Habits of the Mind: Analytical Thinking
Since 1992, the faculty has focused on the Habits Of The Mind as academic learning outcomes for students in each course. We believe that a wise school's goal is to get its students into good intellectual habits. Rancho has received statewide recognition and financial support for our commitment to develop curriculum, instructional, and assessment practices that infuse intellectual habits throughout the curriculum.
Students will learn and practice the Habit of Analysis in each course at Rancho. Teachers will provide students with rubrics that will help students to learn to assess their progress in developing analytical thinking skills.
The Habit of Analysis
Examining material, through various reasoning processes,
to find the essential features of its parts in order to provide
evidence for a conclusion.
| Subject | Reasoning Process | Students Will... |
| Humanities | Constructing Support | Students will develop clearly stated positions supported by evidence they have gathered rather than merely stating facts which are obvious. |
| Mathematics | Problem Solving | Students will develop and test methods or products for overcoming obstacles or constraints to reach a desired outcome |
| Science | Experimental Inquiry | Students will test hypotheses that have been generated to explain a phenomenon (an observable event, model, fact or object). |
| Exploratory, P.E., Electives |
Error Analysis | Students will identify significant errors in information or processes, accurately describe the effects of the errors and identify how to correct errors. |
"These habits reflect value. They neither denote nor connote
mere technical expertise, usable skills. They are loaded with judgments,
for teachers and parents as well as for students. The lines between habits
that are good and bad, slovenly and devoted, personal and collective are
blurred. There is no escaping this. A school devoted to the inculcation
of certain sorts of intellectual habitsthe qualities of mind that engender
respectwill tangle endlessly, and revealingly for their students, over
matters of judgment. Good schools welcome this. In fact, only from such
tangling can those habits we most respect emerge."
Theodore R. Sizer, Coalition of Essential School Horace's School
Rancho has been a member of the Coalition of Essential Schools since April
1990