The hidden curriculum for adults: Why school norms shape teachers more than policies

Walk into any school staffroom and resist the urge to join the conversation. Instead, simply observe.

Notice what people laugh at. Notice which colleagues are admired and which are quietly dismissed. Listen for the stories that are told over and over again. Pay attention to the jokes, because humour is rarely accidental. What you are witnessing is one of the most powerful forces in education - not policy, not leadership, not even professional development.

Norms.

Schools spend enormous amounts of time writing policies that describe how people should behave. Yet, as Doug Lemov argues, norms almost always prove more influential than rules because they shape behaviour beneath conscious awareness. They are “largely invisible and unconscious,” yet often override formal policies because they determine what people come to regard as normal.

Peps arrives at a remarkably similar conclusion from a different direction. Drawing on cognitive science, he argues that motivation is fundamentally a system for allocating attention. Every waking moment our brains are making decisions about where to invest limited cognitive resources, and most of those decisions occur automatically rather than deliberately. Rather than carefully analysing every possible course of action, we rely on heuristics - mental shortcuts that simplify an overwhelmingly complicated world. One of the most powerful heuristics is social: What are the people around me doing?

This is where school culture becomes so interesting.

We often assume that teachers behave professionally because they have been persuaded by evidence or inspired by leadership. But the science suggests something rather less flattering. Much of what we do each day has far less to do with conscious reasoning than we would like to believe. We are constantly scanning our environment for cues about what is expected, acceptable and valued. Before we have consciously reflected on whether something is worthwhile, our brains have often already made the decision.

The irony is almost painful. Schools, perhaps more than any other institutions, pride themselves on rationality. We explain. We justify. We produce beautifully designed PowerPoint slides filled with educational research and carefully articulated rationales. We assume that if people understand why something matters, they will naturally change what they do. Human beings, inconveniently, have other ideas.

McCrea describes motivation as an investment engine. Our brains continually evaluate opportunities according to three questions:

• What is the value?

• How likely is success?

• What will it cost me?

Yet because consciously answering these questions hundreds of times each day would be cognitively impossible, we rely instead on fast, unconscious heuristics that have evolved to produce “good enough” decisions in complex environments. Social information becomes one of the most efficient shortcuts available. If everyone else appears to be investing attention somewhere, our unconscious concludes that perhaps we should too.

Daniel Kahneman (2011) famously described this as System 1 thinking: fast, intuitive and automatic. Without it we would spend so much time deliberating that we would never actually accomplish anything. The downside, however, is that these shortcuts make us extraordinarily susceptible to culture.

Which brings us back to the staffroom.

We often think of the staffroom as somewhere teachers eat lunch, complain about the photocopier and occasionally remember to drink a cup of tea before it goes cold. In reality, it may be one of the most influential learning environments in the school. Every conversation teaches something. Every raised eyebrow during briefing, every sigh after a new initiative is announced, every enthusiastic recommendation of a book, every joke about leaving before five o’clock contributes to an invisible curriculum about what professionalism looks like. I wrote about this a bit in a TES article years ago.

Imagine two schools…

In the first, the dominant conversations revolve around workload, difficult pupils and the latest educational initiative that “will all be forgotten by Christmas.” Professional reading is treated with affectionate suspicion. Teachers who leave before five o’clock are jokingly referred to as “part-timers”, while martyrdom enjoys an oddly elevated social status. Nobody consciously decided these should become the norms, yet newcomers learn them astonishingly quickly.

In the second school, conversations still acknowledge the realities of teaching, because pretending otherwise would be absurd, but they are punctuated by curiosity. Someone shares a strategy that worked well. A colleague asks for advice without embarrassment. Research is discussed not because everyone is trying to impress one another, but because learning has somehow become ordinary. Staff leave at sensible times without apologising for it. Again, nobody may have written this into the school handbook. It simply becomes what people like us do.

Social Identity Theory helps explain why these environments diverge so dramatically. Tajfel and Turner (1979) argued that our sense of self is deeply connected to the groups to which we belong. We constantly seek cues about the behaviours that signal membership. The question is rarely, What do I personally believe is best? It is far more often, What do people like me do around here?

