h, cultivate, observe, and assess. The intent is to help students get into the habit of behaving intelligently. A Habit of Mind is a pattern of intellectual behaviors that leads to productive actions.
Persisting
Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they never quit.
—Conrad Hilton
Highly effective people spend an inordinate amount of time and energy listening (Covey, 1989).
Senge, Roberts, Ross, Smith, and Kleiner (1994) suggest that to listen fully means to pay close attention to what is being said beneath the words—listening not only to the "music" but also to the essence of the person speaking; not only for what someone knows but also for what that person is trying to represent
our inclination and ability to find problems to solve.
Thinking Flexibly
Flexible thinkers display confidence in their intuition
They tolerate confusion and ambiguity up to a point, and they are willing to let go of a problem, trusting their subconscious to continue creative and productive work on it. Flexibility is the cradle of humor, creativity, and repertoire. Although many perceptual positions are possible—past, present, future, egocentric, allocentric, macrocentric, microcentric, visual, auditory, kinesthetic—the flexible mind knows when to shift between and among these positions
Thinking About Thinking (Metacognition)
Striving for Accuracy
Whether we are looking at the stamina, grace, and elegance of a ballerina or a carpenter, we see a desire for craftsmanship, mastery, flawlessness, and economy of energy to produce exceptional results
Questioning and Posing Problems
Generative listening is the art of developing deeper silences in oneself, slowing the mind's hearing to the ears' natural speed and hearing beneath the words to their meaning
Applying Past Knowledge to New Situations
Thinking and Communicating with Clarity and Precision
Gathering Data Through All Senses
Creating, Imagining, Innovating
Creative people are open to criticism. They hold up their products for others to judge, and they seek feedback in an ever-increasing effort to refine their technique. They are uneasy with the status quo. They constantly strive for greater fluency, elaboration, novelty, parsimony, simplicity, craftsmanship, perfection, beauty, harmony, and balance.
Responding with Wonderment and Awe
Taking Responsible Risks
Finding Humor
You can increase your brain power three to fivefold simply by laughing and having fun before working on a problem.
—Doug Hall
Thinking Interdependently
Collaborative humans realize that all of us together are more powerful, intellectually or physically, than any one individual
Working in groups requires the ability to justify ideas and to test the feasibility of solution strategies on others
t also requires developing a willingness and an openness to accept feedback from a critical friend. Through this interaction, the group and the individual continue to grow. Listening, consensus seeking, giving up an idea to work with someone else's, empathy, compassion, group leadership, knowing how to support group efforts, altruism—all are behaviors indicative of cooperative human being
Remaining Open to Continuous Learning
Intelligent people are in a continuous learning mode
They are invigorated by the quest of lifelong learning. Their confidence, in combination with their inquisitiveness, allows them to constantly search for new and better ways. People with this Habit of Mind are always striving for improvement, growing, learning, and modifying and improving themselves. They seize problems, situations, tensions, conflicts, and circumstances as valuable opportunities to learn (Bateson, 2004).
In this course we are experiencing our teachers presence in our discussions and that is a large part of her presence in the course. She is guiding our learning by questioning our thoughts, and asking for data to back up our opinions. And we are taking part in each students learning process, by reading their posts and reading Professor Picketts response.