As a ‘SunSmart School’ in Australia, it is important to our site, staff, students and community that our students are ‘sun smart’ and understand the impacts of sun exposure and proper UV care.

This would be the aspiration.

Exploring this aspiration, we come to the goals, or the explicit behaviours that would show we have achieved this aspiration or identity.

Our Goals:

1. Students wear sunscreen

2. Students opt to wear appropriate clothing

3. Students seek out shade

4. Students wear hats

5. Students wear sunglasses

6. Students understand the impacts of UV

If we can achieve these goals, we would be embodying the identity of a ‘sun smart school’.

From our list of goal behaviours, we then take one to focus on and explore what supporting that behaviour might look like.

We start with ‘students wear a hat’.

From here, we brainstorm all the possible behaviours we could support to get students to consistently wear a hat.

· Considering all of our behaviour options, we select behaviours that are both feasible and effective, such as: Reminding students to put on their hats before going outside.

· Providing access to hats for all students who have lost/forgotten their hat.

· Having students bring their own hats to school every day.

We agree that these are the most effective behaviours, and that we can actually get the students and teachers to do these behaviours with support.

We now look at each behaviour and consider how can we make that behaviour impossible not to engage with. How can we make it so simple that, even on a student’s worst day, they can still do the behaviour?

This may look like having spare hats available, displaying visual timetables showing when to wear a hat, having ‘cool’ or desirable hats – the list goes on.

We now set up each behaviour with an anchor prompt which cues the behaviour to happen when we want it to:

Anchor prompt Behaviour –

After the lunch bell goes get your hat

After you lose your hat replace the hat with a new one

After you pack your lunchbox for school pack your hat

Each prompt matches the desired behaviour with an already-existing behaviour that has the same frequency, intensity and duration as we want the desired behaviour to have.

Finally, the most important point is to celebrate your successes.

Each desired behaviour, no matter how small, is a vote towards your desired identity and deserves celebration.

Remember, you can celebrate a behaviour at any or all of these points:

1. when you decide to do the behaviour and you expect a reward or consequence

2. while you are performing the behaviour

3. at the conclusion of the behaviour

Remember, challenging behaviour or an inability to do the desired action is not a character flaw and does not mean that a person is lacking, it is a flaw in behaviour design.

If this behaviour design process is not working, then we review, reflect, collect information and troubleshoot. We look back on whether this really is a desired behaviour, how we can make the behaviour easier, whether our prompt is fuzzy or anchored, whether our prompt occurs at the same context, frequency, intensity and duration as our desired behaviour, and finally whether we feel good when we do the desired behaviour.

If we cannot answer these questions, we need to revisit the behaviour design model, make adjustments, and try again. If we go through all of these steps and still have no success, then we need to re-examine if the behaviour we desire is really in line with our aspirations and goals and we may need to change the behaviour.