Habits for Learning: Cultivating 21st Century Attitudes in Our Students

Before starting this reading series, I had a fairly hazy sense as to what exactly 21st century learning really meant. In my uninitiated mind, many thinkers in the field of 21st century learning seemed to refer to their goals as self-evident and justifying their ends of innovation, inasmuch as their goals are radically different than conventional learning. I had heard collaboration tossed around as a key term; in other PBL contexts, I've heard a tremendous amount about self-paced project building.

I was pleased to discover P21 - The Partnership for 21st Century Learning and its research, standards, and detailed framework for implementing 21st century learning. At its core, P21's model revolves around the "4C's": Creativity, Critical Thinking, Collaboration, and Communication. Learning that enables students to access, develop, master, and showcase each "C" is looking towards the future of education, work places, and civilization, writ large. Project Based Learning, it seems, structures its standards and outcomes to allow full expression of each C.

I've also recently encountered two works on effective habits and attitudes that ensure the success of high school age students. In thinking about the underlying values or even habits to best realize 21st century learning, then, each work offers insight into adolescent psychology and developmentally appropriate dispositions, with the direction of such insight informing best academic and non-academic behaviors. In what follows, I briefly read through two works, Sean Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens (1998, 2014) and Angela Maiers' Classroom Habitudes (2012) with the aim of summary and application of both works for 21st century learning.

***

Covey's Seven Habits opens with the assumption that habits shape our being, not the other way around. His seven habits are broken into three "types" for teens' development: private, public, and renewal. The seven habits, it seems are both incremental--one builds on the next--but they're also stand-alone habits.

The private, first three habits are:

1. Be proactive
2. Begin with the end in mind
3. Put first things first

As Covey's model assumes that interpersonal success requires first the mastery of personal, often hidden challenges. Self-mastery before building communities and overcoming interpersonal challenges. 

First, being proactive means knowing that "you are the force;" keep promises to yourself and build your own sense of self-worth by magnifying your gifts. Don't fall prey to "victimitis."

Next, begin with the end in mind: write a personal mission statement; write personal goals. Check your habits related to procrastination. Beginning with an end in mind means that your habits don't reflect a life of leisurely apathy. Every day matters and builds to the end, whatever that might be. 

The final of the first three private habits demands that teens prioritize by planning ahead--and noticing how such planning is liberating in that it frees them to do things well and enjoy their lives. Putting first things last demonstrates learned behaviors related to procrastination that are extremely difficult to break.

The next three habits are in the public and social sphere:

1. Think Win-Win
2. Seek First to Understand, then to be Understood
3. Synergize

Here, Covey does good work helping teens understand how habits of competition for the sake of competition can often lead to destructive social habits. 

Think Win-Win means that having an "everyone can win" attitude removes the focus, in striving to succeed, on others. Life is not a "vicious competition," Covey writes, and habits of focusing on one's own standards and goals for success (as first articulated in the previous triad) are not mutually exclusive of others' succeeding, too. 

The next step, then, in acknowledging others' ability to succeed is giving them a voice through first listening before needing to be understood. Again, this builds on the private victories of the first triad: if you don't need others' approval, then you can succeed in your own realm and also listen to others' challenges and successes without needing to interject your own. 

Finally, now that you have made space for another, you can also work with that other, too. Synergy here means celebrating diversity; it also means working cooperatively with others without any roadblocks related to cliques or prejudice. 

The final habit, for Covey, ensures the success of the previous six: "Sharpen the Saw" or Renewal. Here, Covey argues that developing positive recreational, exercise, and life habits unrelated to the academic and social will enforce and reenforce their continued success. Essentially: avoid burn-out at all costs, as the success of the previous six depends on not burning out. 

While Covey's work is enduring and somewhat timeless in its attention to developmental stages, it is not an obvious work for developing 21st century skills in the classroom. 

***

In Maiers' work, on the other hand, the emphasis falls more on teaching habits and attitudes, and in many more ways than Covey's work, Classroom Habitudes links the development of certain habits and attitudes in the service of 21st century learning. Maiers' seven habits now include passion (her updated, 7th habit of learning), as well as the following dispositions of learning:

1. Imagination 
2. Curiosity
3. Self-Awareness
4. Courage
5. Adaptability
6. Perseverance
7. Passion

Each of the habitudes is a mindset, and one that, if mastered, demonstrates genius--a quality, for Maiers, that is accessible to and can be cultivated by all. In Maiers' words, Geniuses give, take, share, and grow by:

• being diligently curious
• using their imaginations in creative and powerful ways
• facings fears in a challenging and courageous way
• persevering with tenacity to overcome hurdles large and small
• seeing inside themselves with a reflective honesty to use that awareness as an asset for growth
• living and loving passionately
• always understanding the importance of the work and their role in making it successful

Ultimately, each disposition should be cultivated through classroom learning, and classroom learning should generate opportunities, too, for each disposition's expression. I find that in my own classroom, I could be asking myself if and how I'm cultivating any/some/all of these dispositions within each unit and as part of each goal and outcome. As Maiers shows in her conclusion, not what but how we teach influences the sort of people, thinkers, and workers that our students become. Moreover, and with this she ends, a challenge to all teachers in demonstrating such dispositions as central is the undertaking of the dispositions themselves in their own lives--"embodying and living the habitudes you wish you students to acquire and know:" (128)

• Remaining curious
• Using your imagination to seek new solutions
• Persevering through the many challenges you face
• Staying self-aware--notice what you model, monitor what you say, and seek continuos improvement in your practice
• embracing change by knowing you have the capacity to adapt--go forth with courage
• believing in your power to influence
• honoring your gifts and passion

Indeed, the best way to teach something as ambitious and relevant--yet distant in conventional pedagogy--is to take it on, first, as a personal practice of one's own. 

Up next: Hacking Leadership (2016), a monogoraph by two high school principals.