Teaching Minds
How Cognitive Science
Can Save Our Schools

Teaching Minds
How Cognitive Science
Can Save Our Schools
ROGER SCHANK
Teachers College, Columbia University
New York and London
Published by Teachers College Press, 1234 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY
10027
Copyright © 2011 by Roger Schank.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-0-8077-5266-1 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-8077-5267-8 (hardcover)
Printed on acid-free paper
Manufactured in the United States of America
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Milo (who can now read this) and for Max, Mira, and Jonah

Contents
Preface
1. Cognitive Process-Based Education
2. Teaching Kids to Walk and Talk
3. What Can’t You Teach?
4. Twelve Cognitive Processes
That Underlie Learning
5. Real-Life Learning Projects Considered
6. A Socratic Dialogue
7. Knowledge-Based Education vs.
Process-Based Education
8. New Curricula for a New Way of Teaching
9. How to Teach the Twelve Cognitive
Processes That Underlie Learning
10. Defining Intelligence
11. Restructuring the University
vii
12. How Not to Teach
13. How the Best Universities
Inadvertently Ruin Our Schools
14. What Can We Do About It?
Notes
About the Author
Preface
My father always told me that I would be a teacher. He didn’t mean
it in a nice way. My father talked in riddles. As the only child in the
house, I had plenty of time and opportunity to figure out what he was
really saying. This was it: I am afraid that like me, the best you will be
able to do in life is to be a civil service worker. He was also saying: If he
had realized he was going to be a civil service worker, at least he could
have been a teacher, which he might have enjoyed. He wasn’t really
talking about me at all.
I never had any intention of being a teacher. I didn’t particularly
like school and later, when I became a professor, the part of the job I
disliked the most was the teaching. One might wonder how I wound
up being a professor if I disliked teaching, and one might wonder why
I am writing a book about teaching if I dislike teaching. One also might
wonder whether I still dislike teaching. Yes. And no. It depends on what
one means by teaching, which is, after all, what this book is about.
The other day my 3-year-old grandson Milo told me he was going
to teach me how to throw rocks. It seemed an odd idea. What could he
mean by this? To Milo, “teach” means to tell someone what to do and
how to do it and then have the person do it too. Teach is part of tell
plus imitate for Milo. Milo is 3. It is not too surprising that this is what
teach means to him. It is a little surprising that he thinks he should
be his grandfather’s teacher, but that is another issue. But it is really
no shock that Milo thinks this is what teach means. It is what nearly
everyone thinks teach means. The commonly accepted usage of teach
is tell and then have the person who was told, do what he was told.
This certainly is not what teach ought to mean, or more important, is
not what good teaching is. And, every good teacher knows this. The
problem is that the system that employs teachers doesn’t know it and
more or less insists that Milo’s definition be the one that is followed.
Actually, I am being too generous here. Milo’s view, namely, that
after he tells me, I will do what he has said, is a better definition of
ix
x
Preface
teaching than the one actually employed commonly today. Milo at
least thinks that the end result will be the student doing something
that the teacher did. In school, teach usually means helping the student
to know something that the teacher told him. Milo doesn’t know
about that definition of teaching yet since he hasn’t been to school,
but, unfortunately, he soon will.
I have been thinking about teaching for more than 50 years. First
I thought about it when my father said that was what I was going to
be. Then I thought about it as I watched my teachers teach me and, no
less important, watched my father teach me.
My father eventually retired from his civil service job and became
a junior high school teacher in Harlem. He loved his new job and, I
have to assume, became a good teacher. I say it that way because he
was certainly not a good teacher for me, at least not when he thought
he was trying to teach me. I remember him trying to teach me algebra
and it making no sense to me whatever. I remember him teaching me
sports and I mostly think of him as being totally frustrated with my
inability to perform as well as he had hoped. (Being a jock was a big
thing to my father.)
I did fine in algebra without his help and, in fact, became a math
major in college. But, as I look back at it, my father was my first and
best teacher. Why do I say this after all the bad things I have just said?
Because my father was at his best when he wasn’t teaching but was
just saying what was on his mind and arguing. He often talked about
history because he liked history. And when he talked about history
and I asked questions, he became a good Socratic teacher. He forced
me to think and question in our discussions. The conversations were
often very heated but also were a highlight of my intellectual life at
that time. My father didn’t teach me anything except how to think.
That’s better than algebra, actually. For this I am grateful.
So, I thought about teaching then and I thought about it again
when I went to college. As part of my father’s conversations with
me about life, he talked a great deal about his own experiences. His
mother sent him to New York City to live with his aunt in Brooklyn
and to go to college. He was 15 and had, until that time, spent his
entire life on a farm/hotel run by his parents in upstate New York.
He was unprepared for the city, had no money, missed his family,
and had no idea why he wanted to go to college at all. Did I mention
that he was 15? He had graduated first in his class (a class of 16, I
Preface
xi
think) and had skipped a few grades on the way. Suddenly he found
himself at New York University, which in those days was located in
the Bronx.
This is what he remembered most about college in 1923: Apart
from the poverty stories, the “how hard he had to work to support
himself” stories, the stories about watching the Yankees from the elevated
train and wishing he could go to a game, he remembered that
teachers lectured, that you had to memorize what they told you and
then tell it back to them on a test. He thought college was stupid, but
he assured me (in 1960) that college surely had changed by now and
that teachers wouldn’t still be doing this. Oh yeah? In 1962, when I
entered college, they were doing exactly that. And, in 2000, when I
retired from 32 years of professoring, not that much had changed.
So I was thinking about teaching before I got to college and I was
thinking about it while I was a professor and I am thinking about it
now that I have, for the most part, finished teaching. To make sure I
have been thinking about it correctly, I asked former Ph.D. students of
mine, (now tenured professors mostly and some industry executives)
what they had learned from me while they were spending 4–7 years
studying with me. I thought their answers might help me think about
teaching in a new way. I sent an e-mail to maybe 20 former students
whose e-mail addresses I happened to have, and most responded. Here
are some excerpts.
1. I remember quite specifically a homework presentation I
made in your class. When I presented it in class, I was a junior
in college, and all the other students in that class were grad
students. When I was done you smiled at everyone (a rare
event) and said, “Anyone care to follow that act?” Your clearly
heartfelt endorsement of my little research product was a key
moment in my coming to trust my own ideas. I just submitted
a $16.7 million proposal to NIH that would create the first allcomputational
genome center. The kind of chutzpah embodied
in that proposal is one consequence of my experience with you.
2. The way you assigned me to a project—you sent me to each
existing project for 2 weeks until I hit on a project with a good
fit (I was enthusiastic and coherent talking about it). I used this
technique when I was assigning people at Accenture.
xii
Preface
3. You taught me to teach by telling students stories that are
meaningful to you. I think to be a real teacher you have to let
yourself be vulnerable. So the students can see that you are a
human with feelings and fears and goals. And then being able
to say to the students: This is the way I do it; it fits who I am; it
helps me be successful; and don’t let anyone tell you that you
can’t do something.
4. You taught me that not everyone will like you no matter what
you do and no matter how hard you try. I came back from a
Deloitte course evaluation, and the deans just hated me. Instead
of being upset with me, you assured me that you have to just say
what you believe, and some people won’t like you, and oh well.
5. You taught me to start by collecting data. I recall watching
most of your papers start by collection of data. I recall watching
your criticisms of work that was just abstraction on abstraction,
with no data at its roots.
6. You once told me to imagine that my mother was my
audience—if I could explain it to my mother, I could explain it
to anyone. Incredibly, this seems to work for every audience out
there. So I’ve passed that tip along to my students and it seems to
work for them too.
7. I remember that you used to tell us we need to be excited to
get up and go to work in the morning, that that was the most
important thing. For some people, it’s because of the people
you will be with. For some, it is because of the passion about
whatever it is. But, in general, I still give people that advice (and
it is advice I’ve also been giving my own kids). You have to love
what you are doing.
This is just a sample but it reflects what these former students, now
all in their 40s and 50s, remember about what I taught them. Hadn’t
they learned any facts from me? Didn’t I teach them some real stuff?
Some said in passing that they had learned the actual content of the
subjects I taught as well, but that that wasn’t as important to them as
the things they chose to write about. Why not?
Preface
xiii
There are two important answers to this question and those answers
are what this book is really about. My father offered these same
answers to me, not explicitly by any means, when I thought about the
good and bad of having him as my teacher. When he tried to teach me
facts, I learned nothing much. When he engaged my mind, I learned a
lot. As a professor I never forgot this lesson. I rarely tried to teach facts,
upsetting many a student along the way. I just argued with them, or
encouraged them. I never told them much, except maybe some good
stories.
So here are the answers:
The first is:
Teaching isn’t what outsiders to the profession think it is.
The profession I am referring to here is, of course, the teaching
profession.
The second is:
Learning isn’t what outsiders to the profession think it is.
In this case, the profession I am referring to is not teaching at all.
Let’s start with teaching.
A professor friend of mine once asked her class what they thought
a professor’s biggest fear was while teaching a class. They all agreed
it was not knowing the answer to a question a student might ask.
When she told this story to a group of professors, they all laughed
out loud.
Why am I telling this story? Because a student’s view of teaching
varies greatly from a teacher’s view. No teacher worries about not
knowing the right answer to something a student will ask. You can
always fake it (say—What do you think? or, Class, can you help here?) if
you think it is important, but answers don’t matter very much. Teachers
are not supposed to be encyclopedias. They are supposed to be
something else. The question is: What?
