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Over the entirety of this course, I used the eight different habits of mind to help me improve my writing and get better grades on my essays. The eight habits of mind are persisting, managing impulsivity, listening with understanding and empathy, thinking flexibly, thinking about thinking, striving for accuracy, questioning and posing problems, and applying past knowledge to new situations. These eight habits are really great for getting your writings from average to above average. At the start of this class I had no idea what these were, and I didn't even know that they existed prior to taking the class.

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The first essay of this class proved to be a bit of a challenge for me. I really struggled with finding things to write and putting all of my work in an order that is easy to understand. In this essay the main goal was to pick a topic related to literacy that you personally thought helped you improve your writing, and you had to back it up with personal experience like I did in the picture above with a story about when I was younger I used to read books that were above my grade level. I think that without knowing the eight habits of mind this was a little bit harder of an essay for me to write, but if I could write it again after I knew everything that I do now it would be much easier.

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From my first essay to my second not a whole lot changed. Except I feel like I was able to better understand the assignment and I felt like it was easier to write about. My second essay was a visual analysis over a poster about poverty.  One thing that I changed was in the first essay I used the word you a lot and in the second essay I started to use the word people instead and try and not use any second person point of view in my essay. I ended up using it almost too much and it kind of made my writing sound dull or bland and very repetitive. I think this change shows the habits of mind striving for accuracy and applying past knowledge to new situations. I think this because I realized a problem that I was having in my writing and in my next essay I tried to fix the problem. I also brought this into my third essay to really try and always use the correct point of view.

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This was one of the paragraphs from my second essay, as shown in the picture there are five times where I used the word person in the same paragraph.

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Over the period of time when we were working on the second essay I went on vacation for a week during the time when the second essay was ending and the third was starting. I felt a little left behind and I was very confused at first what the third essay was about. I started to go through all of the sources that were in the module section on canvas for this essay, and I found the reading for the essay and it really helped me understand the essay. I also used this habit of mind to finish my second essay. After vacation I was not ready to go back to school and do work every night, but I pulled out my computer when I got home and finished my essay.

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Managing impulsivity, Thinking flexibly, and Metacognition

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Managing impulsivity, Thinking flexibly, and Metacognition

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In the second essay that I did over the poverty visual, I realized that I probably was not going to make most of my readers happy if I said the things that I wanted to say. So instead of just going ahead and writing what I wanted I took time and thought about how other people would think about poverty and what they would say if I asked them their thoughts on my visual. So, the first thing that I did was I used metacognition to think about how I was going to say something in my essay. Then I used managing impulsivity to stop myself from saying my thoughts and feelings. Then I thought flexibly to think about how other people would react to my visual and wrote based on what I thought and what I thought others would think.

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Habits of Mind Animations: Thinking Flexibly

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When I was trying to figure out the main topic of the third essay I was very confused and I didn't know where to start. I then when to my friends in the class and asked them about the essay and most of them did not know really either so I ended up asking some other people in the class and they gave me the answer that I was looking for. I also asked questions during the second essay when we were peer reviewing each other's essays. I asked others what they thought about my essay and I also asked them about different parts of their essay to better understand their thoughts and what they were trying to say in their essay.

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Habits of Mind Animations: Questioning and Problem Posing

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Habit of mind Listening with understanding and empathy

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Habit of mind Listening with understanding and empathy

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When I was doing the second paragraph we did a lot of rough drafts and I had a lot of people viewing my essay and a lot of feedback from those people. After my peers commented on my essay I went through and read every comment and listened to my peers and changed my essay according to their thoughts. On some of the peer reviewing times I even asked questions and listened to their answer instead of just reading their comment on my document. I also did a lot of listening when Mrs. Martin was talking about each essay and really tried to listen and see if anything that she was saying would help me on my essays.

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Throughout the entire class I improved using the eight habits of mind, and in my experience using them I have found a few to be more important than others. In my opinion Persisting, Metacognition, and applying past knowledge to new situations are the most important habits of mind out of the eight. The habit that takes the most work is persisting. This is because when you are writing and you have writers block it is very hard to continue on and write or just think about writing. In the future If I wanted to improve my writing I would definitely review my final draft more than I originally did. Some advice that I would give to people taking this class would be to not give up and push through the pain and suffering and get your work done.

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“Habits of Mind: Persistence.” YouTube, YouTube, 3 May 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAkwmomM62s. Accessed 8 Dec. 2022.
“Habits of Mind Animations: Questioning and Problem Posing.” YouTube, YouTube, 20 Nov. 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M74G-AVqKtU. Accessed 8 Dec. 2022.
“Habits of Mind Animations: Thinking Flexibly.” YouTube, YouTube, 30 Oct. 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfDe5mYWlkY. Accessed 8 Dec. 2022.