Get Students Thinking, Consequences Edition

We learn what we think about

My wife and I often overestimate our capacity to cook. We'll buy ingredients for a few meals on Sunday, but then we get busy and eat grilled cheese or go to the taco truck instead of cooking during the week. Then the vegetables go bad. We end up having to throw them out, and maybe clean some rotten vegetable juice out of the drawer. But we forget, make big plans, and buy too many ingredients again. We end up in a loop of action → consequence, but the consequence doesn't cause us to change our actions.

Students end up in this loop all the time. Make faces across the room at Jimmy while the teacher is talking → get talked to after class → make faces at Jimmy again the next day. Pick your story: skipping, disrupting class, play-fighting in the hallways, stealing other kids' pencils. Maybe you get a talking-to from a teacher, or a detention, or a call home. Sometimes the consequence works, and the student makes a different choice the next day. But often it doesn't. Behavior doesn't change, students fall into habits, and those habits become hard to change.

Here's a basic fact of learning: memory is the residue of thought.¹ That's true for academic learning, and it's also true for behavior change. If I want a student to change their behavior, I need to ask: what are they thinking about? For some students, consequences work. I have a conversation with them after class, or I call home, and their behavior changes. But for other students — particularly students who struggle with impulse control — that consequence doesn't work. In those cases, it's often because the student isn't thinking about the consequence in the moment. I have that long conversation with them, they agree to change their behavior...and by the time class starts tomorrow, they've completely forgotten.

If I want to stop buying too many vegetables and watching them rot, I should think about how much I hate rotting vegetables when we meal plan for the week. If I want students to stop making faces at each other while I'm teaching, I need to find ways to get them thinking about that conversation we had during class, not just after class when I pull them aside.

The key is to preempt misbehavior. Here's a great piece of advice from Adam Boxer. When a challenging student comes in to class, quietly tell them: I'm going to call your (mom/dad/caretaker/etc) this afternoon and let them know how you did in class today. It's up to you whether that's a good phone call or a bad phone call. That's a great example of the broad principle: I want students thinking about a possible consequence during class, and not just hope that call I made yesterday will change their behavior. "I'm going to call home for you today" is just one strategy, there's lots of other ways you can do this that depend on the behavior, the student, and the context. But the important thing is to preempt behavior, to get students thinking about their behavior before they make a poor choice.²

The reason this is so important in behavior change is that our minds avoid thinking when we can. When we’re not thinking, we tend to fall back on habits. A lot of behavior change in schools is really about changing bad habits. Students often want to change these habits! I think framing negative behaviors as bad habits is helpful: it’s often something that teachers ignored for too long and allowed to form. It’s not about blaming students or pointing fingers, it’s about helping students to change their habits.

I worry that this post sounds obvious. Of course we want students thinking about their actions in the moment, especially students who struggle with impulse control and negative habits. But there’s a cycle that schools fall into all the time — that I fall into — where we focus on what happens after some misbehavior. Student does something, student gets scolded, sanctioned, detentioned, suspended, whatever. Student does it again. Adults get mad. “What did we tell you last time!?” And the cycle continues.

1. This lovely phrase comes from Dan Willingham

2. People often struggle to understand that consequences are most effective for students who don't receive the consequence. Let's say you give detention to students who are late to class. There are some students who will get a detention once or twice at some point to test the system, then come to class on time. Some students will get into the habit of coming to class on time because they don't want to get detention at all. And then some students will still show up late and have detention every week. It's important to remember that those detentions are mostly influencing the behavior of students who are rarely or never in detention. There's an ethical question here of whether it's ok to put a group of students in detention every week for the good of the rest of the students in the school. But let's start by being honest about who detentions are helping. Then, let's put some interventions in place for the students whom detention isn't helping. You could think of this post as a blueprint for changing the behavior of that last group of students, the ones who "regular" consequences don't seem to work for.