Persistence - The ability to stay with a task until it is completed, not giving up easily. The ability to analyze a problem and to develop a strategy to solve it, even if it means coming up with alternative strategies when others fail.

Managing and Decreasing Impulsivity - The ability to think before acting. Taking the time to think the question through before blurting out an answer, or taking the time to develop a well thought out answer instead of just getting it over with.

Listening with Understanding and Empathy - The ability to paraphrase other people's ideas accurately and to know how other people are feeling. To be able to accurately express other people's concepts, emotions, and problems requires listening with understanding and empathy.

Cooperative Thinking - Contributing ideas to a group, listening to their ideas, tackling increasingly complex problems, and discussing alternatives are all part of our social intelligence. To be successful, students need to listen, seek consensus, give up ideas to work on others, have empathy, have compassion, have leadership, know how to support the group, and have altruism.

Flexibility in Thinking - The ability to consider alternative points of view and deal with several sources of information. Students need to be challenged by the process of solving a problem and not so much with getting the right answer. They need to be able to state several ways of solving the same problem.

Metacognition - The ability to describe the steps and sequences used before, during and after solving a problem. Students need to plan for, reflect on and evaluate the quality of their thinking skills and strategies. Students need to be able to describe what is going on in their mind as they are solving complex problems. Doing that, they can improve their ability to solve ever more complex problems.

Accuracy and Precision in Thought and Language - Being precise means not using words like, "stuff," "nice," "weird," "things," or "ya know." Being precise means using the words we mean to use. Accuracy can involve students checking over tests and work before turning it in, review the rules they are to abide by, and review the criteria they are expected to follow.

Sense of Humor - Having a sense of humor, the ability to laugh at the right things, is how intelligent people behave. They perceive situations from an original often humorous vantage point, and appreciate and understand other people's humor.

Questioning - We are moving away from teachers asking all the questions and posing all the problems, toward students asking their own questions and designing their own problems. The types of questions students ask should become specific and more profound. Students should ask for data that supports other's conclusions and ask for evidence. Students should ask, "what if…" questions.

Activating Prior Knowledge - Intelligent human beings learn from experience. They explain what they are doing by referring to past experiences. Students learn new material better when they tie it to what they already know.

Taking Risks - Accepting confusion and uncertainty, and seeing failure as normal, interesting and challenging is risk worth taking. Students need to feel comfortable having to create solutions to questions rather than just knowing the right answers.

Using All the Senses - Students learn by using all their senses, such as making observations, experimenting, gathering data, manipulating, scrutinizing, identifying variables, interviewing, role playing, illustrating, or model building.

Creativity - All of us have the capacity to generate novel, original, clever or ingenious products, solutions, and techniques. Creative people are open to criticism; they hold up their products for others to judge and give feedback.

Wonderment - Students should feel wonder and curiosity in the face of problems. Students should enjoy problem solving; they should seek problems to solve even if it means making up problems to solve. Students should do this without their parents' or teachers' help or intervention.