HABITS OF MIND
Before having any conversation about Habits of Mind there are a few essential questions to ask to frame your thinking.
- How have your ideas about intelligence changed?
- What impact might this have on your teaching?
- How might you teach to enhance intelligence?
These are powerful questions to contemplate if we as educators are serious about self-directed, lifelong learners.
Habits of Mind provide a framework to assist teachers, parents and coaches achieve the dispositions of successful lifelong learners. One of the great advantages of the Habits of Mind is that they lend consistency to the language of schools, across year levels, between subjects and throughout the school community to describe how success is achieved. Habits of Mind clarify our educational goals by bringing together consistent naming and explicit identification of the dispositions of successful people.
Art Costa defines the Habits of Mind as;
- Dispositions that are skillfully and mindfully employed by characteristically intelligent people when confronted with problems, the solutions to which are not immediately apparent.”
Everyone uses his or her mind but not all of us use it with great skill. Effective teachers have always worked in ways that develop more mature and effective Habits of Mind in students. What teachers lack is a common language about intelligence. The Habits of Mind give teachers a deliberate and intentional way of assisting students understand life, living and learning.
TEACHING THINKING
It is every teacher’s job to teach students to be effective thinkers but what does that actually mean and how do you do it? The teaching standards describe what getting better means and the curriculum gives us learning concepts that we want students to know. What is usually absent, but often implied, is learning dispositions (Habits of Mind) that students need to develop in order to be successful.
INTELLIGENCE
The traditional view of intelligence is that you were born with a fixed amount of intelligence and that was what you were stuck with for life. IQ tests suggested that you were either smart or dumb and it was unchangable throughout life.
Dr Carol Dweck in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success describes the traditional view of intelligence as a fixed mindset. Alfred Benit, the designer of the IQ test never meant to define anyone as having a fixed mindset. In his book “Modern ideas about Children” he writes:
“A few modern philosophers…assert that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quanitity, a quantity which can’t be increased. We must protect and react against this brutal pessimism…with practice, training, and above all. Method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgement and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.”
In the fixed mindset, failure means you’re not smart enough. In the growth mindset failure provides an opportunity to learn and grow. Educators are not just responsible to teach students content, they are charged with helping them to behave more intelligently. With strategies and awareness intelligence and success can increase.
About 70% of a person’s success can be attributed to hard work that is sustained over time (10 yrs +) in order to be regarded as an expert or to achieve greatness. Hard work doesn’t mean just showing up each day. It means learning from experiences and coming to behave more intelligently.