Monday, December 16, 2013

Humanities: Introducing the Habits of Mind

I know they were in your guidelines and expectations at the beginning of the year, along side academic initiative.

Perhaps we should have done this before now, but here we are going to dive into the Habits of Mind.  What they mean and how we can develop them.

We started class today with an improv game called "World's Worst."  We've played it before, but I had forgotten.  We started with breakfast cereals and worked up to scenes of the world's worst students.

Then we went to BlueLab and did some brainstorming with post-it notes and big ol' tables.  We identified qualities that make up:

  • good students
  • good leaders
  • good employees
  • good problem solvers




We noticed that these four groups of people share very similar positive qualities.

From there, we handed out an explanation of the 16 Habits of Mind from Costa & Kallick.
From Mindwerx.com

Each of those habits was printed on a different sheet of paper.  We sorted our qualities of effective leaders, problem solvers, students and employees on to the different habits based only on what we could figure out from the sheets.  No teaching has happened yet, so this is a scary place to be.



We took some time to check our work after this sort.

And then we reflected by adding "I Noticed/I Wonder/I Think/I Want" statements to a white board using post-its. (This way we can do some prioritizing on Tuesday.)






HOMEWORK

Blog: 3+ Posts 
Req'd Post of the Week:  What do you think of these habits of mind?  Why do they seem important?  How well developed are these habits for you?
Due: Friday, December 20

Study & Complete Roots 7: Product & Quiz
Due: Thursday, December 19

Projects & Arguments, Self Assessments & Reflections
Due: ASAP


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