Kicking bad teaching habits

After a years of teaching, it’s easy to fall into a routine. But which everyday practices are making you worse at your job, without you knowing, asks Oliver Quinlan...

Teaching is a complex business. Just imagine how many choices you make on a daily basis. Every interaction with the class requires a response, whether it’s carefully choosing how to re-explain a tricky concept, or making a split-second decision in the face of challenging behaviour.

Student teachers often talk of how overwhelming it is to take whole-class lessons. But although the number of decisions never really reduces as we become more experienced, we do become more accustomed to dealing with them. This is often down to developing our habits as a teacher; those things we do naturally in response to the situations we face day in, day out.

By definition, habits are things we don’t really think about – but these ingrained responses make a significant contribution to our teaching style. When you come to think of it, it’s a little bit scary how many of the things that define the way teach have become automatic. 

I first started thinking about the power of habits when I decided to try out Professor Dylan Wiliam’s ‘no hands up’ technique for whole-class teaching. This is based on the idea that, when asking children to raise their hands in response to a question, you often get a show of hands from members of the class who already know the answer, and a decision to sit back from those who do not. In this situation, no one actually thinks. The opportunity to do anything other than recall and remember is lost.

In a ‘no hands up’ classroom, questions are posed to the whole class, but the person who answers is chosen at random. Wiliam suggests writing children’s names on lolly sticks, then picking one stick out from the pile to decide who should respond. I’ve also used two packs of numbered cards: one deck is handed out to the class; I shuffle the other and draw a card to determine which child speaks.

The most obvious benefit of doing things in this way is that everyone in the class has to think – anyone might be picked, after all. However, for me, the most powerful effect was on my questioning. Sometimes I would pose a question and choose a number, only to find the selected person was unable to answer. I’d choose another, and again be met with silence.

The temptation was to resort back to my old habit – to ask for hands up and pick someone who knew the answer. Then it dawned on me: what I needed to do was change the question. The reason it wasn’t working was that I habitually asked questions that didn’t make people think – children only needed to remember. This structure forced me to reconsider how I ask questions. If I wanted children to know something, it would be far more efficient just to tell them. My question should then ask them to apply this information – to think.

After a while, it became a habit for me to directly teach certain things and follow this up with questions that challenged my class to use this information: to think, rather than just recall; to ‘have a go’, rather than to just ‘know’ or ‘not know’.

So often we precede the word ‘habit’ with ‘bad’, and yet the very quality that makes bad habits hard to break makes good habits a powerful force for sustained impact on learning. Force yourself to do something enough times and it just might become one of those good habits, taking your teaching to the next level.