Embedded Files
Strength of Mind
Strength of Mind
Definition: Recognizing the limits of your knowledge. I can change my mind.
Motto: “High IH leads people to reconsider their beliefs and attitudes, which should lead them to adjust or change viewpoints that don’t stand up under close scrutiny." ¹
"So how do we make people intellectually curious? We do not need to, they already are. More accurately, they used to be. You see this curiosity is in children. They are learning machines asking questions all day, trying to figure out everything." - Sven Schnieders
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The Strengths Spotlight Podcast Series: Listen to the Institute of Positive Education descriptors of the strengths that include integration strategies.
What it Looks Like and How to Encourage:
Questioning one’s opinions, positions, and viewpoints
Recognizing the value of varying perspectives
Comfortable taking in new information that goes against one’s take on topics
Guiding students to seek to understand
Developing and using a self-talk algorithm around how to recognize the limits of one’s understanding
Promote a language around IH and wellbeing
Situational Analysis (Teachable Moments)
From Character Lab...
Model It. Admit when you do not know or understand something: “That’s a good question. I don’t know the answer, but let’s look it up.” Appreciate others’ insights and let them know when they raise a point that you hadn’t considered: “I never thought of it that way, so it’s interesting to hear what you have to say.” Be willing to change your mind and let people know when you do: “I’m convinced by articles I’ve read about the problem, so my views have shifted.”
Celebrate It. Recognize when someone demonstrates intellectual humility: “I appreciate how open you’ve been to learning more about all sides of this issue.” Look for examples of intellectual humility in science, politics, and other areas; highlight these on social media.
Enable It. Value learning and point out that learning happens when you acknowledge what you don’t know. At dinner, make a habit of sharing a question you have or one new thing you learned. Keep media from diverse perspectives in the house. Establish a birthday ritual of noting how you have changed your mind over the past year.
Unpack the Strength²:
What does the strength look like in action?
What does this strength feel like in action?
When and where can you use it?
What is the "shadow side" of this strength?
Teacher Strategies to Personally Strengthen Their Intellectual Humility:
Grow your awareness of your strengths by making them more visible. Depending upon your learning style and preferred modality, choose tools from your instructional toolkit to apply to yourself. Examples: Audio Recording (have a friend interview you to record your very own "strengths podcast"|Concept Mapping|Outlining|Sketchnoting. Find ways to show how you combine strengths in some situations while also connecting to your talents/abilities, skills, interests, and values.
Listen to or read David Foster Wallace's “This is Water” Commencement Address
Read from a variety of news sources that offer differing perspectives
Review the article "Asking the Right Question is the Answer"
Start with the CL construct of model, celebrate and enable to develop some strategies.
Character Lab Intellectual Humility Teaching Strategies and Tips: How to offer age-appropriate versions of the strategies? Note: There are dozens and dozens of tips from Character Lab. These choices are filtered for elementary school and practicality to bring this strength into the culture of one's classroom.
Possibly build a checklist/rubric with the following questions for students to self-monitor their response to the question “How many of the following are true for me?”
I question my own opinions, positions, and viewpoints because they could be wrong.
I am comfortable saying “I don’t know”.
I reconsider my opinions when presented with new evidence.
I recognize the value in opinions that are different from my own.
I accept that my beliefs and attitudes may be wrong.
In the face of conflicting evidence, I am open to changing my opinions.
I like finding out new information that differs from what I already think is true.
Use WOOP to set goals supported by Character Strengths. (WOOP Worksheet from Character Lab. A more scaffolded worksheet.) Grades 3-5 lesson. WOOP App: Android | IOS
Intellectual Humility Secondary Integration Strategies: These strategies are secondary to the PRIME strategies and at times specific to this Character Strength. Italicized strategies denote secondary strategies attached only to a few strengths. Don't forget to go to the Character Strengths introduction page for the PRIME strategies that work across all of the strengths.
Active/Attentive Listening - One way to help our students make emotional and social connections with each other is to help them learn how to listen with attention. Design a listening protocol based on the tenets of attentive listening that fits the age of your students. Use this article and this one as a starting place with your design work to teach and embed active listening into the culture of your classroom. Look to integrate active listening into your Turn and Talk activities.
Character Day - Find ways to participate and elaborate on the activities offered for this annual event.
I Used to Think... Now I Think... - Use this thinking routine to prompt students to reflect and share ideas and thinking in which they realized that their thinking was incorrect. Use the mantra of "seek to understand" as you guide students to question their thinking to then better understand multiple perspectives.
