Week 3: Habits of Mind

Curiosity– the desire to know more about the world

1. I think I need to work on developing this habit further in class. In my “Me in 6 words” presentation I put curiosity as one of the words because I love learning about new things. But so far, I can’t really think of a time I went out of my way to understand something better or more. What comes to mind is looking up words I am unfamiliar with and just being engaged with assignments that contain subjects I know little about. In the future I will be sure to find opportunities to learn more about the topics covered in this class. I could probably do this better during one of the projects as that’s more of a self guided assignment.

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Openness– the willingness to consider new ways of being and thinking in the world

1. Every time an assignment requires me to respond to some classmates, I look forward to it for this exact reason: I get to see a new perspective that I probably never thought of. A great example of this is from the week 3 exploratory writing where we had to annotate the live action of Beast and the Beast. I loved going through the responses because I got to see more instances the movie showed of both positive and negative examples of gender roles and beauty.

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Engagement– a sense of investment and involvement in learning

1. If I’m being honest I wasn’t looking forward to doing the engaged reading practices or even trying my best on them because I thought they were going to be useless. But the more I have done them the more I have come to appreciate them because they are teaching me great techniques for readings I encounter in the future. I have started taking them seriously because I like the way it’s teaching me useful skills while I'm also learning about new subjects I didn't know a lot about before. In the future I can continue to do this and engage with more people when responding to discussion posts.

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Creativity– the ability to use novel approaches for generating, investigating, and representing ideas

1. The only example of this that comes to mind is my homepage of this website. Before it was required to have the picture and bio of myself, and the short description of the class I had already put that information on my website because I thought it was the best way to represent the ideas I had for my website. Currently, I have modified it to include a slideshow of pictures that I think are like visual descriptors of the objectives and content covered in the course. But in the future to be more creative, when working on the podcast and essay I can try to add something special or more representative of my thoughts than just the rubric given.

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Persistence – the ability to sustain interest in and attention to short- and long-term projects

1. A great example of this is the week 2 exploratory writing assignment. For this I had to watch and annotate a 45 minute lecture and read and annotate an essay. After that I had to write four paragraphs explaining main ideas from each media and use quotes from the sources to support what I’m saying. I thought of this as both a short and long term assignment because that helps me sustain interest in whatever the task is. I thought of the two sources I had to annotate as short term projects and the paragraphs as the long term because it was a summary of what the sources were about.

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Flexibility – the ability to adapt to situations, expectations, or demands

1. This isn’t exactly something I've done in class but more about class. I have a really busy schedule this quarter so I know it’s important for me to manage time well and schedule what I’m doing ahead of time. Because assignments for this class are usually already posted for the following week- for example it’s Thursday of week 2, week 3s assignments are already posted- I get a head start on those and try to finish them before I get too many other assignments from my others classes. I’m expected to meet the demands of all of my classes so the best way for me to do that is adapting to what’s available to me when I have time to do it.

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Responsibility– the ability to take ownership of one’s actions and understand the consequences of those actions for oneself and others

1. I’m not sure how I have shown this in class except by turning in all assignments on time. I understand the consequences if I turn something in late so I make sure I get them done well before the deadline just in case something happens. In the upcoming podcast assignment I need to be able to take responsibility for whatever my role in the project is and if I don't there will be consequences because I wasn't being fair to my group members.

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Metacognition (reflection) – the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes used to structure knowledge

1. Every week I have to write a blog that reflects on my experiences in the class, about class, or something I’ve done that pertains to class. I think these blogs are a good way for me to look back on my writing but also my thought process as I write them. Another way I reflect on my thought process is through the close reading practices because I’m always prompted to reflect on something the author said and later reflect on my thoughts on my behavior throughout the assignment. Although my responses have been pretty consistent I still think it’s beneficial to review what I did and why. I also think it’s good that my responses are consistent because that means I found a pattern that works for my learning.