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What are the mindful habits of successful learners and how can an understanding of these habits help us better achieve our learning goals? This is the question Art Costa Bena Kallick set out to answer with their study of the Habits of Mind. In 'Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind' Costa and Kallick identify sixteen habits which when utilised promote deeper understanding, unlock creativity, encourage reflective thinking and scaffold problem solving for individuals and groups. 

"Habits of Mind are dispositions that are skillfully and mindfully employed by characteristically intelligent, successful people when they are confronted with problems, the solutions to which are not immediately apparent. When we draw upon these mental resources, the results are more powerful, of higher quality, and of greater significance than if we fail to employ those habits. Employing Habits of Mind requires a composite of many skills, attitudes cues, past experiences, and proclivities. It means that we value one pattern of thinking over another, and therefore it implies choice making about which habit should be employed at which time. It includes sensitivity to the contextual cues in a situation signaling that it is an appropriate time and circumstance to employ this pattern. It requires a level of skillfulness to carry through the behaviors effectively over time. Finally, it leads individuals to reflect on, evaluate, modify, and carry forth their learnings to future applications. It implies goal setting for improved performance and making a commitment to continued self-modification. While there may be more, 16 characteristics of effective problem-solvers have been have been derived from studies of efficacious problem-solvers from many walks of life. (Costa and Kallick, 2009)."

"Anxious, overconfident, curious, indifferent, angry, amused, lonely, hopeful, embarrassed, empowered, afraid, excited, diminished-teachers have seen all these emotions emerge from students as they engage with classroom content. Emotional responses to lessons often go through students' minds before they even begin to think about the material: This stuff is stupid/awesome/beyond me. I'm not comfortable with this. Finally, something I'm good at. Maybe somebody will notice I can't read. Let's see her find a mistake in that one-it's perfect. Does the teacher know I didn't study this last night? Some of us deny this reality and claim we aren't trained to guide children's emotional health. We think our purpose is to teach content and skills only, not to deal with the touchy-feely stuff. This attitude turns a blind eye to the developmental nature of the students we serve, and it runs afoul of how minds learn. Unless we're the most severe of sociopaths, we all have emotional responses that affect what we do. Adding to the messiness, our individual perspectives and experiences may put us out of sync with others' emotional states, even as the institutional nature of schools demands emotional synchronicity. The resulting miscommunication, blame, anxiety, and frustration are not the best ingredients for a good day at school. Teachers who deny the emotional elements of teaching and learning can become exhausted from ceaseless confrontations with students' emotional states, often blaming their personal stress and students' failure to learn on students' lack of motivation or maturity. They grow disconnected from students, creating an almost adversarial relationship with them: I need to get them to shape up. It's them or me. These students are hopeless; why should I bother? It's the parents who created this situation. This attitude can bleed into daily interactions with students and colleagues. It doesn't have to be this way. We can develop constructive responses to our own

"We all have them, some good and some bad. We pick them up from friends, family, and even strangers. But we may not recall who we picked them up from or when they began. Because we've practiced them over and over, these seemingly thoughtless repeated habits or behaviors, the pathways in our brain have become so broad, fast, and efficient in carrying them out that we do them automatically without even thinking. Yet these unconscious habits and behaviors add structure and order to our lives and help us to make sense of the world we live in. Our classrooms are full of them. We teachers are pros when it comes to employing and modeling good habits and routines that enable us to manage and carry out the many tasks and demands of teaching. And when it comes to teaching mathematics, we model and teach our students how to carry out procedures and algorithms flawlessly. But why is it that these same students often struggle when confronted with a problem to which the immediate answer is unknown?"

"This habit trains your mind to find the positive in every day and to identify your own agency in creating that positive. Rick Hanson, the author of The Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom, describes our brains as "like Velcro" for negative experiences -- we dwell on them, and "like Teflon" for positive experiences -- they slide right out of our minds. Our minds are practically programmed to notice and remember the things that aren't working -- and as teachers we know there are plenty of those each day. The little successes, growth, and positive moments are washed away by the tidal waves of what's not working in schools."

"Critical thinking is the engine of learning. Within this complex process or so many other relevant themes that contribute to learning: creativity, analysis, evaluation, innovation, application, and scores of other verbs from various learning taxonomies. So the following infographic from Mentoring Minds is immediately relevant to all educators, and students as well. It's a bit of a mash of Habits of Mind, various 21st century learning frameworks, and the aforementioned learning taxonomies, promoting collaboration, problem-solving, and real-world connections (standard "critical thinking fare" with Habits of Mind-sounding phrases such as "Open-Mindedness.""

"This past fall (2015), I was lucky enough to be a part of the K-8 Computer Science Standards Committee for the state of Arkansas. Arkansas is the first state in the US to require all students in K-8 learn computer science standards. These standards will be embedded in other curriculum areas, CS will not be a stand alone subject. All of Arkansas's high school's must have CS courses available for interested students as well. The Computer Science Standards (Linked HERE from the ADE Website) begin with a set of Computer Science Practices. These practices exhibit the "habits of mind" that it takes to succeed in the area of Computer Science. Many teachers will agree that these are also great habits to succeed in every subject."

