Habits of Mind

Today marks the close of our second trimester.  The report cards you will receive next Thursday are meant to give you a point-in-time snapshot of your children's skills relative to grade level course expectations.  The rubric scores for each course topic provide valuable information on your child's pattern of proficiencies relative to the specific targets they have been working toward over the past twelve weeks.  Easily lost in the clinical sequence of defining, instructing, and assessing these learning targets, however, is a reality we must keep ever before us; namely, that children are not assembly line products.  They develop at different rates and with distinct patterns of strength and challenge at each stage of development.  This means that although the target goal for each student in each topic of each course is to achieve mastery (a rubric score of 3), the reality is that few students will follow the same trajectory of skill development in all topics of all courses at the same time.  And that's OK - when we remember that our goal is not the grade, but the learning.

Pay attention to the overall picture of your child's academic progress so you will know what to celebrate and where your child will need some strategic support - but pay closer attention to the learner behaviors that will scaffold ongoing progress, and, therefore, the highest possible long term outcomes for your own uniquely beautiful child.

Our elementary report cards list a number of these behaviors - intermingled with personal and social growth skills.  In middle school, however, you're left to decipher these from the teacher comments.  Behaviors to support fall largely into three areas:

• Personal responsibility - This includes completing assignments, being on time, and bringing necessary materials home and to class 
• Learner engagement - Refers to focused participation in class and in learning experiences; listening actively, thinking deeply, answering and asking learning questions, and producing best effort/best work
• Productive group process skills - Include listening to, respecting, and building on the contributions of peers in discussion and work production, maintaining an outcome-based focus in partner work and small group work settings, and contributing meaningfully to a collaboratively-defined work product.

A well-respected pathway to these productive behaviors are the sixteen Habits of Mind defined by Arthur Costa and Bena Kallick.  The development of these personal habits is where success or failure fundamentally begins.  Refer to the habits to help strategize some ways to support your child in starting or continuing on a road to developing the behaviors that undergird academic progress - and intellectual development.

Additionally, a very specific practice correlated with academic achievement is reading. Much.  Regularly.  Deeply.  If daily reading and listening to reading are not already part of your family culture, consider adding this routine that may well be the single most important factor in academic success across disciplines.

Finally, it's good to periodically stop and remember that skills don't simply emerge with maturation.  Just as in athletics or music or any other area of skill development, academic accomplishment will come through a process we call a "gradual release of responsibility."  In the early years, adults must necessarily own the responsibility for shaping the development of the foundational habits and behaviors upon which academic learning rests.  It's only with incremental practice that we can expect to successfully release the responsibility for these behaviors to our children.  

Toward that end, consider structuring next week's report card review around the habits and learner behaviors.  Then, support your child in a strategic plan to develop just one or two of them.  These directed efforts, together with an active daily reading plan, will most certainly scaffold a new level of success in the months ahead!