habits+of+mind

[[image:meier.jpg]]
Boston:Beacon Press, 2002.

Habits of Mind
As teachers, we see the habit of asking these kinds of questions as critical to our students' education not because our kids have special disadvantages, but because its what we want for all children. ... 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. p.51.

The task of creating environments where all kids can experience the power of their ideas requires unsettling not only our accepted organization of schooling and our unspoken and unacknowledged agreement about the purposes of schooling. Taking this task seriously also means calling into question our definitions of intelligence and the ways in which we judge each other. And taking it seriously means accepting public responsibility for the shared future of the next generation. It's a task for all of us, not just school people or policymakers or even parents alone. The stakes are enormous, and the answers are within our reach. p. 4.

The Habits... Evidence: How do we know what we know? Viewpoint: Who is speaking? Connections: What causes what, is connected to what? Supposition: How might things have been different, if...? Mattering: Who cares?