In September, my Year 12 class had an avoidant attitude to independent study.

It was a problem: as students work towards their final exams, independent study - particularly revision - matters more than ever. I knew I needed to do something different and it was when I was reading James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits, that inspiration struck.

Increasingly, we know that most of our daily actions are driven by habits, and, as a teaching community, we are recognising that students’ habits - what they actually do with their time and how they do it - are perhaps the biggest driver behind success.

I set about embedding four of Clear’s techniques to support my class in building positive study habits. The real impact will be clear on results day, but I can already see a change in attitude.

Embedding the habit

Clear lays out the importance of building habits in small, manageable chunks. After a full day of school, extracurriculars and other obligations, expecting students to complete hours of unstructured homework can lead to overworked students with negative associations of self-study. The key here is little, often and focused.

To get my students in the habit of spending a small amount of time reviewing the content in a focused and productive way, I set a ten-minute online review quiz using Google Forms for homework after each lesson, with a deadline of the next week.

If a student looks through the materials of the lesson, they can achieve full marks. Using Google Forms, I provide immediate, automated feedback, which gives the students a feeling of accomplishment and highlights any misunderstandings. This feedback loop also creates the opportunity for students to follow up on the specific gaps in knowledge identified. 

The short duration of the task makes it more manageable for students - and more manageable for my own workload, too. The consistent structure and duration of the task ensures clarity of expectations, and always having a consistent deadline supports students to build the tasks into their pre-existing routines.

In each subsequent lesson, I review the common misconceptions revealed by the quiz and focus on fine-tuning my students’ knowledge.

Model how to learn 

Students frequently tell me that they don’t know how to revise effectively. This often manifests in poor results, which, in turn, leads to lower engagement with revision.

I now factor in an entire lesson for study skills at the end of every unit - about every 10 to 16 lessons - which involves revising the content from that unit while exposing students to a range of different study techniques.

Every review lesson introduces different techniques.

One lesson gives students the opportunity to engage with different summary frameworks, and I lay out different summary templates: a classic mind-map, a grid, a diagram and a blank sheet of paper.

Students start working in small groups on one template, and I rotate students every eight minutes but split up the groups as I do so: for example, if there are three students in a group, only one moves.

It’s really important to expose students to the learning processes of others, not just the two they started in the same group as. This rotation also helps to keep it dynamic and interesting, more so than if I were just moving the paper and keeping the groups the same.

Learning identity

At the end of each review lesson, I set five minutes aside for students to discuss what they found useful and what techniques they might take from the session into their independent study.

• GCSEs: What research tells us about revision technique
• Why I ditched group revision sessions
• Revision: Why relationships matter for motivation

Clear says that in order to properly embed habits, the behaviour an individual exhibits needs to be associated with a particular identity: this is why the student that identifies with being the class clown will constantly misbehave, and the student that identifies with being curious and creative will ask more questions and take more risks with their learning.

By encouraging students to consider how successful learners approach learning, and highlighting positive behaviours, it provides them with an awareness of certain traits that they can embed into their own decision making and habits.

The qualities of a successful person

In his book, Clear also talks about taking the time to consider the qualities a “successful” person would have, and how to emulate them. At the start of the year, I spent some time getting students to brainstorm the qualities and attributes of a successful learner and asked them to think about a learning role model, using examples of students in the year above.

Whenever students are feeling overwhelmed, or are tackling a challenging task, I refer back to these attributes and encourage them to think about what a successful learner is or what their role model would do in that situation.

Hannah Bradley is a science teacher at an international school in Portugal. She tweets @HannahBradley_9