Weight Watchers does not work because of the recipes and calorie-counting. It works because of the accountability. The recipes and calorie-counting are necessary, but without the weekly weigh-in, things will not change. How do we know this? Because all the information you need to lose weight is already freely available on the internet. People do not pay their subscription to count calories. They pay for the public, weekly accountability.
When it comes to school-wide behavioural change, we tend to be good at the equivalent of recipes and calorie-counting advice — and much less effective with supportive weigh-ins.
I once used a virtual co-working platform that matched determined procrastinators with other determined procrastinators. We both committed to a specific task in a 50-minute session. No emails, no distractions. The science behind this approach identified five behavioural triggers:
These are exactly the same triggers I use when helping schools embed long-lasting changes to school-wide expectations of behaviour.
Schools are usually very good at the training day — the input, the ideas, the inspiration. They are much less good at what comes after: the regular, structured check-in. The weigh-in equivalent. The moment where someone asks, calmly and supportively, "How is it going? What do the numbers say? Where are we making progress and where are we not?"
Without that structure, good intentions drift. Teachers return to old habits not because they are unwilling to change but because the new approaches are not yet habitual, and there is nothing to remind them or hold them to account.
The same is true for individual teachers trying to improve their practice. Knowing what you want to change is necessary but not sufficient. You need a mechanism — ideally involving another person — that creates the conditions for the change to stick.
When we build behaviour improvement plans for schools, we do not just hand over a policy document. We build in the equivalent of the weigh-in: structured, regular review points with clear success criteria and a named person responsible for checking in on progress.
The recipes matter. But the accountability is what makes them work.