Habits of Mind

Habits of mind and approaches to learning are critical to young students’ abilities to thrive in early and elementary science and STEM education. And they are valuable outside of these areas too! Habits of mind (HOM) have been connected to skills that current students will need as our society becomes increasingly technological (see graphic here). One version of HOM includes 16 of them, like persistence and thinking flexibility (see description here). Approaches to learning both incorporate and support habits of mind. Their importance is supported by the fact that the most recent national math and science standards both dedicate sections of their frameworks to these aspects of teaching and learning, even though they may not be explicit components of the standards themselves.

Because they are so important, we include some information about a few aspects here. However, there are more to these than we have space to include, and your professors may assign additional readings and activities to expand your thinking and reflections about them. Before you can support strong habits of mind, approaches to learning in your future students, you have to at least reflect on them in yourself as a learner (even if you do not feel they are fully developed!). Take a moment and reflect on the following questions before you continue reading. Write your answers down, so you can refer back to them in the following sections.

• What does it mean to be a flexible thinker?
• Do you view yourself as a flexible thinker?
• Can you remember a time when you changed your thinking/position on an idea based on new learning?
• Do you think of yourself as particularly good or bad at science or math?
• Do you think all children are naturally curious?

Mindsets. Do you think that someone is born either intelligent or not intelligent? Do you think that intelligence is fixed? If you do, you may have a fixed mindset. If you believe that actually we can change intelligence, we can impact our performance and skills by practice and by making mistakes and learning from them, you may have a growth mindset. Carol Dweck popularized these ideas in her work and research related to the impact of our mindsets on learning, teaching, and even performance in sports. We can think about how mindsets might apply to early and elementary science, math, and integrated STEM thinking and learning.

Curiosity. This may not be the first attribute you think about when you think about teaching science to your future students. But imagine what it is like to learn complex and sometimes abstract concepts about our world or universe, if you are not interested or curious. How can we encourage students to engage with doing the work to find out for themselves if the eraser will fall at the same rate as the textbook, if they are not curious about the phenomenon? Not all students will be curious about all the science topics you cover in a year, but if you figure out what they are curious about, that can be a starting point. If you figure out what YOU are curious about, and try to model that for them, you may be surprised at how your students’ curiosity grows. For example, in a unit on observable patterns caused by the earth’s rotation around the sun (TN 4.ESS1.2), a teacher might begin by asking students if their shadows are always the same length. She might follow-up by providing students with chalk and time outside at different times of the day to trace their shadows. Student observations of the phenomenon of changes in shadow length could lead to discussions of other patterns caused by the earth’s orbit around the sun, further explorations, and the development of models. This would likely be a more engaging approach to the topic than with a reading from a textbook and study of a figure showing the earth’s movement around the sun. Most children are born curious (and thus driven to learn from birth!), but it is also the onus of educators to nurture and sustain that curiosity – it is one of the primary drivers of science exploration. How has curiosity driven your own learning?