Learning as the process of making a new habit

As teachers of adults we are in the business of encouraging students to make new habits and routines, whether it's reading a book differently, using a new set of steps to write, or managing time.

The difficulty of learning something new, for an adult, is that it often requires unlearning something we are holding on to as the truth. This is the process of change.

My goal (stolen from Ken Bain) is to change the way my students "think, act and feel." It's frustrating to find that a student mimicked new ways of thinking and acting during the term, but went back to old ways as soon as the ink was dry on the final.  I want my students to "change for good."

One way to help students change, whether it's physical habits or habits of mind, is to help them activate their background knowledge and become conscious of the process of change. We can ask them to briefly think/discuss with a pair/share with the class the process they have been through in order to successfully make a change.

Whether it's weight loss, smoking or learning how to draw, the process for establishing a new habit or routine has familiar stages, including:

• becoming dissatisfied with the existing way of doing or thinking about things
• facing up to the benefits of the existing habit 
• deciding to change the habit 
• getting ready/making plans to change
• starting to make the change 
• facing setbacks - continuing the new habit after returning to the old one and having to restart 

For example, if the learning objective is for students to use a time management tool, like a planner, the stages might look like this:

• I see the downside of trying to keep all deadlines in my head
• I realize there was an upside, though, because if I don't write anything down, I don't have to think about deadlines until they're a problem
• I decide I need to manage my time differently in college because it's important to my success
• I checked out various tools and I got a planner for Fall term
• At the first class I put deadlines in the planner
• In Week 2 I left the planner at home and didn't enter any deadlines
• In Week 5 I got a progress report that showed I had failed to hand in several assignments, so I pulled out the planner and tried again...

Changing for Good, by James Prochaska, John Norcross and Carlo DiClemente is an excellent resource for supporting the process of change. The authors describe the stages of change along with detailed suggestions about how to support change at each stage.
The more we, as teachers, understand about this process, the better we can support students going through it.