Who decides which is which is anybody’s guess. Teenagers often try
to be all things to all people, but as adults they soon realize that they
simply will have to be themselves and they will try to find work and
friends that suit the personalities that they happen to have.
Personality features are not conscious. We don’t decide which
ones to have and we may not even be aware of how others perceive
us. We do what we feel comfortable doing and we push on. And then
we meet integrity and compliance officers.
They tell us to read every detail of a contract to make sure we are
in compliance, and those who are detail-oriented and fearful of making
errors and introverted and sensitive do it without question, and
those people who are gregarious and confident and aggressive figure
they can get by without it. What is an integrity and compliance officer
to do?
Here is what not to do:
• Don’t try to tell people who naturally act one way to act
differently.
• Don’t make a movie of the idiot who did it wrong and
say, See, look how dumb that guy was and look what
trouble he got into.
• Don’t lecture on the benefits of behaving the way the
company wants you to behave.
• Don’t write a manual with correct behavior that no one
will read.
• Don’t build an e-learning course with multiple choice
answers where one of them is the right thing to do.
The mind is organized around experiences. We remember our experiences
and we index our remembered experiences so that we can find
them later. Individuals don’t know how they do this, but cognitive
42 Teaching Minds
science can tell something about how this process works. You can’t
find an experience that was indexed wrong, for example.
Good indexing involves figuring out the goal that an experience
relates to and the conditions that allowed that goal to be achieved
or not. We do not do this consciously. We learn by doing, that is, we
learn from experience, and from thinking about those experiences.
When we have understood our experiences well enough, we can (unconsciously)
index them so that they will come up again just in time
when we need them again. (This is what we call being reminded.) It
is beyond the scope of this book to explain how that process works. 3
The simple idea is that experiences get labeled when we think about
them and not otherwise.
So the real question for an integrity and compliance officer is how
to get people to think about integrity and compliance issues. This
thinking needs be done over time in a complex way and voluntarily.
How might we do that?
That is the real question.
One answer to this is stories. People really like stories. As long as
there have been people, there have been stories; we have moved from
epic poems and theatre to novels and movies in recent years, but, by
and large, the stories are the same. How to overcome obstacles to getting
what you want, is a theme that dominates much of literature,
for example. Movie makers say it as “boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy
loses girl, boy gets girl.” There have been many books written about
the basic plots that occur again and again in stories.
Human beings understand stories because stories resonate with
them. Characters have dilemmas that readers or viewers themselves
have had. Stories appeal to emotions rather than logic, and emotions
are at the heart of our pre-7-year-old unconscious selves. We feel
something because of a well-told story and that feeling can help us see
something in a new way.
Why am I going on and on about stories? I believe that all of
human intercourse is about the exchange of stories. (I wrote a book
about this. 4 ) If you want to appeal to the pre-7-year-old unconscious
that resides in all of us, you need to hit emotion not logic. This means
that a good story can help someone to reconsider deep down in their
unconscious a feeling or attitude or seemingly immutable personality
trait that they can feel perhaps is somewhat dysfunctional. Stories can
change our natural instincts.
What Can’t You Teach? 43
That story cannot be short and sweet. It takes a great deal of emotion
and empathy to change a point of view in a belief system. Deciding
to construct a 15-minute, e-learning module in which one plays
the sales rep and learns that honesty is the best policy, is so absurd that
I am sorry I am referring to it at all, except that is what was proposed
by the integrity and compliance people to whom I was speaking.
You can move people ever so slightly by having them have emotional
experiences that they can discuss with one another. Imagine a
book club that deals with a book about dishonesty and causes people
in the discussion group to talk about the subject. If the book presented
deep dilemmas to which there were no obviously right answers, this
would allow people to get to and discuss their unconscious beliefs.
Simply articulating those beliefs can be quite helpful. This is what
clinical psychologists are really trying to do, after all. It is also what literature
professors are trying to get their classes to do. Thinking about
and talking about complex emotional issues makes personality traits
and core beliefs something you can think about consciously.
The real issue, in the end, is interests. Teaching works best when
you teach students who agree that they really want to learn whatever
it is you have to teach. This means making sure that students
are preparing to do things that they want to do and actually will do.
