Habits Of Mind

AP World History “Habits of Mind”

1 August 3, 2005

Habits Hidden within the Stated Habits

civilization, society, nation, culture, and zones of interaction, to name but a few. World history students must also be able to use the different analytical units in their study.

While the stated habits of mind provide guidance, they also lay open a complicated and challenging set of thinking tools for anyone, let alone high school students. Therefore, it might be useful for teachers to • Habit of scale switching and sensitivity to scale. World history involves creating, consider the intellectual habits “hidden” within the expanding, and collapsing temporal and spatial stated habits of mind. In other words, what other scales. World History students will work within habits might students need to employ a global stance, large and small geographic places and among vast to do comparative work, and to situate ideas, events, and tiny scales of time. The grain size of the and processes? The following are some important geographic or temporal unit changes with the mental habits to develop while studying World problem under investigation. Experts make such History. shifts easily, moving, for example, from the diary Habit of determining significance. What makes of a single traveler to graphs depicting global something significant for world historical study? trade for an entire era. Will our students be conThis question is critical, because without understandscious of these hidden shifts and what each ing significance, history becomes one thing after entails? Scale switching and sensitivity to scale another. Significance may play an even more vital provide useful tools in making sense of world role as we develop understanding of global history. historical information and arguments. Making We do not use the exact same criteria for detervisible the temporal and geographic level of mining significance in a world historical study as we thought should support students in making do when studying regional, national, or local history. connections between local, national, regional, Ideas, processes, events, or people important at the interregional, and global patterns. local level may not be as important at the global or • Habit of contextualizing. Often synonymous interregional level. The Course Description gives with historic empathy, this skill encourages examples to help teachers formulate a global, students to situate ideas and events in context. comparative standard. However, students need to This complicated habit guards against students understand what makes something significant in establishing superficial or facile generalizations global history. That is, students should also be taking and judgments. Though such thinking is a global or interregional stances to defend or critique hallmark of disciplined inquiry, contextualizing the global significance in particular events, people, plays a particularly crucial role in world history processes, and in material, social, and ecological because of the wide range of cultures students changes. Students should be able to defend their encounter. decisions about global significance by grounding their ideas in evidence. • Habits of navigation. Consider all the mental • Habit of employing multiple units of analysis. World historians employ many different units of analysis. For example, at a societal level, world historians often use institutional categories to organize information by looking for political, economic, religious, familial, or cultural patterns. World historians also use temporal and spatial categories to create eras, periods, and regions that bound information and ideas. World historians also employ many other organizers such as

shifting world history students must do as they study the human past. Students regularly reposition themselves among different regions of the world, eras of time, levels of analysis, units of analysis, types of evidence, and historical arguments. Think about the intellectual shifts required to meet the stated habits of mind of connecting global and local, comparing across cultures, and contextualizing a variety of universal claims. Hidden then within all these habits is the need for students to be able to navigate and regulate their

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AP World History “Habits of Mind” August 3, 2005 thinking. Awareness of the choices historians made when comparing, periodizing, and analyzing along various temporal and geographic levels is a valuable tool in supporting students’ understanding of world history.

• Habit of constructing and assessing historical understanding. History is an epistemic activity, a way of creating, extending, and assessing understanding. History students need to develop these epistemic habits as they develop their knowledge of the past. This is more than reproducing the knowledge of others and is much greater than the habit of memorization. Embedded within every aspect of World History are the habits of disciplined inquiry that students use to develop, test, modify, and revise their understanding.

Habits Hidden in the World History Classroom Focusing on the stated habits of mind and the hidden of habits of mind reminds teachers about both the goal and the means needed to teach World History. However, there is a danger that in focusing on our course goals and means, we might forget that our students also have pre-instructional historical habits of mind. Students are not tabula rasa when approaching history. They have alternative ideas about history’s methods, value, and structure and the nature of historical change. These pre-instructional, alternative conceptions may hinder acquiring the habits of the historical discipline. For example, students may see history as merely transferring inert facts from the history text to their memory, which will hinder their skills in disciplined inquiry. Or, history students might be very comfortable thinking along a local and personal scale of time and place, which will hinder their efforts to assume more global and distant stances. Students typically have heuristics to help them determine historical significance - often trusting authorities to decide whether something is historically important. A growing body of research attempts to describe these alternative conceptions of history, but space does not allow a more extensive review. However, it is critical that teachers pay attention to the pre-instructional habits

of mind that students bring with them to their study of world history. If ignored, these hidden views threaten to undermine our attempts to help students develop more disciplinary habits of mind.

Habits? Whose Habits? Habits are routines that often are invisible to those who practice them. However, when trying to develop new habits or alter old, these need to be quite visible and self-conscious. This idea is crucial in world history, where so many of the habits of mind are new and unnatural for students. Therefore, as teachers, we need to build these habits into our instruction formally and regularly. For students to develop these sophisticated habits of world historical mind, teachers must use the habits of mind overtly, continuously, and habitually in every phase of instruction. Whose habits are these? Obviously, they must become those of the students who will employ them as they study and are assessed in World History. However, these habits must be teachers’ habits as well. The habits must also become the very means by which teachers organize and teach their courses. Is it possible to teach these habits without using them regularly in the classroom? No, we need to use global thinking, employ multiple levels of analysis, compare across time, space, and culture, determine significance, and contextualize ideas and events. Further, we need to demonstrate their use to our students by using these habits overtly, consciously, and clearly. For example, we might ground our course decisions by making a case for global significance or comparison, i.e., “There are other ways I could have approached this subject, but I didn’t think that would be significant in relationship to the global pattern,” or, “ I want to compare these two events. Let’s look at how I’m going to set up the comparison.” Teachers of World History need to externalize their historical choices to bring students into disciplined ways of thinking. When we teach world history, in a sense, we are world historians making decisions about significance or patterns of global development. We must model for students regularly how historians do such thinking in the process of doing their work.

AP World History “Habits of Mind” August 3, 2005

Students In Any Rigorous History Course Should Be Able To: • Construct and evaluate arguments using evidence to make plausible arguments.

Students In A World History Course Should Be Able To: • See global patterns over time and space while also connecting local developments to global ones, and move through levels of generalizations from the global to the particular.

• Use documents and other primary • Compare within and among data: develop the skills necessary to societies, including comparing analyze point of view, context, and societies’ reactions to global bias, and to understand and processes. interpret information. • Assess issues of change and continuity over time.

• Enhance the capacity to handle diversity of interpretations through analysis of context, bias, and frame of reference.

• Assess claims of universal standards yet remain aware of human commonalities and differences; put culturally diverse ideas and values in historical context, not suspending judgment but developing understanding.