The image of the Valley of Latent Potential is here.
More tips from Craig Barton
Video transcript
hello i’m craig barton and welcome to this tips for teachers video now i’ve spoken in previous videos about how i’m a little bit obsessed with routines in the classroom here’s a selection of routines here now once these routines are established it’s brilliant because students can forget thinking about the routines and just crack straight on with thinking about the content of the lesson that’s going to lead to greater learning and understanding but there’s a massive problem with routines and that is they take flipping ages to establish you’ve got to introduce the routine justify the routine practice the routine refine the routine and whilst all this is happening students attention is actually really focused on the routine itself and not on the learning now i actually read about this in a book that’s not directly related to education itself and that’s the new york times best-selling atomic habits by james clear a really really wonderful book and in it james talks about the phenomenon of the valley of latent potential now i’ve taken this image from pepsi mccrae who kindly shared it on twitter and i think this is such an important thing for teachers to be aware of when it comes to establishing routines but also students as well so what the value of latent potential is all about is that whenever we think about establishing a routine in our classroom we hope that it’s going to lead to an improvement in students learning and understanding or at least an increase in the proportion of time within the lesson that we can spend on improving and learning and understanding so we expect that things are going to travel in this lovely linear path but what actually happens in the early days of establishing the routine is we may actually get a short-term dip in performance why well because all our time is spent introducing justifying practicing and refining the routine and that can feel really really frustrating frustrating for teachers and frustrating for students the way i like to think about this is to imagine two different teachers one teacher he or she decides that she’s going to introduce these routines and spend time on the justification the practice and so on this guy here nah forget that let’s just crack on with the learning and try and make it up as we go along now what’s going to happen in the short term is the students in this guy’s class are probably going to do better they’re going to be spending more time actually thinking about in my case mathematics or english or history or whatever it may be in the short term in this class a lot of time is going to be spent establishing those routines and justifying them and so on but then what happens well once those routines are automated then the students in this class they are going to be flying because the teacher only needs to say the word and the student it triggers whatever that routine may be and they can just crack straight on with the learning so being aware of the value of latent potential and sharing it with students particularly in those early days of establishing a routine i think is a potentially important thing to do james clear has some final advice on this to achieve the end goal we need to optimize for the start put everything into perfecting the seemingly small stuff in the beginning it might be frustrating but we’re going to reap the benefits pretty soon so how might you use that tip is that something you’d share with other colleagues just with yourself with your students let me know also if you could like the video and subscribe to the tips for teachers youtube channel i’d be eternally grateful uh if you want to get hold of that diagram visit tipsforteachers.com uk below the video page you’ll be able to download that thanks so much for watching