About The Habits of Intelligent Behavior

Through our Habits of Successful Behavior component, Emagine makes use of this emergent concept of intelligence, especially as it pertains to preparing students to excel in the post-secondary environment. Drawn in large part from Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick’s Habits of Mind (2000) and Gene Bedley’s Character Education, Emagine’s Habits grow out of the belief that to succeed in the post-secondary environment, students must develop the capacity and the will to apply their intelligence creatively and wisely, in ways that reflect their genuine beliefs. Learning and practicing these habits – in learning settings and in everyday life - involves drawing upon intellectual, moral, and emotional resources to inform our choices and guide our actions.

Let us define each of the nine Habits of Successful Behavior:

Striving for accuracy – Employing an exacting standard of precision and excellence; investing the time to check work and the effort to improve it.

Managing impulsivity – Being deliberate, strategic, and patient when approaching a problem; withholding judgement and considering all the information before making a determination.

Perseverance – Never giving up; learning from your mistakes and continuing to forge ahead; being resourceful in the face of adversity and frustration.

Applying past knowledge to new situations – Learning from and building on past experience; appropriately transferring skills or insights gained in one context into another.

Integrity – Being honest with yourself; aligning your actions to your core beliefs.

Thinking flexibly – Being able to integrate new information and then reorganize ideas and reformulate plans accordingly; resourcefulness and agility with different frames of reference, sets of tools, kinds of data; seeing from various points of view.

Thinking interdependently – Being able to recognize the true value of multiple perspectives; being able to tolerate and make use of divergent and/or conflicting points of view; being a team player.

Listening with understanding and empathy – Being acutely and intentionally attuned to another’s thoughts or feelings; being sensitive and attentive to the subtext and the context of a thought or statement.

Finding humor – When appropriate, bringing a playful, clever, ironic sensibility to bear upon intellectual challenges