My students’ responses above give a hint. Teachers are supposed
to be people who help students find their interests in life, think about
xiv
Preface
how to make decisions, understand how to approach a problem, or
otherwise live sensibly. Teachers are never shocked to be asked to provide
personal or professional advice to a student having a problem—
any problem. If one takes one’s job seriously, teaching means being
available to help. But this important advisory job is confused by lesson
plans, and class hours, and lectures, none of which matter very much.
Why do I say that these things don’t matter very much? This is the
essence of what this book is about—the move from content-based instruction
to cognitive-based learning, assisted by good teaching. This
means we will have to define this “new” kind of learning (it’s not really
new, of course, just new to schools) and the “new” kind of teaching
that is a natural consequence of using this new learning method.
Most teachers understand and appreciate that delivering the required
material is not their real job, at least it is not the reason they
signed on in the first place. The employers of teachers, on the other
hand—administrators, governments, department heads, and so on—
expect certain material to be covered. Exciting students is not on their
worry list. This is a big problem for teachers and for students, and one
that we will address here.
But my more serious concern is our conception of learning, not
teaching. Teaching follows one’s conception of learning so getting
learning right is of prime importance. When I said earlier that outsiders
to the learning profession wouldn’t get the real point, I was being
ironic. There is no learning profession. Why not?
In 1989, I moved from Yale to Northwestern to establish a new
institute, funded by Andersen Consulting, devoted to issues of changing
training and education by the use of new technologies. I needed a
name for the institute and came up with The Institute for the Learning
Sciences. I made up the term learning sciences. There was no such field
in academia. Most people thought I meant we were planning to work
on how people learned science. The only academic fields that “studied”
learning were psychology and education. Psychology, being an
experimental field, allows faculty to work only on experiments about
learning that provide data in a controlled environment. Education
faculty study how schools work and very rarely think about learning
outside of the school context or in a way different from the paradigm
already extant in schools. I wanted to create a learning profession. In
1989, there certainly didn’t seem to be one.
Preface
xv
Today this is less true. Cognitive science, a field I also had a big
part in creating, has become more important in the academic world.
Training, and e-learning, the first new field to come about as a result
of our work at my new institute (for better or for worse, I am not too
fond of most e-learning work) have become more important to think
about within the academic context, in part because online courses are
seen as potential revenue producers.
So, while there is still no learning profession per se, there is much
interest in what learning is about. This book is meant to address the
issue of what learning really is, in or out of school, and to answer the
question: How does learning really work? The questions that follow
from the answer to that question are:
• What kinds of learning situations occur naturally?
• How can we focus education (and training and
e-learning) on those types of situations in a new
paradigm?
• What would teaching look like in this new paradigm?
• If what we know about how learning works is antithetical
to how school works, then what can we do?
Answering these questions is one goal of this book.
Another goal of this book is to think seriously about what it means
to teach. Typically, we look at teaching in precisely the way that our
system forces us to look at it. There are subjects and there are experts,
and experts talk about their subjects to students who listen to what
they have to say. This idea is not only archaic—it is wrong. In the history
of humankind, teaching could never have looked this way.
Until recently, teaching always meant apprenticeship. We are set
up to be apprentices, to learn by doing with help from a mentor. We
have done this since the beginning of time. When learning became
academic in nature, when students were expected to become scholars,
all this changed—and it didn’t change for the better. Teaching started
to mean talking, and talking is a terrible way to teach. People aren’t
really that good at listening, after all. Small children don’t listen to
their parents. They may copy their parents. They can be corrected by
their parents. They may be impeded from doing something by their
parents. But listen? Not really. We listen in order to be entertained, not
in order to learn.
xvi
Preface
This lack of understanding about what learning really is like, and
what teaching must be like in order to be useful, has caused us to set
up school in a way that really does not work very well. When students
complain about school, when politicians say school isn’t working, we
understand that there is a problem. But we don’t understand what
the problem is. We think we can fix schools by making them more
friendly, or safer, or paying teachers better, or having students have
more say, or obsessing about test scores, but none of this is the case.
The problem with schools lies in our conception of the role of
school. We see school as a place to study academics, to become a
scholar, when in fact very few students actually want to become scholars
or study academics.
As a society we have gotten caught up in a conception of school
from the late 1800s that has failed to change in any significant way,
despite the fact that universal education has made the system unstable.
Universities dominate the discussion, and everyone listens to
what academics have to say because they don’t see the alternative or
know whom else to listen to. But, if we understand how learning actually
works, and how teaching actually should work, the alternative
becomes much clearer.
It is establishing that clarity that is my goal in this book.
CHAPTER 1
Cognitive Process-Based Education
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember
from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be
taught.
—Oscar Wilde
Learning begins with a goal. However, when we think about education
and school, we often forget this. Someone, somewhere, decides that a
student must learn about Napoleon, but fails to ask how such learning
might conform to a goal that the student consciously holds. We don’t
forget this when we try to teach a child to walk or talk, because we
know that the child does want to learn to do these things. When we
teach a child to hit a baseball, we usually determine beforehand that
the child wants to learn to do this. But, we forget this simple idea of
goal-directed learning as soon as we design curricula for schools. Who
cares if the child wants to learn long division? Make the child learn it.
It is very important. Full speed ahead!
Somewhere along the way, many students get lost. They may get
lost in high school, or in college, or in job training. But somewhere
they learn to shut off their natural learning instincts, the ones that
drive them to improve because they really want to accomplish something.
Instead they try hard to do what they were told to do—they
study, they pass tests, and eventually their love of learning is gone.
The feedback that they previously have gotten from accomplishing a
real goal, one that they truly had held, has been replaced by pleasing
the teacher, or getting a good grade, or progress in their goal of getting
into a “good college.”
Designers (and teachers) of courses must contend with this truth:
The students that you have may not want to learn what it is that you
want to teach.
What to do?
1
2 Teaching Minds
First, we must establish whether students can learn whatever it
is that you want to teach. I always wanted to teach my daughter to
throw a ball properly. She threw a football astonishingly well at the
age of 6. But, she never got it about how to throw a softball. I don’t
know why. She just couldn’t learn to do it right. She can’t do math
either. Believe me, I tried.
Second, we must determine whether what you want to teach can
be taught. Not everything can be taught. It is hard to learn to be a
nice guy if you are inclined to be nasty. You can learn to be nicer, or
at least to fake it, perhaps, but certain things are hard to learn after
a certain age. You can teach a 2-year-old to be nice—a 22-year-old is
another story.
Third, we must figure out what method of learning actually would
teach what we want to teach. This is an important question that is
made more important, in part, by the fact that the learning methods
available in schools tend to be of a certain type. The things that
schools desire to teach are of a type that conforms to the available
methodologies for teaching. Content that lies outside the range of the
currently available methodologies typically is not considered something
worth teaching.
Fourth, we must decide whether a selected learning methodology
actually will work, given the time constraints and abilities of the students,
and other constraints that actually exist. This is, of course, the
real problem in education. It is easy to say that students would learn
better if they had real experiences to draw upon. This isn’t that hard to
figure out. What is hard is implementing this idea within the time constraints
of the school day and the other demands of the school year.
Fifth, we must determine a way that will make what you want to
teach fit more closely with real-life goals that your students actually
may have. By real-life goals I mean things like walking and talking
(and later driving). Why is it that teachers, or more accurately school
systems and governments, want to teach things that are not in accord
with a student’s real interest? While we argue about how best to
teach algebra, no one ever asks what to do if a student doesn’t want to
learn algebra. The question is so weird; the possibility that you could
skip algebra because it doesn’t interest you is so remote that we don’t
even think about this in any way. What is the real cause of this problem?
Why can’t we just let students learn what interests them? Are the
people who run schools simply out of touch with how learning really
works or how actual students behave when faced with something they
Cognitive Process-Based Education 3
don’t want to learn, or is something else more complex going on?
I will summarize these five issues as follows:
ABILITY
POSSIBILITY
METHODOLOGY
CONSTRAINTS
GOAL ALIGNMENT
School is subject-based and, further, those subjects are predefined and
agreed upon by those in charge. Without giving a history of how this
state of affairs came to be, 1 or why it is an issue, it is first necessary to
note that it is the case. I say this because when we were students in
school, we accepted the fact that school was the way it was, and we
assumed that it was the way it was supposed to be. We may not think
each subject we learn is valuable or interesting, and perhaps we long
to learn different subjects, but never do we hear people suggest that
there shouldn’t be subjects in school at all. This is a very difficult idea
to swallow. There have always been subjects. What else would there
be? What would it mean to not have subjects?
Answering this question is the aim of this book. We need to understand
what goes on in schools and what might be preferable. The issue
really is not schooling at all. The real issue is how learning actually
takes place in the human mind.
Ask a student how he is doing in school and he will tell you the
subjects he likes. I like English but I am bad at math, he might say. This
is such a normal sentiment among students that we never think about
how weird a sentiment it really is. We don’t ask: How are you doing at
life? We could ask that of a teenager and she might say: I am good at
dating but bad at driving.
But, actually, you would never hear teenagers say something like
that. This is weird because, in general, dating and driving are much
more important subjects in a teenager’s world than English and math.
But they don’t talk about whether they are good at it or bad at it in
the same way.
They continue to practice and get better at those things because
they care about them. Saying, I am bad at math, means, in essence,
. . . and I don’t care and have stopped trying because I don’t see the point.
