Welcome back to the series, Ways to Think about Learning, where we explore some of the major philosophies and theories that have shaped current educational practices. In an earlier post, Understanding Kallick and Costa’s 16 Habits of Mind, we reviewed six of the habits. Today, we’ll look at four more.

I love the Habits of Mind because each one is universal in nature — it can be applied to anyone’s life at any time — young or old, student or expert. Each habit also assumes a foundation of Growth Mindset², or the idea that the level of success we’re capable of is not a fixed point stamped on us at birth, but rather a ceiling that we can keep pushing up and up. The Habits can also be a helpful guide in trying times when we need a little bit of structure to get us moving in the right direction.

Transition Time

As Dr. Nicole Galante, Director at CTLC, considers the transition back to the traditional classroom for students of all ages who have been learning in virtual or hybrid environments for quite some time now, she believes:

“We have an opportunity to focus our kids and ourselves on these habits, to prepare them for a world that is uncertain, to prepare them to take responsible risks, to be creative, to pose questions that seek to solve problems, and to remain open to continuous learning no matter the circumstances.”

In this way, the Habits can act as manageable, helpful tools for educators looking to create some space for social-emotional work in the third act of this hectic school year. We all know transitions can be a challenge, for children and adults, and everyone working and learning in schools is experiencing some kind of transition right now. Depending on where you’re teaching, perhaps this year was the first since 2020 in which you had a full classroom of kids, in-person, at the same time.

Perhaps, in your district, just this month mask mandates were dropped. Whether that brings you relief or worry, it’s surely a transition for you and students. Having some moments built-in to acknowledge what you’ve all been through can maybe, just maybe, soften the transition. Hopefully, having these habits in your back pocket can support you in creating those moments for yourself and your students — you deserve them.

Habits of Mind

So, let’s dive in! And remember — six of the habits were already reviewed here.

Questioning and Posing Problems

• What it means: Sometimes, traditional schooling can condition students to believe that it’s their job to produce the “right” answer. While living and working as an adult person does quite often require producing the right answer, the process of finding that answer almost always starts with posing questions, and, as Kallick and Costa put it, “finding problems to solve.”¹
• What it looks like in the classroom: One barrier to having students pose questions is that to craft a really good question about subject matter, you kind of have to be an expert in the material. Cough-cough, that’s called Socratic questioning, and teachers do it all day long. To pose a really good question about life or another person, though, you just have to have an imagination and an interest — and that’s where students can practice crafting a questioning mindset.
• What it looks like in everyday life: From small moments, like someone at home wondering: what I tried this instead?, and coming up with a tweaked recipe, a new way of getting out a stain, or a surprisingly efficient scheduling system for a family to follow, to big, world-changing moments, like humankind wondering: how can we get to the moon? — posing questions is how progress begins.
  
  
  
  

Applying Past Knowledge to New Situations

• What it means: The amount that educators and students have learned, pivoted, and mastered in the last two years seemed insurmountable, and was an incredible challenge, and now is a whole mountain of skills and knowledge. This habit is all about taking prior knowledge and realizing that it can be useful in navigating new scenarios as they pop up, and it’s perhaps never been more relevant than right now in classrooms.
• What it looks like in the classroom: Students are more comfortable using technology in the classroom than ever before. That doesn’t mean that the old, tried-and-true, face-to-face modalities of learning aren’t useful — in fact, just the opposite, the large majority of people are relieved to return to that natural mode of schooling. But, it does mean that there is a host of skills among students and teachers that can be accessed and couched, where appropriate and effective, into in-person learning environments. What tech tools support more fluid in-person learning, and as you reflect on the past two years, how much more fluent are you and your students in using technology to learn together, in person?
• What it looks like in everyday life: Being able to apply past knowledge to new situations seems like one of the major differences between adults who learn a set of functional skills and then repeat those day in and day out to make their life, and those who keep building, building, building on each skill they learn. Those in the latter group are able to make their lives a little bit “bigger” with every step, navigating a slightly taller hill with the memory of how they scaled the last, smaller hill. Just like anything else, these two groups aren’t inherently different — they were simply shown how to learn differently — one in finite terms, the other: infinite.
  
