The Hawthorne Effect
I've got my eye on you...
“I am just so frustrated,” the teacher, Jackie, said to me. She’s looking for my help. But, as it turns out, it’s going to be in a weird, weird say.
Jackie’s been around the block a few times. Her classes are solid and her kids are generally well-behaved. But she feels like one of her classes has been souring on her. The kids aren’t quite on task. They aren’t quite listening. She isn’t feeling it, and neither are they.
Her response was, I think, laudable. She decided to center her principal’s evaluation around that class. She invited our principal to come in to that period and see her struggle so they could talk about what comes next. I admire this a ton. She’s too old and too secure to be doing dog and pony shows for her principal: she’s crossed all the way to the other side where she wants her boss to see her struggle so she can improve.
The principal visited, which sparked this conversation with me.
“Paul, it was so frustrating!” Jackie told me. “The kids were perfect! They behaved so well! I don’t think the principal believes me that they were difficult! I’m not even sure you should visit, because they’d behave well for you, too!”
This conundrum is a lot of things. Interesting. Instructive. Maybe even frustrating for Jackie.
But is it a problem?
I knew there was a psychological phenomenon that the knowledge that something is being watched immeasurably changes the person/animal/thing being watched. I did some extremely basic research (just Wikipedia) and learned it is called the Hawthorne Effect, and that it’s not quite the slam dunk fact I thought it was. But I’ll leave you to suss out whatever controversy or uncertainty there is and just accept the fairly basic premise that students (and teachers, of course) will act differently when they know they are being observed–by a principal, a parent, or an instructional coach like me.
Jackie was experiencing that and felt like it was an affront. It hit her as a type of gaslighting: the kids weren’t showing their worst selves for the principal. Her solution: she wanted to film the kids surreptitiously.
I talked her down from that–she agreed that it felt gross–and encouraged her to film not surreptitiously, but often enough that the kids forgot the camera was on. (She eventually decided against filming at all.)
It seems to me completely ordinary that kids will act differently when a different adult is in the room. It’s impacted the way I coach sometimes.
For my first five-ish years coaching, my default was to try to be as invisible as possible. I was more or less unknown to students. While I liked being introduced by teachers in classes I visited–that way I could wander around the room without kids feeling weird about me–I would just as soon not be there. I wanted to be a window, a transparent eyeball: (“I am nothing, I see all”), so that I could report the complete, unvarnished, real truth of what kids were doing.
I don’t think that ideal was ever possible, but it is very much impossible now. I am quite well-known. A few years after I started coaching, my wife joined the staff, and she is now a beloved and popular teacher at the school. This makes me a celebrity-by-proxy. At first, I was more a curiosity (“you mean there’s a MISTER Hamann?”), which made it harder to be invisible. But–in an event I didn’t anticipate–students, both my wife’s and others, have actually started to figure out what I do.
Some of this is because I am doing more student-facing work than I used to be. Students have seen me pinch-hitting for their teachers, either so I can model or so that teachers can watch each other. They have seen me in front of classes giving surveys and such. And, of course, they see me in my wife’s room, eating lunch or bringing her a Starbucks treat (cue all the freshmen saying “Awwwwww…”). This has shifted my relationship to kids, which is to say that I talk to them more…because they will talk to me. I might ask them how it’s going in a class or what they think of an activity. They, because they get what I’m up to, will answer honestly, which is often a good help to me and their teachers. Some have even told my wife that they get frustrated because kids act differently in my presence because I don’t get a “true picture” of what’s going on. While I do not doubt these kids (or Jackie), I question how important the difference is–I certainly still see some of the irritants that teachers are asking me for help with. They don’t all disappear in a Hawthorne Effect bubble of quicksand.
Here’s an interesting coaching session I had lately that seemed to break all the Hawthorne rules. The teacher and I decided to lean into the kids knowledge that they were being watched, and I think it might have been helpful, although I welcome your feedback if I am overlooking something.