Saying, I am good at English, typically means, I am getting a good grade
in English. This state of affairs defines the main problem in education:
4 Teaching Minds
There are subjects that are school subjects and there are subjects
that are life subjects and teenagers can tell the difference. They
work harder at the life subjects.
And, what is the difference between these two kinds of subjects? Goals.
It is as simple as that.
Instead of simply saying what is wrong with schools and what
teenagers are really like in school, I want to take a different tack.
Some teenagers wake up in the morning wanting to learn history
or algebra but they are a very small minority of the school population.
There is no minority, however, when it comes to dating or driving for
teenagers. They all want to do these things. So the question I want to
ask is:
Are there other things that all teenagers want to do and are those
things connected in some way with learning?
Or, to put this another way, if school had been designed around
something other than subjects, what would it have been designed
around? Driving and dating, which we know are winners in a teenager’s
world, could be seen as subjects, or they could be seen as instances
of something else, and that something else might be something
important to learn.
Students everywhere might want to learn whatever that is and they
would work hard to learn it. If we can turn the question around in that
way, maybe we can design better learning situations for everybody.
So, the question is:
What are driving and dating instances of, with respect to learning?
Or, to address this from the cognitive science point of view:
What is it that students are doing when they learn to drive
and date that they might be getting better at while doing those
things?
Can we view whatever it is they are getting better at as an example
of the kinds of things we should want to teach and that students
should want to learn? Answering these questions will allow us to
Cognitive Process-Based Education 5
look at education in a new way. We need to think about how people
actually learn, regardless of the subject, in order to address them.
Let’s think about dating, then. I was never any good at it as a kid.
I know how the non-cool guys feel. But, later on, much later on, I got
very good at it. So, I must have learned something. What?
What was I bad at as a kid? Meeting girls, for one thing. Other kids
could do it easily. I always needed to be fixed up.
Talking to girls, for another. I hardly knew any girls. I went to an
all-boys high school. I was 16 when I went to college and the other
freshmen were 18, so that didn’t help either. In other words, I had no
confidence.
But mostly, I had no idea what to say to a girl. What did they talk
about?
And, one more thing. I really didn’t get the point. I didn’t know
why one wanted to go out with girls anyway. I mean I eventually got
the idea, at least I think I did.
Why am I saying it this way? I am trying to get an insight into the
learning process and I am a fine example. I didn’t know how to do it
and then I did. I didn’t get the point and then I did, sort of. So I must
have learned something between the ages of 16 and 60. What?
Here are some things I learned:
• Human relationships are important, but they aren’t easy
to establish or maintain. They require work.
• The work involves, among other things, learning how to
listen and respond to the needs of another human being.
It involves subjugating one’s own interests from time to
time for the interests of another.
• Girls, and later women, feel good. Being with someone
who loves you feels good. Learning to love feels good.
More than feeling good, these things are critical for
staying alive. This is not so obvious when you are
surrounded by love from your family. But eventually you
are alone, and alone is not so much fun.
As this is not a chapter on love, I will stop there. Suffice it to say
that I learned how to meet girls, how to gain their interest, and how to
form relationships with them. I also learned why I wanted to do that.
Now let’s see what we have learned about learning from my little
diversion into teenage angst.
6 Teaching Minds
We have learned that learning about how other people behave is
very important.
We have learned that learning about one’s own emotions and
feelings is very important.
We have learned that building confidence is very important.
We have learned that learning to listen is very important.
We also have learned that learning how to express oneself is very
important.
Now let’s go back to discussing learning.
Why is it that teenagers are more interested in thinking about dating
than they are in thinking about algebra? Why is it that they don’t
rate themselves on their success in dating in the same way as they do
when they are discussing how they are doing in science?
What do teenagers know about learning that their school doesn’t
know?
This is it:
Teenagers know that the issues I have mentioned above will be
important for them for the rest of their lives in a large variety of
arenas, not just dating.
No matter what they do in life they will need to form relationships,
assess their own abilities, gain confidence through practice, learn to
listen, learn to love, try things out and see how well they work, and
learn why they do what they do. To put this another way:
Dating is way more important than algebra and every teenager
knows it.
Dating is much more important not because teenagers have raging
hormones and they crave sex, as this phenomenon often is described.
It is important because what they learn while dating serves them in
many areas in life and relates strongly to who they will be and how
well their lives will go.
Algebra relates to none of this and they know that too.
So, let me ask a simple question:
If we must have subjects in school, why wouldn’t dating be rated
as way more important than mathematics?
Cognitive Process-Based Education 7
The answer to this is simple enough. School was not designed to help
kids live better lives. That was never the point. But shouldn’t it be? 2
From a cognitive growth point of view, school wasn’t even designed
to teach us things that relate to learning per se.
Scholars designed the subject matter of the current school system.
You hear sportscasters describe football players as scholar-athletes. Really?
Scholars? Why would that be what we are seeking to create? There
are only so many jobs for scholars, and while scholarship is very nice,
it ought not be the goal we seek in school in a system of universal
education.
Yes, but dating? Is that the subject I am proposing? Really?
Let me explain the real issue here. Take a look at the items I
mentioned above.
We have learned that learning about how other people behave is
very important.
We have learned that learning about one’s own emotions and
feelings is very important.
We have learned that building confidence is very important.
We have learned that learning to listen is very important.
We also have learned that learning how to express oneself is very
important.
Now, I will transform these slightly:
Students need to learn about how other people behave and why,
and they need to learn how to interact with different kinds of
people.
Students need to learn about their own emotions and feelings
and how to deal with them.
Students need to learn how to rely on themselves and feel
confident in their own abilities.
Students need to learn how to listen to others and really hear
what they are saying.
Students need to learn how to express themselves effectively.
Now this list doesn’t seem so crazy, does it? In fact, most parents will
tell you that they try very hard to teach all these things to their children.
So one argument might be that the school doesn’t have to do it,
since parents do it.
8 Teaching Minds
Another argument might be that if the schools worked on these
issues, they would have students memorize the 12 principles for building
self-confidence and learn to express themselves by analyzing classics
in world literature.
Here is the key point:
These issues, the ones that could be learned from dating,
transcend all aspects of our lives.
And, more important, students know this. I started with the idea that
learning begins with a goal. The points I listed above are goals that
teenagers actually have. They would not have to be talked into those
goals. Moreover those goals are, as all students know anyway, way
more important than algebra. They aren’t interested in becoming
scholars.
Now let’s consider the cognitive science behind this. Everything
we do as human beings is goal-directed. We go for a walk for a reason,
we shower for a reason, we get a job for a reason, we talk to people
we meet for a reason. We pursue goals as soon as we are born. We try
hard to learn to walk, talk, get along with our family, get our needs
satisfied, and find out what we like and what we don’t like. We do
this from birth. If school related to the goals that children actually
had, that they were working on at the very moment that they entered
school, school would seem like a natural and helpful experience. Students
wouldn’t stress about satisfying their teachers any more than
they stressed about satisfying their parents when they were learning
to walk and talk. Yes, they want to please their parents, but that is not
exactly the same thing.
People know what their goals are and they know when something
they are being offered, a parasailing lesson or a pomegranate, for example,
doesn’t fit with their goals. They can be convinced to try out
a new activity that they believe will not satisfy any of their goals, but
for the most part it is difficult to convince them that weird things that
were not on their goal list actually should be on the list. We say things
to students like, “You will need this later.” But this is usually a boldfaced
lie. You don’t need algebra later. Making up nonsense convinces
nobody.
There is a more important issue here. Later on in this book I will
detail the 12 kinds of learning that make up what it means to learn. If
Cognitive Process-Based Education 9
you get good at learning these things, you get good at what life has to
offer. The list above is a partial list of the group of learning processes
that I detail in Chapter 4. It is really quite important. I have used dating
as a simple way of explaining it because no one has to explain why
that matters to a teenager. Teenagers know that they have to learn the
processes that I discuss in Chapter 4. As things are now, these important
issues are not considered significant enough to deal with seriously
in school. World history is always considered more important. But
why should that be the choice?
Earlier, I mentioned that students want to learn how to drive as
well as how to date. This is a pretty universal goal that teenagers have
so we should ask of it as well whether it is important and what it
might be an instance of that is inherently significant in real life.
On the surface, driving seems a skill that is an important part of
daily life. So, one is led to ask why driving isn’t a school subject? The
answer is that it is. Driver’s education has been taught in schools for
many years. Not every school offers it, but many do. So what is the
problem? It is just a useful skill, not a scholarly subject, so surely I
am not suggesting that it is more important than physics. That is, of
course, exactly what I am suggesting.
In our test-driven society, when driver’s ed is taught, it is taught
with a clear goal and a clear notion of success. When a student has
passed the tests and gotten her driver’s license, everyone is satisfied.
Well, not everyone. I was once called in on a consulting assignment
for a university hospital that was working on a study to prevent
teenage car accidents. The study was funded by an insurance company
that would have been happy to pay out less in damages and, presumably,
also thought fewer dead kids would be a generally good thing.
What is the problem?
Students may have their licenses but they don’t know much about
driving and responsibility. It wouldn’t be a shock to anyone to know
that kids drink and drive, text message and drive, and generally yell
and scream and goof around while driving. They often die from this
behavior. Could we teach them not to do that? The answer always
seems to be to put up posters that say don’t drink and drive and to
make them watch scary movies about car accidents. The school system
strikes again.
