The Habit Ceiling

Hey 👋

Happy valentines (for tomorrow)! This week, a new series on teacher growth…

Big idea 🍉

As teachers, we improve rapidly at the beginning of our careers, but that improvement tends to level off after the first 3 years or so. After this, our growth in effectiveness (on average) is much slower: we reach a plateau.

There are several reasons for this, but the main culprit is ‘habit formation’.

Teaching is an incredibly complex job. When we begin teaching, there are simply too many things to think about at once. The only way we can survive (and eventually thrive) in the classroom is to automate large swathes of our practice: to turn them into habits.

When we do this, we reduce our cognitive load, make teaching less effortful, and create the mental capacity needed to monitor the classroom and respond to unanticipated needs as they arise.

BUT—as anyone who’s ever tried to stop a bad habit knows—when we automate our practice, it makes it much harder to change. Even when we want to change and have the knowledge needed to make the change, old habits still die hard. And, when we do manage to instantiate a new habit, pressure or stress will often prompt us to revert. Ever been in a classroom anyone?

Habits help us to become good at teaching, but they also stop us from getting better. They are a double-edged sword. This is why experience is not the same as expertise. After year 3, if we’re not careful, we can just end up repeating our 4th year for the rest of our career.

In short, we’re only ever as good as our habits. They’re a ceiling on our effectiveness.

If we’re not intentional and intelligent about pushing through this ceiling, we can find ourselves stuck on the plateau. We’ll look more at what we can do to break the habit ceiling next snack, but for now, the first step is just to become aware of it.

🎓 For more, check out this paper on habit formation and teacher growth.

Summary

• Teacher improvement tends to level off after the first few years—this is largely due to habit formation.

• Habits help us to cope with the complexity of the classroom, but they also make us more resistant to change.

• This means that we’re only ever as good as our habit ceiling: if we want to be more effective, we need to change our habits.

Little updates 🥕

• Study testing student confidence rating of answers → finds it shifts the focus from understanding to memorisation, making knowledge harder to apply.

• Report on how schools prevent violence → suggests we need more support and better tools to keep students safe (without unfairly punishing them).

• Paper on video analysis in teacher training → finds that short feedback typically improves classroom awareness, while detailed feedback tends to boosts knowledge and confidence.

• Analysis of equity across 80+ countries → finds slight overall improvement in educational equity, but progress is uneven with mixed national trends.

• 🇺🇸 US tour alert! Team Steplab (Me, Zach, Harry, Josh ++) are running events in Charlotte, New York, and Philadelphia this May → Find out more 

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