Habits of Mind in Personalizing Learning - A Conversation with Bena Kallick

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

So now here we are in this age of polarity. So how do I maintain a flexible way of thinking and how do I listen with understanding and empathy? The agility that you have to use your thinking skills is directly tied to your agility of mind to lend yourself to the situation.

Welcome back to the podcast. Speaking with Bena Kallick today was a wonderful chance to hear about all of the incredible work she's been doing in dispositional and personal learning now for decades. Bena is the co-founder and co-director of the Institute of Habits of Mind with Art Costa. She is also the founder and program director for EduPlanet 21, a company dedicated to online professional learning and curriculum development based on the Understanding by Design framework. Bena is a prolific author, and has published many works on the habits of mind, alternative assessment strategies, and personalized learning. Formerly a teacher center director, Bena also created a children's museum based on problem solving and invention and was the coordinator of a high school alternative designed for at-risk students. Bena has taught at the Yale University School of Organization and Management, University of Massachusetts Center for Creative and Critical Thinking, and Union Graduate School. Please do reach out to Benna on LinkedIn or on Twitter, and you can find the links in the show notes.

Hi, Benna.

Hi, Tim. How you doing?

Hey, I'm good.

How are you?

Just fine, thank you.

Good. Well, I just want to say it's such a privilege to be able to talk to you. I've been reading your art work for a long time, and it's almost like you're a kind of a Marvel superhero group, you and Heidi and Alison. And it feels like I'm kind of coming to the pinnacle of the trio there.

So I don't know about that.

Perfect. Well, I wanted to begin by looking a little bit backwards in terms of the history of the Habits of Mind, because it's a really resonant framework even now. So it would be really fascinating just to hear a bit of perhaps the history of you and Art developing the Institute, and then, you know, how you see it still having very strong relevance with what's going on now in terms of the educational shift.

Well, I mean, briefly, what I can say in terms of its history is that Art and I started over 30 years ago, and we were very much interested at the time what was going on in the country. ASCD, which is the national organization that everybody was kind of attuned to, and they were really promoting thinking skills. And Art and I were involved with a lot of that work. It's where we met Jay McTighe. It's where we met a lot of the people who were involved with the thinking movement— Edward de Bono, Bob Ennis— I mean, it was like the people. And so we would all get together and we would talk, and a lot of it was focused on questions of curriculum and focused on the questions of theory— what's the philosophical, what's the epistemological—

and such.

And Art and I kind of started thinking about it and saying, you know, there's a little bit of a place for thinking about dispositions. So you can say for sure, I know how to compare and contrast. I have that skill. It's a very good thinking skill, but will you actually do it when it's called for?

Yeah.

And so that's the question. And it's always the agility that you have to use your thinking skills is directly tied to your agility of mind to lend yourself to the situation. So we started thinking, you know, that's something that maybe we should take a bite in. And we started looking at it. And Art at that time was the editor of a very important book that was out called Developing Minds. And it was very, very popular. I think it went through 3 printings. And I was— I had chapters in it, other people did. And then from there, we started looking and realizing there were some things that a lot of people who contributed in Developing Minds had in common about dispositions. So for example, Art was studying the work of Reuben Feuerstein, and he was looking at this whole question of, can you really intervene and teach thinking by intervening? And it was really a matter of then trying to understand how do you coach someone who might have very limited intellectual capabilities to learn how to think? And that was really the beginning of a lot of the work that went on in trying to understand how do you teach for thinking. And one of the things that we heard in a lot of what he said was what we then began to call managing impulsivity, which is you do have to stop, you do have to think. So we started to realize that that was one thing. And little by little, as we studied all the different people, things started to come up. David Perkins, when he would talk about creativity and we would say, well, isn't that about thinking flexibly and about creating, imagining, and innovating? And then as we started to pursue Daniel Goleman at that time, who was talking about emotional intelligence, so what's that all about? And everything that we seem to touch kept coming back to us saying, yeah, it is really all about these dispositions. Dispositional thinking.

Yeah.

And at that time we thought if we called it habits of mind, we would be able to kind of also connect it to what people were thinking about in terms of how do you actually become more skillful. Now the habits of mind are different in the sense that, for example, Stephen Covey has 7 Effective Habits, but the habits are all done as nouns. For example, you set goals, you have honesty, but most of the language that was around was in terms of nouns.

Interesting.

And it was our idea that we wanted to make it all verbs.

Yeah. Wow.

So every one of our habits is an -ing word.

Yeah.

