What Makes Instructional Practices So Hard to Change?
Every school and district leader has struggled with trying to change instructional practices. Over the years, cognitive scientists and educational researchers have delivered several important findings regarding what makes instruction more effective, but these findings rarely seem to make it into standardized classroom practices. Why is this and what can be done about it?
There are four powerful forces at work to prevent new instructional practices from taking hold, despite new scientific findings about the efficacy of certain practices. These four forces are the basic behavioral concept of habit formation, the depth that traditional instructional practices are ingrained, the institutional experiences surrounding pre-service preparation, and the cultural norms that exist in school settings.
The first thing that we have to remember when trying to introduce a new instructional strategy into an institution is that the new pedagogy represents a new habit. By looking at teaching as a set of habitual behaviors, it becomes a bit more clear why changing them can be so difficult, even when people really want to change. Adopting new habits is an incredibly effortful and difficult endeavor. The difficulty only increases when the change is not self-selected or is imposed.
Every year millions of people adopt New Year’s Resolutions intending to improve their lives. These are self-directed goals that people are selecting themselves and have built-in motivation to make that change. However, even with these positive characteristics, less than 25% of these resolutions are still intact by Valentine’s Day.
Creating a new instructional habit requires an approach that honors behavioral principles. New habits require a sound rationale for why the new instructional practice is going to benefit the students we serve. Staff will need plenty of peer and environmental support to assist them through the phase of acclimatizing to the new pedagogy. One of the best organizations at creating peer and environmental support is Weight Watchers. Take a page from their book and give people “buddies” to hold each other accountable, ensure public reporting of success, and structure the environment to make it easier to implement the new teaching behavior — reminders, prompts, and cues.
It is also important to plan for failure. Failure should be expected and anticipated, meaning, develop plans for when people fall down in their attempts at the new strategy. If failure really means failure, you will have a success rate of less than 10%. On the other hand, if failure means “First Attempt In Learning” you can help people recover from their setback, learn from it, and make a new attempt. It is important for failure to be normalized and not shamed.
To effectively plan for the changing of instructional habits, we have to remember where current instructional habits come from. These instructional practices are not typically “taught” in teacher preparatory programs. Instead, these practices are deeply rooted in the subconscious of what teachers expect school to be like because of the time they spent as a student.
Teachers, for the most part, have spent over 17 years in pretty traditional classrooms, and internalized a sense of what school and the educational experience is like. In addition, the teaching profession is mostly staffed with people who enjoyed that experience — enjoyed it enough to want to spend their life in the institution.
None of these things mean instructional practices can’t change — we have all seen teachers who evolve and adapt, making intentional careful changes to their pedagogy. The dilemma for leaders is how to make that evolutionary change in practices the norm, not the exception.
Two other institutional pressures exacerbate this situation. The experience of student teaching actually reinforces this dynamic, not that traditional practices are taught explicitly. Instead, preparatory colleges rarely check to see if mentor teachers model exemplary practices on a daily basis. Many of these colleges are desperate for mentor teachers and will allow anyone who is tenured to mentor a student teacher. On the flip side, these programs are often structured to allow mentor teachers increasing time away from their teaching duties throughout the student teaching experience. This all adds up to a message that tells student teachers there is a significant difference between what they need to do to get the job and what is acceptable once they have the job.
Some colleges and school districts have attacked this dynamic very explicitly, by both changing the standards to become a mentor teacher and moving away from the gradual release model of student teaching. These colleges have instructional and planning behaviors that they want their pre-service teachers to learn, and choose mentor teachers who model these behaviors on a daily basis. There is no allowance for student teachers to find their mentor teacher. Additionally, they have made the student teaching experience a team teaching experience. Team teaching, as a student teaching experience, has proven to be more effective for the pre-service teacher, better for student learning, and serves as professional development for the mentor teacher as well.
The second institutional pressure comes from the cultural norms of the school itself. If school leaders want to change instructional practices, they need to think like organizational developers by diagnosing the existing cultural norms and devise a way to change the instructional culture. This is particularly difficult, as there is no set formula that will work in every setting. Leaders have to understand the existing instructional practices, their origins, the social and power dynamics among faculty, and the building’s capacity for change.
By thinking differently about why change is so difficult and what it takes to make it happen, schools can be effective in changing practices. However, until we do the deep planning for change, educational initiatives will continue to follow the pattern of low impact, wasted-effort professional development.
