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Education, especially formalized education in schools, has long held that in order for students to learn effectively, they must have solid study routines, consistent teachers, and unified textbooks. Clearly, with almost all educational institutions supporting the idea of consistency, there must be myriad benefits to focusing on routine, habit, and consistency when studying.
However, recent neuroscience research is suggesting that this approach, while it may have its benefits for creating a consistent education system for a country, may also limit students and cause them to be less adaptable in the future. This new research shows that while consistent education may be effective for a consistent world, learning in a static environment may not fully prepare students for an ever-more-quickly changing world.
This article will discuss the benefits of both extremes and suggest how teachers can utilize both approaches to give their students consistently good teaching but also prepare them to adapt that knowledge to a wider array of contexts.
Benefits of Routines
Routines are Comfortable
One of the main benefits of routines is that they provide a sense of safety and consistency. Humans like to know what to expect. This is why the first day of a new school year can be a bit nerve wracking.
A classroom without any routines would be chaotic, stressful and inconsistent across time and between teachers and schools. Routines help teachers by making lesson planning easier by having the same types of activities regularly, and help students by allowing them to focus on the content rather than the new situation they’re learning in.
If every day in the classroom were new, students would be uncomfortable, the teacher would be overwhelmed trying to make each day unique and special, and while perhaps schools would occasionally turn out successes, they would have inconsistent results that are hard to improve as there is no consistent data to look at how approaches to learning could be improved.
Routines Develop Good Habits
Routines are also good for developing good habits. Education experts have long known that routines in the classroom translate clearly to students having better routines and habits as adults. The routine of school prepares students for the routines of a typical working day.
A consistent approach to learning can also help students better see the system behind learning and how they can implement this same system of study, review, and practice for other skills later in life if they want to learn something new as adults. Consistency in efforts is a key skill for most jobs, a healthy mind and body, and even when communicating in a personal relationship.
Routines Free Up the Teacher
Another more practical benefit of routines is that they free up class time for the teacher to be able to do more targeted work. This can lead to students who are struggling falling further and further behind with the teacher not being able to spend any time helping them to catch up with the group.
If the teacher is always doing completely new material, students will need a lot of whole class guidance to be able to do activities and it will take a lot of time to begin each new activity. Routines in types of activities will allow most students to get straight to work without much teacher time and that will allow the teacher to use their time to help struggling students, challenge fast learners with extra work, or collect data on the students to improve future lessons.
Benefits of Variety
Variety Teaches Adaptability
One of the main benefits of variety in classroom activities and materials is that if students only work with learned topics in one way and in one context, they will only be able to use it in that exact same context. While this is useful for very specific or important routines that do not change, most of the time this greatly limits students’ ability to utilize information they have learned in the classroom in their lives and future work.
Every teacher has experienced the frustration of teaching students a concept very clearly, then giving a test and having students completely flop the quiz or exam. This should be a sign for every teacher that they need to add more variety of practice into their lesson.
No matter how clear the teacher’s explanation, simply hearing about a topic does not prepare a student to be able to use that information or even understand it in a written form. Imagine a student doctor who listens to a lecture on a new form of surgery. After the lecture, are they now ready to perform the operation on a person? Absolutely not.
Medical students not only attend lectures but also are taught through looking at pictures, doing simulations, practicing on dummies, being quizzed through differential diagnoses and other ways to ensure they understand conditions in a variety of contexts, whether hearing the symptoms described, seeing them visually, or recognizing them as an inconsistency in a process or procedure.
This isn’t just true for the medical field either. No matter the field, if a person imagines someone reading or even fully memorizing a book about their job, they would not feel that person is now prepared to take over their work, just because they’ve read a book on how to do it.
Similarly, teachers need to ensure they not only teach information and drill it, but also ensure students understand the content they are learning and how it looks, sounds, and works in practice. This will make it much more likely for students to recognize and be able to utilize what they have learned when they encounter the appropriate situation in their futures.
Variety Creates Critical Open Minds
Another benefit of variety is that it ensures that students don’t only learn to accept the first source they encounter but instead to look at a variety of sources to learn about a new topic. If people accept whatever source they are presented with as “the authority” on a topic, this will create people without critical thinking skills that simply believe and reshare whatever they come across in their futures.
Instead, teachers should ensure students learn from a variety of learning materials rather than a singular textbook and hear from many experts online rather than just listening to one teacher all day every day. This will get students into the habit of consistently looking for any new information from a variety of sources and model for them how to do that safely and effectively.
