AP World History “Habits of Mind”
August 3, 2005
Habits Hidden within the Stated Habits
While the stated habits of mind provide guidance,
they also lay open a complicated and challenging set
of thinking tools for anyone, let alone high school
students. Therefore, it might be useful for teachers to • Habit of scale switching and sensitivity to
consider the intellectual habits “hidden” within the
stated 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 important
mental habits to develop while studying World
History.
Habit of determining significance. What makes
something 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 vital
role 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 we
do when studying regional, national, or local history.
Ideas, processes, events, or people important at the
local level may not be as important at the global or
interregional level. The Course Description gives
examples to help teachers formulate a global,
comparative standard. However, students need to
understand what makes something significant in
global history. That is, students should also be taking
global or interregional stances to defend or critique
the global significance in particular events, people,
processes, and in material, social, and ecological
changes. Students should be able to defend their
decisions about global significance by grounding
their ideas in evidence.
• Habit of employing multiple units of analysis.
World historians employ many different units of
analysis. For example, at a societal level, world
historians often use institutional categories to
organize information by looking for political,
economic, religious, familial, or cultural patterns.
World historians also use temporal and spatial
categories to create eras, periods, and regions that
bound information and ideas. World historians
also employ many other organizers such as
1
civilization, society, nation, culture, and zones of
interaction, to name but a few. World history
students must also be able to use the different
analytical units in their study.
scale. World history involves creating,
expanding, and collapsing temporal and spatial
scales. World History students will work within
large and small geographic places and among vast
and tiny scales of time. The grain size of the
geographic or temporal unit changes with the
problem under investigation. Experts make such
shifts easily, moving, for example, from the diary
of a single traveler to graphs depicting global
trade for an entire era. Will our students be con-
scious of these hidden shifts and what each
entails? Scale switching and sensitivity to scale
provide useful tools in making sense of world
historical information and arguments. Making
visible the temporal and geographic level of
thought should support students in making
connections between local, national, regional,
interregional, and global patterns.
• Habit of contextualizing. Often synonymous
with historic empathy, this skill encourages
students to situate ideas and events in context.
This complicated habit guards against students
establishing superficial or facile generalizations
and judgments. Though such thinking is a
hallmark of disciplined inquiry, contextualizing
plays a particularly crucial role in world history
because of the wide range of cultures students
encounter.
• Habits of navigation. Consider all the mental
shifting world history students must do as they
study the human past. Students regularly repo-
sition themselves among different regions of the
world, eras of time, levels of analysis, units of
analysis, types of evidence, and historical argu-
ments. Think about the intellectual shifts required
to meet the stated habits of mind of connecting
global and local, comparing across cultures, and
contextualizing a variety of universal claims.
Hidden then within all these habits is the need for
students to be able to navigate and regulate their
2 AP World History “Habits of Mind”
thinking. Awareness of the choices historians
made when comparing, periodizing, and anal-
yzing along various temporal and geographic
levels is a valuable tool in supporting students’
understanding of world history.
• Habit of constructing and assessing historical
understanding. History is an epistemic activity,
a way of creating, extending, and assessing under-
standing. History students need to develop these
epistemic habits as they develop their knowledge
of the past. This is more than reproducing the
knowledge of others and is much greater than the
habit of memorization. Embedded within every
aspect 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 History
Classroom
Focusing on the stated habits of mind and the hidden
of habits of mind reminds teachers about both the
goal 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 habits
of mind. Students are not tabula rasa when approach-
ing history. They have alternative ideas about
history’s methods, value, and structure and the
nature of historical change. These pre-instructional,
alternative conceptions may hinder acquiring the
habits of the historical discipline. For example,
students may see history as merely transferring inert
facts from the history text to their memory, which
will hinder their skills in disciplined inquiry. Or,
history students might be very comfortable thinking
along a local and personal scale of time and place,
which will hinder their efforts to assume more global
and distant stances. Students typically have
heuristics to help them determine historical signif-
icance - often trusting authorities to decide whether
something is historically important. A growing body
of research attempts to describe these alternative
conceptions of history, but space does not allow a
more extensive review. However, it is critical that
teachers pay attention to the pre-instructional habits
August 3, 2005
of mind that students bring with them to their study
of world history. If ignored, these hidden views
threaten to undermine our attempts to help students
develop more disciplinary habits of mind.
Habits? Whose Habits?
Habits are routines that often are invisible to those
who practice them. However, when trying to develop
new habits or alter old, these need to be quite visible
and self-conscious. This idea is crucial in world
history, where so many of the habits of mind are new
and unnatural for students. Therefore, as teachers,
we need to build these habits into our instruction
formally and regularly. For students to develop these
sophisticated 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 them
as they study and are assessed in World History.
However, these habits must be teachers’ habits as
well. The habits must also become the very means by
which teachers organize and teach their courses. Is it
possible to teach these habits without using them
regularly in the classroom? No, we need to use
global thinking, employ multiple levels of analysis,
compare across time, space, and culture, determine
significance, 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 global
significance or comparison, i.e., “There are other
ways I could have approached this subject, but I
didn’t think that would be significant in relationship
to the global pattern,” or, “ I want to compare these
two events. Let’s look at how I’m going to set up the
comparison.” Teachers of World History need to
externalize their historical choices to bring students
into disciplined ways of thinking. When we teach
world history, in a sense, we are world historians
making decisions about significance or patterns of
global development. We must model for students
regularly how historians do such thinking in the
process of doing their work.
 AP World History “Habits of Mind”
August 3, 2005

Students In Any Students In A

Rigorous History Course
Should Be Able To:
• Construct and evaluate arguments
using evidence to make plausible
arguments.
• Use documents and other primary • Compare within and among
data: develop the skills necessary to societies, including comparing
analyze point of view, context, and
bias, and to understand and
interpret information.
• Assess issues of change and
continuity over time.
• Enhance the capacity to handle
diversity of interpretations through
analysis of context, bias, and frame
of reference.
World History Course
Should Be Able To:
• See global patterns over time and
space while also connecting local
developments to global ones,
and move through levels of
generalizations from the global to
the particular.
societies’ reactions to global
processes.
• Assess claims of universal
standards yet remain aware of
human commonalities and
differences; put culturally diverse
ideas and values in historical
context, not suspending judgment
but developing understanding.