Freshman science. The teacher, Carolyn, another solid veteran, has not taught freshmen in at least a decade, and has been dealt a hand with a lot of neurodiversity and kids managing their ADHD. After a brief start where she thought she wanted to talk about lesson planning, she decided that she wanted me to track on-task behavior.
I headed in there for two consecutive days and tracked each kid’s on-task behavior by looking at a new kid every ten seconds and jotting what they were up to. At the end of those two days, the teacher clocked in at an on-task rate of X. It wasn’t the lowest I’d ever seen, but it could get better. She declared she could get to X+10 with a little work.
And then, Carolyn surprised me by breaking my fourth wall.
The next day, when I wasn’t there, she showed the kids their on-task rates. She didn’t do this in a punitive or angry way: just said “Hey, Mr. Hamann was in here checking out whether you were on task or not. He wasn’t doing this to get you in a ‘gotcha’ way: he was doing it so we could figure out how to make the class better.”
I was quite surprised that the kids would see their numbers, but decided to jump into the pool of it all. I printed out color copies (don’t tell the district, please) of each kid’s on-task charts. Carolyn handed them out, and the kids chatted among themselves about what they noticed.
Carolyn and I decided that our next step was for me to chat with each kid who had a lower (X-10 or lower) on-task rate. I asked them two different questions: What can you do to improve your on-task rate? And what can your teacher do to improve your on-task rate?
The results of this were quite wonderful. The dozen-ish kids I talked too, one by one, about 3-5 minutes each, were disarmingly honest. Four or five had been diagnosed with ADHD and were forthcoming when I asked what they have done that had worked best in sustaining attention. Some said they were seated by the wrong people. One said he just was having a terrible day. One other said he was bored because he always finished early. And another said he just flat hated science.
I took all of my notes from the interviews and input them into NotebookLM. To that, I added a few websites with advice for how to teach ADHD teens. I then asked NotebookLM to generate suggestions, both in written and podcast form, for tweaks we could make to increase engagement.
Carolyn was quite thrilled. I helped her set up her next lesson with the tweaks she felt would be best for this set of freshmen. She had some individual conversations with some kids based on what they told me. And she tried to set up a collective, communal responsibility for everyone getting it, telling kids that “your primary responsibility is that you are engaged and understanding the material, but your secondary responsibility is that your partner is engaged and understanding it.”
After that, I came back to take more data. One or two kids asked “are you here to do that thing again?” I was honest: I said yes.
Class went on as normal. If kids were on pins and needles from me watching them, it didn’t seem like it. Nobody was looking at me (save one delightful kid with ADHD who waved at me once). They were focused on the science, chatting with each other, and occasionally smacking each other’s knees and forearms when a kid would zone out. Two came up and asked me for their numbers after class (they weren’t ready yet).
Carolyn reached her goal of X+10% in just that one attempt.
Was it because I was watching and the kids knew I was watching? There are two answers to this.
I don’t feel like it was. If kids were aware of my data collection that second set of two days, their awareness waned. I eventually faded into the furniture. And, in any event, it seems that the individualized hard work we did with kids, as well as the quickie research on best practices to work with teens with ADHD, had way more effect than my presence ever could.
Even if they were hyper-aware of me…so what? The data is still good. I was there each time, so it’s not like I could have impacted the data. And if kids’ exposure to their own data made a difference, it was a difference for the better.
That’s ultimately the goal, isn’t it? For kids to be aware of their engagement and to improve it? Carolyn and I got that by showing them a measure of their engagement and discussing what to do about it. A teacher reaching her goal is an unalloyed good. If, for some reason, the kids slip back into old habits while I’m gone, Carolyn knows where to find me and we can re-boot a cycle.
I have some more to say about my own relationships with kids and how they have made major strides this year. I will address those in a future post. But right now, because of my work with Carolyn, I think I have a deeper, more nuanced way to handle a situation like Jackie’s if it comes up again. While Jackie wound up there on her own, I think I can persuade her to celebrate the good behavior of the kids and try to determine what, besides the Hawthorne Effect, might have brought about that change.