Given Up on New Year’s Resolutions Already? Here’s How Research can help you Stick to your Educational Goals
It can take much longer than the 20 to 30 days often talked about as the time required to bring about the formation of a new habit. On average it's 66 days, but can take up to eight months, so stick at it
At the start of the calendar year and new term, many, many teachers and school leaders will make, and then rather sadly subsequently break, a whole range of New Years’ resolutions.
Given one of the one of the goals of New Year’s resolutions it to bring about beneficial changes in actions and behaviours and for those changes to be sustained by becoming habits, it seems sensible to consider what the research literature suggests about habit change and habit formation.
In doing so, this will then hopefully give us some clues as to what we can do to give ourselves improved chances of keeping our New Year’s resolutions and making new habits.
Neal et al (2012) state that habits are defined as actions that are triggered automatically in response to contextual cues that have been associated with their performance.
The regular performance of the action creates a linkage between the situation (cue) and the action, so as the cue is encountered or experienced it triggers the action which is performed automatically, for example, automatically taking the register as students enter a classroom, or when asking a question of a class, choosing the first student who puts up their hand.
Lally et al (2010) worked with 96 undergraduates and asked them to adopt a new health-related lifestyle behaviour. Of the 82 participants who completed the study, the average time it to took for a behaviour to become automatic was 66 days, although this varied by participant from 18 days to 254 days.
This period of time is much longer than the 20 to 30 days which is often talked about as the time required to bring about the formation of a new habit.
So what if a teacher or school leader wishes to create a new habit for themselves? Working in a health context, Gardner, Lally and Wardle (2012) have developed a useful checklist which can be used to help with habit formation, and which I have adapted for use in schools:
- Decide on a goal that you would like to achieve in your teaching, for example, improved questioning skills
- Choose a simple action that will contribute towards your goal and which you can do on a daily basis within a lesson, tutorial or other context eg questioning and wait-time
- Plan which lesson or lessons where you will undertake the chosen action. Try to be consistent and look to find some action which you can repeat daily
- Every lesson or session you encounter that time or place, perform the action you have chosen
- Continue the action for at least 66 days – in other words a term – by which time the action should have become automatic
So, what are the implications for the teachers who wish to create a new habit for themselves, or for school leaders wishing to create new routines for their schools
- Changes in actions and behaviour take time and ‘victory’ should not be declared too early and will take at least a term.
- To get new habits requires the opportunity to repeat the desired behaviour on a regular, if not daily basis.
- School and college leaders need to be conscious of situational and contextual cues and work to create an environment where those cues promote positive habits and reduce the numbers of cues and contexts which facilitate less productive habits and behaviours.
I hope you find this advice helpful, and I wish you every success in both making and keeping this year’s resolutions.
Dr Gary Jones is a former further education college senior manager interested in evidence based practice. Find him at evidencebasededucationalleadership.blogspot.co.uk and follow him on Twitter at @DrGaryJones.