That makes teaching much easier for all involved. The one-size-fits-all
curriculum doesn’t work because one size doesn’t fit all. Let detailoriented
people learn detailed kinds of things. Let artistic people learn
artistic kinds of things. Let logical people learn logical kinds of things.
Everyone would be much happier and all would enjoy learning a lot
more if we simply let people be themselves.

CHAPTER 4
Twelve Cognitive Processes That
Underlie Learning
Those who know how to think need no teachers.
—Mahatma Gandhi
Not everything we would like to teach can be taught, as we have seen.
Similarly, not everything we would like to learn can be learned, especially
if we are taking the wrong approach to learning. In the previous
chapter we discussed what can’t be taught. Now, let’s talk about what
can be taught.
One problem in such a discussion is that we are used to (because we
went to school) thinking about what needs to be taught and learned
in terms of subjects (English, math, science, etc.). We think this way
because school originally was organized by professors who had specialties
in these subject areas. These professors were scholars and they
set up the lower schools on the basis of the specialties that they had.
When I was working in artificial intelligence, I began to realize
that what I needed to teach the computer to do in order for it be smart
was a far cry from what people thought needed to be taught. People
assumed that we needed to tell the computer facts about the world of
the type that children learn in school, and that this would make the
machine smart. (Quite recently, I attended a meeting of AI people who
were planning a project to allow computers to pass SAT tests as a way
of showing that the computer was smart!)
But what computers lack is intelligent capabilities, not information.
It is easy enough to fill a machine with information, but when you are
done, it would be able to tell you only what you told it. (If that was what
a child did, you would think that he was brain damaged.) Intelligence
and the learning required to create useful new knowledge are really a
result of an amalgamation of cognitive processes. Intelligent computers,
and intelligent people, need those processes to be working well.
45
46 Teaching Minds
What I mean by this, is that there is stuff we can do mentally,
and that learning just means doing that stuff and getting better at it.
Learning is not any one process, but many processes, depending on
what you are learning.
What are the cognitive processes that make up learning? If we
wish to teach people, it is important to ask what cognitive capabilities
we want them to have when we are done, not what we want them to
know. In other words, we want to understand what we have to do in
order to make them better able to think.
In this chapter, we will discuss the kinds of cognitive processes
that people can (and must) learn to do well. Later we will discuss how
to best approach learning and teaching these processes.
There are 12 types of processes outlined here. There may be more
types than these, but with these we pretty much can cover the ground
of what human learning looks like. I have divided them into three
groups: conceptual processes, analytic processes, and social processes. Notice
first that all the types are types of processes. Thinking is a process.
It is something we do. We need to see what that doing is like.
All these processes require practice in order to master them. You
cannot learn to master a process without practicing it again and again.
Feedback and coaching help one learn.
CONCEPTUAL PROCESSES
1. Prediction: Making a prediction about the outcome of actions
This is experiential learning about everyday behavior in its most
common form—it includes learning about how to travel or eat or get a
date, for example. In its complex form it is how one learns to be a battlefield
commander or a horse race handicapper. One learns through
experience by trial and error. The cognitive issue is building up a large
case base and index that case base according to expectation failures, as
I described in Dynamic Memory. We learn when predictions fail. When
they succeed, we fail to care about them because most of the predictions
we make are uninteresting (I predict the room I just left will look
the same when I return). Learning to predict what will happen next
requires repeated practice in each domain of knowledge. There is some
Twelve Cognitive Processes That Underlie Learning 47
transfer across domains but not that much. (Learning to buy an airplane
ticket is somewhat related to eating in a restaurant, but not that
closely. You might use a credit card in each, for example, and might be
refused service because you are rude.)
2. Modeling: Building a conscious model of a process
We need to learn how things work. A citizen knows, presumably,
how voting works. Someone looking for venture capital should know
how fund raising works. Processes need to be learned in order to effectively
participate in them and in order to propose changes in them.
Building a conscious model of a process matters a great deal if you
want to make the process work for you. If you want to get into college,
you need to understand how the process works. This cannot be
learned from experience in a serious way because one may do it only
once and may not be able to experience the entire process. Having
the process explained to you may not work that well either because
this will not bring an operational understanding of it (as opposed to
a more superficial understanding of it). Designing it, modifying it,
and participating in simulations of it work much better as learning
methods.
