Habit Assemblies

Hey

Hope you’re keeping that mental chatter under control. Today, more on (solving for) complexity…

Big idea 🍉

The more complex a school, the more attention and effort is required just to maintain it… attention and effort that could (should) be going into improving learning.

Ruthless simplicity (doing fewer things) and collective alignment (doing those things the same way) are two powerful levers for reducing this complexity.

Most schools pursue collective alignment by focussing on teachers... practising agreed routines and norms together, then implementing them back in classrooms. This is great... BUT, the schools that do it best go one step further. They also practise with students. All together. At once.

A kind of habit assembly.

Imagine 200 year 7s in the hall, all practising how to turn-and-talk. How to answer questions. How to treat others with respect. How to sit and act in ways that optimise attention.

Without this, we have to build culture from scratch, in isolation, 30 students at a time. With habit assemblies, students arrive in our classrooms already primed. We just need to stick to the plan.

The rationale for this is social norms. Our behaviour is shaped less by what we're told to do and more by what we see others doing. In a habit assembly, every student sees every other student doing the same thing. They don't just learn the routine... they internalise the norm… this is how we do things around here.

And culture compounds: once routines are internalised, each lesson reinforces the norm, which makes the next assembly even stronger.

Most schools already have the time for this. Existing assembly slots or collapsed tutor/form time can be repurposed without adding to the timetable.

Of course, this only works if it's done with students, not to them. Roll it out heavy-handedly or without buy-in and things'll backfire fast.

The more we build habits together, the stronger the culture we end up with.

🎓 For more, check out this paper on how habits boost learning

(and keen an eye out for the forthcoming Second Series of our Great Teaching Unpacked docco, which will showcase a great school running habit assemblies)

Summary

• Habit Assemblies involve large groups of students practising core routines together.

• Seeing everyone do the same thing supercharges social norms and accelerates culture.

• This reduces our burden as teachers and reduces coordination cost for schools.

Little updates 🥕

• Paper tracking high-performance teachers moving to low achieving schools → finds that when settings change, teaching performance may not always fully translate.

• Paper on differentiation → finds little association between differentiated instruction & socio-emotional outcomes.

• Analysis of learner’s sense of belonging → shows a moderate positive correlation between belonging & positive achievement.

• Research on question-asking → suggests that learners with stronger question-asking abilities may do better in open-ended assessments.

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