Sixteen Habits of Mind

1.

Persisting: Stick to the task. Dont give up easily.

2.

Think before act: Taking time to reflect on an answer before giving it.

3.

Listen to others: Pay close attention to what is being said beneath the words. Read between the lines.

4.

Think flexibly: Open your mind to change based on additional information and data or reasoning, even when it contradicts your beliefs.

5.

Thinking About your thinking: Take the time to wonder why you are doing what you are doing. Know what you know and know what you dont know, that is the true knowledge.

6.

Striving For Accuracy and Precision: Dont turn in sloppy, incomplete or uncorrected work. Check your work over for accuracy and precision.

7.

Questioning and Posing Problems: The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution. Use your creative imagination, raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle.

8.

Applying Past Knowledge to New Situations: Learn from your experience. When confronted with a new and perplexing problem, draw forth experience from one event and apply it in another context.

9.

Thinking and Communicating with Clarity and Precision: Communicate accurately in both written and oral form taking care to use precise language, defining terms, using correct names and universal labels and analogies. Avoid overgeneralizations, deletions and distortions.

10. Gathering Data through All Senses: Get information into the brain through the all sensory pathways: gustatory, olfactory, tactile, kinesthetic, auditory, visual. Do not operate within a narrow range of sensory problem solving strategies.

11. Creating, Imagining, and Innovating: Use your imagination and creativity to innovate. Constantly strive for greater fluency, elaboration, novelty, parsimony, simplicity, craftsmanship, perfection, beauty, harmony, and balance.

12. Responding with Wonderment and Awe: Have not only an "I CAN" attitude, but also an "I ENJOY" feeling. Enjoy figuring things out by yourself, and enjoy learning throughout your lifetimes.

13. Taking Responsible Risks: Accept confusion, uncertainty, and the higher risks of failure as part of the normal process of learning. View setbacks as interesting, challenging and growth producing. However be aware that not all risks are worth taking!

14. Finding Humor: Humor liberates creativity and provokes such higher level thinking skills as anticipation, finding novel relationships, visual imagery, and making analogies. Enjoy and find humor in things that you do.

15. Thinking Interdependently: Take care of each other. Share your energies with the group. No one must feel alone, cut off, for that is when you do not make it. In our modern world problem solving has become so complex that no one person can go it alone.

16. Learning continuously: Be in a continuous learning mode, constantly search for new and better ways. Strive for improvement, always growing, always learning, always modifying and improving.