And the second part of an -ing word is that we really didn't wanna fall into the rabbit hole of how do you assess it by getting mastery? Because we said, you know, there's really no way to get mastery. I mean, I will say certainly I have worked all my life on listening with understanding and empathy. Never master it. Never. I get better at it. I grow with it, but I never get to a mastery because, and that's the thing about habits of mind is they're situational and every situation that you're in, you're responding. So for example, I could say I am a phenomenal listener. When I agree with you.

Yeah, yeah.

So now here we are in this age of polarities.

Yeah, that's true.

Where we're all feeling the tension of different points of view. So how do I maintain a flexible way of thinking? And how do I listen with understanding and empathy? And how do I make sure that I'm not always thinking about me, but I'm lending myself to the other person? How do I do all that? That's complex. So what we tried to do was get that across by saying, if you start to build the habit, if you start to say, okay, I know listening with understanding and empathy is really important, so I start to practice it, and as I start to practice it, I see the benefit. It's like, oh, I get it. This is valuable. And as I do that, I have that little metacognitive head that says, you know, the next time you're feeling like you really want to turn this person off, you might just say to yourself, you know, hold off for a minute, really listen, manage your impulsivity. So that self-talk becomes a part of how you build it into a habit.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's like a positive feedback loop as you develop more. And I love that idea that mastery is not a destination. I mean, you know, it's all just process-focused, isn't it? You're constantly on the journey, to use a cliché, but you never actually arrive.

And that very much frustrates educators because one of the things they want to do is make rubrics for it and make sure that you've got all, you know, because people don't really like to think of a rubric of growth. So part of the work that I've been doing, particularly with Alison Zamuta, when we did our book on Personalized Learning with Habits of Mind, is to really think about that idea of what, what could a continuum look like and how do you really begin to think about growth And this is something that Art and I have written about. One of the books that I think is fairly popular, especially right now, is Assessment Strategies for Self-Directed Learning, in which we talk about all this.

Wonderful. Because I think that, I mean, that was one of the things that I'm very interested in. And I keep coming back to this with quite a few people is that there are these very powerful ideas that have been around. I mean, you're talking about 30 years or more that your ideas have been developing and We're still having many of the same conversations about how do we really emphasize growth and process over achievement and how do we bring more self-direction into learning and then how do we assess that? And there are more and more convergences. I think I'm seeing at the moment, which is great in terms of the way that these ideas are coming together.

I was going to say, just to piggyback on what you were asking about how it's sustaining itself over all these years is that I think people are always realizing that as much as they think the other sorts of academic skills are terribly important, which they are, in the end, the life skills are also equally important.

Yeah.

And we keep seeing it, it keeps coming back. What do employers say? Employers say, oh, these kids, they can't even answer the phone properly. Well, so it's a communication skill.

Yeah.

And, and so one of the things Art and I actually wrote a paper on this, that these soft skills and people call them soft because they can't touch them. That we say the soft skills are probably the hardest skills to learn.

Mm-hmm. Exactly. Yeah. And that's, I also wanted to ask you about your work with Allison, taking the habits from one side and then the personalized learning framework from the other side and bringing them together. Seems like a very powerful unity. So maybe you could say a little bit more about that. In terms of how you see that developing, or some examples perhaps of the way that's being used in schools specifically?

So one of the really wonderful things about working with Alison is it's reawakening some things that I kind of had put aside.

Yeah.

And at the same time, Art is joining us, and there are many, many conversations that Art and Alison and I have together, and we're producing a newsletter together because we see the power of all this conversation. So part of it is the work of habits of mind. The work of dispositions is basically all personal. It's all relational. So in personalized learning, we're saying to kids, you know, try to get in touch with what your dreams are, what your aspirations are. Don't think you're just doing a task. Also think about what meaning does this task have for you? How is it helping you to grow? How is your mind growing? How are you becoming more of an advocate for your own perspectives? And how do you make sure your voice is being heard? So all of those things have a natural relationship with the habits of mind, because if you're developing your voice, then clearly you're developing how to think with clarity and precision. And you're also learning how to question and pose problems. So all of the things that we're talking about with personalized learning, as you're doing this, you're moving yourself towards becoming more self-directed. So the whole kind of combination just fit beautifully.

Yeah, that's great. And do you see, you know, in terms of the work that you do with schools, that these ideas, and maybe even particularly now, perhaps with the significant disruptions and transitions that people have had to make very rapidly, do you see that there are people picking up those ideas positively now?

