Interleaved Practice : The role of habits in the implementation of a new technique

Abstract: Teaching is a complex and stressful job and despite efforts to consolidate the understanding of professional development programs, the effectiveness of such programs in real schools remains inconsistent. In this study, habit is used to understand the barriers to teacher development when looking to implement “interleaved practice” in mathematics. Interleaved practice consists of exercises involving different concepts, as opposed to “blocked practice” where there is only one concept practiced at once, and it has a growing experimental research base although lacking evidence from naturalistic studies. After an introduction to interleaved practice and the science behind it, different teachers’ activity was tracked using weekly surveys before the completion of interviews. The results showed that secondary mathematics teachers understood the benefits of interleaved practice, particularly in comparison to their previous employment of blocked practice which they now viewed negatively. Resource creation was the greatest barrier to the implementation of interleaved practice, which all the teachers overcame by finding personal resource creation routines, resulting in differing interpretations of interleaved practice. On top of the routine to create resources, each teacher described a unique rhythm that their normal lessons followed. There was a negative correlation between stress and the use of interleaved practice, however, one outlier strongly influenced this as they uniquely reported the highest levels of stress and had minimal novel use of interleaved practice. The results showed that with a light intervention, teachers can intuitively understand the weaknesses of the predominant blocked practice, but to change this habit they needed to define a new routine for creating interleaved resources. Understanding the teachers’ habits in terms of routines brings into focus the role of pedagogies of enactment, the teaching of strategies, within professional development. In terms of interleaved practice, this means evaluating how different strategies might affect teacher choices and student learning, and in general the interaction between strategies and teachers’ routines and habits. Finally, the stress outlier raises questions for future research on the effect of stress on teachers’ habitual behaviour, the strength of any relationship and whether it is linear or non-linear.