3. Experimentation: Experimentation and replanning based on
success and failure
This is probably the most important learning process we engage
in while living our lives. We make life decisions and we need to know
when we need to change something. There are big decisions—like
getting married or how to raise a child or whether to change jobs—
and little decisions, such as changing your diet or your sleep habits.
We make our decisions on the basis of what has worked before and
what has failed to work. We tend to make life decisions without much
knowledge. We don’t know how our bodies work all that well and we
don’t really know how the world works or what it has in store for us.
Thinking about these issues and learning from failure is a pressing
need all through life. Learning to analyze what has worked out and
what has not and why is part of living a rational life. These things can
be learned by living and talking about our experiences, thus creating a
database of stories that we can rely on later. We learn by talking with
48 Teaching Minds
others and hearing their stories but we also learn from our own experience
as we construct our own stories. We can learn about life experiences
through reading and movies as well. We like stories in all these
forms precisely because they focus on real-life issues. The cognitive
task here is story creation, comparison, indexing, and modification.
Most conversation depends on story exchange. The more emotional a
story is, the more likely it is to be remembered.
4. Evaluation: Improving our ability to determine the value of
something on many different dimensions
There are no rights and wrongs in what we like. But there is general
agreement about what makes a work of art great. The factors to
be considered are not necessarily conscious, although for experts they
typically are. In these more subjective and subconscious areas of life, it
is more a matter of trying to understand what feels right than understanding
why it feels right. There is a difference between being someone
who can make an artistic judgment and being an art expert. One
might learn to notice things that one had failed to notice, if someone
takes the time to point them out. Learning to make artistic judgments
is about learning to notice, to describe, and to appreciate. One’s concept
of beauty changes when one’s focus changes. Practice is a key
idea here as is the assembling of a case base to use as a comparison
set. Nevertheless, the comparison set is not usually conscious. One
can like something because it is pleasing without realizing (or caring
about) why it is pleasing.
When we make a value judgment, we don’t necessarily know the
values we have and we haven’t necessarily learned them consciously.
We should value human life over property but whether we do or not
we will find out only if the situation arises. It is tempting to try to teach
values but this actually is done so early in life and in so many subtle
ways that anybody over the age of 10 is unlikely to be much affected
by what people say to them about what they should value and what
they shouldn’t. Perhaps husbands should value helping their wives
over watching football but that doesn’t mean they will. In important
areas of life, on the job and in child raising, for example, one’s values
come into play. If parents believe they shouldn’t correct a child when
he makes a mistake in speaking, they soon will find that they have
Twelve Cognitive Processes That Underlie Learning 49
a child who speaks poorly. The value held by the parents may well
be that self-confidence is more important than being articulate (“We
don’t want to criticize him.”). Perhaps it is. But the consequences of
one’s values manifest themselves every time a value-based decision is
made.
Nevertheless, we do need to learn to make value-based judgments.
Doing this requires understanding what our values are. Confronting
a person with her own value system (one that she has unconsciously
adopted) can help her think things out, but change is never easy.
ANALYTIC PROCESSES
1. Diagnosis: Making a diagnosis of a complex situation by
identifying relevant factors and seeking causal explanations
Diagnosis is a very important skill and one that needs to be learned
both in principle and separately for each domain of knowledge. Diagnosis
of heart disease isn’t a different process in principle from diagnosis
of a faulty spark plug in a car engine. Nevertheless, one wants a
specialist to do the diagnosis in each case. Why is this? Diagnosis is a
matter of both reasoning from evidence and understanding what to
look for to gather evidence. Given all the evidence, it is easy to make
a diagnosis in an area of knowledge you don’t know very well. So, the
gathering of the evidence is the most important part. Crime analysts
and gardeners both do diagnosis. They both reason from evidence.
What separates them is knowing what constitutes important evidence
and what does not. Here again, this comes from experienced cases.
Analytic processes involve attention to details that enable the
forming of hypotheses that can be tested by a variety of methods.
