Want to Help Your Students Achieve Their Dreams? Start with Their Habits

There’s an unwritten understanding that educators should be supportive when students want to do great things with their lives. But we have to wonder: what is our responsibility to students who have big dreams but aren’t working towards them at all? We certainly don’t want to crush their spirits by saying their goals are unrealistic, but it’s also not helpful to merely say we believe in them. Instead, we can be of service when we help students understand that success doesn’t usually come from a single choice, but rather from the cumulative effects of repeated behaviors. Routines that support our health, productivity, and happiness facilitate the incremental progress necessary to achieve our goals. In other words, some of the most important decisions students will make about their lives are what their habits will be.

Many of our habits can feel out of our control, but when we learn how they operate, we can nurture ones that support our goals and crush ones that interfere with them. Any automatic behavior, whether it has a positive or negative impact on our lives, can be mapped to a habit loop. A cue starts the loop. It can be anything that reminds us of doing the habit, like a certain feeling, time of day, a place, people we’re with, or what we did moments before. It leads to the behavior, which is the action of the habit. The behavior provides some sort of satisfaction, which is why we repeatedly engage in it. In an everyday example, if you want to nurture the habit of eating a healthy breakfast every morning, the cue could be washing the dishes the previous night, which prompts the behavior of assembling the ingredients for overnight oats. In the morning, in addition to enjoying tasty food, you’d also get the satisfaction of energy to sustain you until lunchtime.

When we take a close look at problematic habits we want to crush, we see that we get a sense of satisfaction from them too, but it’s usually fleeting and followed by negative side effects. In another example, imagine you tend to wait until the weekend to start your most dreaded task, grading papers. Maybe the habit operates like this: the cue of collecting papers from your students prompts the behavior of tossing them on top of the catch-all “to-do” pile on your desk. It gives you the satisfaction that the papers are easy to find and they’re also out of your way during class. But there’s a negative side effect: procrastinating on grading ruins your weekends. When you only have a vague thought in the back of your mind that you need to get around to grading “soon,” you let the pile linger for several days, but then end up feeling the pressure to give students timely feedback.

Of course, as a teacher, you accept that you’ll frequently have to do some work beyond the school day, but it’s disheartening when it takes over your best opportunity to recharge after a busy week. So to crush that habit, the same cue can prompt a different behavior: using a file management system that assigns a specific time during the week to grade those papers, like “7th period prep” or “Wednesday, 2:30-3:30.” It still provides the same satisfaction of keeping the papers organized, but chunking the task in a visible way makes it more likely you’ll consider it an appointment you have to keep so you’re able to enjoy your weekend.