This is also a chance for teachers to include materials that disagree with one another and create safe spaces for dialogue on difficult and emotional issues. If students only learn one thing in one way from one voice, they will be unprepared to deal with dissent in their future lives and may respond with dismissiveness, close mindedness, and or even discrimination.
Variety is More Fun!
Variety is also just more fun! If class is simply the exact same boring routine day in day out students will quickly grow bored and feel that class is a prison rather than an exciting learning environment. While many teachers feel that it is their job to “teach, not to entertain them” this approach ignores basic human psychology.
A similar analogy could be to say that a business’s only duty is to make a profit. While profit may be the goal, this ignores the purpose of the business which is to create value and improve human life. If the employees at this job are suffering and miserable, even if it makes a profit, should the business really be called a success?
Teachers are not clowns to entertain their students any more than employers are there to entertain and ensure their employees are having fun at work, but both have a duty to create a healthy environment that people enjoy coming to, that gives meaning to everyone’s life, and makes the world a better place for as many as possible.
How to Have Both Routines and Variety in Class
So now, knowing all the benefits and drawbacks of each approach, are you ready to use it? Not at all! This section will begin to detail ways you can begin to incorporate these ideals into your practice to truly learn how they work in your classroom context.
Have A Consistent Study Schedule
One of the most important parts of routine for the brain is repeated practice. If the brain experiences a stimulus once, it does not really respond very strongly or keep that memory for a long time in most cases. One of the ways you can tell the brain that something is important is by repeating it.
So to help students remember something, should teachers simply repeat important concepts 500-1000 times? Absolutely not! This is neither efficient or putting it into any practical context, another key aspect to never forget.
Repeating something 20 times in 20 seconds will create a much weaker memory in the mind than repeating something twice daily for 10 days. The brain takes in information much better when it has time to process important information before being asked to recall and strengthen the memory again.
One way to think about it is like how a muscle grows. If someone goes to the gym for 24 hours one day, they will make much less progress than someone who goes to the gym once every day for 24 days. The body needs time to process and begin adapting to new stimuli before it is ready to strengthen further.
This is not a new concept in education either. Spaced repetition was discussed in this 1965 scientific study on the topic, but even then teachers have always known they need to review things after a bit of time to ensure students actually retain what they are taught.
Spacing out topics, vocabulary, and types of activities is a lot to keep in mind though, and so this is where a consistent system can be very helpful. When lesson planning, it is good to put ideas, vocabulary and other exercises in not just one lesson plan, but in future lesson plans at the same time.
For example, a science teacher who plans a lesson on plant cell biology should put the activities in that day’s lesson and also write “Review Plant Biology” a few days later and perhaps even a third or fourth time one month and three months later.
While these time periods do not have to be exactly the same, the aspect of consistency that is important here is that you do consistently come back to everything you teach at least 3 to 4 times. If it is worth learning once, it is worth learning properly. No one learns anything properly the first time they cover it.
It can be tempting to follow strict “unit plans” where content is neatly packaged into information chunks, but this can often be too strictly divided to where things you learn about unit 1 or two will not show up again almost at all in other units. While a logical syllabus is important, it should not be so rigid that it prevents reviewing old topics simply because they don’t connect with the current topic directly.
Some teachers may be thinking that this is something they already do and that’s great! This is just one of the aspects of consistency and traditional teaching that teachers should not forget as they make other transitions that may be a little less traditional such as the next tip.
Have a Variety of Voices and Perspectives
Where variety often lacks the most is in who is speaking in a classroom. Walk into the majority of classrooms in the world and there is a very high chance that the person speaking is going to be a main teacher figure.
There are several ways to increase the variety of voices and perspectives in the classroom. The first is more obvious and the second is tragically underutilized due to its bad reputation.
The first and more obvious way to increase the variety of voices in the classroom is to have more student-led activities, discussions, projects, etc. This will keep things feeling more lively, fun, and bring a sense of wonder for the question “what are we going to do next” to the class.
Sitting and listening to one person talk for an hour or more is exhausting, as anyone who has had to sit through a long presentation at a meeting can attest. This is made all the more difficult when the topic being learned isn’t easy. Going full steam for an hour on a difficult topic is simply too much, especially when they have to do the same thing all morning and afternoon and then every day until they’re 18 or even older.
Having shorter lectures with little activities not only gives their brains a break from careful listening, but also allows them to practice what they’ve heard in a variety of interesting and fun contexts. This is where teacher creativity and personality can best be utilized ensuring that lectures stay short and that students get a variety of different activities and projects to work on in between to practice.
