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AP World History “Habits of Mind”
August 3, 20051
Habits Hidden within the Stated Habits
While the stated habits of mind provide guidance,they also lay open a complicated and challenging setof thinking tools for anyone, let alone high schoolstudents. Therefore, it might be useful for teachers toconsider the intellectual habits “hidden” within thestated habits of mind. In other words, what other habits might students need to employ a global stance,to do comparative work, and to situate ideas, events,and processes? The following are some importantmental habits to develop while studying WorldHistory.
Habit of determining significance.
What makessomething
 significant 
for world historical study?This question is critical, because without understand-ing significance, history becomes one thing after another. Significance may play an even more vitalrole as we develop understanding of global history.We do not use the exact same criteria for deter-mining significance in a world historical study as wedo when studying regional, national, or local history.Ideas, processes, events, or people important at thelocal level may not be as important at the global or interregional level. The Course Description givesexamples to help teachers formulate a global,comparative standard. However, students need tounderstand what makes something significant inglobal history. That is, students should also be takingglobal or interregional stances to defend or critiquethe global significance in particular events, people, processes, and in material, social, and ecologicalchanges. Students should be able to defend their decisions about global significance by groundingtheir ideas in evidence.•
Habit of employing multiple units of analysis.
World historians employ many different units of analysis. For example, at a societal level, worldhistorians often use institutional categories toorganize information by looking for political,economic, religious, familial, or cultural patterns.World historians also use temporal and spatialcategories to create eras, periods, and regions that bound information and ideas. World historiansalso employ many other organizers such ascivilization, society, nation, culture, and zones of interaction, to name but a few. World historystudents must also be able to use the differentanalytical units in their study.•
Habit of scale switching and sensitivity toscale.
World history involves creating,expanding, and collapsing temporal and spatialscales. World History students will work withinlarge and small geographic places and among vastand tiny scales of time. The grain size of thegeographic or temporal unit changes with the problem under investigation. Experts make suchshifts easily, moving, for example, from the diaryof a single traveler to graphs depicting globaltrade for an entire era. Will our students be con-scious of these hidden shifts and what eachentails? Scale switching and sensitivity to scale provide useful tools in making sense of worldhistorical information and arguments. Makingvisible the temporal and geographic level of thought should support students in makingconnections between local, national, regional,interregional, and global patterns.•
Habit of contextualizing.
Often synonymouswith historic empathy, this skill encouragesstudents to situate ideas and events in context.This complicated habit guards against studentsestablishing superficial or facile generalizationsand judgments. Though such thinking is ahallmark of disciplined inquiry, contextualizing plays a particularly crucial role in world history because of the wide range of cultures studentsencounter.•
Habits of navigation.
Consider all the mentalshifting world history students must do as theystudy the human past. Students regularly repo-sition themselves among different regions of theworld, eras of time, levels of analysis, units of analysis, types of evidence, and historical argu-ments. Think about the intellectual shifts requiredto meet the stated habits of mind of connectingglobal and local, comparing across cultures, andcontextualizing a variety of universal claims.Hidden then within all these habits is the need for students to be able to navigate and regulate their 
 
AP World History “Habits of Mind”
August 3, 20052thinking. Awareness of the choices historiansmade when comparing, periodizing, and anal-yzing along various temporal and geographiclevels is a valuable tool in supporting students’understanding of world history.•
Habit of constructing and assessing historicalunderstanding.
History is an epistemic activity,a way of creating, extending, and assessing under-standing. History students need to develop theseepistemic habits as they develop their knowledgeof the past. This is more than reproducing theknowledge of others and is much greater than thehabit of memorization. Embedded within everyaspect of World History are the habits of disciplined inquiry that students use to develop,test, modify, and revise their understanding.
Habits Hidden in the World HistoryClassroom
Focusing on the stated habits of mind and the hiddenof habits of mind reminds teachers about both thegoal and the means needed to teach World History.However, there is a danger that in focusing on our course goals and means, we might forget that our students also have pre-instructional historical habitsof mind. Students are not tabula rasa when approach-ing history. They have alternative ideas abouthistory’s methods, value, and structure and thenature of historical change. These pre-instructional,alternative conceptions may hinder acquiring thehabits of the historical discipline. For example,students may see history as merely transferring inertfacts from the history text to their memory, whichwill hinder their skills in disciplined inquiry. Or,history students might be very comfortable thinkingalong a local and personal scale of time and place,which will hinder their efforts to assume more globaland distant stances. Students typically haveheuristics to help them determine historical signif-icance - often trusting authorities to decide whether something is historically important. A growing bodyof research attempts to describe these alternativeconceptions of history, but space does not allow amore extensive review. However, it is critical thatteachers pay attention to the pre-instructional habitsof mind that students bring with them to their studyof world history. If ignored, these hidden viewsthreaten to undermine our attempts to help studentsdevelop more disciplinary habits of mind.
Habits? Whose Habits?
Habits are routines that often are invisible to thosewho practice them. However, when trying to developnew habits or alter old, these need to be quite visibleand self-conscious. This idea is crucial in worldhistory, where so many of the habits of mind are newand unnatural for students. Therefore, as teachers,we need to build these habits into our instructionformally and regularly. For students to develop thesesophisticated habits of world historical mind,teachers must use the habits of mind overtly, contin-uously, and habitually in every phase of instruction.Whose habits are these? Obviously, they must become those of the students who will employ themas they study and are assessed in World History.However, these habits must be teachers’ habits aswell. The habits must also become the very means bywhich teachers organize and teach their courses. Is it possible to teach these habits without using themregularly in the classroom? No, we need to useglobal thinking, employ multiple levels of analysis,compare across time, space, and culture, determinesignificance, and contextualize ideas and events.Further, we need to demonstrate their use to our students by using these habits overtly, consciously,and clearly. For example, we might ground our course decisions by making a case for globalsignificance or comparison, i.e., “There are other ways I could have approached this subject, but Ididn’t think that would be significant in relationshipto the global pattern,” or, “ I want to compare thesetwo events. Let’s look at how I’m going to set up thecomparison.” Teachers of World History need toexternalize their historical choices to bring studentsinto disciplined ways of thinking. When we teachworld history, in a sense, we are world historiansmaking decisions about significance or patterns of global development. We must model for studentsregularly how historians do such thinking in the process of doing their work.
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