Some of the teachers who eventually became our strongest champions of STEM education began as some of its biggest skeptics.

Of course they did.

Don’t we teach students to question everything?

Apparently, those teachers understood the assignment.

Okay, I’m not entirely sure that’s what they were thinking at the time. But still.

Our school was working toward STEM designation in Ohio, and our designation team participated in a series of professional learning experiences that became some of the best schoolwide professional growth I’ve ever experienced.

Because STEM designation wasn’t something a handful of science and math teachers could accomplish while everyone else cheered them on from down the hall.

Every teacher had to be part of the shift.

Math and science, obviously. But also reading. Writing. Social studies. Art. Music.

No subject was safe.

And I mean that in the best possible way.

We weren’t trying to add more STEM activities to the school day. We were trying to create a shift in learning culture.

One part of that shift was identifying the habits of mind we wanted students to carry across classrooms, across subjects, and eventually into their lives.

Our school adopted the 5Cs:

Creativity. Critical Thinking. Collaboration. Communication. Citizenship.

But as we talked about these habits, we started wondering:

If we say we value them, when are students actually supposed to learn how to use them?

Think about collaboration.

We put four students together during math and ask them to solve a challenging problem. We want them to collaborate, but they’re also trying to understand the mathematics, remember what they learned yesterday, interpret the problem, test strategies, and check calculations.

And we’re probably paying close attention to the mathematics too.

As we should.

So when does collaboration ever get to be the most important thing happening in the room?

Our professional learning inspired us to wonder what would happen if, every once in a while, we let the habit itself become the lesson.

Not for an entire unit.

Not even for an entire class period.

Just long enough to practice it.

So I began creating short design sprints teachers could use during morning meetings around events like STEM Day, Hour of Code, and Engineers Week.

For a few minutes, the academic content stepped aside.

The habit could simply be the habit.

Students could try something, struggle, disagree, change their minds, try again—and then talk about what their brains had just done.

What happened when your first idea didn’t work?

What happened when someone else’s idea changed yours?

What did your group do when you disagreed?

When did you suddenly see a possibility you couldn’t see before?

We weren’t studying creativity.

We were experiencing it.

And that distinction started to feel really important to me.

We don’t just want students to know what creativity is. We want them to recognize what it feels like when their own mind is being creative.

That’s metacognition meeting creativity.

Eventually, I brought a problem to my Discovery students, who had been practicing these habits in class since second grade:

How might we share what we’ve learned with the rest of our school?

Their answer was Mindful Monday.

Each week, students focused on one of the 5Cs during our morning announcements. They explained the habit, led the school through a one- or two-minute activity requiring no supplies, and encouraged everyone to notice that C throughout the week.

Where did creativity show up?

When did your group need better communication?

When did critical thinking help you solve something?

The students weren’t merely learning the culture.

They helped build it.

That’s agency in action.

It was service too. They had spent years developing habits that could now be useful to someone else.

And the teachers were practicing right alongside them.

Mindful Monday continues today because habits of mind don’t become habits simply because we value them.

Habits become habits because we practice them.

We understand this almost everywhere else.

Athletes repeat movements.

Musicians practice scales.

Readers practice decoding until they no longer have to think consciously about every familiar word.

So why would thinking be different?

Not worksheets about creativity.

Not vocabulary quizzes on collaboration.

Experiences.

Short, deliberate opportunities to practice a way of thinking and notice what your own brain is doing.

Maybe we’re building a kind of muscle memory for the mind.

And here’s the interesting contradiction:

Creativity isn’t a subject.

Neither is critical thinking. Or collaboration. Or communication. Or citizenship.

They’re ways of thinking, working, interacting, and participating in the world.

A mathematician notices a pattern nobody else noticed.

Creativity.

A historian looks at familiar evidence and asks a different question.

Creativity.

A student turns two whole numbers into a fraction and accidentally teaches his math teacher a new way to find the greatest common factor.

Definitely creativity.

Creativity belongs everywhere thinking happens.

And yet, maybe that’s exactly why it sometimes needs a few minutes of its own.

Those short design sprints were the practice field.

On the practice field, we could isolate a habit. Try it. Notice it. Talk about it. Try again.

Then we left the practice field.

School is the laboratory.

Now creativity has to show up in mathematics. Collaboration has to survive disagreement. Communication has to help someone understand an idea. Critical thinking has to appear when the answer isn’t obvious. Citizenship has to shape how we participate in a community.

And ultimately, even school isn’t the destination.

Life is.

Because someday there won’t be a teacher standing beside our students saying, “This looks like a situation where you should use critical thinking.”

No one will announce that today’s problem requires creativity.

There won’t be a rubric reminding them to communicate effectively.

They’ll encounter a problem, an idea, a disagreement, an opportunity, or something none of us can predict.

And they’ll have to decide what kind of thinking the moment requires.

That’s why I don’t think the 5Cs are really school skills at all.

They’re habits for navigating the world.

The design sprint is the practice field.

School is the laboratory.

Life is where they’ll need it.

We spend enormous amounts of time deciding what children need to know.

Maybe we should be just as intentional about deciding how we want them to learn to think.

Because if we’re serious about developing thinkers, then thinking itself deserves instructional time.

Which leaves me with a question:

What are we expecting children to know how to do that we’ve never given them the chance to practice?