For more than 30 years, educators from around the globe have used the Habits of Mind to enhance their work (and often their lives). We developed this set of 16 thinking dispositions not as a program, but as a dynamic guide for fostering more engaging, illuminating, and skillful thinking. These dispositions—habits like thinking about your thinking and managing impulsivity—are framed in positive, growth-oriented language. Each is described by a verb ending in “ing”to signify that the behavior or way of thinking is always evolving and can always be improving if a person works at doing so.
Since our work on the Habits of Mind was first published by ASCD in the early 2000s, we’ve found that the original 16 are still timeless. But how educators use these habits, and how we talk about them, has adapted to the context and circumstances of the times (Costa & Kallick, 2008, 2009; Kallick & Zmuda, 2017). As we and others have fostered these dispositions within school communities through the Institute for Habits of Mind, we’ve seen educators become more confident and positive in their work, gaining self-efficacy and hope. And we’ve often seen teachers and leaders enhance their social-emotional skills.
When people have a common language to identify cognitive and emotional states that they experience, it helps them manage their interactions. Tapping into any of these habits helps teachers collaborate to meet complex challenges together—and often to find joy and camaraderie in the process. In this article, we will take a closer look at three habits that seem to be central to current issues in schools. We will unpack how these dispositions help educators manage their own health with more social and emotional intelligence. But first, let’s discuss metacognition, as it is foundational to all of the habits.
Metacognition: The Foundation
Metacognition, or thinking about one’s thinking, is essential to the development of social and emotional intelligence. It’s the uniquely human capacity to monitor and control our cognitive processes and mental habits. In thinking, people form internal questions as they search for information and process its meaning. During this process, they develop mental maps and plans of action. As people reflect, act, and analyze results of their actions, they realize that they rarely gain immediate, clear answers to their internal questions or get definitive answers for what’s best to do in their practice. There’s too much we can’t know about where our actions will ultimately lead for even frequent metacognition to steer any educator to total clarity about what’s ideal to do in their practice. So, an educator who thinks about their own thoughts, the actions they take, and the results they achieve learns that it’s OK to stumble; it’s by tripping again and again that we learn the path and how to walk it. Thus, becoming more reflective and tuned in to their own thinking can boost a person’s self-efficacy—their beliefs about their current capacity to learn and perform—and the degree to which they see meaning and value in their work.
Over the past 30 years, the Habits of Mind approach has grown from a concept introduced in an ASCD book to an organization that guides educators worldwide to improve their practice.
Several practices for strengthening metacognition can help us become more attentive to our behaviors and actions—and how those actions affect others or our organization’s culture. For example:
- Pay attention to the self-talk going on inside your head and your emotions as you move through situations in your school; mentally rehearse actions you plan to do, be an “inner coach,” question yourself, and be attuned to your thinking as you are acting.
- Check the assumptions you’re making about others; reflect on why others behave the way they do and consider what biases you may have in how you perceive others’ thinking.
- Mentally work through a plan: choose a strategy, monitor results and make adjustments over time, and apply learnings from the experience.
To show how helpful these habits can be in bolstering emotional intelligence, we expand here on 3 of the 16—persisting, thinking interdependently, and listening with understanding and empathy. These anecdotes and insights from practicing educators we’ve worked with show how they incorporate each habit into their efforts to build social and emotional intelligence—for themselves, their colleagues, or even their school culture.
1. Persisting
When faced with complex and uncertain situations, the habit of persistence helps an educator work through the frustration and confusion of finding a path for problem solving. Persisting and thinking about your thinking go hand in hand. As a teacher persists, for instance, she strengthens her capacity and confidence to thoughtfully choose one “best thing” to do whenever she doesn’t know what to do. She cuts through the noise.
These strategies can help an educator persist through a difficult challenge:
- Envision what it will look like and feel like when you have succeeded in meeting this challenge.
- Break the problem apart into steps. Work to accomplish each step that leads to the final outcome.
- Review the directions and criteria for success related to the challenge to check for any faulty assumptions or misunderstandings.
- Pose questions that may motivate your “why” for doing this work (“Why is it so important that I complete this task? What will happen if I do or don’t complete it?”) or reveal that this challenge can be set aside (“Might my time and persistence be better applied elsewhere to achieve my overall goal?”)
Adina Lubeek is an educator from the Netherlands enrolled in a certification program with the Institute for Habits of Mind. As she was learning deeply about the 16 dispositions, Adina reflected on how impactful persisting was in her recovery from back surgery. Doctors told her that she wouldn’t be able to resume in-school teaching duties for a number of months as she physically recovered. Working from home, she realized that she would need to have a plan to persist so she could be independent, productive, and impactful. She used positive self-talk to encourage herself and strategically planned for how she could manage some of the complex situations she would face. She set and celebrated small goals and wins, breaking the problem into steps. Adina transferred many of the insights gained through her long recovery into ways to bring persistence back to students and colleagues when she returned to work.
2. Thinking Interdependently
Thinking interdependently means knowing that we’ll benefit from participating in and contributing to each other’s ideas, innovations, and problem–solving strategies. Most activities in education require a breadth of knowledge, insight, and creativity that can only be accessed when people come together, are open to one another’s ideas, and achieve consensus by engaging in thoughtful discussions.
Priscila Freitas Torres, head of school from Escola Concept Schools in Brazil, has been working with her school communities to infuse Habits of Mind into daily practices. Students take part in many integrated projects that weave in thinking dispositions. For example, the project “Are You the Change You Want to See in the World?”, developed by educator Laís Pontes, aimed to enhance preschool children’s perceptions of humans’ interconnectedness, helping them to see themselves as individuals in a group, each with different needs, strengths, and learning opportunities. During this learning journey, children took part in a peace crane project. They exchanged origami cranes with peers around the world, including children from the PEEM Peace School in Ojo, Nigeria, drawing a symbol or message of peace on the wings. These learners were exposed to new languages and cultures while beginning to feel empowered to make a difference in their community, country, and world.
Another project, “Random Acts of Kindness,” supported children’s ability to solve problems together. The preschoolers were encouraged to solve their conflicts in a kind way. Students learned the importance of looking at one another as an indication that they were showing that they were paying attention. They reflected on how they used their bodies or hands and their facial expressions—and how to communicate gentleness while working or talking together. Throughout this project, learners engaged in experiences that involved the language of the habit of thinking interdependently and other habits that help people work collaboratively, such as listening with understanding and empathy or responding with wonderment and awe. These young thinkers began to understand the value of “we-ness” as much as “me-ness”—a perception that’s helpful to anyone working in classrooms, PLCs, or at a community meeting!
Strategies to develop this disposition include:
- Contribute to a common goal, seek collegiality, and draw on the resources of others.
- Regard conflict as valuable, trusting one’s ability to manage differences in a group in productive ways. Call attention to times when the group is not behaving thoughtfully and work to protect safety for participation.
- Invite feedback to raise consciousness of how one’s actions affect others in the group or others’ behavior.
3. Listening with Understanding and Empathy
Educators spend a significant amount of time listening to others. However, being able to listen to, empathize with, and understand another person’s point of view is a complex, multilayered skill. When listening, we must balance monitoring our own thoughts while simultaneously listening to the other person speak. Dan Vollrath, a Habits of Mind Institute coach and special educator at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in New Jersey, shares how he weaves this habit into his classroom:
Listening with understanding and empathy runs deep within all aspects of my classroom. . . . Every Monday, I select three students who will serve as ambassadors for the week. The ambassadors’ roles for the week are creating ideas, activities, and strategies [to help our classroom be] a well-balanced SEL environment. One major role of an ambassador is to serve as a support system. If a fellow student is feeling anxious or stressed, they can seek out an ambassador to speak with. Offering everyone a chance to be a leader in the classroom can increase interpersonal skills, social-emotional awareness, and the opportunity to listen with understanding and empathy to peers. If a student needs more support than an ambassador can provide, it’s important to have an alternative support system in place—often the teacher—that the ambassador can connect their peer to.
Teachers and leaders, of course, also need to learn to listen well. Strategies that teachers tell us help both students and educators become better listeners include:
- Provide space for peers or colleagues to share their thoughts without interruption. Ask clarifying questions to better understand the other person’s perspective, and paraphrase what you hear to check that you truly understand.
- Allow space for disagreement—but make certain students check their understanding first before they offer an opinion that conflicts with a peer’s. In the end, students may disagree sharply, but they’ll be clear about where their differences are. It’s also important to ask students to seek commonalities.
- Look for indicators of another’s feelings or emotional state. One teacher has students practice how to pay attention to what a partner is saying (e.g., “I was so disappointed that we didn’t win the game!”) and look for cues about what that person’s body language is expressing. The student might then show empathy by reflecting back on what they notice, saying, for example, “You’re feeling sad. Tell me more about it.”
- Practice holding one’s own judgments, opinions, and prejudices aside and just focusing on and listening to the other person.
30 Years and Still Going
Over the past 30 years, the Habits of Mind framework—and the work of people involved to teach about these ways of thinking—has grown from a concept introduced in an ASCD book to an organization that guides educators worldwide to improve their practice and emotional intelligence. Committing to these habits requires the will, the intention, and strategic moves that incrementally add up over time. The Institute for Habits of Mind works to educate and support teachers, leaders, and students to develop more awareness of their emotional states, gain greater clarity of what to do when they are faced with ambiguity and conflict, and express empathy and curiosity about others. Our mission is to create a more thoughtful and peaceful world.
Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind
A comprehensive guide to shaping schools around Habits of Mind, a foundation for leading, teaching, learning, and living well in a complex world.