If we tell them, then they will do it, never seems to work, but we keep
trying.
10 Teaching Minds
I often have used the Department of Motor Vehicles (the DMV) as
an example of the best there is in testing. They have two tests. Dumb
multiple choice questions that make no sense and a real test that tests
to see whether you can drive. Schools typically don’t have the real test
at all, one that tests to see whether you actually can do something, so
the DMV at least is smarter than the school system.
But the real issue is something else entirely. Driving is an instance
of a piece of very complex behavior that exemplifies one of the ways
in which we learn. Perhaps more important, driving entails a great
deal of other things, which could be learned and should be learned.
A simple example of this is car mechanics. Once upon a time
schools taught kids to fix cars as well as to drive them. Perhaps they
still do. But vocational subjects like that have been relegated to the
back burner of education so that more testable subjects can be taught.
Also, cars have gotten more difficult to fix. This is too bad, because
if car mechanics were required instead of physics, students actually
might learn science.
What do I mean by this?
When we hear an outcry about the nation’s need to make children
learn science, no one ever asks why. The standard answer, if this is
ever asked, is that science is important in tomorrow’s world or some
such nonsense. Push harder and you might get some remarks along
the lines that soon all the scientists will be Indian and Chinese, which
may be the real fear of those who push science in the United States. To
address this question properly, one has to ask what exactly is meant
by “science.”
Imagine that you are a student working on fixing a car in a car
mechanics class. As I write this I am imagining a scene from the musical
Grease, which was set in the 1950s when there actually were cars
to work on in school. I never got to work on a car because I went to a
science high school where such a thing would be looked down upon.
So when I graduated from high school and drove to college and my car
broke down, I hadn’t the slightest idea what to do. I wish I could tell
you that at least I understood the physics of the engine but I didn’t. I
just knew F = MA and other stuff that wasn’t going to help me fix my
engine.
Now let me ask you, how is fixing one’s car engine like fixing
one’s air conditioning or plumbing? The answer to this question has
Cognitive Process-Based Education 11
embodied within it what it means to do science. When science means
learning facts about science, we are talking about useless information
that is readily forgotten after the test. I have no idea why anyone
learns to balance chemical equations or apply physics formulas or
learns about biology classifications in high school. None of this is of
any use to most adults. (It is easy to test, however.)
When the stuff that is being taught does not relate to the inherent
goals of the students, it will be forgotten. You can count on it.
Why this stuff is taught is simply that it derives from a conception of
science prevalent in the 1890s that has not been modified since. It is
defended by people as a way to produce more scientists, which makes
no sense since it probably deters more students from entering science
than it encourages.
Scientific reasoning, on the other hand, is worth teaching.
Why?
Because car mechanics, plumbers, doctors, and crime investigators,
to name four random professions, all do scientific reasoning on a daily
basis. As a society we anoint only doctors with the glory of doing
actual scientific reasoning. The other professions get less glamorous
interpretations. But they are all doing the same stuff. This is what they
are doing:
They are taking a look at evidence and trying to determine the
probable causes of the conditions that they have found.
To do this one must know what causes what in the real world, which
is science; what counts as evidence of known conditions, which is science;
and previous cases that are similar and that any good scientist
must know. So while we may not think of a plumber as doing scientific
reasoning, that is exactly what he is doing.
Science is about creating hypotheses and gathering evidence to
support or refute those hypotheses. Children are natural scientists.
They often try stuff out—skipping rocks on the water or dropping
stones from the roof or lighting things on fire—to see what happens.
But there is more to science than trying stuff out. One must seek explanations
and make sure those explanations are correct. Knowing what
constitutes a correct explanation is really the essence of what scientific
knowledge is about. But notice that there are correct explanations for
12 Teaching Minds
hypotheses in plumbing as well as in medicine and that these explanations
exist for repairing a faulty engine and for understanding who
committed a crime. It is all scientific reasoning.
The difference between plumbing and medicine is in the complexity
of the science. Not a lot of invention goes on in plumbing and
there aren’t all that many explanations to choose from. The degree of
difficulty in understanding what is going on and why is what separates
those fields and makes one science and one not. But the basic
thought processes are the same.
This is important to notice because all these areas of inquiry are
what we might call diagnostic.
So, and this is the important part, the real issue from a cognitive
science point of view is not in teaching science per se, but in teaching
scientific activities, one of which is diagnosis. And, since diagnosis is a
similar process no matter what you are diagnosing, it makes sense that
all through school, diagnosis would be a subject, and not physics or
literature. The things that children are asked to diagnose might start
with things little kids like, like finding out what is wrong with their
pets or their toys, and then move on to things bigger kids like, like cars
and crime, and then move on to large issues, like why a business has
failed or why our foreign policy doesn’t work.
Diagnosis matters a great deal in our lives, yet it is not a subject in
school. This is not surprising because the origins of the school subject
areas, as I have said, are scholarly. But if we want to teach children to
do things that matter and we want to retain their interest because they
know intrinsically that these things do matter, then we must have
them practice diagnosis all through their school lives, in a variety of
venues that correlate with their interests. They don’t all have to diagnose
the same stuff. It is the diagnostic process itself that matters, not
what is diagnosed.
I have been using the word subject for an idea like diagnosis but it
is not a subject and should not be seen that way. I have been using the
word only to contrast it to existing subjects in school. Diagnosis is a
fundamental cognitive activity. Cavemen did diagnosis. They may not
have done it well, but they did it well enough to continue the species.
The diagnostic process is as old as people. Knowing why, being able to
prove a hypothesis, is a fundamental cognitive process.
School needs to be organized around fundamental cognitive activities.
It would be easy to demean what I have said here by saying
Cognitive Process-Based Education 13
I want to teach kids to date and drive better. What kind of school is
that?
But this trivializes the point. I do want to teach students to date
and drive better. But these are just a few instantiations of general cognitive
processes. Forming human relationships and figuring out what
is going in the physical world are two of many very important cognitive
abilities that manifest themselves in myriad ways in real life.
A properly designed school system needs to focus on cognitive
abilities, not scholarly subjects. Kids will recognize instantly that these
activities are the ones they know how to do and that they need to get
better at. If we allow them to choose what areas of knowledge they
would like to focus on while learning these skills, they would be attentive
and interested students. No more ADHD. Poof!
A society that organized schools around cognitive abilities would
become one where people were used to thinking about what they did
and how and why they did it. They would not find school stressful or
boring.
This wouldn’t be a bad thing.

CHAPTER 2
Teaching Kids to Walk and Talk
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite
as much from his failures as from his successes.
—John Dewey
Teaching is a serious issue. Teachers matter. Or at least they should matter.
But we have the sense that it is the job of the teacher to tell us stuff.
Students expect it and teachers do it. Often, teachers get criticized if
they do anything else. And, this is pretty much the beginning and the
end of the problem with teaching. We force teachers to teach wrong.
I am beyond the age where I have little kids that I have to teach
how to walk and talk. But when I did, I don’t remember preparing
any lesson plans. In a cognitive process-based model of education, all
teaching looks like the teaching you do when you teach your children
to walk and talk.
Lately I have been personally interested in being taught. This is
because at the age of 55 I started to play softball in an old guys’ softball
league in Florida. I discovered I wasn’t really very good. This was a bit
surprising since I had played in the university softball leagues while I
was a professor and had stopped playing only in my 40s. I wasn’t a bad
player then. There hadn’t been that long a hiatus. And, I was playing
against people a good deal older than myself since I am rather young
as recent Florida transplants go. I used to be a good hitter and I wasn’t
now. The reason was easy enough to understand. In the university
leagues they play fast pitch. A batter has a second or so to decide about
swinging. It is all instinct. At least it was after having played for 40
some odd years.
But, in Florida, old guys play slow pitch. The pitcher throws the
ball in a high looping arc and it is a strike if it lands on the plate. Quite
a different experience from trying to hit a ball that is zinging by your
head. Should be easier, no? Not for me. It took a bit of thinking to
figure out why.
15
16 Teaching Minds
I analyzed how I was swinging, when I was swinging, and what
kinds of pitches I was swinging at, and I came to many different conclusions.
I realized I needed to wait longer before I swung. I realized I
had to stop swinging at inside pitches (the ones that almost hit you).
I realized that I had to stop swinging at pitches that looked good but
yet dropped in front of my feet. I realized I had to see the ball hit the
“sweet spot” on the bat. I realized I needed to change my whole approach
to hitting, in fact.
OK. I realized a lot. I had come to many conclusions. Now what?
Just do it, right? Aha. Not so simple.
You can’t just do what you know you should do. Why not? Because
your subconscious isn’t listening to what you have to say. This is
why you don’t tell a little kid how to walk and talk. Apart from the fact
that he wouldn’t understand you anyway, even if he could understand
you, the part of his mind that would be doing the understanding is
the conscious part. Cognitive process-based teaching teaches nonconscious
processes a good deal of the time.
A child learns a lot more from falling down than he ever will learn
from hearing Mom say, “Watch your step.”
We are wired to learn from failure. Those who don’t learn from
failure typically die young. We are descended from people who learned
not to eat certain poisonous plants, and not to travel in a way that
would expose them to danger, and to stay near their mates, and to
protect their offspring. Those who didn’t do these things, those who
didn’t learn from their own failures and from the failures of others,
didn’t get to have surviving offspring. The human race exists precisely
because it is capable of learning from failure, both individually and
collectively.
