Additional Info:
Students need more than just academic skills for success in college and career, and the lack of an explicit instructional focus on the “soft skills” critical to postsecondary success poses a challenge for many students who enter college, especially the underprepared.

Based upon a multi-campus, cross-disciplinary collaboration, this book presents the resulting set of habits-of-mind-based strategies that demonstrably help not only low-income, ESL, and first-generation college students overcome obstacles on the path to degree completion; these strategies equally benefit all students. They promote life-long, integrative learning and foster intellectual qualities such as curiosity, openness, flexibility, engagement, and persistence that are the key to developing internalized and transferrable competencies that are seldom given direct attention in college classrooms.

This contributed volume, written with full-time and adjunct faculty in mind, provides the rationale for this pedagogical approach and presents the sequential instructional cycle that begins by identifying students’ assets and progressively focusing on specific habits to develop their capacity to transfer their learning to new tasks and situations.

Faculty from both two-year and four-year colleges provide examples of how they implement these practices in English, math, and General Education courses, and demonstrate the applicability of these practices across course types and disciplines.

Chapters address key factors of college success, including:
* The link between habits of mind and student retention and achievement
* Using an assets-based approach to teaching and learning
* Supporting and engaging students
* Creating inclusive learning communities
* Building confidence and self-efficacy
* Promoting transfer of learning
* Teacher networks and cross-disciplinary collaboration

By foregrounding habits of mind as an instructional lens, this book makes a unique contribution to teaching in developmental and general education settings. (From the Publisher)

Table Of Content:
Foreword (Emily Lardner)
Prefact
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Why Habits of Mind Matter (Jennifer Fletcher)

ch. 1 Discovering Assets (Hetty Yelland)
Superpower Essay (Lydia Graeyn)
Reflecting Home Culture (Adela Najarro)
Book Building (Adela Najarro)
Opening-Week Activities (Ken Rand)

ch. 2 Creating Communities (Adela Najarro)
Pass as a Class (Lydia Graecyn)
Building a Supportive Community in the Classroom (Tina Sander)
Forming Familias (Adela Najarro)

ch. 3 Engaging Leaners (Jennifer Fletcher and Hetty Yelland)
Lazy Teacher of Genius? A Case for Vocabulary Enhancement through Playing Scrabble in the Classroom (Hetty Yelland)
Recess (Jennifer McGuire)
The Great Debaters? Well, Close Enough (Maria Boza)
Gender and Miscommunication (Sunita Lanka)
Letters to the Editor (Kathleen Lenoard)

ch. 4 Building Confidence (Jennifer Fletcher)
Bordom Busters (Jennifer Fletcher)
A Diference You (Jennifer Fletcher)
Working the Workshop (Lydia Graecyn)
Proofreading: How Can We Polish Our Essays When Our Brains and Computers Have Such Limitations? (Tina Sander)

ch. 5 Developing Students’ Self-Efficacy (Adela Najarro)
Academic Essay Structure (Adela Najarro)
Group Projects: Turning Students into Teachers (Olga Blomgren)
Students Respond to Instructors’ Comments on Essays (Rhea Mendoza-Lewis)
Cheating? Everyone Cheats (Daphne Young)

ch. 6 Promoting Transfer of Learning (Jennifer Fletcher)
Using the Habit of Mind as a Reflective Tool (Natasha Oehlman)
Reading, Writing, and Habits of Mind Reflection Essay (Olga Blomgren)
Words of Advice (Jennifer McGuire)
Negotiating Transfer within Sustainability: From Consumer to Policy Maker (Rebecca Kersnar)
Writing in the Math Class (Ken Rand)

Conclusion (Jennifer Fletcher)
Appendix A: Making Cross-Disciplinary Intersegmental Collaboration Work
The Story behind the Exemplars (Jennifer Fletcher and Becky Reed Rosenberg)
Appendix B: Connective Learning Log
Questions for Reflecting on Transfer of Learning
Appendix C: Habits of Mind Lesson Student Feedback Form
Appendix D: Presurvey of Math
Appendix E: Presurvey of Writing
Appendix F: Postsurvey of Math
Appendix G: Postsurvey of Writing
About the Editors and Contributors
Index