Accentuate the positive

Hey 👋

Thanks for opening this email and giving it your attention. This week, how to effectively (and not) harness norms in school…

Big idea 🍉

Norms are the unwritten rules that govern the behaviour and attitudes of a group. They are so powerful that they often override more formal rules or policies.

The best way to harness the power of norms in school is to raise the visibility of those behaviours and attitudes that we want others to emulate. What we amplify, we encourage.

100% adoption is the ultimate goal... even a single dissenter makes it easier for folks not to follow along. When we see one person picking up litter, we might consider doing it. When we see everyone else picking up litter, we start to worry about being left out.

Some aspects of this are obvious. You likely do lots of amplification already... "Singh has come in and got started on the task straight away."

But some aspects are less obvious. In particular: the importance of accentuating the positive.

For example… In the early years of my teaching, there were times when a large proportion of my class didn't do their homework. I'd come in the next lesson and chastise them. "Team, this isn't good enough. Loads of you didn't do your homework. Sort yourselves out."

But what message was I sending about norms in this moment?

I was basically signalling that the emerging norm was one of not doing homework. And so, those few students who did do their homework were now questioning whether they were at risk of not aligning with expected group behaviour (unconsciously at least) 😱

It would have probably been more productive to just emphasise those students who did do their homework, or highlight a time when the majority of the class demonstrated a high submission rate.

In short, when nudging norms, it's best to amplify what we want to happen, not what we don’t. We must accentuate the positive.

🎓 For more, see this paper on the pitfalls of social norm interventions.

Summary

• Norms are the unwritten rules that govern the behaviour and attitudes of a group.

• We can influence norms by raising the visibility of those behaviours and attitudes that we want others to emulate.

• And we should avoid accentuating things we don’t want to happen.

Little updates 🥕

• Analysis of grades in single sex vs mixed schools → finds that girls get a small boost in results from girls-only classes.

• Meta-analysis of various factors which make teachers stay or leave → identifies a range of individual and contextual drivers.

• Study on the value of decomposition + recomposition in teacher development → suggests it helps! Summary here.

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