RICHer Habits

As I was wrapping up the 2023 calendar year, a book captured my attention called Rich Habits by Thomas Corley. At first I dismissed the book since the title sounded trite and my initial scan of the book seemed oriented around something like a get-rich-quick framework. However, I gave it time to develop and was surprised to find that the main point of the book had less to do with wealth creation than I had at first expected. Instead, the kinds of habits that were delineated had more to do with good living. My initial misgivings gave way to a new appreciation for what Corley was on about. Quite a few of his habits aligned well with my own moral outlook.

While some of the advice in Rich Habits is squarely in the domain of financial advice (such as “save 20 percent of your net income”), many of the habits explored by Corley seem almost unrelated to wealth and finances. For instance, he notes that over 80 percent of wealthy people read at least 30 minutes daily. Corley writes about habits such as emotional control, listening more than you talk, avoiding toxic relationships and seeking a mentor. As a classical educator, I found that many of Corley’s habits align well with the kinds of insights one gains from the rich intellectual and religious traditions delineated in the great books. I expected to find trite and trivial material, but instead found wisdom.

What Corley really gets right is the inspiring idea that must be present to generate the effort that goes into forming a new habit. My initial read was that whatever Corley was on about, it would not truly inspire me to form new habits. It is not as though riches hold no attraction for me. It’s just that I have an aversion to money making for its own sake. Perhaps I have taken too close attention to the verse “For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” (1 Tim. 6:10). I am not saying that it is evil to earn money, nor is it evil when one has the opportunities of utilizing the wealth-making tools available to us today. But for me I have often not been motivated by money and instead desire some higher cause. This is where philosophy and theology have gotten me: the higher calling. Thus, in discovering the extent to which the Rich Habits aim towards higher ideals, I really started formulating some thoughts on habits I could go after in this next calendar year.

Reviewing Habit Formation by Charlotte Mason

Let’s take a moment to consider once again how one forms habits. Mason writes, “In all matters of physical exercise it is obvious to us that–do a thing a hundred times and it becomes easy, do a thing a thousand times and it becomes mechanical, as easy to do as not.” (School Education 105). This principle of repeatability is core to habit formation. Having begun with an inspiring idea such as living a fuller, richer life, we need to detail specifically what the habit is. Take for instance, the desire to read more. We sense that reading more will make us wiser and more knowledgeable. But simply telling ourselves to read more won’t get us there. Instead, we need to spell out the details. When, where, what and how are essential here. A more detailed habit will be articulated as “I will read for at least thirty minutes daily by placing a book next to my favorite chair and setting a reminder when I get home from work.” Notice how specific such a program is. It implies that the necessary materials are set out. A time and location are set, and a numerical measure is established to know when the habit is performed each day. Being specific like this helps us track when we have accomplished one of the many times we need to practice the habit for it to be fully formed.

We must be diligent and vigilant with ourselves. When training a child, we are the grown up that can assist them with reminders and accountability. But if we are on our own, we may need to recruit the support of others. Telling a spouse or a friend of the habit is really effective to support this new area of growth. Set some check in times to report on how things are going. Or find someone who wants to develop the same habit as you. Getting the details right can be helpful here. You don’t need to overdo it on what your daily routine will be. Set reasonable standards. Make it easy to comply. If you get started into your habit routine and discover it is a little overbearing, tinker with it a bit. With the reading example, it may be that 15 minutes is the right dosage. If you’ve only been reading zero minutes a day, even five minutes a day is a massive improvement and puts a peg down on the daily habit of reading.

Aim for full compliance, or at least be honest with your progress. It is worth having some sort of tracking device (a simple notebook would suffice, but there are also apps for this). If you aimed for 30 minutes, but your time got interrupted, no worries. Simply mark the 23 minutes spent that day. Accept it for what it is and aim all the more to fulfill your goal the next day. One piece of advice I’ve heard from numerous sources is to never let a habit lapse for two days in a row. Life throws us curve balls, so we can allow for a one-day lapse. But it is then up to us to regroup and recommit to never let two blanks to occur.

