Habits of Mind Relfection

Habits of Mind.  The passage says a lot of interesting, insightful things about regular patterns when problem solving, but let's explore this a bit more in depth.

There were some things in this passage I completely agreed with. Of these included;

• "Good problem solvers are flexible thinkers and display confidence in there intuition."  I wanted to analyze "flexible thinking" and find out what studies really thought of it.  I much enjoyed the first paragraph of this article, it really reminded me of the Habits of Mind. Exercises For Flexible Thinking.  I love how well it conveys what flexible thinking really is and how it ties into problem solving.  
• "They call upon their store of knowledge and experience for sources of data and processes that will help them solve each new challenge." I love this sentence just because I can tie it into my own life, it is truly an everyday skill, unlike some of the other things mentioned in the passage.
• I also liked the simplistic format of the text that made each paragraph and subject easy to understand and break apart to explore a deeper meaning.

FUNNY-problem solving

Above we have a short, three minute video on a horridly incorrect problem but a good method for problem solving. Enjoy!


As well as things I enjoyed about the passage, there were things I disagreed with.

• First of all, the word "habits" itself implies a bit much. A habit is a regular pattern of behavior, but many people don't have skills such as persistence or questioning.
• The fact that they seemed to bounce between comparing these things to adults (using words like mechanics, teachers, and parents) to using words more targeted towards children (students, assessed, rubrics) also seemed a bit disorganized.

As a conclusion, hope this wasn't too boring, Habits of Mind had its strong and weak points, but was generally a great source of information, fairly easy to understand, and interesting to analyze.