habits of mind
- insight
"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?
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?
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.
What does the story of Goldilocks have to do with deliberate practice and the Habits of Mind?
It's worth taking a close look at the definition of the Habits of Mind and teasing apart some of the key ideas. The Habits of Mind are defined as:
Those dispositions that are skillfully and mindfully employed, by characteristically successful people, when confronted with problems, the solutions to which are not immediately apparent.
I could never be like that. They've got something I haven't got... they've got talent.
Sometimes it's easy to look at successful people from a distance and say to ourselves that they are somehow different to the rest of us. They were born with something we simply don't have. We can recognise it, admire it, call it talent, or a gift, but we can never have it. We could never be like them.
Edward de Bono has a wonderful analogy that I love to use when talking about intelligence. He likens a persons innate, inborn, intelligence to the type of car they dive.
We are certainly all born different. That's an undeniable fact of life. In de Bono's analogy this difference is like the car we drive. Some of us a born with Ferrari's and some of us are born with mini's.
The Peter Principle goes something like this:
In any heirachy, an individual will rise to his or her own level of incompetence and then remain there.