Brains crave novelty, but also structure

Novelty is exhausting. I’ve already got all of the lesson plans together, but we’ve done x activity recently so I can’t just do the same activity, that wouldn’t be novel!

So I scratch it. Start over. Design something new. Something the students haven’t seen before. Something that will engage them because it’s fresh. Because the brain craves novelty, right?

Except now I’ve spent an extra hour designing an activity when I could’ve spent that hour on something that actually matters: making sure the input is solid, anticipating where comprehension breaks down, thinking about what individual students need. And my students show up to class not knowing what to expect. Not because the content is unpredictable, but because the shape of the class is. They don’t know what help looks like. They don’t know what’s coming next. And that uncertainty is not engagement. That’s noise.

I learned this from a teacher who kicked me out of a meeting. She had a set routine: certain activities on certain days. A predictable structure. And I dismissed it at the time because I was trapped in the novelty frame. She was boring me. How could boring be right?

Neuroscientists recently did fMRI research on how the brain actually responds to novelty and uncertainty (Cockburn et al., 2021). They found that novelty works as a shortcut: the brain inflates the expected reward of novel options and suppresses uncertainty checks in the process. It feels engaging. But that engagement doesn’t translate to learning.

That’s the trap I fell into. I was chasing a feeling, not an outcome. And while I was burning myself out reconstructing lessons for novelty, I was losing the one thing students actually needed: predictable structures they could rely on so that they can take control of their learning. Novelty should live inside those structures, not replace them. The teacher knew that. The science confirms it.