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While you’re waiting, check out these steps for completing your Habits of Mind Leaner Profile.
How to create your Habits of Mind Leaner Profile
To create your Habits of Mind Learner Profile, there’s just two things you need to know:
1. Context is King
Which of the Habits of Mind is the most important? That’s a question I often ask teachers. But it’s impossible to answer… unless you have a context.
How important any particular Habit of Mind is right now, all depends on the nature of the problem you’re trying to solve. Sometimes a particular Habits is critical to solving a problem. Other times it can be less important, or even detrimental.
For example, consider the problem of drafting an essay. In this context you want to let the ideas flow. To play with them. So the ability to Think Flexibly is likely to be critical to creating a good draft. Later, during the editing process, Striving for Accuracy will be critical, and Thinking Flexibly less so.
Usually there’s 2 or 3 Habits of Mind that are critical to succeeding at a particular problem. In this case, success can’t be achieved without engaging in this Habits of Mind to a high level. We call this group of critical Habits the Critical Cluster. Together they create a Habits of Mind Problem Profile. (more on that later).
The trick to creating a good Habits of Mind Learner Profile is to be able to think of problems where the Habit of Mind you are trying to assess is one of the really important ones to the solving the problem, part of the critical cluster. Don’t worry, we give you some hints and suggestions along the way.
2. Assessing your success, not the Habit of Mind
The Habits of Mind Leaner Profile asks you think about problems that you regularly encounter, where the Habit of Mind is part of the critical cluster. It then asks, what degree of success you usually achieve when confronting these problems. This is important, when you complete your profile, you’re not trying to assess your Habits of Mind directly. You’re assessing the degree of success that level of development brings you.
Why do it this way? There’s several reasons. For now, the most important reason is that it’s much easier to gauge the objective level of success you achieve, rather than try to subjectively assess your Habit of Mind.
The questionnaire that creates your Learner Profile asks you to describe the degree of success you achieve on this scale:
Excel – Extremely high quality achieved. Completed well within any constraints. Possibly exceeded requirements. Very few if any errors.
Achieve – All outcomes reached. Met all key criteria. No significant errors. Completed within any constraints
Complete – Satisfactory outcome achieved. Any errors are minor. Some constraints exceeded, but with minimal negative impact.
Struggle – Some outcomes not met. Notable errors made. Some constraints may have been exceeded resulting in negative impacts
Fail – Major outcomes not achieved. Significant errors and/or constraints exceeded resulting in significant negative impacts.
Avoid – you take steps to avoid these problems. You might reduce your role, or absent yourself.
Ok. So you’ve got the basics:
- Think of problems where the Habit of Mind is critical to success,
- Measure the degree of success you achieve.
Your access code should be arriving shortly. Check your inbox and head on over to create your first Habits of Mind Learner Profile!