Learning & Leading With Habits of Mind

Gathering Data Through All Senses

It is not easy to describe the sea without the mouth.

—Kokyu

Students who have developed this habit feel free to engage and explore all
their senses. When they are confronted with a problem, they suggest
strategies for gathering data or for solving the problem that incorporate a
variety of senses: visualizing, building a model, feeling textures, acting
out or dancing to a poem or a work of prose, listening to and visualizing
recurring cycles and patterns, or moving to the rhythms. They seek ways
to engage all the senses, wanting to hold, touch, feel, taste, smell, and
experience objects and events.
These students’ enriched written and oral language displays an ever-
increasing range of sensory metaphors: kinesthetic, auditory, visual, gus-
tatory, and olfactory. They experiment with vivid, sensuous, and evocative
descriptions and alliterations, describing “a waterfall of problems,” “atonal
music slapping my ears,” or “gardenias: the gods’ belief in aromatherapy.”

Creating, Imagining, Innovating

Originality is simply a pair of fresh eyes.

—Thomas Wentworth Higginson

We k n ow s t u d e n t s a r e c r e a t i n g , i m a g i ni n g , a n d i n n o v a t i n g w h e n w e s e e
them deliberately and voluntarily use strategies for stimulating, generat-
ing, and releasing inventive ideas for a new task. They expand the possi-
bility of creative insight by preparing their minds with much knowledge
about a subject. Then, they generate options and possibilities.
When students who have developed this habit face an impasse, they
deliberately widen the scope of their search with techniques such as brain-
storming, mind mapping, synectics, or metaphorical thinking. They
search for theories, explanations, and frameworks that have generative
potentials, that lead to further meanings. They pursue promising theo-
ries, and they constantly hunt for nubs and kernels of viable ideas. They
explore options, think of possibilities, generate strategies, and explore con-
sequences (Perkins, 1995).

Defining Indicators of Achievement 185