Upstream Thinking

Hey 👋, quick question for ya:

Big idea 🍉

First up, a quick parable (ht Irving Zola): you and a friend are relaxing by a river. Suddenly, there's a shout from the water—a child is drowning. Without thinking, you both dive in, grab the child, and swim to safety.

BUT... before you can recover, you hear another cry for help. You and your friend jump back into the river to rescue the next struggling child. Then another drifts into sight...

and another...

and another...

The two of you can barely keep up. Suddenly, your friend wades out of the water, seemingly giving up. “WHERE ARE YOU GOING?” you yell. Your friend turns: “I’m going upstream to stop these kids falling in”.

There are times when we can get trapped in this kind of 'downstream' thinking. When we invest huge amounts of effort trying to deal with problems as they occur. However, our efforts can sometimes be better directed at tackling problems before them occur… towards prevention. This is 'upstream thinking’.

The further upstream we intervene, the closer we get to the cause, and the more leverage we gain over any outcome. If we look, we can see upstream thinking in lots of places...

• Hospitals save more lives when they focus on smoking cessation alongside cancer treatment.

• Fire services reduce casualties when they invest in fitting smoke alarms alongside improving fire truck response times.

Behaviour for learning is no exception. When schools invest in upstream interventions—like culture, motivation, and systems—they are less likely to see undesirable behaviours manifest.

The most effective schools are those which take steps to influence behaviour before it happens, as well as putting in place strategies for addressing it after it has occurred.

🎓 For more, check out this paper on how we can help students intervene upstream of themselves and this growing suite of classroom management resources from AERO.

Summary

• Upstream thinking entails directing our efforts towards prevention as well as cure.

• When it comes to behaviour, this often involves investing in culture, motivation, and systems.

• The further upstream we intervene, the more leverage we typically have over outcomes.

Little updates 🥕

• Study exploring the impact of teacher messaging before exams → suggests that reassuring messages boost student motivation, engagement, and performance, while lack of messages negatively affects outcomes.

• Paper investigating edu-neuromyths → finds that despite good factual knowledge, many aspiring teachers still hold misconceptions that could negatively affect classroom practices.

• Study on image interpretation scaffolds in history teaching → finds that structured visual scaffolds improve student ability to connect historical images to their context, enhancing reasoning skills more effectively than mind mapping.

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