Which Habits are Sticking at Your School?

What habits are sticking at your school?

Are they the habits that you want to be in place?

Habits are the actions that we take regularly and once ingrained, they are actions that we take without needing to devote a lot of thought to making them happen.

Things like:

• Stopping at Starbucks for mobile order on the way in to work
• Getting on the treadmill at 5:15 a.m. each day
• Listening to your podcast on the drive to work
• Eating bagged salad mix with hard boiled eggs for lunch.
• Skipping lunch
• Emailing from bed at 11p.m.
• Texting your children when they’re done with school.

As a Principal, you have habits that you would like to see spread across your school and become the unconscious actions of your staff. Daily routines, communication patterns, ways to respond to problems or challenging situations. 

When you stop to take stock of habits, you get to see what is actually happening and if it’s what you want, or what you want to change. 

At school those habits might be:

👉Consistently meeting in data teams to look at formative and summative assessment results and instruction (instruction)

👉Holding restorative conversations following minor and major behavioral moments (culture and instruction)

👉Greeting students at the door or as they enter the classroom (culture and operations)

👉Administrators visiting classrooms with brief, focused feedback daily (instruction)

The first quarter has come and gone, teacher conferences, progress reports or whatever other rhythm your school system uses to mark intervals of time in schools are moving. Thanksgiving break is around the corner. 

You set big goals in August and launched them with your team. You were excited to name them for yourself as a leader and for the whole school. You poured hours, and hours and hours into figuring out how to communicate the plan, getting input from people on your team and building in examples and feedback loops. You had a dazzling slideshow and pdfs with great graphics from Canva.

Now would be the perfect time to ask yourself “Which habits are sticking at my school?” 

and

Are they the habits that I want? 

You might call them habits, practices, common agreements or another term, but what I’m referring to are the actions that you want the adults in your school system to collectively take.

 It might be a habit of greeting each student with a “Good morning, Scholar” to give a pause and possibly avoid unnecessarily scolding them for their hat inside the building.

 It might be a practice of planning 5-10 questions for each class period that are at a higher level of thinking and that encourage multiple voices instead of the unconscious “anyone have any questions?” before moving on in the lesson.

It might be the habit of using all of the allotted professional development time for a structured data conference between teachers.

Habits are those that need reinforcement and without a plan for gradual reinforcement and increasing impact, even the most logical and agreed upon changes to the way we operate don’t have a chance of sticking around. 

Response to behavior is one of the habits that starts off strong and, without processes to strengthen and support, can falter and then the lack of a habit becomes proof to many that the change wasn’t good in the first place. 

Here are some questions to support your reflection and then your plans to either AMPLIFY the successful habits or RESET those that aren't taking root.

Instruction and Learning 

What did we agree were our shared practices that were going to make learning stronger across the board?

Habit Amplification - If you notice that the habit is largely in place, but needs strengthening, then choose 4 clear examples of how it’s showing up at your school. Take a picture, write a short caption, put it in the newsletter and the start of your next faculty meeting and invite those teachers to share what they are doing about your focused instruction and learning habit. 

Habit Reset If you notice that the habit is NOT in place and has started to fall apart to be replaced by an old practice, then break the change down into the smallest action that will yield results. For example, if you want to see more formative assessment questions throughout lessons, make a list of 8 sentence stems and share them with clear explanation of the value for student learning. Then get into classrooms, catch folx using the sentence stems and affirm it with them, in your internal newsletter, etc. Start a snowball and help the teachers to see the benefit to student learning by making this your focus too for the next four weeks. 

School Culture

What did we agree to all do to strengthen our school culture as an identity affirming, asset-based school community?

Habit Amplification -If your initiatives around school culture are going strong congratulations! You can and should celebrate that with your entire staff. Interview students (short video clips or statements if you don’t want to collect student video) sharing how they feel at school and make a slide show to share at the next faculty meeting and feature in your newsletter. Amplify what is happening so everyone can see and feel what it is like to have an identity affirming (representation matters!) culture that is focused on connection, community and asset-based responses to children and youth. That means you are restoring relationships; you are meeting misbehaviors as a chance to teach the student in a developmentally matched way how to respond in the future. You are not excluding or pushing out, but you are reframing and bringing the youth back into the school community.

Habit Reset - If the habit you wanted to foster across your school is not in place and criticism and skepticism are in place instead, your leadership move is to assess why.

Things don’t stick for a few reasons:

1. There wasn’t an effective system in place to support each step.
2. The feedback loops broke down (i.e. when a teacher tried a new method and it didn’t work, there wasn’t a way to give him/her/them support and modeling to try it again).
3. The change wasn’t clear. Sometimes people launch initiatives with vague terms assuming there’s a shared meaning. But “restorative conversation” can mean many different things to members of a group if they haven’t all been shown what the key characteristics are and given tools to help them learn a new way of interacting with students. Build the capacity in training.
4. There were changes to staffing and not everyone was onboard. If you had vacancies or people starting the school year at different times, it’s highly likely that not everyone (front office, teachers, administration) knows the new approach and will need explicit onboarding. 
5. People have built up resistance that you will need to break down. When someone tries something imperfectly and it doesn’t work, they can ask for help and get modeling to try again, or they can form a belief that the approach won’t work and go back to another way. Did that happen for you? If so, you need to go back to the start, build relationships, get people who are implementing to speak about their process and break the change down into very small actionable steps.

There are habits in so many areas of a school’s life, but the two most essential and interrelated parts are learning and culture. Bringing your attention to the habits that stick that you want to amplify and those that you want to reset can help you bring everyone towards a positive end to 2023 and a fresh launch to 2024.