Training Doesn’t Change Teaching Habits — Here’s What Does
By the time we started our school in 2017, I had already been in the education business for seventeen years. Since 2000, I had worked with teachers — but they were part-time, coming in for a couple of hours at a time, mostly for UCMAS and our other centres. So when we set up the school, we assumed teacher training would be more or less the same story: bring teachers in, tell them what to do, train them beautifully, and they would follow the curriculum. We were wrong. The Training Worked. The Retention Didn’t. We hired teachers, trained them, and walked out of those sessions confident. A month later, we walked into the classroom — and they didn’t remember a word of what we’d said. They had gone right back to teaching the way they always had. This wasn’t a one-time gap we could fix with a better session. We ran eight-hour trainings, twice a year, year after year. Back to back. And still, the same pattern repeated itself. The teachers weren’t being defiant — but the way they had learned to teach was so deeply ingrained that it was extraordinarily difficult to unlearn, no matter how well-designed our curriculum was. The clearest sign of the problem: if a teacher had never actually run hands-on activities in their own teaching life, they simply wouldn’t run them in our classrooms either — no matter how clearly the curriculum called for it. You cannot hand someone a plan for an experience they’ve never had themselves. The Turning Point: Stop Training Content, Start Training Practice Eventually, we took a hard decision. We stopped relying on sending over a written curriculum and expecting it to be followed. Instead, we shifted almost entirely to hands-on training. We taught teachers how to read and plan a curriculum, not just handed them one. We ran workshops on how to actually write planners themselves — because a teacher who can build a plan understands the reasoning behind it, not just the instructions. We also began training from the child’s point of view. What does a child feel when taught the way these teachers had always taught? And how might that child feel differently when given hands-on, activity-led learning instead? Making that contrast tangible — letting teachers feel the difference, not just hear about it — was what training on paper could never do. From there, the training expanded into practical, experiential territory: introducing Montessori materials properly, using movement and dance as teaching tools, building independence in children, and creating classroom discipline through engaging activities rather than instruction and control. What This Means for Building Reliable Teachers Looking back, the biggest shift wasn’t in what we taught — it was in how. A few things stood out as the real levers of change: Telling doesn’t transfer. A curriculum document, however well-written, cannot override years of ingrained teaching habits. Teachers need to experience the method, not just hear about it. Hands-on training — where they do the activity themselves, and feel what a child feels — creates change that lecture-style training cannot. Teach teachers to plan, not just to follow. A teacher who can write a planner understands the “why” behind an activity, which makes them far more likely to actually run it in class. Change takes years, not sessions. Ours took repeated, consistent training over several years before it truly stuck. For any school or education business investing in teacher training, this is the real lesson: content-heavy training sessions, however thorough, rarely change what happens behind a closed classroom door. What changes it is putting teachers through the same hands-on, experiential process you want them to give their students.
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