These three pieces, determining evidence, forming hypotheses, and
testing hypotheses, are what is commonly referred to as the scientific
method. When science is taught, it often dwells on the facts of science
rather than the process. Diagnosis is about the process. But the process
is not of much use without domain knowledge. Domain knowledge
is often about causality, although that knowledge of causality may be
subconscious. Experts know what causes an engine to misfire so they
50 Teaching Minds
know where to look to find a faulty part. Experts also know that an
engine is misfiring in the first place. What causes what is the real issue
in the comprehension of any given domain.
We learn to do diagnosis, and to understand what causes what,
consciously. This is knowledge that can be taught to us by experts, but
it needs to be taught as part of the process of diagnosis. If you have a
goal (understanding what is broken or has gone awry is a very typical
goal), then it is much easier to acquire information that helps in the
pursuit of that goal than it is to acquire that same information without
that goal. To learn diagnosis, one must practice more and more
complex cases in one area of knowledge.
2. Planning: Learning to plan; needs analysis; conscious and
subconscious understanding of what goals are satisfied by what
plans; use of conscious case- based planning
People plan constantly. Often their plans aren’t very complicated.
Let’s have lunch is a plan, after all. Sometimes they make much more
complex plans. A football coach makes plans to fool the defense. They
are called plays. A general makes battlefield plans. A businessperson
writes business plans. An architect draws up architectural plans. All
these more complex plans have a lot in common with the let’s have
lunch plan. Namely, they have been used before or something quite
similar has been used before. People rarely make plans from scratch.
When they do, they find the process very difficult and often make
many errors.
Learning to plan, therefore, has two components: being able to
create a plan from scratch (which almost never actually happens) and
being able to modify an existing plan for new purposes. The first one
is important to learn how to do, but it is the latter ability that makes
one proficient at planning. Planning from first principles is actually
quite difficult. Normally people just modify an old plan. Last week we
had steak; this week let’s try lamb chops. This doesn’t sound like rocket
science and it isn’t. Computer programmers write new programs
by modifying old programs. Lawyers write contacts by modifying old
contracts. Doctors plan procedures by thinking about past procedures.
In each case, people try to improve on prior plans by remembering
where these plans went wrong and then thinking about how to improve
them. Acquiring a case base of plans is critical. One can modify
plans from one domain of knowledge to use in another but this is not
Twelve Cognitive Processes That Underlie Learning 51
easy and requires a level of abstraction that is very important to learn.
Most creative thinking depends on this ability to abstract plans from
one field of knowledge to another. We learn to do this by practicing
it. Teachers can help people see correspondences across domains. Abstraction
of this sort is what creative people do best.
3. Causation: Detecting what has caused a sequence of events
to occur by relying on a case base of previous knowledge of
similar situations (case-based reasoning)
All fields of knowledge study causation; biology, physics, history,
economics—they are all about what causes what. The fact that this is
an object of study by academics tells us right away that it is not easy
and no one knows for sure all of the causes and effects that there are
in the world.
Because of this, acquiring a set of known causes and effects tends
to make one an expert. A plumber knows what causes sinks to stop
up and knows where to look for the culprit. A mechanic knows what
causes gas lines to leak and knows where to look. A detective knows
what causes people to kill and knows where to start when solving a
murder case. Causal knowledge is knowledge fixed to a domain of
inquiry. Experts have extensive case bases. Case bases are acquired by
starting on easy cases and graduating to more complex ones. It is important
to discuss with others the cases one works on because this
makes one better at indexing them in one’s mind, enabling one to
find them later as needed.
4. Judgment: Making an objective judgment
There are two forms of this, both involving decisions based on
data. The first is deciding whether you prefer Baskin Robbins or Ben
and Jerry’s. There is no right answer. We make judgments and then
record them for use later. We find ways to express our judgments (Ben
and Jerry’s is too sweet, for example). We learn what we like by trying
things out. A wine expert learns about wine by drinking it and recording
what he thinks so he can compare his thoughts about one wine to
those about a different wine later on.
