5. Small interventions with massive leverage - Part 1

There is a lot that goes into learning a new skill. A lot of what dictates a learner's success is to do with their behavior outside of structured lessons, rather than any base-line attributes. For example, people who are willing to struggle tend to do better than people who want things to come easy. People who put in more time (within reason) do better than people who waste time.

Education is not about filling people's brains with facts. It's about success. Ideally long term success.

Often, setting learners up with the useful tools, mindsets and attitudes up front can pay massive dividends in their learning journeys and careers. And often, those tools, mindsets and attitudes can be promoted with really simple, cheap and scalable interventions. Sometimes it's just about getting the learners to look at themselves a little bit more closely.

Throwback

In an earlier article I spoke about how educators should focus on planting seeds. An educator should not set themselves up to be the point source of knowledge, it's important to set learners up so that they can grow and learn on their own.

There are a bunch of things that an educator can do during a lesson in order to get this right.

This article builds on that somewhat. The tools we talk about here can act to further amplify the positive effects of teaching.

If the educator's job is to plant seeds, this is a bit like setting up a self-watering system. Sortof.

Adapt to your context

Before getting into the specific interventions and techniques, it's worth noting that none of this is magic. There isn't really a one-size-fits-all silver bullet for how to teach well. Everything in this article is based on solid evidence, but different interventions will need to be adapted to different contexts.

Without further delay, let's get on with the interventions.

Values affirmation

Asking learners to think about their personal values can increase learner attendance by a significant amount, as much as 20% in some cases.

Of course, an increase in attendance doesn't directly translate into an increase in learner performance. Classes are actually kinda tricky to get right. But learners who are willing to show up tend to do better.

This tiny intervention has also been seen to reduce the racial achievement gap by nearly 30%.

In a study run by Stanford Professor Geoffrey Cohen, it's seen that the positive effects of this tiny intervention can effect learners for years.

How does it work?

There are a few theories the main one is that if you get a learner to think about themselves as a whole, rather than just in relation to the subject being studied, then they are less prone to suffering from "stereotype threat". Stereotype threat theory states that "minority students underperform because of pressures created by negative stereotypes" [ref].

In other words, stigmas surrounding a person's group memberships can harm a their performance. Just reminding a person that they don't belong by getting them to state their race, age, gender or socioeconomic standing can make them perform more poorly.

So if you get a person to see themselves as an individual with unique values, experiences and drives then that has the opposite effect of getting a person to see themselves as "one of those {insert stigmatized group here}".

All that said, values affirmation is not only useful for minority students.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how - Friedrich Nietzsche

Obviously if you are aware of your values, you will be more motivated to act in accordance with those values.

How to do it?

There are a number of different ways to pull this off. One is to simply ask learners to list out values. Another is to pick specific values and spend time writing about each one in depth.

It is also very useful to think about times when a value was especially relevant, eg how certain values came into play when making a specific life decision.

Encourage a sense of belonging

One of the reasons values affirmation seems to work is because it reduces a person's tendency to make attribution errors about their own abilities, that is, their tendency to incorrectly think they have negative traits based on some group they are a part of, or some negative experience that they've had.

There are a number of small, related interventions that can have an outbound effect:

• work to give learners a sense of belonging, and set them up with expectations about challenges that they will face when they are making transitions
• get learners to act as "experts" and share their expertise about how to interpret events and show up (the "expert" ends up learning a lot in the process)
• ask advancing learners to write about how their experiences in a way that would be useful to newer learners
• get learners to share their difficult experiences with each other so that they can see how many of their struggles are normal. Or find other ways to normalize different struggles

This last point is something I have used a lot. For example, as an educator I have met many people who struggle with procrastination. A useful intervention is to just gather a bunch of people together and say "Raise your hand if you struggle with procrastination". After the vast majority of people have raised their hands (including me), it's easier to remove the shame and replace it with some strategies.

Support network

The next trick is leveraging learner's existing relationships.

Research shows that an engaged support network—family members, friends, peers, or others—can lead to better student attendance, better test performance, and lower dropout and higher graduation rates. In this case, a study supporter was a friend or family member who received weekly text messages about the student’s course (about tests, or what the student was learning), designed to prompt discussions with the student - Lindsay Moore @ Behavioral Scientist

The results of this intervention were pretty big: Participating learners were 7% more likely to pass their courses. This is pretty straight-forward to get right.

It's also pretty straightforward to get wrong... I have personal experience in seeing the effects of sharing poorly chosen metrics with learners and accountability partners. If you set people up to optimize for a metric then they just might do that. So choose carefully! If you are sharing a result then always think about unhealthy ways a learner might optimize for that result.

In my case, I was working with a learning provider that was getting learners to optimize for the pace of moving through a course, but they did not expose or even check for real understand of the concepts. The metrics looked great, but when the learners where questioned about things they had covered, many an advanced learner didn't know their arse from their elbow. It might seem like a silly example, but the fact that it happened in a respected code school run by smart and well-meaning people shows that it is a pitfall worth explicitly mentioning.

As soon as people start to myopically optimize for a metric, the metric can become not only misleading, but genuinely damaging for the people it aims to serve.

That said, again, I don't think it's terribly hard to get this kind of thing right. You just need to think through how people are likely to behave based on what you show them. And make sure that educators, not just administrators, get a say in what is communicated.

Moar text messages

The power of little text messages extends further than what we have already spoken about.

encouraging text messages emphasizing belonging and planning could increase class attendance by nearly 21 percent over the full year; students who received the text messages were also 16 percent more likely to pass their exams (currently a working paper) - Lindsay Moore @ Behavioral Scientist

21% boost in class attendance is powerful! Of course, that doesn't directly translate into a 21% boost in learner performance. Classes are actually kinda tricky to get right. But learners who are willing to show up tend to do better.

Of course, there is nothing magical about text messages specifically. Any cheap way to get messages in front of the students will do. The messages just need to be written with a certain end in mind, and they need to be presented to the learners often enough to make a difference, but not often enough to feel spammy.

Be intentional

Again, it's important to know that different learners in different contexts with different backgrounds will respond best to different things. While these interventions and tools are all pretty small, they are very powerful when applied in an intentional way.

While running these types of interventions on students, it is very useful to think like a scientist, not just a teacher.

Dear learners

While this site is primarily for teachers, basically all of what I write can be directly useful for people who are learning. The science of learning, metacognition and motivation stays useful whether you are trying to teach or to learn.

Try to see how this stuff will be useful in your own life. Sit down and think about your values, your future, your community. Find an accountabilibuddy, learn about the science of learning.

This will be rocket fuel for you and your own growth. And maybe one day you can use these skills to help someone else.

In fact, if you learn the about how to level up your own learning with the explicit intention to help others do the same, then you'll benefit from a powerful thing called the The Protégé effect

Next up

There is a lot more to be said on this topic, see more in part 2!