Culture Onboarding

Hey

It’s gonna be a great couple of days. I can feel the stirrings already. But first…

Big idea 🍉

Habit assemblies are a powerful way to shape school culture. But to secure the ultimate behaviour, we should also look to the start of the year, before lessons have even begun.

Culture onboarding is an extended, multi-day habit-building exercise for new students, focussed on establishing keystone behaviours, values and metacognition: how to enter and exit the classroom, how to do paired talk well, how to show each other respect, how to respond to feedback...

This is powerful because, at this stage, norms are still up for grabs. Nothing has set yet, especially if older students aren't around (and when they do show up, there's a strong norm in play).

This is a big early investment... BUT it pays back every single lesson from that moment on, potentially saving hundreds of hours of learning time by the time students leave.

If we don't do this, students will just bring the habits they've built over the years. That inertia is hard to compete with. Also: when we leave behaviour to chance, it tends to be those students with the greatest self-regulation and home support who flourish, and those with the least who lose out.

How do we do culture onboarding well? First, we work out our behaviour curriculum: not just the habits, but the values and the thinking underneath them. Then we teach it, just like anything else. We explain it, model it, practise it, and then constantly reinforce it. Habits take time to bed in, we need to keep coming back to them... every year, every term, every week, (and for some schools) every day.

It's also a chance to build relationships and joy: pit kids against the clock, bake in moments to celebrate. Done well, onboarding isn't a drill exercise... it's a warm welcome to the community.

🎓 For more, check out this paper on school-wide positive behaviour interventions or this OG blog by the wise Joe Kirby.

Summary

• Habit assemblies are valuable, but culture onboarding helps establish behaviours before lessons even begin.

• Explicitly teaching routines (eg. entering classrooms, responding to feedback) builds norms that help every student succeed.

• Doing this well means teaching culture deliberately: explaining, modelling, and continually reinforcing it.

Little updates 🥕

• Paper on task difficulty → finds that high-demand tasks combined with interleaved practice can improve learning outcomes.

• Study on immediate judgements of learning → finds no clear learning benefit, with difficult tasks sometimes harmed.

• Article on AI tutoring → finds human support increases engagement by providing motivation, though usage remains low.

• Study on tackling non-attendance → argues most strategies have limited impact, but family engagement shows promise.

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