habits of mind
- James's blog
"I've already done persistence!"
This was what my daughter came home saying after her teacher had "done" persistence for the third time this semester. And it's the sort of thing I hear from lots of teachers and students just before their work with Habits of Mind falls over.
How do you avoid the "We've done this already" syndrome?
Sometimes students think that if they need to persist at a task in class then they must not be smart enough. They learn not to value persistence because they see it as a sign that they are not smart enough to "get it" the first time.
Of course that's a generalization, but there's more than a little truth to it as well.
In my classroom I used the strategy described in this blog entry to teach students scientific method and how to plan an experiment.
One of the characteristics of people who are good at Managing their Impulsivity is their ability to plan. They are good at establishing goals and then planing out the steps required to reach that goal.
However, in many classroom situations the planning is being done for the students. Teachers routinely plan out the learning path, the steps for the assignment, or the order of the tasks that need to be completed.
It may seem counter intuitive, but the word “think” is something that should only rarely be used in a classroom. The reason: students don’t know how to think, and you can’t teach them to do it!
A few weeks ago I took a close look at the definition of the Habits of Mind. I teased it apart with an educational audience in mind. That got me wondering about how we define the Habits of Mind for children and the general public. When we talk about "Habits of Mind", what ideas do most people bring to mind?
Why do you teach the way you do?
I recall a mentor of mine telling me once that the biggest change in education in her 40 years of teaching was the arrangement of tables. Children use to sit in rows, now they sit in groups. They are still doing exactly the same things as before, but now they do them sitting next to other students rather than on their own.
Understanding intellectually that The Greatness Gap can be bridged by hard work and deliberate practice doesn't always close the emotional gap!. There is still a lingering feeling that successful people might be different in other ways. And the most common difference raised is that successful people are more motivated than the rest of us.
So where do Habits of Mind fit into the picture of learnable intelligence and the acquisition of excellence? Well, the story fits together something like this:
Over the past 30 years or more we've learnt a lot about successful people. Psychologist like Anders Ericcson and Carol Dweck have made a career out of studying high achievers and identifying their common characteristics.