Essential Skills & Dispositions

The Essential Skills & Dispositions describe the behaviors and qualities of mind we want our students to develop across disciplines. This set of twenty performance indicators are meant to stand as equal to, but fundamentally different from the content performance indicators in the section below.

The collection of documents in this section provide leaning progressions, supporting readings, and examples of learning progressions written for younger students. We believe it is crucial for teachers to spend time reading the ES & D Framework and discussing it with colleagues. We also encourage teachers to spend time with the learning progressions as both the language and the scale is different from the content indicators.

A disposition is:

• A descriptor of someone's mindset
• A way of being
• Demonstrated through a behavior or habit
• A reflection of a person's beliefs or thinking