“We are Better Together Than Apart” — An Interview with Superintendent Greg Hutchings
Dr. Gregory Hutchings has been unapologetic about his stance when it comes to combatting issues of racial inequities. In this interview, he talks about racial equity being at the heart of his work and decision-making as exhibited by the school reopening plan that he proposed known as the Virtual PLUS+ model. Dr. Hutchings was […]
Leading With Habits of Mind in Mind: Positive Thoughts During Unprecedented Times
By Art Costa and Bena Kallick While we can all agree that the Habits of Mind pervade all subject areas and can be infused throughout most of all the activities in learning, we may never have thought of putting them to the test of being challenged during this COVID-19 crisis. Yet, the Habits of […]
How to Coach for Thinking, Not Imitation
By Bena Kallick, Art Costa, and Allison Zmuda Coaching to develop skills is different from coaching for thinking. When you coach students to build skill development, the expectation is that they will be learning by imitation. However, when you coach learning that requires deeper, strategic thinking, then your purpose is to ask the kind […]
A Note to the Habits of Mind Community
By Bena Kallick, Art Costa, and Allison Zmuda This is not the way any of us would have imagined the last weeks of school. Shuttering schools has caused families all around the world tremendous hardship as we all are doing our best to protect health, manage finances, balance schedules, and grieve loss of events/milestones/face-to-face interactions as well […]
Co-Creation Readiness: Tapping Different Perspective to Deepen Understanding and Inform Decisions
by Giselle O. Martin-Kniep and Bena Kallick “What we see depends mainly on what we look for.” ― John Lubbock “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are” – Anais Nin What might we learn from tapping the experiences and perspectives of parents, students, and teachers related […]
Leading in a VUCA World
By Art Costa, Bena Kallick, and Allison Zmuda When we walked into school each day prior to COVID-19, we were accustomed to living in an unpredictable environment. Many of us have developed some of our greatest strengths through that unpredictability. Through the many challenges, we become more creative, inventive, and flexible problem solvers. When […]
Curriculum Triage: How do we manage the instructional challenge right now?
By Bena Kallick and Allison Zmuda Stories are pouring in from all over the world — each rich with curricular ideas that resonate not only for the moment but also for the future. This is a time when our dispositions really matter. Each of these contributions shows how the authors are thinking flexibly and […]
Turning to the Habits of Mind in a Time of Crisis
By Bena Kallick and Allison Zmuda As we continue to scroll through our social media feeds and hear from you via email and video conferences, what is so heartwarming to see is how the dispositions have become a touchstone as we navigate personal and professional challenges. We always suggest that the habits are “what […]
Featuring Communication with Schools and Families
By Bena Kallick and Allison Zmuda As we read through these examples, we were struck by not only what they were saying but the ways in which each was presented. The tone was invitational, honest, and resilient. They ask their communities to read these with some creative possibilities for the present and a mind […]
Harnessing the Power of Metacognition in Fragile Times
By Art Costa, Bena Kallick, and Allison Zmuda As we are increasingly inundated with “great ideas,” free offers to use subscriptions to new tools, and mixed messages at the local, state, and national levels, how do we keep our head above water? We are getting seasick and need to find some moments of safe […]
Thinking Flexibly in the COVID-19 Crisis: Continuing to Grow Learning Practices in a Time of Uncertainty
This collection of posts is a co-created endeavor from a group of friends and colleagues who want to stay true to our own personalized mindset by co-creating and problem-solving ways to navigate the unexpected move to an online learning ecosystem. No one anticipated that we would be living through the Chinese definition of crisis: […]
Creating, Imagining and Innovating
by Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick Creativity is a survival skill! The brain is always looking for something that it didn’t know before, that’s not being taught to it, and to find a way to figure something out: that’s creative. Creative thinking has always been essential for human survival. According to Charles Limb, […]
Gathering Data Through All Senses
By Bena Kallick and Arthur L. Costa “Nothing reaches the intellect before making its appearance in the senses.” Latin proverb Does this quotation shock you? Or should we say, shock your senses? Perhaps it is surprising to realize that your brain reduces the world to its elementary parts: photons of light, molecules of smell, […]
Thinking and Communicating with Clarity and Precision
by Arthur L. Costa, Ed.D. and Bena Kallick, Ph.D. “Watch your thoughts, they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.” Frank Outlaw Do you ever hear your friends, siblings or adults in your life […]
Applying Past Knowledge to New Situations
by Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick “Learning is the ability to make sense out of something you observe based on your past experience and being able to take that observation and associate it with meaning.” Ruth and Art Winter Intelligent human beings learn from reflecting on and making sense of their experiences. When […]
Questioning and Problem Posing
By Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick Co-Founders, Institute for Habits of Mind International “The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination […]
