Lesson 7, ‘Rewards and Mistakes’, examines two ideas. First, what are positive versus negative rewards? And then, what do you do when you make a mistake?
Atomic Habits Lesson 7 – Rewards and Mistakes
Most people fall out of good habits after a mistake because they don’t have a plan…
If ‘oops’, then what?
We are about to pass the half-way point of these 10 lessons. I hope that you are finding them useful.
Lesson 6 examines how identity habits are much easier than motivation. If I believe that I am someone who regularly or always does something, that’s a lot easier than motivating myself, and trying to convince myself, that I should do that same thing.
Atomic Habits Lesson 6 – Make it Rewarding
Lesson 5 is about reducing friction and habit stacking. How do you decrease or eliminate things that make your habits hard to get started, and how do you stack your habits so that they become an automatic process once you get started?
Atomic Habits Lesson 5 – Make Habits Automatic
This is the first ‘Storytime’ in the series, where I share a personal story. I share my fitness routine to exemplify how I use this lesson to my full advantage. My morning routine is automatic, and so I only have to initiate one habit and then the entire habit stack just gets done.
Lesson 4 looks at designing and priming the location where you do your habits, so that the environment works for you.
Atomic Habits Lesson 4 – Place Based Routines
Reduce friction and distractions, do your 2 minute planning, and then get to it!
Lesson 3 asks three questions:
Developing good habits starts with obvious intentions. This works well as part of the 2 Minute Planning suggested in Lesson 2.
Atomic Habits Lesson 3 – Make It Obvious
Lesson 4 will be shared on Monday, I’ll be taking the weekends off from these 10 lessons because they are being introduced to Inquiry Hub students on 10 consecutive school days.
Creating Lesson 1 was a comedy of errors.
Version 1: I have Descript which adds captions, but I didn’t use it for my upload, despite knowing that I have a hearing impaired student at my school. That wouldn’t do.
Version 2: I added the captions, re-uploaded to YouTube, and only then noticed that the captions spelled James Clear’s last name as Clare. That wouldn’t do.
Version 3: I uploaded the 3rd version and noticed my cover title said ‘Identity based Goals’. The whole video is about Habits, not Goals. That wouldn’t do.
Version 4: Is live and good enough!
I’m going to focus more on just getting these done now, rather than changing minor imperfections. That said, I’m open to feedback.
Atomic Habits Lesson 2 – The Two Minute Rule.
This goes more specifically into Two Minute Planning. I’m not sure if this follows the true intention of James Clear’s two minute rule, but I think it works well for students to ritualize a good habit.
I’ve had this ‘in the works‘ for a very long time. Here is lesson one of ten:
Lesson 1, ‘Identity Based Habits‘, is the first of 10 Lessons based on James Clear’s book ‘Atomic Habits’. It was created by Principal David Truss for Inquiry Hub Secondary Students.
I will share all 10 lessons here over the coming weeks. Atomic Habits is one of the best books I’ve ever read, and I wanted to share what I’ve learned with students at our school. These students get a lot more unstructured time than most high school students, and developing good habits about using that time well is something that can drastically improve a student’s effectiveness and output.
I hope to help guide our students to better productivity.
I love this statement by Dr. Alize Pressman,
“Competence builds confidence, not praise.”
So much pushback from kids comes from the frustration, or fear, of failure. Celebrate the path to little wins, focus on what they can do on their journey to doing more difficult things… and students start to shine.
Praise builds expectations of repeat performances. When students can’t hit those targets they lose confidence, or they stop trying… because it was so hard to get that praise and they aren’t convinced they can work that hard again. Or worse, they did work harder but didn’t hit the mark worthy of praise anyway. How disheartening is that? It’s definitely not a confidence builder.
“How did that make you feel?” is a question that fosters a student’s confidence. “That looks amazing, good job!” is a statement that puts pressure on repeated performance, and fosters performance anxiety.
“Competence builds confidence, not praise.”
I’ve had the privilege of watching a few final presentations for our IDS courses – Independent Directed Studies – at Inquiry Hub. Our students choose a topic and put 100-120 hours of work into research, design, and creation of their own courses. The topics vary considerably from making a movie to learning to suture stitches, to designing a facial recognition doorbell, to creating a tabletop role playing game based on the student’s heritage.
I love seeing the diversity of the presentations, and the passion and enthusiasm students have sharing their work. I’m so impressed by both their presentation skills and so their slides. These students could teach a thing or two about how to create a slideshow to many professional presenters I’ve seen.
That’s because they get a lot of practice designing presentations and presenting. They have to do so in groups and on their own many times a year… more than in any typical school. And they get feedback, lots and lots of feedback, from peers as well as teachers.
For these final presentations parents are also invited, and even if parents can’t make it, students still have an audience beyond just the teacher. Students can invite anyone they want to watch, and we’ve even had two of our secretaries invited because they have similar interests in the topics, one on hairdressing and another on embroidery. The community aspect of these with parents, mentors, and community members joining in is absolutely wonderful. Our assistant superintendent also joined for a couple presentations.
It’s pretty special watching these final presentations. I think that every student should get a chance to delve into an area of interest that they choose. Learning shouldn’t just be about transmitting knowledge but about knowledge construction, and what better way to do this than to have students design their own learning experience?
I’m writing this at the edge of Allouette lake in Golden Ears Provincial Park, 8:30 PM Tuesday. I’m here with three teachers and 18 students who will be spending the night in the campground nearby. It’s pouring rain. Actually right now it’s a little on the light side, but it has been continuous and at times quite heavy since we arrived, five hours ago.
It’s starting to get dark and we will be walking back in just a few minutes, but I’ve got a little window of time to dictate this while I stand near the steepest part of the path leading to the lake. Three students didn’t want to come down this section I didn’t want to leave them behind so I’m hovering back as the other students return this way from walking along the shore.
On a miserable day like this it would’ve been easy to cancel the camping trip. The rain has been relentless, but in all honesty it hasn’t dampened spirits. When we get back to the campsite we will roast some marshmallows either on the propane fire or on the open fire pit if we can get one started there.
The message is simple, too often we cancel things because conditions aren’t perfect. We look for excuses when in actual fact it’s just laziness or thinking that because conditions aren’t perfect, the trip might be ruined. In reality, we can make many more opportunities work than we actually take. It just takes a little effort and a small shift in attitude. There were a couple cancellations made by students and/or their parents over the last couple days, and the forecast might have been one of the reasons. Those are the students that lost out. Not a single student here is losing out.
We live on the edge of a rainforest. If we think that rain is a reason to cancel something then we are really missing out on a significant part of the year when we can find joy in the simplest of things.
Camping in the rain might not be as good as camping on a warm, beautiful day, but that doesn’t take away from the opportunity we have regardless of the weather.
Kids are heading back this way now, and so I think I’ll end this right here. I need to be present and enjoy their presence… no matter what the weather looks like.
