Don't Miss the WOW Moments in Teaching or in Life

Carole Hayward

Midway through her Saturday morning presentation, “Practical Ways to Use the Habits of Mind Within Your Classroom," New Zealand presenter Karen Boyes asked participants to hold up three fingers to form the shape of the letter W. 

“Now hold up another W with your other hand. Hold them up to the sides of your face, and open your mouth round and wide—that’s your ‘WOW.’ Don’t let a day go by without a WOW moment,” Boyes said, and then she had the participants turn to each other and spell out WOW in this manner. “Now you can say you were wowed at today’s presentation.”

A longtime practitioner of the habits of mind (PDF) approach, Boyes encourages educators to persist (first on the list of habits of mind), even if you are the only one around who is using this approach. When she first started at her school, she was the only one adopting the habits of mind approach, and her colleagues wondered what she was doing. But then they started asking questions, such as “How did you get that student to do that? I've been trying all year and couldn't get through.” Over time, they came to realize the power behind the habits of mind.

However, not everyone has been so easy to convince. Boyes related the story of one principal who said that the approach didn’t work. “What do you mean they don’t work?” Boyes asked. “We put up the posters and they don’t work,” he countered. Boyes explained to him then and to the audience now a favorite quote from one of her colleagues: “It’s not enough to have these habits on posters. You have to get them off the walls and into their hearts.”

When countering criticism that perhaps phrases like “managing impulsivity” might be a bit much for kindergartners to say, Boyes argues that if young students can say “Tyrannosaurus Rex”, they can manage habits of mind phrases. At one school, a preschool student was given a digital camera to take pictures of examples of the 16 habits of mind. The 4-year-old student found examples of all 16. “It’s heartening to hear about students using these phrases," Boyes said. "When one young student's father got stuck under his house doing some work, his daughter told him, ‘Just persist, Dad!’”

Boyes shared this quote: “Habit is a cable—we weave it each day and at last we cannot break it.” She emphasized that this applies to adults as well as students. But we have to teach students how to do these things—we have to unpack it for them. “We’re always telling our students to listen, but do we teach them how to do it?" she asked. "We spend 55 percent of our lives listening, but is there anyone among us who couldn't be a better listener?”

Breaking Habits

The goal is to evolve from teacher-led learning and thinking to student-led mindful learning. This can be accomplished through a series of progressive, although often overlapping, steps:

• Exploring meanings.
• Expanding capacities.
• Increasing awareness.
• Extending values.
• Building commitment.

To truly help students build these new habits, it may be necessary for you to change some habits as well. When you grade students' assignments, for example, you mark what’s wrong on the page. Boyes states emphatically that you should stop doing that: "You should say that there are three answers on this page that are incorrect. Find them and correct them." Learning should be about learning what you don’t know. Stop being an accuracy checker, Boyer argued; have students do that for themselves.

Similarly, every time students get stuck on something, they raise their hands for help. Teachers become the “unstuckers.” But how will that help students when they are on the job someday? Will they sit there, raising their hands for help? Or will they have the habits that will allow them to address the challenges they face? 

"We have to teach students skills and habits that will help them succeed in life," Boyes concluded.