Did you ever wonder why what you learned in school isn’t still in
your head, or why you can’t remember what your wife wanted you to
get from the store on your way home? Or, why the things you have
decided to do to improve your business or make more money or be a
better person actually don’t ever get executed? The answer is simple:
You can’t learn by listening—not from teachers, not from your wife,
not from helpful suggestions from wise people, and not even from
yourself.
Why not? Because it is your subconscious that is in charge of executing
daily activities—from swinging a bat, to driving home, to talking
to people you want to make an impression on, to getting along
with your wife. Your conscious mind can make decisions, but your
Teaching Kids to Walk and Talk 17
subconscious pretty well does what it is in the habit of doing. The
subconscious is a habit-driven processor.
Bad habits, as they say, are hard to break. Actually, all habits, good
or bad, are hard to break. A new swing is really hard to develop, as is a
new way of selling, or a new way of treating people, or driving a new
route home.
This is the real use of education: the creation of new habits. This
can be done in only one way. The subconscious learns in only one
way.
The subconscious learns by repeated practice.
The only teaching that can work, then, is the kind of mentoring that
helps someone execute better while they are practicing.
How is a high school football coach different from a high school
history teacher?
Before we attempt to answer this question, we need to consider
why it is an important question to consider. In general, I think most
people would agree that the behavior of these two types of teachers is
likely to be quite different. In our mind’s eye, we see images of yelling
and crude behavior versus refined lecture and discussion. But let’s get
beyond the superficial stereotypes and think about what they teach
rather than their style of teaching it.
The history teacher at his worst teaches facts, and at his best teaches
careful analysis of sources of facts.
The football coach at his worst teaches that someone could never
possibly do something, and at his best coaches someone to do something
better.
The history teacher teaches the conscious. The football coach
teaches the subconscious.
This makes sense if we view education (in school) as a conscious
affair. It certainly seems to be a conscious affair. We discuss history,
we don’t do history. And, it makes sense in football since the coach
doesn’t need players who can discuss football—he needs players who
can execute.
It begins to make less sense when we consider how the conscious
and the subconscious interact.
As long as we see ourselves as rational beings who can think logically
and make carefully reasoned decisions about our daily lives,
then education indeed should be about the promotion of reasoned
18 Teaching Minds
deliberation and the gaining of knowledge that will enhance our ability
to reason. But suppose this conception we have of ourselves and
our ability to reason logically is simply wrong?
Our entire education system depends on this debate. Actually the
word debate is really not right here as there is no debate. The other
side, the side that says we need to teach our unconscious because our
conscious isn’t capable of listening, has not really been expressed directly
very often. It is, however, indirectly referred to often enough.
Plato comments:
The most important part of education is right training in the
nursery. The soul of the child in his play should be guided to
the love of that sort of excellence in which when he grows up to
manhood he will have to be perfected.
Why should this be the case? Why should it be in the nursery where
real training takes place? And, what kind of training could the nursery
provide—the kind of the football coach or the kind of the history
teacher? And, what can we learn about education by considering seriously
what Plato said?
The principles of learning in childhood are rather simple really.
The first and most important part of an analysis of early childhood
learning is an understanding of where the motivation comes from.
If learning starts with a goal, as we have said, one question is, What
goals do children have and how do they happen to have them?
When people mention motivation, the word reward often is added
into the discussion. What kinds of rewards do children receive and to
what extent are these involved in learning? Bear in mind that there
are three kinds of rewards: intrinsic, extrinsic, and systemic. If it makes
me happy, I don’t need you to tell me I did well. If the activity doesn’t
really matter to me (an algebra test, for example), I will need some
outside reward to even try. When do kids learn because of the use of
external rewards? If I do well on an algebra test, it might be that it
gives me intrinsic happiness to know I did well at algebra. As a mathoriented
kid, I did get that kind of reward. It also makes you happy
when your parents are proud of you. And it makes you happy when
your grades win you admission into Yale or get you something else
you might want. Which types of rewards figure into early childhood
learning and what can we learn from this about learning? And, what
will this tell us about teaching?
Teaching Kids to Walk and Talk 19
Let’s start with walking and talking.
Walking and talking are intrinsically rewarding. No kid needs encouragement
to do either. They do have to be discouraged from crying
when a word will serve them better. I want milk works better than wah.
But they learn this quite naturally without very much parental help.
They learn to walk when their parents hold their hands and cheer
when they succeed, but they would have learned to walk anyway.
The parents’ role as the teachers of their children can be seen very
clearly when we consider walking and talking. Kids can learn to do
either without much help, but they do these things quicker and better
with parental help. Children who are spoken to by their parents, and
listened to and corrected when they make an error, learn to speak well
and more clearly as adults. While everyone learns to walk, parental
care prevents falls when steps and other hazards present themselves.
So, is the parent teaching the child? What does the parent actually
know about how to teach walking and talking? Actually the parent
knows quite a bit about teaching. We are wired to teach our children
and help them. All higher level animals do this as well. It is not a particularly
conscious process.
So, at what point are children better taught by professional teachers
instead of their parents? This is an important and interesting question.
A professional teacher is better than a parent if and only if the
teacher knows more about what is being taught than the parent does.
Teachers may take education courses and that may seem to qualify
them to teach, but really those courses are not so much about the art
of teaching per se. Teachers learn to teach by teaching, like anyone
else learns how to do anything. But teachers learn to teach in the
system they find themselves in. This means that typically they learn
how to manage classrooms and deal with administrators and handle
various issues that are very specific to school.
Teaching outside of school usually does not entail managing multiple
children nor should it entail dealing with state standards and other
governmental interference (although that often happens anyway).
So, knowledge is the real issue in teaching, not teaching skill. Or
so it would seem.
Actually this idea is clearly wrong if one thinks about university
teaching. Professors become professors by writing a Ph.D. thesis, not
by learning anything about teaching. They may have some teaching
experience prior to becoming professors because they may have
taught an introductory course or two as graduate students, but nobody
20 Teaching Minds
teaches them how to teach. In fact, professors are not qualified to
teach since they know nothing about teaching. They are hired by universities
because of their research credentials, and teaching doesn’t
matter much. There is some lip service about the subject but no one
ever got hired at Yale as a professor because she was a great teacher
who did no research.
Here is a professor of computer science from a very highly ranked
Big Ten university (he does not want his name mentioned):
Every faculty member in the Department of Computer Science
at my university thinks that their small insignificant area is
important enough that all undergraduates must take a course in
it. When you add all those courses up there is simply no time
for a student to do anything other than take crazy courses in
subdisciplines represented by the faculty in the department.
Everybody’s course is a sacred cow. If you tried to put something
new in, something would have to come out, and no faculty
member wants his course to be eliminated.
Professors are not there because they are good teachers.
I certainly knew nothing about teaching when I became a professor
at Stanford many years ago. But I hated seeing students bored and
miserable and started to think about what the problem was and how
I could fix it. Many professors do exactly this. They want to be good
at something they do regularly and their pride makes them into good
teachers. Not all professors do this, by any means. What does it mean
to become a good teacher in that context?
Professors are rated for their teaching ability. It is clear if one looks
at those ratings what the criteria are from the students’ perspective.
They rate the friendliness, fairness, enthusiasm, and even the “hotness”
of their teachers. These ratings have been studied extensively and
conclusions like this one are typical:
While student evaluations of faculty performance are a valid
measure of student satisfaction with instruction, they are not by
themselves a valid measure of teaching effectiveness. If student
evaluations of faculty are included in the evaluation process of
faculty members, then they should represent only one of many
measures that are used. 1
Teaching Kids to Walk and Talk 21
Professors and universities are very concerned about the evaluations
of the teaching of the faculty and these days websites (like www.ratemyprofessors.com)
make a very public show of how badly received
some professors are. The professors are concerned with how they appear
and whether they are liked and how all this might affect their
salaries. They are not concerned with teaching effectiveness because
they are not really teachers in their own minds.
Let’s hear from an Ivy League professor (who also doesn’t want to
be named):
There are faculty here who study real-world phenomena and
don’t know how to apply that knowledge to their own lives. We
could teach students here how to make use of what we teach
in their own lives, we just don’t. Right now the approach that
is taken makes most of the information that professors impart
useless. It doesn’t have to be that way.
My colleagues here don’t even do what they are studying
when they are out of the lab. They are not successful people in
life. If someone studying memory had to remember something,
would they make use of their own data? I doubt it. Many of our
professors don’t realize that they may not know as much as they
think they know. All these people assume that whatever they do
is the best that can be done.
When a child learns to walk, you cannot say you were very good at
teaching her to walk. She would have learned to walk without your
help, most likely. When you teach a child to play baseball, you can
more easily say that you were a good teacher, but really who knows
you didn’t screw him up with nonsense that it may take him years to
undo? I was taught to step into the pitch in baseball and years later
learned that what I was taught was wrong.
College professors can be evaluated on effectiveness only if someone
knows what that means. Does it mean how well students do on
exams? We can make easier exams then. Does it mean how many of
them get into Ph.D. programs at Harvard or how many get good jobs
upon graduation? That likely has nothing to do with the effectiveness
of the professors.
There are no measures that make sense, for a very simple reason.
College teaching doesn’t make much sense in the first place. Lecturing
22 Teaching Minds
and giving grades is certainly not a paradigm that any parent would
use. You don’t grade your child on speaking ability; you help her speak
better. If it takes longer to do that, then it does. Even the DMV doesn’t
care about effective teaching. It doesn’t give grades, just licenses. Can
you do it well? is the question the DMV is charged with answering. But
can you do it well? isn’t a meaningful question in the top universities
because there is typically nothing, other than research, that anyone is
really being taught to do.
