Habits of Mind. An enduring part of a changing world

Blogs, Habits of Mind

The Habits of Mind were my first passion in education. This passion has endured for 20 years. I’ve spent countless hours developing Habits of Mind resources and delivering professional learning to teachers around the world.

What originally drew me so strongly to the Habits of Mind was the fact they weren’t simply dreamt up by Art Costa and Bena Kallick. They weren’t merely “good ideas”.

Edward de Bono’s work is a good idea. Much of Harvard University’s Visible Thinking Routines are good ideas. Practically every graphic organiser is a good idea. While these ideas may be powerful, practical and useful, they aren’t real. They are tools created to help us think and learn.

Like Mindsets and Virtuous Practice, the Habits of Mind weren’t created – they were identified. What Costa and Kallick did was recognise and describe the learning dispositions of expert learners – those who had reached the top of their fields. Of course, others had done similar before, but Costa and Kallick’s work was more elegant, comprehensive and accessible, especially to educators. We rushed to adopt the Habits of Mind in our schools and classrooms.

The Habits of Mind are a real part of the world. The beauty of this is that they endure. They are as relevant today as they were 50 or even 500 years ago, and they’ll be just as relevant in the future.

We hear a lot about the students of today having to face a rapidly changing world. But no matter how the world changes, our students will need to engage in the Habits of Mind to be successful. As author Nassim Nicholas Taleb says: “We can’t predict the future, but we can prepare for it.” Developing powerful Habits of Mind is an essential part of preparing students for an unknowable future.

In the ‘90s and early ‘00s, the hype surrounding Habits of Mind was like the hype that surrounds Mindsets today. The Habits were the “next big thing” and many schools were quick to adopt them. Unfortunately, the combination of our inexperience and the adoption of some less-than-rigorous approaches to their implementation often led the Habits of Mind becoming “last year’s initiative”. (See [1]“How Growth Mindsets become ‘last year’s initiative’ – A cautionary tale”).

Fortunately, we’ve learnt a lot about how to succeed with Habits of Mind since then. We know how to make them stick in our schools and we know how to make a real difference to student learning outcomes. To find out more about what we’ve learnt, download my free e-book Success with Habits of Mind.

Because the Habits of Mind are real, they have endured. You can’t escape the importance of these 16 dispositions. And with time, we’ve learnt more about how they connect to other ideas, such as Growth Mindsets and Virtuous Practice, and how to bring them to life in the classroom.

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