Finally, consider the reward of your habit. I think the truest reward is the acquisition of the habit itself. With our example of reading daily, the true reward is a growing list of books read. It is becoming the kind of person who reads daily. Now, it can be helpful to have little rewards along the way. But be careful not to become behaviorist about your habits. You are not trying to become your own trained monkey after all. What I try to do is picture pleasant things that would induce me to continue my habit training regimen. For instance, would a nice cup of tea, sipped slowly during my reading episode better incline me towards maintaining a daily reading ritual? Most certainly! For others it might be a chat in the kitchen with a spouse who have mutually agreed to a reading routine and delightfully share what they’ve read. There are all kinds of little rewards that fit well the overarching goal of living a life that is fuller and richer.

My 2024 Habits

So what is my list of habits for this next year? Here are three of my most important habits along with a brief description of each.

1. Begin each day with morning prayer. As an Anglican, we have a rich tradition of the Book of Common Prayer. It really only takes about 20 minutes to read the morning prayer, which incorporates confession, adoration, intercession and Bible reading. I have an app on my phone that makes it super easy to do the readings as well. Deepening my relationship with God is very important to me, so this is one way to habitualize a standard process that will daily work toward this goal.
2. Read for a minimum of 30 minutes daily. I already read a lot and have opportunities to access great books as well as professional journals. However, my reading habit occurs in fits and starts. I tend to go days and even weeks without reading and then go on a reading binge. So this habit is more about making reading a regular part of each day. I am still likely to binge read when approaching a deadline, but I think I can curtail the drastic on and off again nature of my reading. I have accumulated a number of books that I am very interested in reading, and now this habit will see me systematically make my way through them.
3. Write a minimum of 500 words daily. This is actually transforming an old habit into a new format. Previously I cultivated a habit of writing a minimum of 20 minutes a day. This fit nicely into my morning routine and gave me a sense of accomplishment before I even started working. Now I have some new goals on the horizon to develop at least one of the book ideas which will require a more consistent output. So I shifted from a time-based approach to a word-count approach. I am aiming to send one book proposal by March 31^st.

SMARTer Habits

Breaking down these habits, they have several things in common. First, there is an embedded inspiring goal, such as a deep relationship with God or a book proposal. Many New Year’s resolutions are inspiring goals, but they often lack specific routines that leverage daily effort to accomplish those goals. This leads to the second things these habits have in common which is a specific daily action. Here I draw from the SMART goals framework to spell out habits that are Specific, Measurable, Ambitious, Realistic and Time-related. Now, there are some different ways the acronym SMART has been constructed, but I find this one the most helpful for me. Let’s break this down a little bit more. By specific, we mean that details get spelled out. I add in another “S” by keeping the details simple as well. I should be able to recall in a few short phrases what the plan is. By measurable, we mean that it should have some form of numerical measurement that demonstrates that you have actually done or not done something.

By ambitious, we mean that the goal ought to be a bit challenging and aim at something that you feel is important to you. This draws upon what we learn from the Zone of Proximal Development. We grow when we challenge ourselves a little bit. If our goal is too easy, we become bored with it and hinder our own growth. By realistic we mean that the goal can actually be achieved. A goal that is too challenging, in other words, also hinders growth. If we’ve set ourselves an impossible task, then we shut down any hope of accomplishing it.

Finally, by time-related, we can mean an amount of time is allocated each day or we set some sort of deadline by which the goal is accomplished. For two of my habits, I have set a daily amount of time devoted to the habit. For the last one, I have set a deadline for shipping a book proposal. Using the SMART framework can help quickly map out a habit that actually works for you.

In my previous work on habits, I spelled out ways we can incorporate Charlotte Mason’s method of habit training for the children we are working with. I think if we are taking habit training seriously as a tool to enable our students to enjoy freedom and masterful living, it behooves us to likewise habit train ourselves. Taking inspiration from our educational values, we can imagine ourselves as carrying out our calling, appropriately handling stress, taking care of ourselves in healthy ways, and being well connected with God and our family and friends. So as you go into this next year, consider how you can aim at your highest values and then develop habits that will give you the best opportunity of achieving that inspiring vision.

Take a deeper dive into Charlotte Mason’s practice of Habit Training with our on-demand webinar. Learn practical tips to guide students towards their best, most mature selves with this training video.