This leaves us in a quandary when it comes to understanding what
it means to teach well. Here is the Ivy League professor again:
People need to learn to generalize the information that they are
given. They need to learn how to think about content in order
to see how that content may or may not be true for them. We do
not do that here. Instead we teach that this is the way it is done.
We have kids at mediocre universities who don’t know the
facts and then we have kids at the good schools who know the
facts but very few who know that those facts are not necessarily
true. We need a different approach to knowledge than we
currently have. By having students memorize the facts, it makes
it seem as if the facts are truer than they actually are. We need to
teach students to attack the facts and not to replace them with
other facts.
If facts are taught here in this way, and we are setting the
standard, then we have a problem. Some faculty here actually do
teach in this way, but it is not the main culture. Even the hardcore
facts, like dates, are arguable. Students are not taught to use
the information they have to question other information.
If we are teaching something where there are no performance measures,
then effectiveness cannot be gauged. If the performance measurement
is based on an exam, this likely would not reflect on the
teacher’s ability at all. Some students do well on exams and others
don’t, even though they all hear exactly the same lectures. And, when
there are performance measures, it is not always clear that it was the
teacher who was in any way responsible for the success of the students
(or their failure).
So what is effective teaching?
Teaching Kids to Walk and Talk 23
If a teacher is better at teaching a child than a parent is, it must
be because the teacher knows something the parent doesn’t know or,
at least, doesn’t know how to teach. This makes the teacher more effective
than the parent, but for very uninteresting reasons. You can’t
teach what you don’t know, of course.
But knowledge alone is meaningless because teaching is not about
the transfer of knowledge. I realize that a great many people think that
this is what teaching is about; except if that were the issue, students
wouldn’t even think about rating their teachers on anything except
how much they knew. And, by the way, that is about the last thing
teachers are ever rated on.
For the most part, teachers are rated by students on how entertaining
they are. But entertainment and teaching are really not particularly
related. They are not unrelated because you can’t get through to
someone who has tuned you out. But you can entertain your students
and get great ratings and still teach them nothing.
Here is the Big Ten professor again:
At a big state university, which one would think has an
obligation to supply training to the students of that state in a
major field in which students can readily find employment,
the faculty could care less about that and they only want to
do graduate teaching. We teach courses that are modeled after
courses in the professor training schools like Harvard and MIT.
But how many professors do we need?
Superstars who bring a lot of funding are very important in
the university. The superstar system made sense when there were
superstars. But today how many of these superstars have really
big ideas? Does my school really have any superstars at all? I
don’t think so.
The School of Education, where I am also on the faculty,
has a research focus, which they do badly. Most of their
students plan to be teachers. But they teach them the literature
and not how to teach. It is the same situation as in computer
science. They really want their students to become professors of
education. They are not teaching teachers to teach because they
don’t care about that. They look down their noses at teacher
preparation schools. Ninety-eight percent of their undergraduates
24 Teaching Minds
want to become teachers but the faculty are focusing on their
graduate students. They don’t teach the teachers. They do it, but
it is not their focus.
The average professor of education here understands that he
is supposed to teach teachers to teach but he gets evaluated on
his research not on the quality of teachers who come out. It is
a research university. How many dollars do you bring in? How
much do you publish? Where would quality of teacher training
fit in that model?
So, again, what exactly is effective teaching? Let’s look at two of the longer
versions of what my former Ph.D. students and former employees
wrote to me when I asked about good teaching. These stories each need
some context in order to be understood, and then I will comment.
The first story is from a Ph.D. student of mine who then continued
to work with me for 30 more years.
You were collecting key things teachers needed to know to do
story curricula properly. Your contribution was “know when to
lie to students.” That triggered all kinds of discussion, pro and
con, leading eventually to a longer, more explicit statement
about knowing when to oversimplify, etc.
Reflecting on it later, I realized that “know when to lie to
students” was the right way to say it. The rephrased version was
too reasonable. It didn’t trigger any emotional reaction and reevaluation.
“Know when to lie” is a lie, but that’s the point.
Why is this story important? I placed it here because it reflects an
important belief that I hold about teaching. At the moment to which
he is referring, we were writing, as a group, a set of guidelines on how
to teach Socratically using the online curricula we were building for
high schools. We were, in essence, writing an instruction manual for
teachers on how to teach in a new way. When I supervise very smart
people who know perfectly well how to do things, I deliberately provoke
them. I believe that my job is to make them think. There is no
better way to make people think than by annoying them in a way that
makes them defend their point of view, especially when their point of
view may not have been well thought out.
Teaching Kids to Walk and Talk 25
It is important, when teaching Socratically, which is my preferred
methodology, to make students question their beliefs. No one is a better
teacher than a teacher who makes students wonder whether he has
been wrong about something.
Do I think that teachers should lie to students?
I think teachers should make students think harder than they
might have been capable of doing without the teachers. I also think
that teachers should not tell answers to students. Students do not learn
from memorizing answers. They learn from developing questions for
themselves that they then can begin to find answers to.
I believe that effective teaching makes . . .
students develop questions to which they then will seek answers
students look for answers from people other than the teacher
students confused and less certain than they were before
Now, I realize that these are pretty nonstandard ideas. That is, of
course, the point.
This next writer worked for me (after getting his Ph.D. elsewhere)
in the academic world and later in the business world.
Probably the most important lesson I learned from you was the
value of overstatement and oversimplification in communicating
ideas and getting people’s attention. I recently retired and was
roasted at my retirement party by a group of longtime employees
and there were some interesting anecdotes about what I’d taught
them about selling their ideas through management. Software
engineers are often uncomfortable making a point without
giving every possible nuance, caveat, and detail. This typically
causes management’s eyes to gloss over and their ideas never
get a fair hearing. So, I’ve (apparently relentlessly) encouraged
employees to make their points quickly and to use overstatement
and oversimplification as rhetorical devices. I’m still wincing
over the roasts that portrayed my predilection for interrupting
presenters and asking, “What’s your point?”—I learned that one
from you.
26 Teaching Minds
I most certainly taught the lessons this writer describes. I hated it
when students couldn’t get to the point and I frequently interrupted
them when they were speaking. In business, I make a point of saying
things that are very simple, which tends to upset people. I find this a
good way to start a conversation that addresses complex issues.
Of course, I never actually say any of this. I simply do it. The real
issue in teaching, by parents or by teachers or by anyone else, is the
model you present to the students. That model is presented by what
they see you do and how they see you act. They can choose to emulate
you or not. But a good teacher makes students think about how to
behave and about what works and what doesn’t.
I believe that effective teaching makes . . .
students think about how the teacher is behaving and causes
the students to wonder about whether copying this behavior
would be a good idea
students think about what works and what doesn’t in the adult
world
This next writer is a professor at a major university. I hired him to be
on the faculty at Yale, which was his first academic job.
I teach by telling stories that are meaningful to me. I let them
see who I am and how I live. I let them see what is important
to me and why. To be a real teacher you have to let yourself be
vulnerable. The student needs to see that you are a human with
feelings and fears and goals. You are saying to students: This is
the way I do it; it fits with who I am; it helps me be successful;
and don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do something.
Everyone wants to control you, but in the end, you have to be
you, for better or worse. So, don’t let anyone tell you that you
can’t do something.
I tell that story over and over and over again in different
ways. About my research, about my company, about my family. I
walk the talk.
And, the students have to see that there are consequences
of breaking the rules; that it costs; and the costs can be high
Teaching Kids to Walk and Talk 27
at times. But that’s part of the price of believing in yourself.
Sometimes you get hurt and then you have to pick yourself up
and try it again.
This writer was writing about his teaching. I behave this way as well,
and he knows it.
I believe that effective teaching makes . . .
students think about the stories the teacher tells
students believe that their teacher is not a phony, so they can
take what is said seriously
students think about what it means to put oneself on the line for
one’s own beliefs
The next writer worked for me as a writer for many years. Her main
career was, and is, as a concert musician.
My high school English teacher was a great teacher. He was
married to the Singer sewing machine heiress but committed
to teaching kids. He had us keep a writing journal and was just
excellent at helping me understand what was so personal to me
that others wouldn’t be able to connect (or perhaps just plain
sappy romantic drivel!) and what was “strong” and pertinent to
everyone. I still have the journal and wince at what I wrote but
still really admire his comments in the margins.
In the future, in a world where online learning begins to preempt
classroom teaching, mentoring will replace lecturing. Many teachers
know how to mentor but often they are not given the opportunity
or don’t take the time to do it. The teacher described above was a
personal writing mentor, which is about the only way you can teach
someone to write.
I believe that effective teaching makes . . .
students look more carefully at the work that they themselves
have produced
students believe that their teacher is their personal mentor
28 Teaching Minds
Here is the same woman, this time writing about how she learned
music.
My mentor, Otto-Werner Mueller, was conducting the Yale
Philharmonia in the 1970s—I met him as an undergrad in
Madison, WI. I attended his graduate seminars in Madison and
spent a lot of time with him while he was in New Haven. He
guest-conducted the Hartford Symphony (where I now work)
twice in the past few years. (He is 83 now.) I spent hours and
hours in “lab orchestra” watching him teach his conducting
students, both in Madison and at Yale. What always struck
me was how students were either so self-conscious they were
wooden, or how they’d try to imitate Otto (who at 6 feet, 7
inches had amazing stature) physically and couldn’t pull it off.
