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Not happy with the prevailing culture in your classroom? With a little understanding about how normative messages work, you can start to change your students’ attitudes, says David Didau...
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Human beings are social animals and as such are finely attuned to picking up messages about what’s socially acceptable. If we want to change students’ behaviour, we need to change the messages we broadcast about what is socially normal.
Helpfully, in a review of the factors that influence alcohol consumption amongst university students, Brian Borsari and Kate Carey identified three factors of which we should be aware when considering how to communicate social norms:
Let’s say we want to communicate the normative message that everyone hands in homework on time, how would we start? First, we don’t need to get it out directly to every student.
If farmers need to eliminate a disease from a herd, only a critical mass of the cows need to be immunised. We can achieve this sort of ‘herd immunity’ in the spread of normative messages; if enough children are told handing in homework is normal, everyone else will fall into line.
Instead of randomly picking students to spread our normative message, it’s worth knowing that some of them have a disproportionate social influence.
In a fascinating study across 56 schools, Elizabeth Paluck and colleagues identified the students most likely to spread positive normative messages to prevent the spread of bullying.
They found that a relatively small group of highly influential students acted as a weather vane, changing the social climate of their schools; if they acted a certain way or stated a belief, their peers would be more likely to fall in line.
A second important finding from social psychology that we should bear in mind is to avoid negative framing. Our tendency is to avoid risks when they’re framed negatively and embrace risks when a positive frame is presented.
For instance, we’re happy to pay home insurance on the off chance that our house is burnt to the ground, but we’d likely be unwilling to gamble the same amount of money on a horse race.
Insurance makes us feel secure – we won’t lose what’s already ours – whereas gambling makes us feel we might lose what we already own. Both tend, on average, to result in a similar net loss, but how we feel about this loss is very different.
What students see and hear around them becomes normal. If we say things like, “I’m disappointed that no one has handed in their homework,” we’re unwittingly communicating the idea that it’s normal not to hand in your homework.
If instead we say, “I’m really pleased to see that so many of you have handed in the homework,” we communicate the idea that doing homework is normal.
September is a great opportunity to start everything afresh. By harnessing the power of normative messages you can make small but significant changes to students’ attitudes and behaviour.
David Didau is an independent education consultant and writer. He blogs at learningspy.co.uk.
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