While many teachers now have quite active student centered classrooms, many of these still don’t utilize the second approach to increasing the variety of voices in a classroom: Videos.
When teachers think of videos in the classroom, they generally think of the hour long videos given to substitute teachers to play when the teacher didn’t leave a real sub plan. However, this is a long outdated view that needs to change.
In the past, students really only had access to one teacher to learn from. Perhaps, if students were very lucky, a visiting teacher might give a guest lecture, but otherwise, students could only learn from one teacher all year long.
Videos changed that. While originally only long form documentaries or movies were really available to teachers, but now there are thousands and thousands of video resources on almost any imaginable topic.
Think of a high level difficult topic you teach in your class. It is guaranteed that if you search for that on YouTube, there are going to be several fascinating videos on the topic carefully crafted by other experts and learners around the world.
The types of videos that teachers should use in their classes are from other teachers, not entertainers. The videos that are most efficient and effective for class time are between 5-20 minutes maximum.
There are many entire YouTube channels and playlists covering almost every imaginable academic topic. Teachers can give a lecture, get students discussing and thinking, and then play a video that deepens their understanding of a topic. A great example of this are the hundreds of TED talks given by experts in their fields who give thought provoking talks perfect for sparking long class discussions or debates.
Whether it be by adding more student discussion time or by bringing in more short video lectures, teachers should try to speak less in their classrooms. While this may feel a bit uncomfortable or like you are being lazy, your voice is not the value you bring to your students. It is your expertise in education, lesson planning, and helping them learn that defines a teacher’s ability.
Keep Consistent Rules
Another area that teachers should keep more consistent is their rules. While it may seem kind to give students lots of extra chances and avoid punishing them, this inconsistency is going to create unfairness and can even be harmful for the child’s future.
Rules need to be explicitly stated at the beginning of a class, agreed upon, and held firm throughout the school year. This should not simply be the teacher telling the students what to do, but should also include a time for the teacher to ask the students about any rules they would like to put in place.
If everyone can agree, then all rules should be considered equally important. This gives a lot more ownership and buy-in for the rules rather than simply making them only go one way.
The hard part is the enforcement. While it may be tempting to give students extra chances and try to avoid punishing students, this is a very dangerous approach.
Teachers who enforce rules sporadically will fall prey to their own natural subconscious biases which will lead to unfair treatment of students in the classroom. All students deserve to be treated equally and the only way to do this is to make rules with reasonable punishments that students agree to that are consistently enforced.
Not only can it create an imbalance in how students are treated, it can also teach students that they can talk their way out of trouble or that rules are not really something that bad to break. This can lead to very serious problems later on in life with the police who are not going to think twice about enforcing the law exactly as written.
Activate a Variety of Sensory Systems
Another area where variety should be the focus is in the number of sensory systems that are activated in a lesson. All too often, students only read about or listen to topics. It is very important to bring in lots of video content as well as getting students to physically perform activities wherever practical.
This focus on activating multiple sensory systems goes perfectly hand in hand with the previous advice to have lots of different types of activities and videos, so this tip is simply an addition to the first.
Videos not only work by bringing in another teacher into the classroom so that students get a variety of expert voices, but they also tend to include lots of interesting visual information that can help students get a much better idea of what they are learning than just from a static book.
Think about how much easier it is to learn a recipe by watching a cooking video tutorial than it is from just a cookbook! This is the mindset that should be applied when choosing video content to bring into class.
Not only should teachers use videos, activities, and projects as different categories of class activities, but another layer of variety is that each of those categories should be subdivided and a variety of different videos, activities, and projects that activate different sensory systems should be chosen. This will ensure class show information in a variety of contexts, every type of learner is served, and class is simply fun and different every day
Conclusion
In conclusion, both consistency and variety have their place in a classroom. Consistency brings benefits when planning study schedules, as it is important to regularly return to old topics and not get lost in trying to make everything new. It also is beneficial for creating fairness and equality in the classroom.
Variety is also extremely valuable though as it helps the brain learn more in the way it has been designed to learn by activating multiple sensory systems and showing information in context. On top of that, it is simply more fun and exciting to have different new and fun things to talk about and do during class.
Lastly, videos need their classroom reputation fixed. While they certainly can be used as a lazy activity if they are an hour long, 5-20 minute videos are a far better choice as they not only spice things up, but also bring in experts from around the world to your classroom, something students of the past could only get on special occasions.
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