ABSTRACT
As promoted by Art Costa and others, productive habits of mind are core ingredients for success in school and life. 1 The question is how can teachers instill and support habits such as persistence, striving for accuracy, questioning, responding with wonder, listening with understanding and empathy, managing impulsivity, thinking flexibly, and others? One approach is for the students to construct a set of habits from their previous knowledge and personal experience and then to wall cue the concepts prominently for reference. To develop this list, the teacher and students create a pool of success stories from which they can derive the causal factors that led to the successes. The stories can be from fiction, nonfiction, and life. Through cooperative learning small groups, the teacher and students then select the most common factors leading to academic and life success. The student discoveries can be matched to the habits of mind suggested by educators. Since empathy, for instance, is a necessary habit of good character and an attribute of a civilized conscience, students can also be shown to see it and other social habits as attributes of civil character that they can then display along with the habits of mind.
