My district's Advanced Tech Fellows (ATF) met today for a full school day of STEAM research, discussion, and collaboration.  This time gave me the chance to think about some recent developments in my classroom. 
       We have been working with a program called Code Monkey, which presents scaffolded coding challenges.  Several of my students despair when they are not able to solve a problem right away.  They ask certain peers for "help", by which they mean they want someone to tell them the answer.
        In addition, the class worked on "Thinking Cap" problems yesterday.  In our Math in Focus curriculum, these problems require the students to solve more complicated, depthful problems.  Once again, many students were not able to maintain their efforts.  They wanted help almost right away.

This is the Thinking Cap problem I am referencing

      Obviously, the students needed more strategies for how to proceed beyond their initial efforts.  Two strategies that came up were rereading the math problem and breaking it down into smaller parts.  I believe that these strategies can be generalized into most STEAM activities.  In order to persevere, students need to know strategies they can use to address challenges or problems.
      In addition, I am questioning if I should add one more disposition to my current list of four.  The students lack a sense of what might be called "purposeful tinkering".  They try one or two things and then give up.  In activities like Makerspace challenges, Code Monkey problems, or "Thinking Caps", students need to be able to try a number of approaches.  They can then learn new information from each attempt.  To me, trial and error means that you try something and learn from the error.
       This could be defined as a disposition - the habit of playing around with a situation in differing ways.  My colleague suggested calling this Experimentation, which seems good enough at this point.  This type of thinking is critical to STEAM, although I just didn't think of it as a disposition until recently.
       It also just occurred to me that the addition of Experimentation to my list allows me to make an acronym of my dispositions: Cooperation, Optimism, Visualization, Experimentation, Reflection (COVER).

Here are the four thinking skills.

        I have introduced two of the habits in my classroom, and touched upon the two others. I began with Reflection.  We have been practicing mindfulness at morning class meetings.  We began with mindful listening, shifted to mindful feeling (of the breath through our noses), and addressed mindful walking and tasting.  We finally have ended up with mindful seeing - with which I had a lot of success last year.  The students sit in an oval around the rug and I shake up a 2-liter glitter jar that I created last year.  The glitter falls for about 3 minutes.

Glitter Jar - partially settled

Mindfulness Board

          Once I had reached this point last year, I had the students choose a focus - listening, breathing, seeing - for the class meeting.  Most of them chose to watch the glitter jar.  In addition, I stressed the need for them to keep their body still.  The class can remain largely still and silent now for the full three minutes every morning.  The trick, of course, will be getting them to extend this mindfulness to other parts of their days. (For further information, see A Still, Quite Place by Amy Saltzman and The MindUp Curriculum by the Hawn Foundation.)

The Mindful Monkey

     This all fits into Reflection - which I defined as "being mindful about yourself".  We have begun to explore Reflection as it applies to the students as readers and writers.  Most importantly (for a STEAM focus), we have discussed being mindful about how students approach problem solving situations and learning in general.  We have even setup a mascot of sorts in the Mindful Monkey.  I have used this monkey in the past to encourage my students to use common sense.  But common sense can be a form of mindfulness, so I decided to change that this year.
     I liked the idea of having a mascot for the habits of mind, so I searched around for possible mascots for the three other habits I was stressing this year.  I defined Optimism as "approaching things positively."  The perfect mascot was already hanging from my ceiling.

"Just keep swimming ..."

     Who better to exemplify perseverance and a positive attitude than Dory?  My class now knows to "just keep swimming", when they reach a difficult patch.  Of course, just knowing the mantra does not guarantee that they will persevere.  However, one of my main goals for the beginning of the year was to teach the concepts and definitions behind these Habits of Mind to my students so that they would be familiar to them for the remainder of the year.  I believe the combination of posted definitions, regular reinforcement, and the use of mascots will help them understand these Habits as we reference them throughout the year.