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The New York State Education Department (NYSED) adopted a set of three standards for social and emotional learning (SEL) in August 2018. In doing so, they have paved the way for explicit instruction in and assessment of 21st-century skills. The three-goal framework selected by NYSED (2018) is modeled after the five competencies of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL, 2018). The authors are overjoyed by this movement to promote dual objective learning (Vermette & Kline, 2017) targeting affective and cognitive goals, but are hesitant to use the CASEL (2018) framework for such SEL standards. Prior to NYSED’s (2018) adoption of the new standards, the authors championed the use of Costa and Kallick’s 16 Habits of Mind (2000) as the best dispositional framework. Now, however, the authors argue that cross-walking the Habits of Mind (Costa & Kallick, 2000) to the CASEL (2018) competencies unlocks previously untapped potentials of both frameworks. This article outlines how such an overlap between the frameworks can be achieved, and proposes how the Habits of Mind (Costa & Kallick, 2000) can be directly used by the students as evidence of their development of the competencies.

For the continuing development of quality instructional practices, educators must have access to the findings of research and be in a position to explore applications of those findings. We think we may have found such a resource: A 2016 book titled The ABCs of How We Learn: 26 Scientifically proven approaches, how they work, and when to use them by Schwartz, Tsang, and Blair is a concise, insightful, and applicable set of 26 short articles that explain key learning factors, provide examples, and identify the supporting scholarship. In this article, a first-year middle school science teacher and a veteran teacher educator collaborate and offer teacher educators and professional developers an overview of the 26 factors and an interpretation of how to effectively utilize this text. The article opens with a vignette of a middle school science lesson that readers may analyze anyway they wish. The debriefing offered in the article introduces the ABC framework by identifying the various principles as they are utilized in the learning experience. Then the authors describe and comment on the entire set of 26 factors and speak to the book’s great potential for helping teachers integrate research-supported findings into their daily efforts.