Lesson Databases - Find lessons at the Heart-Mind Online resource site provided by the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education. Find lessons at the Greater Good in Education resource site provided by the Greater Good Science Center (University of California - Berkeley). Edutopia offers five lessons to encourage intellectual humility.
Parts, Perspective, Me > Exploring Complexity - Adapt this thinking routine to be a human system and social situational tool. Help students use the first step of "what are the parts?" to guide them to ask questions about the parts (information, bias, etc.) of the other person(s) stance on a topic. Remember that a guiding mantra to intellectual humility is to seek to understand. The second question "what can you look at it from?" fits nicely in developing student growth by seeing multiple perspectives. The third question "how are you involved?" gets at students questioning their personal information sources, biases, etc.
Questioning Websites - Go down this page to find the website section to review the list of resource sites. Work to help students build their “questioning toolkit” to grow their analysis skills and to step back to see various positions on issues.
Self Awareness in Social Situations - Build on growing analysis skills being taught and a deeper understanding of intellectual humility to help students connect to their understanding of the social intelligence Character Strength.
Sketchnoting to Paint the Strength Picture - Guide your students to make visible their self-understanding of how they currently engage with each strength. A secondary activity is to have your students sketch out new ways they can exercise each strength. We know that going from thinking about ideas to then make them visible often leads to taking action with the ideas. The first step to this strategy is to teach your students about sketchnoting. You will find applications of this tool across all areas of your curriculum. :) Students can take pictures of their sketches to upload to Seesaw to then explain their thinking.
Strength Chart - Teachers have lots of ways to bring strengths into the language and culture of their classrooms. A teacher at one of my schools connected to the school's core values by having the names of students on small sticky labels that he stuck to the core values poster. He would place the student's name by the value on the chart in the following ways that are adapted here for the strengths. One technique is for students who want the class to support his/her effort to grow their strengths to have his/her name placed beside the designated strength(s). A second strategy is for teachers to verbally highlight students who are applying their strengths at the moment in class. The teacher then puts the student’s name by the strengths on the chart.
Superhero Creation - Challenge your students to create a superhero who maximizes this strength. One approach is to have your students draw a picture of the character with a biography that describes how the superhero uses the strength in his/her life. You can provide categories such as physical, intellectual (thinking), emotional, and social as to how the superhero demonstrates the strength. This activity could take the form of playing cards that students then create games around.
Talk Moves - Here are some sample questions and a video that one can use to help students ask each other questions to go deeper in their understanding when speaking with others.
What made you think that?
How did you get that answer?
Is it possible there is another way to think about …?
Is it possible that what you know about … might be incorrect?
Why is that important?
What do mean by …?
What is your interpretation of ...?
What is your evidence?
How do you know that?
So you are saying …?
Can you say more about …?
Other possibilities: Intellectually Humble Super Hero marketing design projects, Student-created videos highlighting stories of people learning they didn’t have the answer or a valid position on a topic, high school IB students using CAS time to produce age-appropriate videos for ES students answering questions of “What is intellectual humility? What does it look like?”. Incorporate into co-curricular activities like field trips, after-school activities, assemblies, etc.
Look to connect to the strength of curiosity in supporting students to have a posture of questioning their own thinking. Help them be curious about why they think the way they do. Help them use questions to get past having a simple binary answer. Guide students to find ways to strengthen their sense of perspective and of varying viewpoints.
You can help students with the question “what information do you have to support your belief?”. This connects to information literacy/fluency lessons helping students learn which information sources can be trusted and which cannot. One lesson on internet resources could be in using the Tree Octopus website.
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The making thinking visible routines offer strategies to help students process information to better understand concepts and complexity. Teachers can redesign individual routines to meet the developmental and learning needs of their students. Here are a few samples.
See-Think-Wonder - Use in a variety of ways to help students develop this routine as a habit when encountering new situations and information. The key is building in the habit of automatically gathering information as opposed to jumping to conclusions.
Think - Puzzle - Explore - This routine can become a part of the class culture when approaching new topics. It also can be taught as a personal algorithm for students to engage when they feel they really know a lot about a topic. Change the “you” in the questions to “I” and maybe add a fourth question of “Who can I talk to to get another take (perspective) on this?”.
Zoom In - Instead of using this routine to help students make inferences, look to have them think they know what the larger image is but have it be something else.
PERMAH & Strength Hacks Simple daily strategies for wellness!
Attentively listen to others with no thought to share your knowledge :)
Brain Breaks - Pause to bring movement and energy into your classroom. Here are a few brain breaks and an assorted listing to add to your collection.
