Professsional Practice: Making the Shift towards Dispositions

What is a particular disposition that resonated with your values and ideals? Before our next meeting in April, think about ways you can make this more explicit for your students. Here are some ideas:

• Re-tool an assessment or assignment to emphasize that disposition.
• Create a new activity or assignment that asks them to demonstrate that disposition.
• Think of how you can purposefully model that disposition in class and check students' understanding or responses.
• Think of ways you can highlight and reward the demonstration of that disposition in class.

It would be great if you could save an artifact or write a brief reflection on your experiment so that we can share and process our experiences together at our next meeting.

Also, I'd like for us to read Chapter 4 in Intellectual Character. Ritchhart provides several vignettes of teachers on their first day of class, trying to set a tone for thinking. It might be helpful to think about our discussion of windows and mirrors as you read.

I think Chapters 5 and 6 are helpful, but it depends on where you are in this process and where you'd like to go. Chapter 5 explains specific practices called thinking routines that you can start to implement in class. Chapter 6 really starts to get more at this idea of our implicit curriculum and how the very language we use in class communicates powerful messages about what it means to learn.