The second form is reasoning based on evidence. A jury does this
but it doesn’t learn much from it. Judges, however, learn in this way,
as do psychiatrists and businesspeople. They collect evidence, they
52 Teaching Minds
form a judgment, and later they may get to see whether their judgment
is correct. When asked, they can tell you clear reasons (typically
post hoc justifications) as to why they decided the way they did. The
wine expert can say reasons as well, but the evidence for taste is not
really all that objective. (Of course, the evidence may be found after
the judgment is made. People are not always entirely rational.)
To learn to make objective judgments, one needs constant feedback
either from a teacher or from a colleague or from reality. One
needs to think about what was decided and why. People who are good
at this are good at it because they have analyzed their successes and
failures and they can articulate their reasoning. Learning requires repeated
practice.
SOCIAL PROCESSES
1. Influence: Understanding how others respond to your requests
and recognizing consciously and unconsciously how to improve
the process
Human interaction is one of the most important skills of all. We
regularly interact with family, friends, colleagues, bosses, romantic interests,
professors, service personnel, and strangers. Communicating
effectively is very important to any success we might want to have in
any area of life. But, we do not know why we say what we say, nor do
we really understand how we are being perceived by others. We just
talk and listen and go on our way. Some people are loved by everyone
and others are despised. It is wrong to assume that we know what
image we project or that we are easily capable of altering the way we
behave so that we will be perceived differently.
How do we learn to become conscious of inherently unconscious
behavior? One can learn to behave differently if one becomes consciously
aware of the mistakes one is making. Watching others, watching
oneself, thinking about how to improve—all this helps one make
subconscious behavior into conscious behavior.
We unintentionally return to standard ways of acting in various
situations. A wallflower at a party doesn’t decide to be a wallflower—it
is simply behavior she is comfortable with. If no one is harmed by
Twelve Cognitive Processes That Underlie Learning 53
these subconscious choices, then there is no need to fix anything. But
often we might behave differently in how we treat others, if we realized
what we were doing. Getting along with people is a very big part
of life. Each of us has our own distinct personality and often it doesn’t
match with our own ambitions and desires. To change our behavior,
we need to practice new behaviors that become as natural to us as
our old behaviors. The only way to do this is to do it. People can help
point out what you are doing that isn’t helpful to your needs but that
does not mean you can easily change. If you want to change, you need
to try new behaviors and practice them. This can be coached. Practicing
new behaviors and being critiqued can help greatly. Written communication
is handled the same way.
2. Teamwork: Learning how to achieve goals by using a team,
consciously allocating roles, managing inputs from others,
coordinating actors, and handling conflicts
It is the rare individual who works all alone. Most people need
to work with others. Children are not naturally good at this and are
taught to “share.” Then they sometimes do what is called “parallel
play” where they play near one another doing different things. Getting
kids to cooperate to do something together is not easy. Usually
one wants to dominate the others. There is nothing wrong with this
per se. People are who they are and they need to assume roles in any
team that are consonant with their personalities. One person plays
quarterback and another blocks. People do not have to do the same
thing in order to work together. But they do need to get along and
function as a team. This is no more true of sports than it is of the
workplace. People learn to work in teams by working in teams and receiving
helpful advice when a team is dysfunctional. Football coaches
explicitly teach this. More formal learning situations (like school) often
don’t, which is unfortunate. It really isn’t possible to get along in
the real world unless you can assume various roles in a team that fit
with who you are.
3. Negotiation: Making a deal; negotiation/contracts
Contracts, formal and informal, are the basis of how we function.
We reach agreements in business, in marriage, in friendship, in a store,
54 Teaching Minds
and at school. Parties to those agreements have the right to complain
if obligations are not met. Learning to make a contract, legal or not,
is a big part of being a rational actor. To make a contract one must
negotiate it. Negotiation often is seen as something only politicians
and high-powered business leaders do. But, actually, we negotiate with
waitresses for good service and we negotiate with our children when
we give them an allowance. Learning how to negotiate can be done
only by trying and learning from failures. The techniques tend to be
context-independent, but there is, of course, special knowledge about
real estate and politics (for example, the relevant laws) that makes one
a better negotiator in each situation. Again, practice with coaching is
the ideal.