Cross Strengths - Which Character Strengths most come into play to support this strength?
Download a curiosity app that serves up a daily fun fact so that you can say "I didn't know that!".
"How is your/my PERMAH today?" Find ways to bring this phrase into the culture of your class for daily self-reflection and connection with others.
Language - Look to use phrases such as "which strength(s) can I engage, exercise, dial-up, apply... in this situation?"
Grade(s) Specific Teaching Strategies: The following ideas are offered as jumping-off points for teachers to build from and adapt to their needs.
EC-K>
Come up with a catchy phrase for students and teachers to guide them in finding facts and using perspective to form a belief. "Perhaps, how do you know that?”
Lesson Listing - Access teacher-created lessons and those from other providers. (To be developed)
Storybook readings, digital media, and share time by teachers and students to build understanding.
Use visuals of toolkits and tools engaging language of creating our "strength toolkits" with strengths as tools.
1-3>
Grades 1-2> possibly doing some storybook readings and use of digital media. Eventually could lead to students writing their own story books that involve when they realized they misunderstood something.
Come up with a catchy phrase for students and teachers to guide them in finding facts and using perspective to form a belief. Perhaps. “How do you know that?”
Lesson Listing - Access teacher-created lessons and those from other providers. (To be developed)
Use visuals of toolkits and tools engaging language of creating our "strength toolkits" with strengths as tools.
Weekly IH SeeSaw Journal post: will need to develop prompt and potential categories for students to draw a picture of and/or take a photo of. They then voice-record their response.
Work with student ideas to learn and strengthen their IH.
4-5>
Come up with a catchy phrase for students and teachers to guide them in finding facts and using perspective to form a belief. Perhaps. “How do you know that?
Journal - Good Doc or paper version. The teacher provided prompts and in time work with students to create new prompts. Could be a section of the portfolio.
Lesson Listing - Access teacher-created lessons and those from other providers. (To be developed)
See if Edward de Bono’s Six Hats Thinking can be adapted in some form.
Work with student ideas to learn and strengthen their IH.
Assessment:
Rubrics: At an age-appropriate level work with your students to design a rubric for this strength. Here is a sample rubric for grit written for high school students. Look to do a junior version for this strength. The rubric creator Rubistar can help with this process. Also, keep single-point rubrics in mind as a first step to help your students apply this strength in their lives.
Surveys: Commercial providers such as Flourishing at School offer surveys and other digital tools to document student wellness. Students aged 10-17 can take the VIA Youth Survey. Student Thriving Index from Character Lab.
Visible Thinking: Harvard's Project Zero researchers provide thinking routines and other approaches to help students make their thinking visible. You see many of the thinking routines listed here under the PRIME, SECONDARY, and THINKING ROUTINES sections of this site. You also have several strategies that have students sketchnoting, mind mapping, journaling, etc. to make their thinking visible for reflection and assessment purposes.
Teaching Tools:
Apps- Padlet,
Art supplies for the drawing of pictures
Library Storybooks
Media
Mobile Whiteboards
Older students use a paper notebook, Google Doc, or anther digital journaling tool (e.g., blog, portfolio, etc.)
Seesaw
Learning About IH:
Websites>
Right Question Institute for Teachers
Articles and Books>
Be Humble, and Proudly, Psychologists Say. NYTimes. Includes link to the research for the article.
Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild
Think Again: The Power of Not Knowing What You Don't Know by Adam Grant
Parent Engagement:
Ask someone to video record the strength in action and publicize the efforts via social media (#----------) and the school website.
Family Tree of Strengths: Provide parents with definitions and strengths in action information. Provide a family tree graphic organizer with space for names and the individual’s main strengths. Give prompts to guide parents to explain how family members and earlier generations lived specific strengths.
Have students take their character cards home to teach their parents about their strengths.
Investigate the Right Question Institute to prepare questions for family discussions.
Strength-based Parenting - Share with your parents the Dr. Lea Waters website which includes resources and information on her book. Here is an article to help with your understanding of strength-based parenting.
Teachers offer ideas for parents to weekly share with their children examples of their experiences of intellectual humility.
Teachers send specific reminders to have family talks around the intellectual humility reflection products the students produce.
VIA Strengths Survey: Send parents information about the strengths and the English language Strengths Survey that they can take. The results can offer a discussion starting point.
Character Lab Research References
¹ Mark Leary
² Embedding Character Strengths. Institute of Positive Education. With permission.
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