I think so. I think what's really amusing to me is that for the first time, many teachers, not all, but many teachers are realizing that you can't just assign and assume, which is like a big aha. Oh, you mean I gave an assignment, I gave them something really exciting to do, and then finding out that the kids don't have the developed capacity to really manage themselves. In project work, in thinking about what time management looks like, and thinking about if I'm going to be needing to communicate with a group, how will that communication work? So a lot of this has gotten exacerbated because it's right in your face now as a teacher. You see it. For example, I can't just send you off to a Zoom room and assume you know what you're doing, so I have to say to the students, you know, okay, Let's just take a beat now and let's just think about, so when you get in the Zoom room, what might be some really good Zoom rules that you would have? And you could then say, you know, so the task I've asked of you is to really give more meaning to this particular piece of work. So when I say give meaning, let's now look to ask ourselves, put the chart up of the habits of mind, which of these habits do you think you're going to need? To be able to give more meaning to this? And how will you then manage yourselves to make sure that you're putting your attention there?

The idea of coaching is coming just more and more strongly into the field. And it feels, I mean, as you've been talking now, that the way that we communicate between colleagues or between the teacher and the students becomes much more of a coaching type conversation as we're engaging with these types of things rather than the old, more hierarchical teacher-student conversation.

Oh yeah, very definitely. And we refer to it as a three-legged stool. So we say that it's cognitive coaching and then Bob Garmston with Bruce Wellman did Adaptive Schools and then Habits of Mind. And we consider that, you know, the real strength is when people are really solid with all three. Yeah. But so you were asking about the work in schools, and it's very interesting to me because I think part of the work, when it gets most powerful, is when adults realize that they have to work on habits of mind in order to be good teachers of habits of mind. So an example, in one middle school that I'm working, they decided that every teacher was going to choose a habit to work on, as well as making sure that the class would have a habit to work on. So 16 is a lot. You often have to just choose 1 or 2 and say, if we would get a lot of mileage out of this if we did, and that doesn't mean you do it all year necessarily, you introduce others, but it gives you the focus. So this teacher was just working with the new generation of science standards in the United States, and they're very inquiry-based. And this teacher said she's really trying hard her 7th grade science class to have the kids raise lots of questions. So right away it started to feel like a natural. So I said, well, what are you going to be doing with your students? How will you help them? I'm going to work on questioning and posing problems because I really want them to generate the questions. And I want to give them time to do that. And I said, and which of the habits have you chosen to work on? And she said, managing impulsivity. So I was a little bit taken by surprise. I said, oh really? Tell me more about that. And she said, well, what I know about myself is as soon as I give them the opportunity to start working on questioning, I start watching the clock. And if I see that the period is about to end, then I start saying, okay, let's all pull together now. Let's do something with these questions. Let's categorize. And she said, I realized that if I really want them to get good at questioning, I have to give them time to practice it. And so I'm going to have to manage my ins— pulsivity and not push to come to action right away. Well, now when you think about that, it's small, but it made an enormous difference in her practice because as she saw what the kids started coming up with, she started to realize that she did need to do different ways of bringing them together and how would they do the synthesis of what they were learning. And so they started to become more the voice of the inquiry rather than she. And that then changed a whole lot of other things. And by the way, when you touch one, you're usually touching 4 or 5 at the same time.

Yeah. That's so interesting because it's— that also speaks to the, the kind of habits around being a teacher. I mean, you know, we all have our habits in the classroom that we've kind of developed over years of practice. And then that's very interesting that one of the things that teachers have a bias towards quite often, I think, is intervening and perhaps intervening too early. Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah, we need to actually have the confidence and courage in a way to back off a little bit and allow space, but that is, that's uncomfortable actually sometimes.

Yeah, teachers by and large naturally like to feel like they're in control, so it's really hard because you feel like you're, what's going to happen next? I don't know if I can bring it back. Yeah, but there are strategies and they do learn and it really is so meaningful for the students. Another really great example right now is I'm working with a school in Texas where it's a whole big district and they're concerned because the students, given what's going on in this country right now with Black Lives Matter, there's a lot of push from the students who are aggressively giving voice to the idea. We want to talk about this stuff. Why isn't this in our curriculum? Why aren't we reading these books? Yeah. So from a personalized perspective, they do want to address this. They want to be sure that they are working with the students, but how do you work with the students when you're talking across all kinds of issues and not agreement, because it's a very bimodal population in which there's lots of disagreements.

Yeah.

So what we've been doing is we've been designing the work around what I call dialoguing across the issue. And to do it by focusing on 3 habits, and they're learning it: listening with understanding and empathy, thinking flexibly, because thinking flexibly is also being able to take in another person's perspective and to allow it to influence you, to not just wash it over.