4. Describing: Creating and using conscious descriptions of
situations to identify faults to be fixed
When problems exist in any situation, we need to be able to describe
and analyze them. We need to be able to describe them in order
to get help from people who may know more about the situation than
we do. We need to learn to focus on the critical issues. In order to do
this, we need also to be able to analyze these situations to see what was
supposed to happen and why it isn’t happening. Consultants who try
to fix failing businesses do this sort of thing all the time, as do doctors
when consulting on difficult cases. Creating a careful description of
a situation is a skill that can be learned only through practice. This
sometimes is described as learning an elevator speech to tell someone
succinctly what you are doing. This ability is a very important part of
understanding and helping others understand.
Now let’s see what we have. First let’s list again the types of cognitive
processes that underlie learning:
Conceptual processes
1. Prediction
2. Judgment
3. Experimentation
4. Evaluation
Twelve Cognitive Processes That Underlie Learning 55
Analytic processes
1. Diagnosis
2. Planning
3. Causation
4. Judgment
Social processes
1. Influence
2. Teamwork
3. Negotiation
4. Describing
What kind of stuff is this? I said above that these are cognitive processes.
So let’s look at them from that perspective. Let’s start with the
analytic processes.
What does it mean to say that diagnosis is a cognitive process? It
means that there are steps and these steps are based in thought rather
than in action. The first step may be to gather evidence, for example.
While this seems like a physical act, and often it is, it is actually a
mental act. Evidence can be gathered by asking questions, by looking
carefully at a scene, by listening to sounds, or by taking blood tests.
There are many ways to gather evidence and typically the physical
manifestations of evidence gathering bear no real relationship to one
another. Evidence gathering is a mental act, although physical actions
may be involved. It is a mental act that is part of a set of complex mental
processes that, of course, include reasoning about the evidence,
checking the validity of the evidence, comparing known information
with previous cases that are similar, and so on. Diagnosis is a complex
mental process. Teaching diagnosis matters because getting good at
diagnosis can make you a good mother, a good teacher, a good detective,
a good nearly anything you can think of. The process of diagnosis
is constant in our mental lives.
Are all 12 of the processes listed above like this? Clearly the other
analytic processes are very similar. Planning is a mental activity
that one gets better at by doing it. Whether you are planning a party
or planning a career, the process involves thinking about steps and
56 Teaching Minds
imagining consequences to those steps. The more you plan, the better
you get at it. We do planning every day. It matters a great deal and
the better you are at it, the easier your life will go. The same is true of
the third mental process: analysis of causation. Knowing why something
happened allows us to not do it again—if we didn’t like the end
result—or to try to do it again, if we did, and everything in between.
Determining causation is a mental process that is very similar to diagnosis,
of course.
So these three are all cognitive processes and they require constant
practice. Getting better at them throughout one’s life is very important.
I define learning as improvement in one’s cognitive processes.
Lifetime learning does not mean the continual acquisition of knowledge
so much as it means the improvement in one’s ability to do these
processes by means of the acquisition and analysis of experiences to
draw on.
CHAPTER 5
Real-Life Learning
Projects Considered
I learned more about the economy from one South Dakota
dust storm than I did in all my years of college.
—Hubert H. Humphrey
These days everyone has ideas about ways to improve student learning.
These range from having kids stretch between classes, to listening
to Mozart, to eating right. Of course, those things won’t harm you, but
they really have nothing to do with learning. They are about getting
students to concentrate on material that doesn’t interest them much.
Presumably, a tedious task is made better by these kinds of things. An
interesting task does not need that kind of enhancement. It should be
interesting in and of itself.
In the summer of 2008, I met a most unusual man. He recently had
retired from being the CEO of Epson Europe. Some years earlier, his
close friend, who was director general of a college, got sick and died.
His dying wish was that his friend, the Epson CEO, would succeed him
and become president of the business school of the college. And so it
happened that a professional from the business world found himself
in charge of the Business Engineering School at La Salle University in
Barcelona, Spain. During his years at Epson he had hired many graduates
from that college and others, and believed that the training they
received there was highly theoretical, not practical enough or oriented
to the real world of business. It was clear to him that students needed
a different kind of training in order to prepare them for professional
life. He began to talk to the faculty about teaching different kinds
of courses, ones that were less theoretical and more related to what
people actually do in business. The faculty objected. Shocker.
