students’ prior knowledge and level of achievement. We may have an idea
of common errors or misconceptions and plan for these to be addressed.
With all of this forethought, we plan a series of learning activities designed
to build students’ understandings, skills, and knowledge so the students
can achieve these learning goals.
When it comes to teaching Habits of Mind, we use the same planning
process as we do for other aspects of our teaching. We make the Habits of
Mind an explicit outcome of our teaching. We consider the students’ cur-
rent level of achievement and prior knowledge of the Habits of Mind we
are addressing. We plan for common misconceptions or difficulties to be
addressed, and, most important, we sequence a series of learning experi-
ences designed to develop students’ Habits of Mind so they can become
the skillful and effective problem solvers we would like them to be.
Although effective teachers have a clear vision of what development
and improvement of their students’ learning looks like, describing the
development of a Habit of Mind may be more difficult. In Chapter 4 we
described five dimensions of growth. Not only do we want students to
explore the meanings of the Habits of Mind, we also want them to
become more skillful in their application of a Habit of Mind. We want
them to apply the Habits of Mind in increasingly diverse situations, we
want them to place an ever-higher value on these habits above other pat-
terns of behavior, and we want them to continuously strive for self-
improvement. Once recognized, these dimensions can help us design
activities to develop our students’ Habits of Mind.
In designing appropriate activities, the first two approaches to con-
sider are the following:
•Cognitively Demanding Tasks.
•Building Intuitive Awareness.These approaches to lesson design might be labeled “teaching forthe
Habits of Mind” because they simply create classroom conditions in
which the Habits of Mind will be encountered, labeled, recognized, and
reinforced. When a school’s curriculum is rich in these cognitively
demanding tasks and when teachers use the language, the development
of the Habits of Mind is expected or hoped for. We refer to this situation
70 Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind