Berea Elementary School is
Growing Minds of All Kinds with Habits for the Mind
Do you know how long it takes to make or break a habit? Current research states that it takes approximately twenty-eight days for habits to be formed or broken. At Berea Elementary, our students, teachers and staff collaborate on a daily basis to form productive habits and extinguish unproductive ones. As we strive for continuous improvement in relation to our school mission, we implore our students to practice good habits that foster positive academic, emotional, social and physical growth on a daily basis. Using our school mission as our compass, we promote habits that enhance each area based around the notion that practice makes permanent.
Our entire staff has formed the habit of focusing on the continuous academic growth of our students. Over the last two years, our teaching staff has woven authentic literacy experiences (literacy activities that are purposeful, meaningful and strategic) throughout our Literacy Collaborative instructional framework. While Literacy Collaborative has enabled our teachers to focus on each student’s individual growth, our data pinpointed an instructional void: the need to nurture higher level thinking skills among all our students. Higher level thinking skills ensure students dive deeper into material in order to obtain a thorough understanding of content, develop opinions, devise arguments for or against an issue, and much more. These skills encourage students to evaluate and synthesize information from multiple sources in order to apply powerful connections and articulate their ideas with skill and clarity.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that literacy skills impact intelligence, profoundly affecting a child’s life and career options as well as their understanding of the world. By adopting the concept of authentic literacy, which involves generous amounts of purposeful reading, writing and talking, our staff is focused on nurturing powerful minds in all our students. While researching avenues to infuse the higher level thinking skills into our daily instruction, we have begun to incorporate authentic literacy experiences using the Habits of Mind, referenced in the book Results Now by Mike Schmoker (2006) as our foundation.
The Habits of Mind focus on five areas which include critically examining evidence, seeing multiple viewpoints, making connections, imagining alternatives, and understanding relevance. These five areas work in tandem to create a rigorous instructional outline for our students, as well as a planning rubric for our teaching staff. Our staff rapidly discovered that tapping into the Habits of Mind created a paradigm shift in their lesson planning process. On a daily basis, our students are asked to exercise the Habits of Mind while reading, writing, calculating and thinking. Each habit capitalizes on their current abilities while challenging their higher level thought processes. Our students are making connections across subject areas, as well as educated inferences related to an array of literary genres. Furthermore, our teachers are challenging students to examine evidence from multiple sources in order to understand the overall relevance of content, procedures and ideas.
Developing the Habits of Mind is critical to each student’s intellect and supports college readiness skills that are profoundly missing from most educational institutions. In order for the Habits of Mind to develop into life-long habits for our students; it is imperative that each student is acutely aware of their own academic growth related to these habits. This awareness is termed metacognition. During our student presentation for the Board of Education in May, we will illustrate how this awareness can be nurtured in the classroom. One of our primary teachers will present a data wall divided into sections representing various higher level thinking skills on which the class is currently focusing. Students place their names within the sections that depict the higher level skills they are working on and/or have mastered. This data wall process challenges students to be aware of their strengths in order to overcome any deficit areas they may encounter.
In order for these higher level skills to become life-long habits, they must be reinforced consistently. Children must encounter authentic literacy experiences at both home and school to provide the essential practice that makes these habits permanent. While we all know that reading to and with children on a daily basis is necessary, fostering the Habits of Mind should be an aspect of each literacy experience. Although it may seem overwhelming to nurture these habits at home, it primarily involves asking questions that encourage children to think within, beyond and about the text. The following are activities connected to each one of the Habits of Mind and will assist parents in reinforcing these habits at home:
· Critically examine evidence in a text: After reading “The Little Red Hen,” evaluate the hen’s character. Is she selfish or fair?
· See the world from multiple viewpoints: Read both “The Three Little Pigs” and “The True Story of the Three Little Pigs” by A. Wolf. Make an argument for either the pigs or the wolf.
· Make connections and detect patterns among ideas and perspectives: Compare and contrast “City Mouse and Country Mouse” for their values. How do these values impact their choice of neighborhoods in which to live?
· Imagine alternatives (What if?): After reading “The Cat in the Hat,” what would have happened if the mother came home while the Cat was still cleaning the house?
· Understand relevance (What difference does it make?): Does the author’s choice of setting in the book, “Little Red Riding Hood” affect the plot of the story and why?
While we continue to foster positive habits at school, we invite all parents, family members and caregivers to support these habits at home. In order for practice to become permanent, practice must occur on a daily basis outside the school walls and throughout our Valley Central School District community. These habits should be nurtured at the dinner table, on our athletic fields, during music lessons and within our conversations. These habits will only become permanent when they become routine. As we nurture our students into life-long learners, we inspire them to develop positive academic, emotional, social and physical habits that will last a lifetime. There is no time like the present to nurture healthy habits in our children. Twenty-eight days starts…now.
Respectfully submitted,
Hope Stuart
Principal