A provost friend of mine once said that with faculty, everything is
a la carte. What he meant was that professors never feel that they have
57
58 Teaching Minds
to follow the wishes of the administration. They consider themselves
free agents. This former CEO, coming from a business where there really
is someone in charge, didn’t know what to do. He talked to people
who talked to people and eventually he found me.
As a professor for 30 some odd years, I developed a healthy disrespect
for professors as a group. They tend to lobby for keeping their
lives easy and that means, among other things, making sure they
don’t have to teach too much or teach in a way that makes them have
to work too hard. Professors always have something more important
to do than teach. I am not criticizing here. I would have been the first
to whine and wail if anyone had made me teach more than one course
every other quarter. I considered myself a researcher, also a graduate
seminar teacher, but classes with lots of students wanting to hear a
lecture? Ugh.
The college president and I had dinner and discussed what we
could do together. I said we could build any program he wanted online
as long as we didn’t need the approval of faculty to do it and we had
good experts available. He said he was the expert and we needed the
approval of no one. I said it would be expensive and he said, God will
provide. (Did I mention this school is run by the Christian Brothers?)
Two months later I found myself in front of 25 faculty in Barcelona
as I interviewed the president about what someone would have
to know how to do in order to make them into someone whom he
would hire. He gave me a list. The faculty got to comment, but that
was about it. It was clear who was in charge.
So, we built a story-centered curriculum meant to teach practical
business by creating simulated experiences. The idea is to deliver
it online around the world, using mentors who speak the students’
language. (The website is in English). No classes. No lectures. No tests.
Graduates get an MBA degree but this curriculum doesn’t have that
much in common with traditional MBA programs. The idea is to help
people launch their own business or go to work.
Students are part of teams that work to create deliverables within
a story about a situation that demands some work on their part. They
consult with their team members and use extensive background and
step-by-step help that has been created as part of the website. Mentors
are available to answer questions and to evaluate the final work
product. The projects are large enough that students need to divide up
the work and consult with one another on how to proceed. Eventually
Real-Life Learning Projects Considered 59
they create a deliverable and either continue to work on improving
it after receiving feedback from the mentor or move on to the next
subtask in the story.
I will describe briefly the stories that the students work within
(they each last anywhere from 6 to 9 weeks). Then I want to consider
what these courses are really teaching from the perspective of the
framework of cognitive processes that I described in Chapter 4.
COURSE 1: “CASH CRISIS”—
ANALYZE AND SOLVE FINANCIAL BUSINESS PROBLEMS
The story for this course is that a family that owns a winery business
hires a consulting firm to help determine why the bank denied the renewal
of a loan. The students, working in the role of assistant consultants,
first conduct financial analyses to determine problems within
the business. Next, they conduct a root cause analysis to determine
the underlying causes of the problems affecting the business. Students
then develop solutions to address the problems and write a report outlining
the solutions, including 5-year financial projections.
COURSE 2: “GOING ONLINE”—
TAKE A SMALL BUSINESS ONLINE
Students are contacted by an investor who is interested in starting an
online business selling gift baskets. She wants the students to help her
plan what the business will sell in the gift baskets and to design the
user interface for the website. She is leaving it up to the students to
determine what sort of gift basket business they want to design. Her
immediate concern is seeing what the site would look like, and how it
would function, to make sure she will have a good design to impress
prospective buyers.
Students begin by interviewing prospective customers and seeing
how they typically buy such items online, to learn from their usage
patterns and to determine common breakdowns in the usual process.
Next, students produce expected user scenarios for the “personas”
they identify as being prospective users of the site. They then define
functional and nonfunctional requirements for the site they must
60 Teaching Minds
design. They design the information architecture, including content,
sitemap, wireframes, and low-fi prototypes, after which they test their
prototypes on prospective users. The final step in the process is a review
of proposals from a set of vendors who could build the site the
students designed.
