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This will be an interesting topic to watch. How can we help students learn the habits of complex thinking, and unlearn the habits of shallow thinking? If the best practices of effective study become automatic, the student will be more able to focus on new ideas.

These really are easy habits, and I have employed most of them in my classes over the years. Of course, some are easier to pull off than others! Habit number 3 reminded me of something from my grad school days to the point that I felt compelled to post the very first comment.

Like Anastasia Salter, I love making resolutions, and am resolutely bad at keeping them. I think her focus here makes a lot of sense, choosing habits which will be sustainable and support a sense of balance.

Do you talk to your students about their study habits? Do you structure assignments to lead them into good habits? This Washington Post article summarizes a 2013 study on the effectiveness of 10 commonly used learning techniques. (The original study is linked from the Post article, and available to us free through OhioLINK.)

A guide to mentoring undergraduate research from the University of Miami, including many concrete suggestions for habits and activities to develop. Also includes a lot of information specific to undergraduate research opportunities at Miami, which might spark conversations about scaffolding research experiences at Kenyon.

The productive (and appropriate) use of data about student use of online resources is going to be an interesting part of teaching in the future, and a difficult one.

I've heard multiple Kenyon faculty say that the first step of teaching writing in their disciplines is to unlearn the writing habits students used successfully in earlier educational experiences. What can we do to better "communicat(e) what really happens inside our classes" as this author asks?

"Class visitation ... is intended to foster conversations among faculty that will lead to a deeper understanding of classroom dynamics and improved student learning." A good essay by Rick Holmgren at Allegheny College about why observing other people's classes is a good habit to develop, and some suggested techniques from getting the most out of the visit.

"In my view, the way to defend the value of college is to defend the importance of intellectual virtues and then show that the education that colleges provide is successful at cultivating those virtues." Swarthmore psychologist Barry Schwartz gives an interesting list of the habits of mind which are the components of "critical thinking."

This article touches on some of the concerns about rubrics I often hear from faculty, especially that rubrics cause students to "write to the rubric". The author suggests making rubrics focused on generally beneficial writing habits. Another issue mentioned is the variance of rubrics between faculty, but that seems healthy given that writing assignments are also thinking assignments, and patterns of thinking may vary significantly from course to course.