Very few were able to incorporate what he was teaching and then
make it their own.
I believe that effective teaching makes . . .
students look at what the teacher does and see how they can
imitate it in a way that is consonant with who they are
The next writer was a Ph.D. student of mine and is now a professor at
a major university.
Trust your intuitions. This was something you told many of
us over and over. It has had three meanings for me—first, that
the only right things to work on are those that I can imagine a
solution to; second, that whether a way of attacking something
is the right way or not, it will lead me to the right way; and
third, go out on a limb. I can’t say how I learned this except,
perhaps, through trusting your advice and then noticing that it
got me to success over and over again. It began to really sink in
when I had my own students. Often, the most interesting things
they brought to me were more intuitive than they were based
on what everyone else was saying. And I have had to reassure
people that their ideas are good and they should follow up on
them. Of course, there are also intuitions that my students have
that I don’t think are good, and I don’t advise them to follow
Teaching Kids to Walk and Talk 29
up on those. So I think I now believe in trusting intuitions that
someone I trust can also see value in, and for my students, trust
intuitions that someone they trust can also see value in.
I believe that effective teaching makes . . .
students trust their own intuitions
students trust their teacher’s advice
The final two are a little different from the others. I included them
because teaching is not always implicit, as the above stories indicate,
but sometimes explicit. The next writer was student of mine who is
now high up in a large corporation.
You taught me that you always start by collecting data—so basic,
but so often overlooked. I recall watching most of your papers
start by collection of data. I recall watching your criticisms of
work that was just abstraction on abstraction, with no data at
its roots. For the work I’m currently doing, I have a log of all the
types of entities (typically business or government enterprises),
interactions (typically business models or sustainability models),
and outcomes. I just gave five talks last week and used the
method of “start by collecting data” when introducing my work
and when being a critical thinker about the work of others that
was being presented to me.
This point is about how to do real research does not apply to everyone.
But a more general form of this advice is to start at the beginning,
which is usually useful advice. Knowing where the beginning is can
be complicated, however.
I believe that effective teaching makes . . .
students understand how to begin a process
students understand what you tell if you constantly demonstrate
the value of what you tell them
This writer was another of my Ph.D. students who is now a professor
at a major university.
30 Teaching Minds
You taught me about the important role of explicit social
hierarchies in a learning environment. At Yale the hierarchy was
very clear and everyone knew exactly where they stood. You
pay your dues before you join the club and academia is chock
full of clubs. You taught this by both example and explanation.
Seeing a good clear example of a social hierarchy that works
(such as the one we had in our lab at Yale) gave me one level
of understanding, but I had to see what happens when the
hierarchy is not so obvious to truly appreciate the importance
of the whole concept. Any longstanding community will have a
social hierarchy, but it’s not always so obvious (especially when
the community likes to pretend it doesn’t exist), and that makes
it really hard on newcomers. I’ve seen some really stellar junior
faculty get into difficult tenure decisions because no one was
guiding them politically (or else they just blew it off). And more
recently I’ve been running into more and more students with
“entitlement issues” who just don’t seem to buy into any social
hierarchies. There is a lot of social commentary on why this is
happening and how the workplace needs to adjust to a whole
generation of kids who always got trophies.
I believe that effective teaching makes . . .
students understand where they fit in the world in which they
live
students understand how to get ahead in the world in which
they live
students understand the roles of those around them
There is certainly a great deal more that one could say about effective
teaching. Unfortunately, much has been written on effective teaching
that is not particularly helpful. Mostly it is politically correct advice
that is quite difficult to implement. Here are two lists that I found. The
first is from Learning to Teach in Higher Education. 1
1: Interest and explanation
2: Concern and respect for students and student learning
3: Appropriate assessment and feedback
Teaching Kids to Walk and Talk 31
4: Clear goals and intellectual challenge
5: Independence, control, and active engagement
6: Learning from students
The second is from a Michigan State website and was taken from a
book by Arthur W. Chickering and Zelda F. Gamson entitled Seven
Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. 2
Principle 1: Good practice encourages student–faculty contact
Principle 2: Good practice encourages cooperation among
students
Principle 3: Good practice encourages active learning
Principle 4: Good practice gives prompt feedback
Principle 5: Good practice emphasizes time on task
Principle 6: Good practice communicates high expectations
Principle 7: Good practice respects diverse talents and ways of
learning 3
Whenever I see phrases like diverse talents or ways of learning or active
learning or active engagement I am very distrustful of the advice
being offered. Active learning should mean learning by doing, but it
never does because learning by doing is very difficult to implement
in the university context (which is where this advice comes from). It
is easier to do it in 1st grade, but after a while the class has to sit still
and listen and that is not active learning no matter what the teaching
guides say. Different learning styles is usually a way of saying, “some
people are dumber than others,” which no one wants to say. What
bothers me most about these kinds of lists is that they avoid saying
what really needs to be said. It is nearly impossible to measure your
success as an effective teacher because the performance expectations
of students are almost always about test scores and very rarely about
actual production.
With this idea in mind, that effective teaching means helping students
do what it is they wanted to do and not what it is that you wanted
them to do, I will list the suggestions I have been scattering about
in this chapter. Bear in mind that this is not meant to be a complete
list. I got this list the way you saw, by interpreting things written by
students and former employees about their own experiences.
32 Teaching Minds
Effective teaching makes . . .
students develop questions to which they then will seek
answers
students look for answers from people other than the teacher
students confused and less certain than they were before
students think about how the teacher is behaving and causes
the students to wonder about whether copying this behavior
would be a good idea
students think about what works and what doesn’t in the adult
world
students think about the stories the teacher tells
students believe that their teacher is not a phony, so they can
take what is said seriously
students think about what it means to put oneself on the line for
one’s own beliefs
students look more carefully at the work that they themselves
have produced
students believe that their teacher is their personal mentor
students look at what the teacher does and see how they can
imitate it in a way that is consonant with who they are
students trust their own intuitions
students trust their teacher’s advice
students understand how to begin a process
students understand what you tell if you constantly demonstrate
the value of what you tell them
students understand where they fit in the world in which they live
students understand how to get ahead in the world in which
they live
students understand the roles of those around them
Now, taking my own advice about starting with the data and then classifying
it, let’s look at these rules as a group. What exactly are they suggestions
about? Broadly speaking, they fall into the following categories:
Helping students think:
students develop questions to which they then will seek
answers
students look for answers from people other than the teacher
Teaching Kids to Walk and Talk 33
students are confused and less certain than they were before
students think about the stories the teacher tells
Helping students observe and copy good behavior:
students think about how the teacher is behaving and wonder
about whether copying this behavior would be a good idea
students think about what works and what doesn’t in the adult
world
students look at what the teacher does and see how they can
imitate it in a way that is consonant with who they are
Making students respect their advisors:
students believe that their teacher is not a phony, so they can
take what is said seriously
students believe that their teacher is their personal mentor
students trust their teacher’s advice
students understand what you tell if you constantly demonstrate
the value of what you tell them
Teaching students how and when to take action:
students think about what it means to put oneself on the line for
one’s own beliefs
students understand how to begin a process
Teaching students to be good critics of their own work:
students look more carefully at the work that they themselves
have produced
students trust their own intuitions
Teaching students their place in the world and how to succeed
in that world:
students understand where they fit in the world in which they live
students understand how to get ahead in the world in which
they live
students understand the roles of those around them
34 Teaching Minds
Effective teaching, then, means teaching these things:
How to be a critic
Whom to respect and copy
How to know where you fit
How to take action
How to think
The relevant question for a teacher, then, is: Does your teaching result
in students who can do the five things listed above? There are many
ways to get those things to happen for students. These, however, typically
do not include lecturing, being entertaining, giving easy grades
or easy tests, or marching students through boring exercises that teach
them the truth.
Effective teaching is made much easier, of course, if what you are
trying to teach is something worth learning. So, let’s move on to discussing
that.
CHAPTER 3
What Can’t You Teach?
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance
it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
—Henry B. Adams
When children are born, they come with distinct personalities. Ask
any mother of a second child. “It even behaved differently in the
womb,” she will say. One kid is aggressive while the other is contemplative.
One kid is constantly talking while the other hardly says a
word. One kid is shy while the other is outgoing.
Often, when we think about teaching and learning, we have the
idea that if we want someone to do something, or know something,
or behave in a certain way, all we have to do is teach it to them. So we
teach kids to appreciate music, when they may have no interest in,
or inclinations toward, music at all, or to act in the class play, when
they are simply bad at acting, or to throw a baseball when they simply
can’t do it and don’t care. Often, but not always, we are forgiving of
the differences between people and their individual talents and we
acknowledge that she is tone deaf, or he will always throw poorly, and
we give up.
Small children are like sponges. They ask questions constantly
and, if they have reasonable parents, get answers. The belief system
that children adopt is usually quite similar to that of their parents.
They don’t decide to try out a different religion at age 5; they do what
they have always known. They eat what they were fed and they like
to go to places they have been taken. Parents influence every aspect of
a child’s belief system. Because of that, we have the sense that we can
teach children anything, but this gets less true as they get older. The
Jesuits have a saying about teaching a child before he is 7 and thus
producing the man he will become. There is some truth to this. If you
really learn honesty when you are 5, it is unlikely you will become a
crook. Your subconscious wouldn’t permit it.
