DEPUTY PRINCIPAL REPORT

Teaching, Learning and Innovation

Making it Routine

It was great to see so many prospective (and current) parents and students attend the College Open Night. So much was happening around the college, but in particular a great deal of modelling by our students of how we approach learning at The Riverina Anglican College. To all of those students and their teachers, bravo! It was also great to see so many Year 11 parents at the information evening on Tuesday. I am a big believer in the triumvirate of parent, student, teacher as a learning team, and this was a great way to kick off Stage 6 for our Year 11 students. A big thank you to Helen Foster and Patricia Humble for their presentations about the Higher School Certificate and International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme and our library staff who always provide a wonderful venue.

As I mentioned in last fortnight’s newsletter, a routine is a vital part of being able to operate at a premium learning level. Many argue it is the secret to operating at your best in life, so it is certainly achieving ‘bang for our buck’ if we look to apply routine to our early learning experiences; we will actually be establishing habits which will serve us well throughout our life. This week I will touch on the features of a habit, with my Week 8 newsletter focussing on how to apply what we know about routines to our lives and learning.

The big question is…how do I form new habits? What do I do when the New Year gloss wears off and Week 5 of Term 1 feels exactly like Week 5 of Term 4 last year?

There are in fact a range of frameworks that can aid this very process. There are four parts to the process:

Cue: what triggers our brain to initiate a behaviour. Primary rewards like food and water, but further rewards like fame and money, love or personal satisfaction can also drive your cues.

Craving: without a craving we have no desire to act. You do not have a desire to be on your phone-you have a craving to be connected or entertained. Every craving is linked to a desire to change and this is different for everyone. A gambler hearing a horse race call is stimulated in an entirely different way to someone for whom this is just background noise. 

Response: this is the actual habit you form, being a thought or an action. Two barriers to your response can be if there is too much effort required vs the reward gained.

Reward: The response delivers the reward and it satisfies the craving. They satisfy us and/or teach us what is worth remembering in the future.

Together, these four steps form a neurological feedback loop—cue, craving, response, reward; cue, craving, response, reward—that ultimately allows you to create automatic habits.

The four steps can be broken into two phases, the first two being the problem phase and the second two the solution phase.

click on image to enlarge

Result-buying the chicken becomes associated with watching television. The entire process is completed in a split second, and we make it subconsciously. So much so that as we become adolescents we may well have been developing our bad habits without even knowing our motivations. And as adults, the process becomes even more hard-wired.

In the next newsletter,  I will outline precisely what this means for adolescent (and adult) learning and how we can create those good learning habits and break the old bad habits.

Anthony Heffer | Deputy Principal - Teaching, Learning and Innovation