Habits of Mind

Instructional Strategies

Persistence

• Model how you work through academic challenges, such as reading a difficult book or completing a complex project. 
• Emphasize the long-term benefits of an activity rather than the immediate gratification, what they’ll get out of a project rather than how fun it is. 
• Teach strategies for coping with challenges, such as thinking of alternative courses of action.

Managing Impulsivity

• Provide scaffolding through software, group activities, and checklists to help learners analyze problems and plan projects carefully before beginning to work on them. 
• Draw connections between quality products and thoughtful processes.

Listening to Others with Understanding and Empathy

• Teach active listening strategies. 
• Have learners reflect on what they have learned from their peers. 
• Create an environment where learners take pride in group accomplishments.

Thinking Flexibly

• Model changing your mind about an issue after learning more information about it. 
• Teach strategies for generating multiple solutions and taking multiple perspectives about problems.

Metacognition

• Provide scaffolding such as checklists to help learners in planning and monitoring their work. 
• Ask learners to discuss the thinking strategies they are using with their peers. 
• Prompt learners to think about their thinking processes at various points during work on a project.

Striving for Accuracy and Precision

• Provide learners with a variety of high-quality models and point out what makes each model excellent. 
• Co-develop rubrics for evaluating projects. 
• Provide tools to help learners evaluate their own work according to established criteria.

Questioning and Posing Problems

• Model curiosity about academic topics. 
• Provide opportunities and tools to support questioning. 
• Highlight and praise exemplary learner questioning.

Applying Past Knowledge to New Situations

• Explain new concepts in terms of familiar ones. 
• Ask learners to draw connections between their experiences and what they are learning. 
• Use comparative language such as metaphors and analogies to explain new concepts, and encourage learners to do the same to describe their understanding.

Thinking and Communicating with Clarity and Precision

• Share examples of good writing and speaking in the subject that learners are studying, such as good science writing or good statistical explanations. 
• Model both giving and using feedback to improve a project. 
• Teach learners effective strategies for evaluating their own writing and speaking and for responding constructively to the communications of others.

Gathering Data through All Senses

• Provide opportunities for learners to think about subjects in non-conventional ways, such as movement in math or music in science.

Creating, Imagining, and Innovating

• Have a variety of materials and equipment available. 
• Expose learners to a wide range of creative products. 
• Set an example by thinking creatively yourself and sharing your products, your processes, and your joy in your accomplishments.

Responding with Wonderment and Awe

• Take learners out of the classroom for mini-field trips in the neighbourhood, and encourage them to notice things that interest them. 
• Share those things related to academic subjects that move you.

Taking Responsible Risks

• Minimize the consequences of failure when learners take academic risks. 
• Create an environment in which trying new things is rewarded even when the results may not be what you wish.

Finding Humour

• Discuss the appropriate use of humour in the classroom. 
• Design instructional activities which allow learners to use humour to accomplish academic tasks. 
• Create an environment that is relaxed and encourages learners to play with language and events in humourous ways.

Thinking Interdependently

• Teach specific skills for working with others such as active listening, building on others’ ideas, and drawing out quiet group members. 
• Take notes while learners are working in small groups and summarize the good and bad things that you noticed in a class discussion. 
• Teach learners strategies for working through problems whenever possible instead of intervening. 
• Highlight the accomplishments of successful groups and point out the strategies they used to work well together.

Learning Continuously

• Share your enthusiasm for beginning new tasks and learning new skills, and invite community members into the classroom to tell about their experiences at lifelong learning. 
• Recognize learners’ efforts to go above and beyond learning activities. 
• Provide suggestions for activities that enhance what learners are learning.