35
36 Teaching Minds
Then, what is the role of the subconscious here? When a child is being
taught at 3, he is not being taught consciously. He does not memorize
rules for walking or talking and he does not learn anything very
much by consciously trying to learn. Rather, a child absorbs by constantly
practicing and then making that practice a part of who she is.
Later, when the subconscious attitudes about walking, talking,
relating to others, family values, and all the rest, are well within the
deep subconscious of the child, we begin the attempt to teach the
child consciously. We worry when we hear, for example, that:
About a quarter of teens questioned in the broad survey weren’t
able to correctly identify Adolph Hitler as Germany’s chancellor
during World War II. About 20 percent couldn’t say whom
America fought in that war. 1
More than a quarter wrongly believed Columbus sailed to the New
World after 1750. Half didn’t know whom Senator Joseph McCarthy
investigated. And a third had no clue the Bill of Rights is the source
of freedoms of religion and speech. Nearly a third couldn’t tell you
who said in a famous speech: “Ask not what your country can do for
you . . . .”
Until a child enters school, he has been learning things that are
useful to him. He knows where his toys are and how to play with
them; he knows how to get food; he knows how to get his parents to
do what he wants (perhaps); he knows how to entertain himself. In
short, he has learned what he has learned because he has found his
new abilities to be of value.
And the history cited above? Of what value is it to know about
Joe McCarthy? Not only is it of no value to a child, but what we know
about McCarthy is slanted by whoever is writing the history and biased
by whatever point the person is trying to make. It is all very well
to tell students the truth about what happened in the past and assume
that they will learn from it, and therefore not repeat it, but we can’t
easily know the truth and they are not likely to learn much from the
telling anyhow.
Pundits scream and yell about what children don’t know. The
question is: Why do they need to know it? If the answer is that it
makes the system happy that they know certain facts while not making
the child in any way happier, we all can guess how well that is
going to turn out.
What Can’t You Teach? 37
The bottom line here is one of initial belief systems and
fundamental personality characteristics, coupled with the notion of
truly held goals. You cannot teach someone something that:
• does not help them achieve some goal they actually hold
• is not in line with their fundamental personality
characteristics
• goes against their subconscious beliefs
You can try, but you won’t succeed.
So the question of what you can’t teach, which is very important
when we think about teaching and learning, comes down to a question
of whom the child has become because of what she learned prior
to the age of 7, and what she was anyway when she exited the womb.
Those two things are powerful enough even if you don’t add in trying
to teach something that in no way relates to any goal the child has.
This is even more true for adults, of course. We can try to teach
adults things that are at odds with who they are as people, but good
luck with that.
Traits may come with the child, or they may have been learned
by the child prior to the age of 7, but it really makes no difference
when we are discussing teaching. Personality cannot be changed.
Core beliefs are very hard to change. Interests are hard to change,
although new ones can be found. Clinical psychologists try to make
small changes in these aspects of people but they have a very difficult
time doing it.
But my point here is to address an issue in education and training
that is not well understood. Simply stated it is this: It is not possible to
teach or train students to do things that are not in line with who they are as
people. This matters because much of what we try to teach in school
and train for in companies is an attempt to alter behavior.
I have been building what have come to be called e-learning systems
for about 25 years. Over the years, I have realized that there is
nothing new under the sun in the subject matter that e-learning systems
are asked to address. One of my least favorite subjects, one that
comes up frequently, is integrity and compliance. I have been asked
to work on this subject quite often. Usually what is being asked is impossible.
Most e-learning companies simply do what they are asked to
do by the client without pointing out—if they even know—that what
they are being asked to teach can’t be taught. Companies that need
38 Teaching Minds
to train their employees in such things, because of some regulation or
other, ask for it, and e-learning companies willingly build it.
Unfortunately, as my mother would have attested to, were she still
around, I was born with off-the-scale honesty. I can’t build e-learning
I know won’t work any more than I was able, when I was 5, to let my
mother walk out of a store without paying (by mistake) without becoming
hysterical.
So, now I am hysterical about fraudulent education and fraudulent
e-learning—namely, courses that claim to teach subjects that alter the
very nature of a person. Of course, such courses don’t say that is what
they are trying to do, but it is pretty much the basis of courses about
safe driving or drugs or sexual behavior, or how not to violate the law.
How is training about compliance an attempt to alter basic
behavior?
Recently I was presented with an opportunity to teach integrity
and compliance to the employees of a large company that bids on
RFPs. The bidding process is part of a legal process and the company
wants its employees to stay within the guidelines.
Fair enough. Makes sense.
Except, when you look at the guidelines, they include an array
of rules spelled out in a complex document, typically a signed legal
contract for potential bidders. To know those rules, one would have
to read the contract. In effect, the company wants to train people to
read, and pay careful attention to, the contract. The company wants
to do this by putting employees in fictitious situations in which someone
has not read the contract and this failure to read causes serious
difficulties for the company when the employee violates a rule he
didn’t know about.
Much of e-learning is like this. You are the manager of a large
project, which needs to finish on time, and is over budget. Do you:
• steal money
• lie about the time you have spent
• tell the company it can keep the damn project
• carefully explain to your superiors the problems that exist
and let them decide
Do people learn from stuff like this? Of course not. But everyone feels
better after producing it. At least I assume they do.
What Can’t You Teach? 39
If this stuff makes people happy, then build more of it, by all
means. But if we want to address real issues, we need to discuss personality
and how to deal with it.
I have insisted, as long as I have been discussing education, 2 that
learning has to be experientially based. I proposed building complex
social simulators 20 years ago, and this has come to be understood by
the e-learning community as telling people they are in a situation that
they may or may not relate to instead of actually putting them into a
very realistic simulation of that situation. The reason they do it that
way is money, of course, but something gets lost in the translation.
What is the difference?
Suppose that I tell you that you are a baseball player in the major
leagues and your team is down by one run with one out in the bottom
of the ninth with the bases loaded. I then give you a set of multiple
choices about what to do on the first pitch (like, a—take the first pitch,
b—look for a fast ball, etc.). What is the problem with this? There are
right answers about what to do, but they depend on many variables
(Do you know this pitcher’s habits? How have you been hitting today?
How fast is the guy on third?). Pretending that we can abstract a situation
with a simple description and then suggest there is a right answer,
is absurd. But more important, if you have never actually been in that
situation, if you have never played baseball, your comprehension of
the unmentioned details is likely to be zero. Attempting to teach anything
through short descriptions of situations followed by multiple
choice answers is just dumb.
Why, then, do e-learning companies keep on building courses that
sound like that? Usually the answer is that corporations that don’t
know any better asked them to.
What does this have to do with altering basic behavior? I do indeed
play baseball, as I have said, and what I would do in that situation
depends on my personality in many ways. It also depends on
an accurate assessment of my own abilities. What it doesn’t depend
on is deep thought. Professional athletes do not become professional
athletes owing to their superior cognitive abilities. They have superior
physical abilities and rely on instinct for thinking. They do what they
“know” to do. They don’t think it out. Coaches try like crazy to get
them to think it out, but you often can find a 20-year professional veteran
getting chewed out by his coach and being asked, What were you
40 Teaching Minds
thinking? Nothing. He was thinking nothing. Correct action is rarely
about thought, especially when little time for thinking is available.
So, then, how do we teach people to do the right thing, especially
when the right thing is not in line with their normal behavior?
Can we teach nurturance, or aggression, or extroversion, or orderliness?
I hope that it is obvious that we cannot do this. People are
born with these characteristics. They are not learned. Ask any parents
of more than one child. They will respond that their children had
certain personality traits that were apparent from birth. My grandson
Milo is a neatnik. Everything has to be in its place. Also, he loves to
perform in front of an audience. His parents do not share and did not
teach him these behaviors. The degree to which we have such traits
defines our innate personalities. So, we need to translate this question
into one we can answer.
The real issue is one of degree and not of kind. You will never
teach someone who is fundamentally dishonest to be very honest,
or vice versa. You will never teach someone who is very aggressive to
be very passive. What you can do is make people aware of the consequences
of their actions and hope to change their behavior slightly,
when they have the time to think about what they are about to do.
You can make people aware of their behavior, and their rational selves
can direct what they do, if they have time to think about. But their
subconscious is likely to want them to behave differently, and it is
their subconscious that is usually in charge in a pinch.
Someone who hates details is not a good candidate for being
taught to read contracts in detail. Similarly, someone who loves details
is not a great candidate for sales rep. (Why? Because being very
people-oriented is actually a characteristic that never goes hand in
hand with being detail-oriented.) So, it is not uncommon for companies
to be faced with the arduous task of training their salespeople
to pay attention to detail. Telling them to hire differently is hopeless,
because people who are both very detail-oriented and love engaging
people socially do not exist. Accountants don’t usually win personality
contests. What to do?
This is indeed a job for teaching but not for teaching of the usual
sort. To see what kind of job it is, we need to think for a moment about
how the mind works. Specifically, we need to think about how the
unconscious learns to make decisions.
What Can’t You Teach? 41
If you have a character trait, say, honesty, you have had to come
to grips over the years with its upside and its downside. People appreciate
you for being honest, but not when they ask you if they look
good after they have spent an hour dressing (I speak from experience
here). People dislike dishonesty but not when it helps get a deal closed
because you said you loved a restaurant that you really hated. We have
mixed feelings about honesty, as we do about any personality characteristic.
We like friendly people but we dislike overly friendly people.