Educational outcomes in traditional settings focus on how many answers
a student knows. When we teach for the Habits of Mind, we are interested
also in how students behave when they don’t know an answer. The
Habits of Mind are performed in response to questions and problems, the
answers to which are not immediately known. We are interested in
enhancing the ways students produce knowledge rather than how they
merely reproduce it. We want students to learn how to develop a critical
stance with their work: inquiring, editing, thinking flexibly, and learning
from another person’s perspective. The critical attribute of intelligent
human beings is not only having information but also knowing how to
act on it