Despite nearly universal enrollment rates in primary education in many low- and middle-income countries, many children are not receiving the quality education they need to thrive. Nine out of ten children in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, cannot read with comprehension by the age of 10. A critical piece in solving this learning crisis is to support teachers in helping students develop fundamental reading and math skills. 

In tribute to October 5, World Teachers’ Day, let’s all imagine for a minute what it’s like to be a teacher.

Teachers make 1,500 educational decisions a day. For example, teachers have to decide which lesson to deliver, how to deliver it, how to answer students’ questions, how to keep their class on task, how to assess whether students are making progress, what to do if individuals are falling behind … the list goes on. That’s a lot of decisions! It equals about 250 decisions per hour over the course of a 6-hour workday, or four decisions every minute. 

Now imagine that a local organization comes in and asks you, a teacher, to apply in your classroom a new evidence-based best practice designed to improve your students’ reading and math skills. This practice might be Teaching at the Right Level, an instructional approach in which children are grouped and taught based on their learning level rather than age. They provide you with training and materials. However, what the organization doesn’t fully appreciate is that they are asking you to engage in many behaviors that differ from what you have grown accustomed to over years of teaching—and that actually implementing these new practices is harder than it appears.

Why is it hard for people (not just teachers!) to change the way they work, even when they’re told about more effective practices? In part, because of what’s called behavioral barriers, the specific ways that our minds interact with the context around us. The field of behavioral science can help us understand what these barriers are, and then design educational programs that address these barriers. 

With generous funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), a cohort of organizations used a behavioral science approach to improve the uptake of teaching best practices in five foundational learning programs in sub-Saharan Africa and India.

ideas42 has summarized the eight key behavioral barriers preventing teachers from taking up pedagogical best practices that these organizations identified through their work with teachers in South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Senegal, and India.

The commonalities found across these projects conducted in different countries illustrate that, although we must always consider how the nuances of people’s contexts might impact their decision-making, there are often predictable patterns when it comes to human behavior.

We’ve created a checklist to help implementers of foundational learning programs recognize these behavioral barriers in their contexts and design programs that mitigate them–enhancing teachers’ ability to take up new practices and help students learn.

You can download the checklist and read our full report here. And if you’re interested in exploring how behavioral science can be used to enhance education around the world and help address the global learning crisis, please reach out to us at globaldev@ideas42.org; we’d love to hear from you!