Behavior Change Principles and Practice – University College London (NCL)

This four-day course will introduce students to the principles of behavior change and how these can be applied to practical problems in your own area of interest.

It’s aimed at everyone interested in behavior change – from researchers, practitioners and intervention designers to managers and policy makers.

This course aims to provide:

• a greater understanding of the possibilities for applying behavior change interventions to your own situation
• a practical framework for developing, implementing and evaluating these interventions in your area of interest

This course run by UCL Centre for Behavior Change (CBC), in partnership with Dalhousie University. This course is for everyone interested in behavior change, including students, researchers (from post-docs to professors), practitioners, intervention designers, managers, and policy makers.

It will be highly participatory, with short presentations, discussions, group work and tutorials.

There’ll be a maximum of 25 participants to enable individual guidance.

You’ll be encouraged to take part in:

• discussion groups – these will draw on real-life scenarios generated in advance by participants (you’ll have the opportunity to submit an issue you’d like to work on during the week)
• tutorials – at the end of each day there will be small group tutorials led by experienced facilitators to support the application of the learning points from that day to your own situation. These will be organized according to level of expertise and area of work, and your personal objectives will be reviewed with your tutor as the week progresses.
• the buddy system – in order to support long-term change, you’ll be encouraged to team up with a ‘buddy’ to review action plans weeks or months after the course has finished and continue the reviewing, problem-solving and planning begun within the course

You’ll be given a manual to support your learning and you’ll leave with an individual, tailored action plan for applying what you’ve learnt in the course to your own situation.

By the end of the course, you’ll be able to:

• describe and discuss how capability, opportunity and motivation interact to support behavior change using the COM-B model and analyze behavior in context and identify targets for change using the COM-B model
• apply the Behavior Change Wheel to develop a broad strategy for behavior change
• identify specific behavior change techniques to include in interventions in the strategy

• describe key principles underpinning maintenance of behavior change
• describe and discuss how to embed behavioral change within organizations

For more information and to register, view the course website.