  
  
  

Thinking and Communicating with Clarity and Precision

• What it means: In Kallick and Costa’s words, this habit describes “striving for accurate communication in both written and oral form; avoiding over-generalizations, distortions, deletions and exaggerations.”¹
• What it looks like in the classroom: One of the most powerful guidelines I ever learned about teaching is this: students can learn either a new skill or new content in a single learning segment. They can’t do both. So when teaching a new skill, why not ask them to grapple with content they’re already very familiar with? For this habit of communicating with greater clarity, a writing exercise about something they’re already expert in — for one student, it may be Major League Baseball, for another, braiding hair, and yet another, working on cars — allows them to actually push their mastery of the skill. That is, you can guide them towards detail when they know what they’re talking about. Then they can do it with something they’re just learning. Plus, you get to know them better!
• What it looks like in everyday life: As adults at work, we may only get a few minutes or interactions with our teams each day. Being prepared to convey what it is you need to communicate and posing the questions to which you need answers during those minutes is the difference between effective and ineffective work. Similarly, in quarrels with friends or family members, the outcome is only as good as we are specific. If you say “you’re just tired,” but that’s really not the problem at all — well, it’s not likely the real problem will get solved any time soon.
  
  
  
  

Responding with Wonderment and Awe

• What it means: I love this habit, and think it’s a great one to pause on, because it reminds us that The 16 Habits of Mind are not meant to be prescriptive. They’re not a curriculum to be rushed through. They offer guideposts for a successful, happy lifestyle — and this is one of the greats. In Kallick and Costa’s words, it is to “become intrigued, find the world awesome, mysterious, with phenomena and beauty.”¹
• What it looks like in the classroom: In the classroom and outside of it, this is the child — or adult! — who finds the world fascinating; who sees the sky open up with snow and lifts their head to let a snowflake fall on their tongue. It’s the student who loves the process during lab class because they’re not sure what’s coming…but they’re excited to find out. Teachers work hard every day to bring opportunities to students that inspire genuine wonderment. They chase the sound of students excited to know more, whether it’s focused silence or collaborative buzz. As we all know, getting to this place isn’t easy, but combining new skills, support, and opportunities that let students be who they are while they grow into themselves can make these beautiful moments happen.
• What it looks like in everyday life: Children, of course, are often so joyful because they radiate wonderment and awe. For them, everything is new, and when that newness is delightful to them, we see children exclaim unabashedly with awe. I remember a science unit in sixth grade that summed up with a field day where we (with a lot of teacher supervision) shot off the model rockets we had carefully crafted. We had to know: What would make one group’s rocket fly high? What would make another group’s peter out? I was awed. It was awesome. In school, every day can’t be field day, but there’s so much joy that students receive from teachers who bring their own excitement to teaching — bravo to you, for doing just that.
  
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take a pause 

We’ll pause there, with more habits to come next time. This is a good place to reflect on the habits explored today and to ask, which speaks to you the most and why? Which one jumps out as interesting for yourself? Which one do you think might speak to your students the most? How can they be integrated into planning, to give a little space and time for social-emotional work? Where can they support academic rigor?

• • Questioning and Posing Problems 
  • Applying Past Knowledge to New Situations
  • Thinking & Communicating with Clarity and Precision
  • Responding with Wonderment and Awe

Learn More!

For more information on the 16 Habits of Mind and how to adopt the principles into your school or classroom, explore the Institute for Habits of Mind, and consider certain workshops available through CTLC that are totally asynchronous, flexible, and designed to help you integrate many principles like these into your everyday teaching. 

Explore CTLC workshops:

• Challenge-Based Learning and Design Thinking
• Technology Tools for Integrating Social-Emotional Learning Competencies in the Curriculum
• The Blended Learning Classroom