Learning & Leading With Habits of Mind

Lochhead, J. (2001).Thinkback: A user’s guide to minding the mind. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Marzano, R., & Hutchins, ...

Thinking is an engagement of the mind that changes the mind. —Martin Heidegger,What Do We Mean When we ask teachers what they wa ...

Careful, intentional, productive questioning is one of the most pow- erful tools a skillful teacher possesses. Engaging students ...

thought? Some questions limit other people’s thinking. These limits must be avoided for students (and adults) to use the Habits ...

Questions That Stimulate Complex Thinking Questions invite different levels and complexity of thinking. Early in chil- dren’s li ...

activate the senses to gather data for processing at the next-higher level. Several cognitive processes are included at this lev ...

•“Name the states that border California.” (Naming) •“How does the picture make you feel?” (Describing) •“What word does this pi ...

•“What do you think caused the liquid to turn blue?” (Explaining) •“Arrange in groups the things that a magnet will and will not ...

hypothetically, to use their imagination, to expose a value system, or to make a judgment. These questions lend themselves most ...

•“How is rap music like another form of poetry?” •“How were the inventions of the industrial age a necessary form of development ...

The teacher also uses invitational stems to enable the thinking skill to be performed: •“As you recall... .” •“As you consider.. ...

Categorical Questions to Engage the Habits of Mind If we want students to become more mindful of the Habits of Mind and to pract ...

We o f f e r e x a m p l e s o f “ c a t e g o r i c a l qu e s t i o n s ” t h a t a r e i n t e n d e d t o d r aw forth one o ...

(Thinking and communicating with clarity and precision; thinking about thinking [metacognition]) •“As you talked to yourself abo ...

Self-generating questions facilitate comprehension. We know that reading with a purpose stimulates a more focused mind. Question ...

Learners construct knowledge as they build cognitive maps for organizing and interpreting new information. Effective teachers he ...

and organize information to complete the prompt. After the testing doc- uments were collected, the teacher asked students to wri ...

persist, and they could call on a highly developed system for reflection and metacognition. In the end, these students’ test sco ...

Constructingabstract concepts and practical products of thinking. Fa c i l i t a t i n gthe full range of Habits of Mind within ...

The Visual Brain The brain is capable of absorbing 36,000 images every minute. How can this incredible figure be true? It is bec ...