As a teacher, your ultimate task is to influence the behaviour of your pupils. In my year-10 class, for instance, I had the ambition of getting pupils to do more homework. Modern science has a great deal to say about behaviour and education: it appears to help if you let pupils plan their own weekly homework schedule. Every Monday, a large set of exercises has to be completed – how or when that happens is entirely up to them.
The second element of evidence-informed practice: thinking more in terms of reward than punishment. Because it was still a year-10 class, I had devised a combination of carrot and stick: an incomplete weekly task meant coming in at the end of the day to finish it, whilst a completed one earned a sticker.
Behaviour also happens to be the first topic in year 10, which makes for a pleasant starting point. Plenty of engaging videos and practical examples: Skinner operantly conditioning his pigeons,1 Lorenz getting goslings to waddle along behind him, ravens tobogganing down rooftops on jam-jar lids, and so on.
In terms of content, alongside those wonderful stories there are many concepts but few difficult processes to grasp – ideal for easing pupils gently into upper secondary school.
After about three weeks I noticed that my homework regime was bearing fruit: at the check, around 80 per cent had completed the weekly task in one go. The day before, I had rushed to the local discount shop to buy new stickers.
What I hadn’t realised was that I had quietly been doing something educational at the same time. I had just handed out yet another sticker when a boy looked up from the exercise he was working on, met my eyes, and I could almost see the penny drop in his head. ‘Sir, are you operantly conditioning us?’
Reinder Bosman (1997) is a biology and research & design teacher at the Goois Lyceum in Bussum. He shares his experiences in and around his classroom and in the field here.
1 In the printed version this read: ‘Pavlov operantly conditioning his dogs’ (but that was of course ‘classical conditioning’, hence this correction as of 3 October 2025)