Schools in the 21st century have had many pieces added to their curriculum. They are no longer the institutions which deliver the three R’s to students but have had to face a world where any fact can be googled with a response available within seconds.
No longer is rote memorization quite as important as it once was, but educators are still left with the knowledge that some memorization, such as math facts is essential. How important is cursive writing? Should our youth know how to count change back to a customer rather than rely on what the electronic cash register tells them?
As educators wrestle with those issues as well as many others, we also know that there are many 21st century skills that we need to embed in our daily work with students. One among those is helping our youth develop Habits of Mind that will assist them in working their way through challenges they face beginning in kindergarten.
Those Habits of Mind which have been described by Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick include the following: persisting, thinking and communicating with clarity and precision, managing impulsivity, listening with understanding and empathy, thinking flexibly, questioning and posing problems, thinking about thinking or metacognition, applying past knowledge to new situations, and remaining open to continuous learning.
Some of our teachers in RSU 29 have been to a County wide training session in the fall and learned that many of these Habits of Mind already have a place in their instructional practices. Beginning when children enter school, they have instruction on managing their impulsivity. Teachers have not necessarily used the words managing my impulsivity but our early elementary teachers who attended the workshop came away believing that they could use that specific vocabulary.
The result of this early training has shown teachers that children as young as five years of age can begin talking about what their classroom environment looks like and sounds like when they are able to manage their impulsivity. When children can begin to talk with adults and among themselves about how their behavior impacts their learning in the classroom, changes begin to occur for them and for the classroom environment.
Although all teachers in RSU 29 have not had this Habits of Mind training, what we have learned is that the instruction has its place in our classrooms and that we need to be more explicit about that instruction as we move forward. Educational outcomes in traditional settings focus on how many answers a student can correctly produce either verbally or in writing.
When we teach for the Habits of Mind, we are interested also in how students behave when they don’t know an answer. When a student does not immediately know the answer to questions, the Habits of Mind will illustrate how a student responds to questions and problems that will help teachers talk with students about what we do when we do not immediately know an answer. Educators are interested in enhancing the ways students produce knowledge rather than how they merely reproduce it.
We want students to learn how to develop a critical stance with their work: inquiring, editing, thinking flexibly, and learning from another person’s perspective.
Costa says, “The critical attribute of intelligent human beings is not only having information but also knowing how to act on it.” Our workplaces want employees who will collaborate to problem solve; therefore, we want to talk more with students about how they learn and relate to other learners as they go through our school district. As the district moves forward the professional development, more discussion and training on Habits of Mind will be a part of that work.
