I read an interesting book on "happiness", one of the points of which was that when you buy something or are given something you will feel a certain amount of happiness. If you buy two or more things and receive them at the same time you do not experience nearly the same amount of happiness from those items as you would if they were spread out over a period of time.
Do we maximize happiness in our practice? Normally, give people multiple gifts (birthdays, Christmas..) on special occasions. Likewise, when it is renovation time or time to move people buy multiple things for our house all at once. It is not maximizing happiness but it is very hard to change our practice.
This is one area where I feel education has come a long way. While there are a few hold over practices, in the vast majority of instances we question our practices and look at the feedback (not necessarily formal) that the kids give us and we adjust. Research is no longer a four letter word as we look to best practices from afar and from our colleagues to improve what we do.
Contrary to the simplistic and untrue sound byte that some use ("education hasn't changed since the Industrial Revolution") maybe we could use the education system as a model for thinking about changing our own practices.
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