Yeah.

And then also questioning and posing problems, learning how to really question one another without judging and without making people feel trapped. And so we work on those as we're building, and Allison and I have built a continuum of how you begin to awaken people so that they're not afraid to be in something that's very controversial. How do you make sure that the silence is allowed? How do you create a psychologically safe space for kids to have their voice? And then what are the behaviors that you want the kids to have when they're doing this work?

Then maybe just to shift a little bit to thinking about your work with EduPlanet 21, because you've, so you've worked on that software platform and the way that you've, you're using that to then support this work, because obviously a lot of this work is instructional coaching and supporting teachers in the moment, but then also there's the whole piece of what do we do with planning and writing curriculum and the way that we do that to support the same types of things. So how has EduPlanet 21 come about and what's your vision for the way that you're using that?

Well, so my partner Jeff Colosimo and I started a company, I guess maybe 15 years ago, we started one called Performance Pathways and what we were interested in there was curriculum mapping and so we designed curriculum mappings software. Now, what I always say about myself is that I'm a techno peasant with techno vision. So I would always say to, to Jeff, well, why can't we do that? I mean, here's the way I can imagine it. And of course, over the years I have learned and been humbled by the complexities of programming. Nonetheless, I continue to push for the vision. And what was wonderful about my partnership with Jeff is that he's very respectful of education. He's not just a He was willing to work with me so that the things that I believe need to have the greatest amount of integrity, he was able to stand by and make happen in the software in ways that he could. And so that company became very successful and it was bought out by a larger company. And then the two of us looked at each other and said, okay, what's our next move? And we said, all right, we really think the next move is to make sure that we have a very good curriculum mapping software that actually has a unit design that has the kind of strength. So it isn't just anything can happen, but to really help people understand the power of UBD.

Could you just say maybe a bit more about what UBD is? I mean, obviously a lot of my listeners will understand that, but some won't. So it'd be interesting. And it's obviously a fascinating thing in itself.

So what we thought was Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins designed something called Understanding by Design, which we all refer to now as UBD. We all meaning those who know, however. And so Understanding by Design is really a very powerful way to think about curriculum. And again, it's more around this question of what's mastery and what's growth, because basically Understanding by Design says that what you're really aiming for, what really matters, is the way you understand deeper conceptual material. So it isn't just the mastery of facts, it's also how do you really show that you understand the deeper meaning of some of the things that you're learning. So one of the ways that you can really design for that to happen so that you're not just having a programmatic design but you're really designing for deeper understanding. And one of the ways to do that is to start with the assessment in mind, because then you won't say I'm teaching to a test and not believe that the test has value. So what test would have value? What assessment would have value? And so they then took on the task of trying to help people understand what performance assessment looks like.

Yeah.

So they, they really helped the whole education field really grapple with and understand in better ways how you really design for students to show understanding through performance.

Yeah.

And so that then leads you from once you decide that that's the performance you care about, for example, I'm going to have a very heated debate about The American Revolution. Hearing that you're British, I think you'll appreciate that because I'm going to say that there really are two perspectives to this, and it's not just mean old King George.

Yeah, very good. Yeah.

And so, you know, there's lots of ways that we could get those perspectives. And maybe the way I'm going to have you as a group of American students study it is I'm going to have you do a debate, and the performance will be where you're going to understand both perspectives and actually understand the context in which all this took place. So I'm not going to just say, tell me the facts of what you know about the revolution. I'm also going to ask you to dig into that aspect of it more with greater, deeper understanding. If I do that, then, then I already know what is the content that I need to teach you, because it's not in the absence of not knowing. There's lots to know.

Yeah.

And then what skills do you need to have and what habits of mind will you need in order to be able to do this work with a, an open mind and with good, solid critical thinking? So all of those come together and the software that we have in EduPlanet 21, the platform is really designed for you to have a way to work your way through using a template that is the template that Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins designed, and to actually map out your curriculum as a unit doing that and pulling all of that together. And then also tied vertically to what happens in the next year and the next year and the next year.

Yeah.

So how do you actually get that curriculum pathway? And then what we said was, well, then teachers need coaching and how to think about this. It isn't just go forth, do it. So we did connected professional learning experiences for teachers who can get certified, get credit, you know, whatever their district, their schools. Yeah.

Brilliant. Perfect. Well, thank you, Bernadette. I mean, it's a real privilege to be able to talk to you and I really appreciate having the opportunity to grapple with some of these big questions with you. So thank you very much.

Thank you.

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