"A glimpse of student athletes in peak physical condition vaping just moments after competing in a football game led Stamford High School Principal Raymond Manka to reconsider his approach to the epidemic. His school traditionally has emphasized discipline for those caught with e-cigarettes. Punishments become increasingly severe with each offense, from in-school suspensions to out-of-school suspensions and, eventually, notification of law enforcement. But Manka began thinking about it more as an addiction problem, and less of a behavior issue, after seeing the two players from another school vaping near their bus. "It broke my heart," said Manka, whose school is now exploring how to offer cessation programs for students caught vaping or with vaping paraphernalia. "We've got to figure out how we can help these kids wean away from bad habits that might hurt their body or their mind or otherwise create behaviors that can create habits that will be harmful for the remainder of their lives," he said."

"Coding brings young children rich opportunities for language development and the "notion of learning from mistakes," says Chip Donohue, the dean of distance learning and continuing education at the Erikson Institute in Chicago, a graduate school in child development. "We actually don't do enough of that with young kids." The sequencing and patterns involved in programming reinforce skills that have always been taught in the early years, but now also create "habits of mind that are essential for the 21st century," adds Donohue, also senior fellow at the Fred Rogers Center, which provides resources and information on media use with young children. When children code together, they are also learning from each other. "In the process of learning to code, people learn many other things. They are not just learning to code, they are coding to learn," Mitchel Resnick, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, wrote in an EdSurge article. "In addition to learning mathematical and computational ideas (such as variables and conditionals), they are also learning strategies for solving problems, designing projects, and communicating ideas." Resnick adds that these skills are useful to everyone "regardless of age, background, interests, or occupation.""

""Creativity isn't about music and art; it is an attitude to life, one that everybody needs," wrote the University of Winchester's Professor Guy Claxton in the lead-up to the 2014 World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) dedicated to creativity and education. "It is a composite of habits of mind which include curiosity, skepticism, imagination, determination, craftsmanship, collaboration, and self-evaluation." Sounds like the perfect skill set for equipping young people to navigate an increasingly complex and unpredictable world. Encouragingly, there's plenty of evidence -- from both research and practice -- that most of the above can be taught in the classroom. In fact, innovation and education experts agree that creativity can fit perfectly into any learning system. But before it can be incorporated broadly in curriculum, it must first be understood."

"Are you looking for ways to integration technology in your lesson plans and courses that provide for an engaging experience for you and your students? Fans of instructional technology know that it can be fun and inviting, and engaged students are far more likely to be learning. I believe that if you can get students involved and motivated effectively enough, you can improve their learning habits over the long term. With that in mind, here are 10 highly engaging uses of technology in the classroom, along with dozens of tools and resources for implementation. Most of these involve free web based tools, so that's an added bonus!"

"Although it's difficult to change the way the (school) system operates, it is possible to adjust how you operate within the system. Introducing meditation and mindfulness techniques in the classroom not only allows you to create a calmer environment, the practice has proven to have verifiable benefits on the human brain. A 2011 Harvard study of MRI images showed a thickening in the cerebral cortex (an area responsible in part for attention and emotional integration) in meditation participants in as little as 8 weeks. So, it's more than a good habit and some quiet time in the classroom, you may be helping the brains of your students develop even more than you realize. Where do you even begin teaching meditation when you may not be familiar with the practice yourself? Although it seems like an incongruous match, this is yet another area where technology steps in to make learning convenient, and a variety of apps offer options for every age, ability, and amount of available time. Here are a few to experiment with as you get started."

"The new school term is well under way and the early efficiencies are slipping and bad habits are slipping in. Homework is already being completed late and stuffed into heavy schoolbags before the kids stagger off again. In my own case, I seem to spend way too much time each day trying to persuade my son to take a day's worth of kit to school, rather than a week's. The problem is that the sanctions that come with forgetting sports kit or books is worse, in a child's mind, than the possibility, long hence, of back pain. But there's things that parents and teachers could do, which help take those damaging decisions out of the childrens' hands:"

"When Ernest Hemingway would stand at his desk, he had a funny habit as he wrote: when he was working on the tough bits he'd write in his boyish, punctuation-disregarding longhand. Once the juice started to flow, he'd switch to the typewriter. Hemingway was moving between unmediated and mediated work: the pencil to his page was unmediated, the typewriter mediated. The analog helped to find flow, the mediated helped find efficiency. As Clive Thompson, the author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better, would argue, working in analog or mediated ways changes how our brains and thoughts behave: anyone who's ever received a serendipitous answer from someone on Twitter has experienced how technology can amplify our social thinking, while at the same time if you've put off your projects because you're fiddling on Facebook, you know much tech can distract us--to the point of changing the structure of our brains."

"This sample rubric from Lisa Yokana can help guide efforts to assess the materials and knowledge students come to understand through the process of making, as well as the habits of mind and qualities they demonstrate. For more information, read the associated post: "Creating an Authentic Maker Education Rubric." For an editable version of this rubric, check out this "Editable Sample Rubric.""

"It's always revealing to watch learners research. When trying to understand complex questions often as part of multi-step projects, they often simply "Google it." Why do people migrate? Google it. Where does inspiration come from? Google it. How do different cultures view humanity differently? Google it. Literally Google it. Type those questions word-for-word into the Google search box and hope for answers. Educators cringe, but to the students it makes sense. And if you think about it, this is actually helpful-a rare opportunity for transparency into the mind of a student. When your formative years are spent working your fingers through apps and iPads, smartphones and YouTube, the digital world and its habits can bend and shape not just how you access information, but how you conceptualize it entirely. And among the most powerful forces here is the Google.com search engine."