Students who are successful have more than just academic knowledge. They have certain habits of mind that allow them to manage stress, build endurance and handle academic and emotional set-backs. Learn six habits of mind that can be targeted for improvement and have a significant impact on student success, and explore classroom strategies to bring each one to life: Persisting towards solutions Working with precision Asking questions Working with others Making connections Monitoring progress and embracing learning

1. HABITS OF MIND FOR
STUDENT SUCCESS
BUILDING PERFORMANCE CHARACTER

2. What is Character?
2

3. Help Where Help is Needed
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An academic intervention program must provide
explicit and systematic re-teaching of core skills.
But skills gaps are NOT the only thing holding
students back…
Academic
Struggle

4. Help Where Help is Needed
Academic
Struggle
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5. Help Where Help is Needed
“Pure IQ is stubbornly resistant to improvement after about age
eight. But executive functions and the ability to handle stress
and manage strong emotions can be improved, sometimes
dramatically, well into adolescence and even adulthood.”
Paul Tough, How Children Succeed
“The part of the brain most affected by early stress is
the prefrontal cortex, which is critical to self-regulatory
activities of all kinds, both emotional and cognitive. As
a result, children who grow up in stressful
environments generally find it harder to concentrate,
harder to sit still, harder to rebound from
disappointment, and harder to follow directions.”
Paul Tough, How Children Succeed
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Academic
Struggle

6. Help Where Help is Needed
“A psychologist at Stanford named Carol Dweck has
discovered a remarkable thing…students do much
better academically if they believe intelligence is
malleable….She has shown that students’ mindsets
predict their academic trajectories.”
Paul Tough, How Children Succeed
“Dweck and others have shown that with the right kind of
intervention, students can be switched from a fixed mindset to
a growth mindset, and their academic results tend to rise as a
result.”
Paul Tough, How Children Succeed
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Academic
Struggle

7. Help Where Help is Needed
“The students who persisted in college were not necessarily the
ones who had excelled academically at KIPP. Instead, they
seemed to be the ones who possessed certain other gifts, skills
like optimism and resilience and social agility. They were the
students who were able to recover from bad grades and resolve
to do better next time.”
Paul Tough, How Children Succeed
“For young people without the benefit of a lot of family
resources, without the kind of safety net that their wealthier
peers enjoyed, these characteristics proved to be an
indispensable part of making it to college graduation day.”
Paul Tough, How Children Succeed
7
Academic
Struggle

8. The Importance of Character
 Research has shown that certain character traits
are as important to a student’s success in school
and beyond—if not more important—than
academic skills and content.
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9. Performance Character
 The character traits identified by researchers as
having profound effect on student success are not
moral or ethical traits or values, but performance-
related traits and values.
 It’s all about how students think about and interact
with their work…
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10. What Have You Seen?
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11. Performance Character Traits
 Persisting towards solutions
 Working with precision
 Asking questions
 Working with others
 Making connections
 Monitoring progress and embracing learning
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12. Developing and encouraging grit, perseverance, and
resilience can have enormous benefits in every aspect of
a child’s life.
Persisting Towards Solutions
• Try to find places where you can
give students chances to keep
working on papers, projects, and
even tests, so that “getting it right
the first time” isn’t the only value
being taught.
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13. How Do You Teach It?
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14. Whatever subject you teach, students should be
encouraged and rewarded for close attention, careful
work, attention to detail, and an insistence on
excellence.
Working with Precision
• Giving students the chance to keep
improving on work for a better score
rewards precision and attention to
detail.
• As long as students can keep
making their work better, there’s no
need to display student work that
has errors or is less than exemplary.
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15. How Do You Teach It?
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16. Do we reward our students for sitting still, remaining quiet,
and simply receiving what we deliver? Or are we modeling the
importance of having a restless, active, inquiring mind that
wants to—needs to—know more?
Asking Questions
• Use “think-alouds” to model
active reading and active
problem-solving. Help
demonstrate what active
questioning looks, sounds, and
feels like throughout the day.
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17. How Do You Teach It?
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18. Few jobs require or reward isolation, secrecy, or “eyes on
your own paper.” In fact, being able to work effectively with
other people, in the same room or across the world, is
increasingly important. Are we teaching these skills?
Working with Others
• Don’t just provide
opportunities for group
work. Use rubrics and
sample student work to
model what effective
collaboration really looks
like.
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19. How Do You Teach It?
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20. If we are not explicitly helping students connect their learning
to other subjects and other contexts, nothing we teach them
will seem relevant or be of much use to them once they leave
our classrooms.
Making Connections
• Look for opportunities
to change formats,
perspectives, and genres
to help students stretch
their understanding and
make generalizations.
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21. How Do You Teach It?
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22. Is school something our students actively do? Or is it simply
something that happens to them? We need to help students
take ownership of their learning and track, monitor, and
evaluate their progress and success.
Monitoring Progress / Embracing Learning
• Give students opportunities
and tools to track and
evaluate their work and their
progress, both within projects
and across the school year.
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23. How Do You Teach It?
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24. Help Where Help is Needed
Academic
Success
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25. Useful Resources
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26. And Don’t Forget…
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