None of the approaches have body of pedagogical understanding to effectively teach the habits. systems, the praxis lags behind the conceptual work. That whopping big topic deserves much exploration all of its own. In this paper, I am not going to address the pedagogy of habits of mind. Even the internal world is real, as in experiences and knowing, and is shaped by the play of the mind. So, I think of the mind as the broadest toolkit of human capacity to make sense of, and influence, the way things happen in the world-the world that is visible and also not so visible. In these habits of mind, heart smarts are extremely valuable, and the spirit has an active, essential role in this description of how humans work at their best. As I use the word mind, I intend it to include the intelligence of the heart and the spirit. The development of higher order thinking skills could be viewed as a huge side benefit of dedication to the habits of creative engagement-and indeed they might be a good lens through which to assess some of the learning impact of such an approach. This is not another way of presenting Bloom’s taxonomy of Higher Order Thinking Skills, although many kinds of higher order thinking appear in the application of these habits. Notice that these are not the habits of brain or intellect. Let me apologize in advance for the pages of verbiage before we get to the goods-since this is a first offering of its kind to the arts learning community, I feel impelled to lay a conceptual foundation and not merely cut to the bullet-point chase. This current iteration names 20 habits, and the list has climbed as high as 29 and had days as low as seven. This proposed irreducible core is more preliminary than final-the number and names have shifted right up to today’s writing, and will continue to evolve (and reduce, I hope) with use. I have tried to distill my understandings of creative engagement down to the smallest but still complete set of mental habits. The metaphor of “habits of mind” is growing in importance throughout education, provoking new pedagogical thinking and practice. I put it forward, nonetheless, in the hope that it clarifies current understandings and invites colleagues to find useful ideas and run with them. This essay’s perspective will necessarily be partial and pedestrian too, particularly since it offers a new construct of such complex matters. The articulations of those natural processes of “flow” are always incomplete and clunky compared to the live act. I have studied this internal action arena for a long time, and found many ways to describe the ways we function inside the creative experience. This essay explores what we do inside when creatively engaged. There is no righter right thing that humans know than the experience of creative engagement-making worlds we care about and exploring the worlds others have made-and there is a lifetime of pleasure to be had in that lifelong learning. I hearken back to Plato’s dictum that the single most important thing for a society to accomplish in order to succeed is to teach its young people to find pleasure in the right things. These habits of creative engagement are the ways we work when we apply ourselves with artistry-into any kind of project or problem, not just those in artistic media like dance, music, drama, the visual and literary arts. We when develop these capacities, these ways of working inside, to the point that we can apply them both by intention and intuition, we have and developed them into habits of mind. In this essay, we will explore the key processes, actions and attitudes activated when we invest ourselves in the flow of creating. Creative engagement is to me a bull’s eye of such potent centrality that its concentric circles of resonance and impact contain the kind of learning that individuals, schools, institutions, our culture and the world in general are crying to provide. My current answer is shared in this essay, and in its simplest statement, it is: I think the single most potent school reform goal would be to place the highest priority on individual creative engagement, and to shape schooling to develop the habits of mind that constitute creative engagement. My answers have changed over time as my understanding of the dysfunctions of American schools deepen, and as my own pedagogy refines and discovers new core practices. Over the years, I have asked many education professionals the following question: If you were to place all your chips on one key idea upon which to stake American school reform, which gamble seems best to take? I have heard answers that range from reducing class size and differentiated instruction, to authentic assessment, drastic increases in teacher pay, to no-schools-but-widescale apprenticeships.
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