Helping Students Build Productive Academic Habits

As teachers, we know the importance of productive academic habits. Whether that means teaching students how to create their own scaffolds or ensuring that they know how to take advantage of resources around them, when students demonstrate productive academic habits, they are able to more effectively engage in high-level thinking.

To build productive academic habits, I’ve found it helpful to think about addressing common habits that might hold students back. In my experience, these four habits are particularly common and are ones that teachers can fairly easily address: (1) waiting to be asked questions, (2) waiting for the teacher to answer questions or deliver information, (3) completing major assessments without verbal explanation, and (4) progressing through a class without reflection.

By helping students shift away from these common habits to more productive ones, teachers can set their students up for success in this school year and beyond.

BUILDING THE HABIT OF ASKING QUESTIONS

In many classrooms, students wait to be asked a question, and when a teacher asks if students do have any questions, they are often met with silence. I wanted to change this for students by building a daily practice in which students asked questions. I implemented a low-stakes question formation routine to start each class.

Here’s how the routine works: At the beginning of every class, students start with a five-to-eight-minute journaling practice. In their journals, they write questions about what they’ve already learned, what else they’d like to learn, or any other questions about the content we are working on. Students write down as many questions as they can in this time. Then, we go around the room and every student reads out a question from their list. This helps students not only to practice the habit of forming questions, but to ask those questions out loud. Students feel the curiosity building around them and are more engaged in the lesson, since there is information they are actively seeking out.

As students continue to practice this habit each day, they start asking questions throughout class, not just during this activity. You can also give students scaffolds such as Bloom’s taxonomy question stems to inspire a range of questions.

BUILDING THE HABIT OF SUMMARIZING CONTENT

In many classrooms, teachers will close a lesson with a summary of the day’s content, filling in any gaps for students. But by doing this as the teacher, you may take away an important learning opportunity for students to synthesize their thoughts and codify the learning on their own.

To build the habit of summarizing lesson content, I created study pods in the classroom that were responsible for working together to summarize what they’d learned in class that day, what they needed to do next, and what questions they had. The pod then worked together to answer any of those questions and filled in any gaps as a team. If a pod could not answer a question after working together, they knew they could either ask another pod or ask me as the teacher for support.

As students build this habit in groups, they not only learn to rely on their classmates, but also learn the importance of taking the time to digest a lesson before moving on. This can then become a habit they employ at the end of every lesson, whether that’s in my classroom or elsewhere.

BUILDING THE HABIT OF VERBALLY EXPLAINING WRITTEN ANSWERS

In my experience, I’ve found that someone truly understands something when they can explain it out loud to someone else. But for most students, when they complete an assessment, there isn’t a verbal component: Students complete an assignment, hand it in, and walk away. To try to address this, I’ve implemented a way for students to verbally defend their work when completing written assignments.

When students come up to my desk to hand in their work, I will ask them to give me a quick summary of one of their answers. This works on a vocabulary quiz or a larger literary analysis, as students just have to give some verbal explanation of the work they’ve written down. Once the assessment is over, I ensure that no more students are working and then call them up one at a time to hand in their work and offer a verbal explanation privately to me. This works particularly well if you have another adult in the room so that the student sharing their thoughts out loud can do so outside of the classroom.

This practice teaches students the habit of being ready to explain their thinking clearly and concisely. In the real world outside of our classrooms, students will be asked to think on their feet and explain their ideas verbally. Building this habit helps prepare them for life outside of the classroom while also further deepening their understanding of classroom content as they practice explaining it.

BUILDING THE HABIT OF REFLECTING THROUGHOUT A LESSON

For many students, reflection isn’t a natural part of their learning process. But reflection can help students be more present, more aware of their own grasp of content, and ensure that they walk away from a lesson feeling like they got something from it. I wanted to help students build the habit of reflecting throughout a lesson.

In class, I tried this by explicitly telling students to be present with their “thinking caps” on. I would ask students to “stop and think,” giving them time to pause and consider what we were learning about and what questions they had. I would encourage students to review the learning objectives posted on the board and try to think about how those objectives connected to what we were talking about in the moment and how those learning objectives might connect to things outside of our classroom.

As students have more opportunities to practice this reflection, they can begin to build the habit of reflecting throughout a lesson on their own.

While there are many ways for students to be successful in school, productive academic habits like these are a strong foundation for them to build upon. By giving students the opportunity to practice and build these habits in your classroom, you can set them up for success in future grades and beyond the classroom.