R#2

William James made insightful connections between the importance of habits and learning in his talks to teachers. James explained how, as humans, we are subject to the law of habits. His description of how the nervous system of humans supports the creation and continued refinement of habits immediately caused me to consider two ideas that did not officially surface or resurface in educational circles until the late twentieth century, schema theory and cognitive load theory. James's emphasis on the importance of developing habits early in life as to commit them to be automatic so our minds could be freed to do other work, shed light on the idea that our minds can only handle a limited number of processes at a time. By assisting students in habit forming, either physical or mental, would allow for deeper thinking of other subject matter. I considered the law of habits as a means of clearing the stream of consciousness of unnecessary debris.

As I considered James’s thoughts on habit forming, I question why as educators we do not spend more time on the development of habits in the area of thinking. Just this past week during a professional development for teachers, a participant asked how to assist our early learners in the development of thinking skills. My response simply stated the need to teach thinking skills, all of them, intentionally and provide opportunities for students to hone them. Students from an early age need to develop habits in the areas of critical and creative thinking and as educators we are providing a disservice to our students if we neglect it.

In the next chapter, James discusses his association of ideas in two laws, the Law of Contiguity and the Law of Similarity. James states, “If, arresting ourselves in the flow of reverie, we ask the question, ‘How came we to be thinking of just this object now?’ we can almost always trace its presence to some previous object which has introduced it to the mind, according to one or the other of these laws" (p. 66). I connected his thoughts on these two laws to metacognition. I found his perspective of the teacher's role in guiding correct associations or dissolving wrong associations of thoughts from one object or idea to the next as a principal task enlightening.  The ability to accomplish this task is in the art of teaching.