Managing Impulsivity
By Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick Co-Founders, Institute for Habits of Mind “The sign of intelligent people is their ability to control emotions by the application of reason.” Marya Mannes Do you ever find yourself just blurting out what comes to mind? After you say it, do you regret it? Do you find […]
Metacognition: Monitoring Your Thinking
By Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick “When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself” Plato Game play can be a great time to strengthen your mind. Most games require strategic thinking. The problem is posed; the solution has multiple possibilities; the aim is to strategically either get to the direction most […]
Thinking Flexibly
By Arthur L. Costa, Ed.D and Bena Kallick Ph.D. “Change is the new normal: no industry is standing still these days, and this means that the innovation challenges we face are also constantly changing.” —Adam Richardson, creative director at Frog Design Do you ever find yourself fixed in your way of looking at a […]
Listening with Understanding and Empathy
By Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick “Empathic listening is a deep level of listening. When we are engaged in real dialogue and paying careful attention, we can become aware of a profound shift in the place from which our listening originates. We move from seeing the object world of things, figures and facts to listening to […]
Remaining Open to Continuous Learning
By Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick “All of the top achievers I know are lifelong learners… looking for new skills, insights and ideas. If they’re not learning, they’re not growing…not moving toward excellence.” Denis Waitley Successful people are in a continuous learning mode. Their confidence, in combination with their curiosity allows them to […]
Thinking Interdependently
By Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick “Getting along well with other people is still the world’s most needed skill. With it…there is no limit to what a person can do. We need people, we need the cooperation of others. There is very little we can do alone” Earl Nightingale Did you know that […]
Finding Humor
By Art Costa and Bena Kallick “Warning: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.” Ellie Katz Humor refers to our human ability to perceive and express a sense of the clever or amusing: What is the astronauts’ favorite place on the computer? The space bar Humor consists principally in the recognition and expression of […]
Taking Responsible Risks
by Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick “There is a time for daring and a time for caution, and a wise man knows which is called for.” John Keating, Teacher in Dead Poet’s Society So, the challenge, as John Keating puts it, is how do we become wiser? When we consider how to know […]
Responding with Wonderment and Awe
By Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick “Wonder is what sets us apart from other life forms. No other species wonders about the meaning of existence or the complexity of the universe or themselves.” Herbert W. Boyer On July 14, 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft zoomed within 7800 miles of Pluto snapping epic close […]
Persisting
By Arthur L. Costa, Ed.D. and Bena Kallick Ph.D. “If I had to select one quality, one personal characteristic that I regard as being most highly correlated with success whatever the field, I would pick the trait of persistence. Determination. The will to endure to the end, to get knocked down 70 times and get […]
Using Animation to Teach Habits like ‘Persisting’
This blog post is part of an ASCD partnership with Wonder Media. To see all blog posts from Wonder Media on the 16 Habits of Mind, you can click here. The challenge of teaching the Habits of Mind to very young students isn’t the language involved – children love the vocabulary, because they love anything that […]
Striving for Accuracy and Precision
“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job […]
DECLARATION ON EDUCATION FOR LIFE: Creating a Global Groundswell for Real Learning
Education should prepare all young people to deal well with the real challenges of life. It should enable them to deal with tricky situations, learn difficult things, and think clearly and ethically about what matters. Schools should be models of places where students learn how to live together with civility and respect for differences […]
School Transformation in the 21st Century
by Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick There is a gap between what is claimed as values for 21st Century educational essentials and what we value in our assessments of teachers, students, schools and even our nation’s educational systems. As we examine the many lists of desired skills and competencies to prepare our future […]
Habits for Success in School and Life
by Arthur Costa, Bena Kallick and Morton Sherman Take a moment to join us in a snapshot of a classroom we recently observed: Students are hard at work designing a travel brochure as a part of their study of Ireland. They need to think about how much it will cost by air or by […]
Habits of Mind: Dispositions of Success
By Arthur L. Costa Ed. D. and Bena Kallick, Ph.D. As we study the habits of mind, we are impressed by the international response to the questions: “What is it about your students that makes you think they need to learn how to think?” and “How would you like them to be?” These questions […]
Four Steps Down The Road for Success with CCSS
by Bena Kallick and Arthur Costa Rather than step backwards into the abyss of a “do your own thing” system in which questions of equality are left to the moment, let’s see if we can use the new Common Core State Standards as a way to move in a new direction. At the core […]
