Habits of Mind

As I continue to work my way through Deborah Meier's The Power of Their Ideas, I'm particularly struck by one of the key organizing structures around which the intellectual work done at CPESS revolves: their "Habits of Mind."

From my work at High Tech High, I was already familiar with such ideas, but they were sort of an endangered species in the years when I worked there. Now that I'm seeing them described in Meier's book, I'm reminded how much they resonate with my own values about what defines work worth doing. The six habits that they emphasized at CPESS were:

Evidence: "How do we know what we know?"
Viewpoint: "Who's speaking?"
Connections: "What causes what?"
Supposition: "How might things have been different?"
Relevance: "Who cares?" "So what?"

Once upon a time, HTH had adopted this same set of habits (although they preferred the term "perspective" over "viewpoint"). I think they should bring them back.

I realize now, as I don't think I have done before, that I imply a lot of these habits in the work I do with my students, particularly the first three, although I rarely make explicit the manner in which these habits can be learned and cultivated. The fourth - supposition - is the one I practice least in my own life, and so is not surprisingly the one I promote least in my own classroom.

The fifth - relevance - is the one I think we as teachers do the worst job of addressing with our students. What I mean is that we too rarely have a good answer to the questions, "Why are we learning this?" or "When am I ever going to use this in my life?" Although the relevance of our curricular content is usually (hopefully) clear to us, it's not made clear to students. It's not surprising, then, when students have a hard time applying it to their own work.

References:
Meier, D. (1995). The Power of Their Ideas, (50). Boston: Beacon Press.