The post Goal Setting and Habits: Starting the New Year SMARTer appeared first on .

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

The case of Alice may be considered a good cipher for that of many modern educators. We have a vague awareness in all our modern ‘subjects’ and ‘classes’ that our students are supposed to be getting somewhere. But we are not always sure of where. At the end of the day, many teachers rejoice in success if they have simply made ‘progress’ in any particular direction. Work has been done, material has been covered, grades have been entered, and not too many disciplinary situations had to be resolved. 

In such an experience of teaching, Bloom’s taxonomy can act as a real savior, delivering the average teacher from the listless state of meandering about the work of school. The definite aims of the cognitive domain in all the precision of their taxonomy have the power to cut through the ambiguity and aimlessness of much modern teaching. 

In this article we build on our proposal to replace Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives with Aristotle’s Five Intellectual Virtues by starting with an analysis of the positive of Bloom’s. In proposing a taxonomy of educational objectives, Bloom and his fellow university examiners made a real advance for modern education, even if they participated in the modern era’s reductionistic philosophy. In the midst of an educational climate that now hosts an active postmodern retreat from overarching values and metanarratives, the clarity of Bloom’s taxonomy of learning goals is like a breath of fresh air to many educators. Instead of wandering aimlessly like Alice in Wonderland, here at last is a clear and precise path forward. 

As I mentioned in the first article in this series, it is important to recognize the positive in Bloom’s taxonomy, even if we are ultimately going to propose a revision of it, because we are most likely to get back on track if we understand clearly where we went wrong. Wisdom involves sifting the value of another’s viewpoint and integrating its virtues into a broader theory. If we simply dismissed Bloom’s taxonomy as mere modernism, we would be acting only as reactionaries, like a pendulum swinging from one extreme to another. Instead we must take what is best from it and integrate it fully with the ancient and classical insights it neglected.

With that goal in mind, let’s now discuss three blessings of Bloom’s. 

1. Objectives Avoid Subjective and Ideological “Learning” Activities
2. Objectives Drive Observable Growth
3. Objectives Foster Flow

The Blessings of Bloom’s 1: Objectives Avoid Subjective and Ideological “Learning” Activities

The value of educational objectives is well-illustrated by the anecdote of Doug Lemov, a trainer at Uncommon Schools and author of Teach Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College. In describing a teaching technique he calls “Begin with the End,” he explains his process of lesson planning as a novice teacher:

When I started teaching, I would ask myself while I planned, ‘What am I going to do tomorrow?” The question itself revealed the flaws in my planning method in at least two critical ways—even without accounting for my sometimes dubious answers.

The first flaw was that I was thinking about an activity for my classes on the following day, not an objective—what I wanted my students to know or be able to do by the end of the lesson. It’s far better to start the other way around and Begin with the End—the objective. By framing an objective first, you substitute “What will my students be able to do by the end of my lesson?” for “In which activities will my students participate today?” The first of these questions is measurable in a meaningful way. The second is not. The success of an activity is not determined by whether or not you do it and students seem to want to do it, but by whether you achieved an objective that can be assessed.

Doug Lemov, Teach Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College (Jossey-Bass, 2015), 132-133

Lemov’s original experience is reminiscent of Alice’s listless meandering and is a cogent critique of many teachers today. It is still common for some teachers to plan activities with no awareness of their purpose other than to fill up the time that students are there. Or worse is when teachers plan activities, like watching a part of a movie or a YouTube video, simply to check the box of incorporating technology into the classroom or some other ideological agenda. 

This sort of error is the result of what Lemov had earlier called ideologically driven guidance, where teachers are judged as effective based on whether they have checked off

a growing list of ‘musts’: teachers must teach English, math, science, history, the arts, banking and financial literacy, environmental stewardship, entrepreneurship, and personal hygiene, in a technology-rich environment that builds self-esteem, seats students in pods, provides multiple solutions to every problem, avoids ‘teacher talk,’ and never exposes a student to a page of text that has more than five vocabulary words he or she doesn’t know. Please don’t forget the anti-drug unit. 

Teach Like a Champion 2.0, 6-7

Kolby has written about this problem of ideologically driven guidance in a series on how to synthesize Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion 2.0 with the classical tradition. The solution to this plethora of bureaucratic hoops is to empower teachers as field experts and master craftsmen, who hold themselves accountable to what works in meeting real objectives for student learning.

In The Problem of Technicism in Conventional Education, I revealed the flaws in the modern focus solely on technique, to the detriment of more holistic goals, like wisdom and virtue, but it’s worth noting that the laundry list of postmodern ideological goals can leave the average teacher afloat on a sea of subjective preferences. Jumping through all the hoops makes each teaching moment as arbitrary as the last. 

By comparison with this, Bloom’s modernist focus on objectives for student growth has a healthy realism and objectivity to it. At the end of your course, unit or lesson, the student should be objectively developed in some way. They should know something real and measurable, and not just had a fluffy experience of some kind. And if some definite knowledge is to be transferred, then the teacher must know what that is. As John Milton Gregory, an earlier modernist-classical thinker, stated memorably,

“What a man does not know he cannot teach, or, if he teaches, cannot know that he teaches.”

John Milton Gregory, The Seven Laws of Teaching (Canon Press, 2014), 27

If the teacher begins with a definite goal in mind, then at least she can know whether or not she reached it and adjust accordingly. 

Which brings us to our second blessing of Bloom’s…

The Blessings of Bloom’s 2: Objectives Drive Observable Growth

We have all likely heard of the acronym SMART goals, but we may not know the story of their development. In his book Smarter Faster Better Charles Duhigg describes how Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, two university psychologists, researched the most effective way to set goals. One of their experiments involved coaching typists at a large corporation who were already the fastest at their company. Locke and Latham provided them with a system for measuring how quickly they typed — at the beginning of the study, they averaged 95 lines per hour — then they helped them set a specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound goal (SMART), like averaging 98 lines per hour over the next week:

The conversation didn’t take long—say fifteen minutes per person—but afterward each typist knew exactly what to do and how to measure success. Each of them, put differently, had a SMART goal….

But one week later, when the researchers measured typing speeds again, they found that the workers, on average, were completing 103 lines per hour. Another week later: 112 lines. Most of the typists had blown past the goals they had set. The researchers worried the workers were just trying to impress them, so they came back again, three months later, and quietly measured everyone’s performance once more. They were typing just as fast, and some had gotten even faster.

Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity (Random House, 2016), 117-118

The thing about goals is that they work! Objectives are powerful to the human psyche because they connect in to our dopaminergic system that rewards us for progress or movement in the right direction. As Brian Johnson, a self-proclaimed philosopher and personal-development coach, has paraphrased Aristotle, “We are teleological beings.” We naturally like to aim at targets.

As Duhigg explains,

“Some 400 laboratory and field studies [show] that specific, high goals lead to a higher level of task performance than do easy goals or vague, abstract goals such as the exhortation to ‘do one’s best,’” Locke and Latham wrote in 2006 in a review of goal-setting studies. In particular, objectives like SMART goals often unlock a potential that people don’t even realize they possess. The reason, in part, is because goal-setting processes like the SMART system force people to translate vague aspirations into concrete plans. The process of making a goal specific and proving it is achievable involves figuring out the steps it requires—or shifting that goal slightly, if your initial aims turn out to be unrealistic. Coming up with a timeline and a way to measure success forces a discipline onto the process that good intentions can’t match.

Smarter Faster Better, 118

Alice and teachers like her may have good intentions, but the discipline of crafting and committing to goals makes for better teaching. This is because it requires clearer and more disciplined thinking and planning about the best or most effective course of action. 

Another reason is that clear goals and a process that involves meaningful feedback are two of the characteristics that contribute to deliberate practice (or at least purposeful practice), which is the gold standard of skill-development. The leading expert on elite performance, Anders Ericsson, describes the feedback loop of positive motivation involved in setting such clear goals that add up to larger objectives in his book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise:

Deliberate practice involves well-defined, specific goals and often involves improving some aspects of the target performance; it is not aimed at some vague overall improvement. Once an overall goal has been set, a teacher or coach will develop a plan for making a series of small changes that will add up to the desired larger change. Improving some aspect of the target performance allows a performer to see that his or her performances have been improved by the training.

Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (Mariner Books 2017), 99

If teachers are holding themselves accountable to lesson goals and course objectives, then their teaching can become a craft that they practice in such a way as to attain greater and greater mastery. (By the way, this is exactly what Aristotle meant by the intellectual virtue of art or techne: a craft that someone can master to produce a noticeable difference in the world.)

After all, we know from studies that simply gaining more experience in a craft does not make a professional better, whether the person is a teacher, a doctor, a psychiatrist or a financial advisor. As Ericsson and Pool share,

Research has shown that the “experts” in many fields don’t perform reliably better than other, less highly regarded members of the profession—or sometimes even than people who have had no training at all. In his influential book House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth, the psychologist Robyn Dawes described research showing that licensed psychiatrists and psychologists were no more effective at performing therapy than laypeople who had received minimal training. Similarly, many studies have found that the performance of financial “experts” in picking stocks is little or no better than the performance of novices or random chance. And, as we noted earlier, doctors in general practice with several decades of experience sometimes perform worse, when judged by objective measures, than doctors with just a few years of experience—mainly because the younger doctors attended medical school more recently, so their training is more up-to-date and they are more likely to remember it. Contrary to expectations, experience doesn’t lead to improved performance among many types of doctors and nurses.

Ericsson and Pool, Peak, 105

Apparently, experience is not the best teacher, deliberate practice is. And specific measurable objectives increase the likelihood that a teacher is using the time in the classroom to practice her craft. 

The Blessings of Bloom’s 3: Objectives Foster Flow

For some classical educators, it is possible that the idea of educational objectives and goal setting has the tang of artificiality on it. They may feel that they left the educational establishment, in part to leave such things behind and simply enjoy the craft of teaching, focusing on the deeper and higher things. These past two sections may have been worrying to such educators, seeming to endorse the modern factory model of education. After all, isn’t true classical education more about the intangibles, the unspecific and not easily measurable? Isn’t it about transcendentals like truth, goodness, and beauty, and not the cramming of facts and the constant measurements of tests? 

To these educators I would appeal with the age-old saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” There is some dirty bathwater associated with goal setting and lesson targets. But arguably this is because of the ideologies and bureaucracy of modern educational institutions and not because of the principle itself. So we must ask whether in principle it really is anti-classical to have definite educational objectives to measure and push ourselves against. 

After all, it is not only to jump through bureaucratic hoops that we set goals. The ancient traditions of human beings all across the world involves setting skill-development goals with clear feedback. Humans do this for the joy of the game! It is intrinsically meaningful to grow and develop against a real standard. Having clear objectives and immediate feedback actually fosters flow, that timeless experience of getting lost in a challenging and meaningful activity. As the positive psychologist (and advocate of lifelong classical education) Mihaly Csikzentmahalyi explains in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,

The reason it is possible to achieve such complete involvement in a flow experience is that goals are usually clear, and feedback immediate. A tennis player always knows what she has to do: return the ball into the opponent’s court. And each time she hits the ball she knows whether she has done well or not. The chess player’s goals are equally obvious: to mate the opponent’s king before his own is mated. With each move, he can calculate whether he has come closer to this objective. The climber inching up a vertical wall of rock has a very simple goal in mind: to complete the climb without falling. Every second, hour after hour, he receives information that he is meeting that basic goal.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics ed., 2008), 54

Do you want to enjoy the experience of teaching? Then arguably adopting clear objectives for student learning and playing the game of always seeking improvement is the most direct route. Teaching is a craft, and excellence in a craft involves producing something definite in the world. There must be a product. If so, setting measurable and attainable goals for student growth and striving to meet those goals will be rewarding. 

We must of course still recognize that some of the best and highest aims of education are not easily measurable or attainable in a short time, and that does not mean we should abandon them as objectives. But that does not mean we can abandon SMART goals and lesson targets entirely. We must find a way to embrace both SMART goals and transcendent purposes at one and the same time. Yet that is a topic we must leave for next time…. 

Interested in more on fostering flow in your classroom? Download the free eBook here or visit the flow page to learn more and watch a video by the author, describing the flow state and its relevance to your teaching practices in the classroom.

The post Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Importance of Objectives: 3 Blessings of Bloom’s appeared first on .