Learning & Leading With Habits of Mind

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Integrating the Habits of Mind:

ADistrict Perspective

Nancy Skerritt, Emilie Hard, and Kristin Edlund

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When you start on your journey, pray that the road is long, full of

adventure, full of knowledge.

—C.P.Cavafy,The Journey to Ithaca

Seeking full implementation of the Habits of Mind has defined our jour-
ney of almost two decades in the Tahoma School District in Washington
State. We are committed to a curriculum designed to prepare our stu-
dents for living and working in the 21st century. Our journey officially
began when we adopted a set of outcomes in 1990 that captured the dis-
trict’s learning goals for our students. These include becoming self-
directed learners, collaborative workers, community contributors, quality
producers, effective communicators, and complex thinkers. We realized
at the time that to achieve the outcomes, students would need to acquire
thinking skills and Habits of Mind rather than a specific body of content.
Our ambition was to provide opportunities to learn the outcomes at each
grade level and in every content area.
At the heart of our foundational work was the identification of a spe-
cific thinking skills curriculum. This curriculum consists of 20 thinking
skills and the Habits of Mind, which we originally described as “thinking