Why schools should teach habits of mind, not “college readiness” | Bena Kallick | Big Think

Why schools should teach habits of mind, not “college readiness” | Bena Kallick | Big Think

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What does it mean to prepare students for college and why is that the goal? Bena Kallick, co-director of the Institute for Habits of Mind and program director for Eduplanet21, argues that a shift has to be made. Schools should instead be helping learners by preparing them for life, not just higher education.

Developed by Kallick and Arthur Costa, habits of mind are 16 problem-solving life skills designed to help people navigate real life situations. College is not the best fit for everyone, which means that teaching college readiness is not in the best interest of all learners.

In order for meaningful changes to higher education to work, it has to start at the K-12 level. Students have to be "certified as human beings who are good at learning, who know enough about themselves to know what interests them and how to step out of K-12 and walk into a world of options."

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BENA KALLICK:

Bena Kallick co-created a teachers' center and a children's museum (1970-1982). She co-authored many books and articles on Habits of Mind with Dr. Art Costa and co-authored a book on personalized learning with Allison Zmuda. Art and Bena are co-founders of the Institute for Habits of Mind and are recipients of the Malcolm Knowles Award for Self-Directed Learning from the International Society for Self-Directed Learning. Bena is Strategic Program Advisor for Eduplanet21. She is a well known international consultant.

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TRANSCRIPT:

BENA KALLICK: My instinct says basically that there's no question higher education is going to have to change so I guess just as a bottom line I would say things are going to change. However, I think that it's a kind of complementary set of changes and that's one of the things that I think we have to keep remembering. K-12 has to change in order for higher education to change, and vice versa, in other words if K-12 became a stronger more meaningful place for kids to be engaged with learning, and if they were leaving high school feeling like they weren't certified to take a job here, there or other where, but to actually be certified as human beings who are good at learning, who know enough about themselves to know what interests them and how to step out of K-12 and walk into a world of options. Right now all I hear from everybody is college and career readiness, and then what does that really mean? Why are we trying to get them ready for college? Why aren't we getting them ready for life in which college may play a role? So, I feel like this whole conception of more and more education rather than trying to think about what K-12 can meaningfully do, and for many of us who are working like this we do something that we call the ""profile of a graduate."" And what we mean by that is imagine if these kids leave school how would you like them to be? And then work backwards from that to ask, are you really delivering that and making that a possibility?

That's the K-12 picture. Then from the higher education picture I would say that then there have to be more options. It can't be that one is better than the other. If you need to go to community college it's because it's better for you at this moment for what it has to offer. I think we tend to denigrate some options because we feel they're lesser, rather than actually optimizing each of the options for what's the right place for you. And what I see right now is, for example, general assembly doing a great job of offering all kinds of certifications. You don't need to go to college. Maybe that's not where you should go. You don't need to go to community college. Maybe that's not right, but maybe a certification program. Especially if you're strapped for dollars, why get into a loan situation when you might just commit to learning something that will get you a job where you can then take some of your pay to give it back in order to cover your costs? We're always getting ready for something instead of actually living some of it.

So, one of the things that I'm doing with a group in Brazil right now is we're actually trying to redefine what would a university program look like if it were actually different? So here is the dream, which I believe we'll do some of for sure. And that is that we'll start by having more interdisciplinary work. In other words, this university concept would say you're not getting a master's in business...

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