Habits of Mind

Ted Sizer

A wise school's goal is to get its students into good intellectual habits.(1) Just which habits can be grist for properly endless debate, but the extent of agreement among Americans on these is very high. For example:

The habit of perspective: Organizing an argument, read or heard or seen, into its various parts, and sorting out the major from the minor matter within it. Separating opinion from fact and appreciating the value of each.

The habit of analysis: Pondering each of these arguments in a reflective way, using such logical, mathematical, and artistic tools as may be required to render evidence. Knowing the limits as well as the importance of such analysis.

The habit of imagination: Being disposed to evolve one's own view of a matter, searching for both new and old patterns that serve well one's own and other's current and future purposes.

The habit of empathy: Sensing other reasonable views of a common predicament, respecting all, and honoring the most persuasive among them.

The habit of communication: Accepting the duty to explain the necessary in ways that are clear and respectful both to those hearing or seeing and to the ideas being communicated. Being a good listener.

The habit of commitment: Recognizing the need to act when action is called for; stepping forward in response. Persisting, patiently, as the situation may require.

The habit of humility: Knowing one's right, ones debts, and one's limitations, and those of others. Knowing what one knows and what one does not know. Being disposed and able to gain the needed knowledge, and having the confidence to do so.

The habit of joy: Sensing the wonder and proportion in worthy things and responding to these delights.

Most of these habits may be cast as skills. Ask the student: Can you analyze this matter for me and then tell me what you find? However, the purpose of education involves more than that. Education is so to convince an adolescent of the virtue of these skills and so to give opportunities to practice the skills that they become almost second nature, and graduates live with them fully after they leave school. Of course I listen. Of course I insist on knowing the facts. Of course I am not fully sure about this new matter, but I know what I know and what I do not yet know. Of course you may have a better idea than mine, and I'll listen to it carefully and with and open mind. Of course I'll do something about this if the situation warrants it. Having the skills today is but a small part of the whole. Being committed to using them consistently tomorrow is the crux of it.

Habit obviously, relates to disposition: I have to want to apply these skills. Therefore I must be convinced of their utility and reasonableness. Good schools endlessly labor at this task of persuasion. Good schools self-consciously display these habits in their own functioning. Everything about these schools reinforces the argument that the habits are worthwhile.

These habits reflect value. They neither denote nor connote mere technical expertise, usable skills. They are loaded with judgments, for teachers and parents as well as for students. The lines between habits and are good and bad, slovenly and devoted, personal and collective are blurred. There is no escaping this. A school devoted to the inculcation of certain sorts of intellectual habits –- the qualities of mind that engender respect – will tangle endlessly, and revealingly for their students, over matters of judgment. Good schools welcome this. In fact only from such tangling can those habits we most respect emerge.

Good schools focus on habits, on what sorts of intellectual activities will and should inform their graduates' lives. Not being clear about these habits leads to mindlessness, to institutions that drift along doing what they do simply because they have always done it that way. Such places are full of silly compromises, of practices that boggle commonsense analysis. And they dispirit the Horace Smiths, who know that the purpose of education is not in keeping school but in pushing out into the world young citizens who are soaked in habit s of thoughtfulness and reflectiveness, joy, and commitment. Further, mindless schools may show students a superficial picture of that which is to be most highly valued, what the schools puts forward as its most respected students. Kids with high scores will always be ridiculed, human jealousy being what it is. But they will fare much better in a school which knows that the display of knowledge, however accurate or rich, in only a beginning, and that students who can use knowledge, who are seemingly in the instinctive habit of using it, are the ones deserving of highest honor.

From Horace's School, 1992, Pp. 73-75.
by Theodore R. Sizer

1. See Rexford Brown, Schools of Thought: How the Politics of Literacy Shape Thinking in the Classroom (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991).

Debbie Meier

We created the CPESS habits of mind ... as we realized the need for unity across disciplines and a focus on the essential. We didn't want an endless laundry list, so we wrote down five, based on many years of watching kids and observing our own habits, and now they are posted in most classrooms... They are at the heart of each curriculum as well as being the basis for judging student performance. We never quite write them out the exact same way, and over the years we've realized they are constantly evolving in their meaning. They are:

-The question of evidence, or "How do we know what we know?"

-The question of viewpoint in all its multiplicity, or "Who's speaking?"

-The search for connection and patterns, or "What causes what?"

-Supposition, or "How might things have been different?"

-Why any of it matters, or "Who cares?"

Lawyers tell us these "habits" are very lawyerly, but journalist and scientists tell us they are basic to what they do as well. As a historian I recognize them as being at the heart of my field. As a principal I find them useful when "naughty" kids are sent to my office. I ask them to put their version of the story on one side and that of whoever sent them to me on the other, then we discuss whether what's happened is part of a pattern, how else it might have been dealt with, and, finally, why it matters.

In order to make such "habits" habitual, they need in-depth practice. Young people need to be immersed in their use. We want to demand evidence in the form of performance at real, worthwhile tasks. To do this we devote ourselves to covering less material, not more, and to developing standards that are no less though and no less rigorous than those associated with traditional displays of academic excellence but sometimes different. It's very hard to use these habits in the typical survey course, no matter how provocatively taught. As we rush thought a hundred years of history in less than a week, or cover complex new scientific ideas one after another, there's no time to study conflicting evidence, read multiple view-points, detect the difference between false analogies and real ones, not to mention imagine how else it might have happened.

As teachers, we see the habit of asking these kinds of questions as critical to our students' education not because our kids have special advantages, but because it's what we want for all children. But building standards based on these habits on mind takes time, takes translating back and forth between theory and practice, between our ideas and samples of real student work. Can a student do a distinguished piece of work at CPESS without demonstrating breadth of knowledge about the larger context? Is it okay if Francis know a lot about Japan's involvement in World War II and uses diverse sources with considerable discrimination but seems to know very little about the same war in Europe? It is okay to be comfortable with ideas and experimental evidence in the field of genetics but superficially ignorant about a presumable simpler phenomenon like photosynthesis? Teaching this way requires forms of rigor few of us have ever before demanded of ourselves. It doesn't mean dispensing with all shallower "survey" requirements, but it shifts the balance dramatically. And it creates anxiety as we ask, But what will other people say if our kids don't know x or y? Of course, in reality their peers who take the traditional courses don't remember x or y anyway. But while that's reassuring, it's a cop-out. So it's an endless tension, a see-sawing back and forth between "coverage" and making sense of things.

From The Power of Their Ideas, 1995. Pp 50-51
by Debbie Meier