Supporting students in making physical activity a habit

To get young people into sport and PA we usually start with ‘why’. However, Jay Coakley, the father of sport sociology suggests that if we want to understand how to set young people up for a lifetime of PA, we should look to, and learn from the experiences of active adults when they were young. However, there’s a paradox here that continues to trip us up and it plays out like this...a young person has positive experiences in sport/PA. This grows into a passion. The passion might lead to pursuing a sport related degree and the most common of these is sport science. Sport science is a common first degree for people who go on to teach PE. Equipped with deep knowledge about the scientific benefits of physical activity the now qualified teacher believes that it is via rational persuasion that an individual will get into the very thing that the teacher is into. This logic is flawed and ignores the emotional attachment that got the teacher into sport/PA in the first place. As such, we lose the soul of our subject. Rationality, objectivity, science does not shape behaviour. Feeling connected to people, places, activities does. So in this blog I’ll explore what we can learn from the behaviour science of habit formation that can help us support students more effectively.

This work drives much of the thinking behind miMove, the app we created that enables students to self - report their activity experience and by so doing, help schools to become more active communities.

I think PE is the only subject primarily concerned with supporting students to adopt certain behaviours (i.e. to BE physically active). This notion has certainly been central to PE’s purpose for at least half a century (Kirk 2010).

The brilliant Mikael Quennerstedt highlights this succinctly when he says...

“The only real sustainable aim for PE is more PE” 

I would humbly suggest we change the last E in the quote above to an A as in physical activity and in this blog we will refer to PA when discussing the universal goal of encouraging more young people to be active so that they benefit from the richness it can bring to their lives.

So having established that PE is primarily about behaviour adoption, let’s turn to what we know about behaviour.

For a start, we should acknowledge that most of our behaviours are habitual. Consider the actions you did this morning after waking - like brushing your teeth, having a shower, having your breakfast, even the order you did these in - most of these are not so much choices or decisions but habits - habits, which over time, have an enormous impact on our lives. 

Psychologists talk about the habit loop and understanding how habits are formed is vital for our work– a habit starts with a cue that triggers a behaviour or action and leads to even the tiniest of rewards. Habits are formed when the anticipation of the  reward is sufficient to drive the behaviour - think the tiny hit of adrenaline that accompanies lacing up your shoes before engaging in a sport or physical activity.

According to BJ Fogg (2020) “It doesn’t take 21 days to wire in a habit. Sometimes, all you need is a shot of positive feeling and emotion, a dose of celebration. Celebrating is a great way to reinforce small changes — and pave the way for big successes”. There are deep implications here for teaching a version of PE that is aligned to the aim of participation beyond the school gate and beyond the school years. What do your students know about the power of celebration? When and what are they permitted to celebrate? In our very public subject it is too easy for students to feel ‘not very good’ by which they usually mean ‘not as good as [insert name of classmate]’. Student centred PE in which each student knows where they are at and what they need to learn next, facilitates magical moments of personal celebration because being good equals doing something that you couldn’t do last week or last month and you can now do it because of your effort in supporting your learning. - cue mini fist pump through to full blown celebratory dance!

PE lessons have tended to focus over the years on ability and competence to take part in a range of activities. Motivation has often been regarded as an individual matter. However, self-determination theory sees motivation as the product of competence, autonomy and relevance. Autonomy and relevance would certainly impact on the habitual ‘cue’ and it is here that this work blends with ideas around meaningfulness.

Fogg suggests that there are only 3 factors that impact motivation:

The PERSON - Do you already want to do the behaviour? Those students we worry about (who invariably get least of our attention) are those who are not connecting to what we have to offer them. If their answer is ‘No’, we need to change what and how we try to connect to these reluctant students. In other words we change what we can control….

The ACTION - make it more palatable. Make it accessible and break it down into more manageable, tiny steps. We’ve seen miMove schools set very small targets – the key is to just GET STARTED and build confidence. One school set a minimum expectation of students taking part in 2 activity sessions outside of school. Over a 10 week period, this grew to 5.6 sessions a week.

CONTEXT is third and probably the key factor. By context we are referring to factors that shape the physical, social and emotional environment.

So, if the goal is more PA, as students progress through different programmes they need to know how to stay active in their own time if PA is to help them flourish and thrive. 

References

Kirk, D. (2010) Physical Education Futures, Routledge, Oxon

Fogg, B.J. (2020) Tiny Habit, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston