Purpose.The purpose of this lesson design is to plan for, experience,
and reflect upon the use of the Habits of Mind when presented with cog-
nitive tasks—or when problems may emerge from the environment—that
are challenging, controversial, ambiguous, or enigmatic, and whose
answers are not immediately known.
Strategies. A cognitively demanding task, such as those described in
the following examples, engages students skillfully in a variety of authen-
tic, rich activities that require strategic planning, creative approaches, and
the application of organized, multiple, and complex thinking skills and
Habits of Mind. These activities might include solving a problem, mak-
ing a difficult decision, resolving polarities, creating something new, or
investigating an unknown. Here are three examples:
•A secondary science teacher asks her students to consider a sce-
nario in which a 15-year-old boy obtains a hair sample from a person he
believes is his father, without that person’s permission. The students
are then asked to answer the question “Should paternity exclusion test-
ing be allowed without the authorization of the people involved?”
(Moulds, 2006).
•A 5th grade teacher asks his students to compare and contrast two
versions of the famous story of Pocahontas and John Smith by reading the
fictionalized account The Double Life of Pocahontasby Jean Fritz (1987)
and watching the Disney movie. Students work in groups to take accurate
notes about the characters, setting, plot, and events that are depicted in
the movie and to extract precise details from the text. Students draw con-
clusions about the accuracy of historical events after finding significant
patterns in the similarities and differences between the two sources (Rea-
gan, 2009).
•A 1st grade teacher organizes the class into small groups and pre-
sents each group with a strong horseshoe magnet and a wide variety of
objects made of different elements: wood, metals, glass, cloth, ceramics,
and paper. She asks her students to group the materials according to those
that a magnet will or will not pick up. From their classification and exper-
iments, students will describe the properties of each group of objects and
draw conclusions as to which materials are attracted to magnets.
72 Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind