior worthy of gratitude more likely to occur. Students know their goodness is seen and valued, not just by their teachers but their peers. It spreads. Maybe at first it's due to the plausibility of appreciation but after a while it just takes on a life of its own. People are kind and considerate because, at Michaela, it's what they do—it's their habit.

But the gratitude, I think, is as much about the giver as the recipient. Maybe that's the most important point. To show gratitude causes you to look for and then to see the goodness around you, and therefore to perceive a world full of goodness all around you. Which makes you happy. And just maybe optimistic—to think the world is the kind of place that will embrace you when you give your best. The habit of showing gratitude caused students to see more things to be grateful for, to have a more positive view of the world. They saw it as a place where people were likely to smile at them, help them, support them. Building a habit of seeing it made it appear everywhere. In the Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor describes this as the Tetris Effect. You play enough Tetris and you see its characteristic shapes everywhere. Similarly, you see enough hard work behaviors from your peers, enough generosity and kindness, enough academic success, and it changes your view of the world. And this, too, is something we can use in the classroom, recognizing that where we direct our students' attention can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Narrating the good, the hard work, and the productivity around them helps them to see it when it is present and to learn more from observing it.