B.H.S. Social Studies Habits of Mind
- Striving for Accuracy: Always doing your best! Setting high standards, checking your work, and finding ways to constantly improve.
- Metacognition – Thinking about your thinking: Knowing what you know! Be aware of your own thoughts, strategies you use to learn, what are you about to do and what impact will it have on your contribution to class discussion or what impact will it have on your written work.
- Empathy: Perceive past events and issues as they might have been experienced by the people of the time, with historical empathy rather than present-mindedness.
- Inquiring Mind: Interrogate texts and artifacts, posing questions about the past that foster informed discussion, reasoned debate and evidence-based interpretation.
- Geographical Awareness: Applying geographical knowledge, understanding, skills and approaches appropriately and creatively to real world contexts and to contemporary situations and issues.
- Reflection: Engage in patient reflection in order to grasp the significance of the past in shaping the present.
- Read critically: In order to discern differences between evidence and assertion and to frame useful and appropriate questions about the past.
- Mutability: Recognize that history is an evolving narrative constructed from available sources, cogent inferences and changing interpretations.
- Appreciation: Appreciation for and understanding of the diversity of cultures and variety of historical contexts, as well as to distinguish elements of our shared humanity.
- Synopticity: Approaching History in the way a professional historian would by drawing together knowledge, ideas and arguments to show overall historical understanding.