McCrea makes precisely this point. Where the value of an action is uncertain, our brains frequently default to observing the behaviour of those around us. Evolutionarily speaking, this was a highly adaptive strategy. If everyone else in your tribe suddenly started running, stopping to conduct a balanced review of the evidence before deciding whether to follow probably wasn’t conducive to survival. Schools are not prehistoric savannahs of course, although some Monday morning briefings occasionally feel surprisingly similar…

The thing is, that consequences also extend well beyond classroom practice and into teacher wellbeing. As I have blogged about before, educational discourse often treats wellbeing as something that can be delivered through initiatives: a wellbeing week, free fruit in the staffroom, perhaps a mindfulness session squeezed into an already overcrowded twilight programme. These gestures are usually generous and well intentioned, but they often fail to address the mechanism that shapes wellbeing most profoundly: social norms.

If the prevailing norm suggests that asking for help signals weakness, teachers will quietly struggle alone. If staying until seven o’clock becomes synonymous with commitment, workload will expand to fill the available time. If perfectionism becomes the unofficial measure of professionalism, exhaustion slowly acquires the status of virtue. Nobody explicitly tells teachers to neglect their families or sacrifice their health. They simply observe what successful people appear to do and unconsciously adjust their own behaviour accordingly. One of the worst leadership actions I ever witnessed for example, was a senior leader sending weekly spreadsheets round to all staff of the amount that teachers had pressed ‘on call’ for pupils who were misbehaving. This made so many teachers feel a sense of shame, with the implications that they were clearly weak teachers because they had asked for help. Grim.

The reverse is equally true. When experienced teachers openly admit uncertainty, psychological safety begins to grow. Edmondson’s (1999) research demonstrates that teams learn more effectively when individuals feel safe enough to acknowledge mistakes, ask questions and seek feedback without fear of embarrassment. Likewise, Barsade’s (2002) work on emotional contagion reminds us that emotions spread rapidly through organisations. Cynicism is contagious, but luckily, so are optimism, generosity and trust.

This suggests that wellbeing is not primarily an individual characteristic but a collective achievement. It emerges from the norms that schools repeatedly reinforce.

Perhaps this also explains why leaders so often struggle to change culture through persuasion alone. We explain the rationale. We share the evidence. We produce beautifully formatted implementation plans. Yet if heuristics guide much of human behaviour automatically, leadership becomes less about convincing people and more about shaping environments in which desirable behaviours become the obvious behaviours. So, rather than repeatedly telling teachers that collaboration matters, make collaboration visible. Rather than encouraging wellbeing, allow respected colleagues to leave at sensible times without apology. Rather than celebrating resilience, celebrate sustainability.

Repeated experience becomes expectation…Expectation becomes heuristic…Heuristic becomes culture.

Lave and Wenger (1991) describe professional learning as participation in a community of practice. Teachers become professionals not simply through courses or qualifications, but through everyday interactions with colleagues - their community. The hidden curriculum for adults is therefore every bit as influential as the formal curriculum.

The irony, of course, is that schools understand this perfectly when thinking about children. We know pupils are shaped by routines, peer influence and classroom norms. We deliberately engineer classroom culture because we recognise that behaviour is contagious. Yet somewhere between the classroom door and the staffroom kettle we often forget that teachers possess exactly the same cognitive architecture. Shock, horror…Teachers, it turns out, are every bit as human as their pupils!

Perhaps that is the most important lesson of all. Every school is constantly teaching its staff what professionalism looks like, whether intentionally or accidentally. The question is not whether norms exist - they always do. The question is whether we are shaping them deliberately or merely inheriting them from the loudest voices in the room. Because long after the policies have been rewritten, the PowerPoint slides archived and the implementation plans forgotten, the norms remain.

And, more often than not, they are what people actually follow.

References

Barsade, S. G. (2002). The ripple effect: Emotional contagion and its influence on group behavior. Administrative Science Quarterly, 47(4), 644–675.

Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Penguin.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press.

Lemov, D. (2021). Teach Like a Champion 3.0. Jossey-Bass.

McCrea, P. (2020). Motivated Teaching: Harnessing the Science of Motivation to Boost Attention and Effort in the Classroom.

Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations.

Cialdini, R. B., Reno, R. R., & Kallgren, C. A. (1990). A focus theory of normative conduct: Recycling the concept of norms to reduce littering in public places. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58(6), 1015–1026.

Bicchieri, C. (2017). Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure, and Change Social Norms. Oxford University Press.