The planning team introduced the Eight Habits of Mind from Ted Sizer's book, Horace's School, to the entire staff and it was adopted as a set of core values and beliefs to help guide their decisions and actions. Posters were made of the eight habits and displayed throughout the high school building.

The Habit of Perspective:

• Cultivating the ability to perceive things in their actual interrelationships or comparative importance
• Subjectively evaluating relative significance
• Acknowledging and respecting points of view (one's own and others)

The Habit of Analysis:

• Organizing an argument (read, heard, or seen) into its various parts, and sorting out the major from the minor parts within it
• Separating opinion from fact and appreciating the value of each
• Pondering arguments in a reflective way, using such logical, mathematical, and artistic tools as may be required to render evidence
• Knowing the limits and importance of such analysis

The Habit of Imagination:

• Searching for both old and new patterns
• Noticing details and the unusual
• Being disposed to evolve one's own view of a matter

The Habit of Empathy:

• Sensing other reasonable views of a common predicament, respecting all, and honoring the most persuasive among them

The Habit of Communication:

• Accepting the duty to explain the necessary in clear and respectful ways (both to the audience and to the ideas being communicated)
• Being a good listener

The Habit of Commitment:

• Recognizing the need to act when action is called for and stepping forward in response
• Persisting patiently as the situation may require

The Habit of Humility:

• Knowing one's rights, one's debts, and one's limitations and those of others
• Knowing what one knows and what one does not know
• Being disposed and able to gain the needed knowledge and having the confidence to do so

The Habit of Joy:

• Sensing the wonder and proportion in worthy things and responding to these delights

Sizer, R. T. (1992). Horace's School: Redesigning the American high school. Boston, MA: Mariner Books, p.73