Collaboration and Shared Leadership: IAS students develop their collaboration and shared leadership abilities by learning to work with others to identify dimensions of a project, generate and refine ideas, follow through on the consequences of collective decisions, and pursue specific tasks without losing a sense of the whole. As part of this process, they learn to assess and draw on group members' histories, strengths, and potential contributions. They develop skills in listening, mediating conflict, playing different roles, and reflecting on the outcomes of collaborative work. Essential to this progress is understanding different ways of managing groups, and reflecting critically and creatively on collaboration processes.

Critical and Creative Thinking: IAS students develop their critical and creative thinking abilities by learning how to identify assumptions, and to work out how those assumptions inform results. They assess multiple perspectives, with an eye to understanding why and how they differ, and developing the capacity to engage in controversy productively. Students learn to identify central questions or concerns informing other work, and to develop their own work with clear animating questions. Students develop a range of skills in interpretation, analysis, argumentation, application, synthesis, and evaluation.

Diversity and Equity: IAS students develop their ability to live and work within and across diverse communities composed of multiple intersecting identities. Learning from the lived experiences, creative expressions and intellectual perspectives of historically-marginalized groups, students recognize and name historical and cultural relationships between power, knowledge, and difference. They develop the confidence and skills needed to transform unequal relations of power ethically and self-reflexively in order to foster greater equity.

Interdisciplinary Research and Inquiry: IAS students develop their ability to assess and conduct interdisciplinary research by engaging with and across multiple areas of knowledge and kinds of inquiry. They learn to think critically and creatively as they develop research questions, pursue them with appropriate sources and methods, and present results in a form suited to their purpose and intended audience. In this process, they learn to position their own work in relation to other research literatures and methods of inquiry, and in relation to relevant debates and diverse social contexts.

Writing and Communication: IAS students develop their writing and communication abilities by articulating significant purposes for their work, and gaining an awareness of its audiences and contexts. They learn to communicate those purposes effectively to audiences through writing, presentations, and other media, and to use a range of evidence, both qualitative and quantitative, to support their arguments. As part of this process, they develop the ability to identify and refer to other work clearly. As part of the development of reflective practice, students learn how to improve their writing and communication by collecting and reflecting on evidence of its reception by others.