Content area teaching, teaching subjects in isolation, separate of each other, is a common practice in school. I’m guilty of continuing the traditional practice of specializing and teaching only one subject. And the funny thing is that my national board certification is on integration (generalist)! I started my career as an elementary teacher, 4th and 5th, and when I was hired in my current school I taught sixth grade but I was still able to have a self-contained class (I had my group of students for science, social studies, and math). Since I enjoyed teaching Science I was able to teach more and more of it until now I teach only Science and I see 134 students a day.
I mean, it’s easier on me. I get fewer preps and I can focus on doing a good job providing my students a wonderful Science experience. I still believe strongly in integration though but over the years have given up certain things to have my students focus on Science for the 50 minutes a day for most of the 180 days in a school year they have me for Science. One such thing was reading strategies. It seemed worthwhile to me to forgo direct instruction and practice of reading strategies to do more “Science.”
Another thing that I used to directly teach and have students practice, or at least I was starting to work on, was the different Habits of Mind. These are things that we expect of our students or take for granted that they are coming to us with but which are important enough to make sure students are fully aware. I don’t do anything with Habits of Mind anymore.
Not only do I not share habits of mind with my students but I also came across another set of habits of mind here. That made me think that maybe it’s a good idea that I stopped introducing my students to habits of mind because now I’m seeing there are more than the ones that I was first exposed to. I came across that link on the Quantum Progress blog by John Burk on his Habits of Scientific Thinking blog post. In that post John writes about the habits of mind directly related to Science. Pretty cool, huh? John wrote a follow-up post here.
So now I have some more habits to think about. Sure we hit upon those habits throughout the year. Is that enough? Do I need to obsess over finding ways to have students think about how they learn or use those habits of mind? Maybe as part of their reflection time?