COURSE 3: MARKETING—LAUNCHING A NEW PRODUCT
In this story, the students belong to a product-launching team. The
goal is to launch a new social network for amateur performers, iSing.
com. Students decide which role they want to play, product marketing
or marketing communication, and working together in teams of four,
they prepare the launching plan for this product. Among the activities
they perform are preparing job descriptions for both roles, preparing
a position strategy statement and a message architecture, preparing a
preliminary market segmentation for the product, preparing demographics
and psychographics of the target groups, launching a kickoff
meeting for the project, and preparing a launching program, including
the following subtasks: total product requirements, barriers to
customer adoption, competitive analysis, market/customer research,
hiring a research firm, market leverage model, communication plan,
web tools, branding, market research, and hiring a PR firm. Finally,
students prepare a complete budget and defend the plan and the budget
in front of the top management of the company.
COURSE 4: RE-ENGINEER A SUPPLY CHAIN
Students now play the role of junior executive in the supply chain
management department of RightByte technologies. They receive a
report from the CEO describing the current processes and the main
problems identified. With this information, students are requested to
find out the root causes of the problems and come up with a suggested
course of action to solve them. They have to take into account the
following design principles for the new solution: customer service impact,
impact on cost savings, and ease of implementation.
From this point on, the teams analyze each piece of the supply
chain to make the deep diagnosis: demand/supply planning,
Real-Life Learning Projects Considered 61
transportation, warehouse management, sales order management,
and central order fulfillment. Once the diagnosis and requirements
are well established, the teams develop a suggested solution. Finally,
top management requires the team to prepare a change management
evaluation to see whether the company is prepared to undertake such
a complex project.
COURSE 5: INVESTMENT READINESS—
HELP A SMALL TECHNOLOGICAL COMPANY TO SUCCESSFULLY
RAISE FUNDS FOR AN INTERNATIONAL EXPANSION IN A
SECOND ROUND
Next.TV is a small company that has been very successful in the local
market. It has developed a software package to automate an editorial
department of a TV channel. Most of the main domestic channels
have already implemented the package and the company wants to go
international. Students are hired as expert consultants to prepare the
company for this second round of financing and to present the project
to Venture Capital firms. Students now do several tasks that they
have already done in the previous modules, plus some new tasks, but
they do them now in an integrated manner and with much less time
to finish them. Task to perform are: analyze starting point (P&L and
balance sheet), enhance the product value proposition, prepare a sales
plan, perform a management audit, prepare the internalization plan,
prepare financial planning, write the business plan, identify potential
VC firms to present to, analyze offerings, and negotiate a term sheet.
COURSE 6: ETHICAL AND LEGAL ISSUES IN CORPORATE
GOVERNANCE
This course involves reading and discussing a specially written novel.
The intent of the novel is to inspire readers to wrestle with the
problems of the characters, who are involved in complex ethical and
moral decisions within the pharmaceutical industry. The novel serves
as a starting point for the kind of active contemplation and discussion
that truly make people better able to think more deeply about such issues.
The students immerse themselves in the story of an international
62 Teaching Minds
pharmaceutical company engaged in a hostile takeover of a smaller,
but highly successful, competitor. Students experience the tough negotiations,
the elimination of dedicated and talented individuals, and
the painful shuffling of roles and responsibilities that accompany major
change in a modern corporation. Students also confront the complicated
(and sometimes conflicting) relationship between social responsibility,
legal responsibility, and profit motive, as they witness the
company’s attempt to establish a new research facility in a blighted
town as a consequence of the merger. As students consider each episode,
they critique the actions and reactions of the central characters,
advise them on next steps, and glean lessons related to negotiation,
change management, legal and ethical issues in corporate governance,
and working with other cultures.
S TORY 7: SELLING AND IMPLEMENTING SOLUTIONS
Students begin their work as new project managers at a premier eventplanning
company, World Class Events. They begin by qualifying
and prioritizing opportunities to propose work to prospective clients,
pitching to senior management which of the proposals should receive
the greatest budget, based on potential profitability, likelihood of winning,
and other relevant considerations. They create a project scope
document for the sales effort, first planning and attending a simulated
meeting with event-planning experts to determine a vision for the
event, including risks and open questions for the client. They then engage
in a role-play call with the client, introducing World Class Events
and clarifying the project vision.
Of course, the intent of this curriculum is to prepare students to go
out into the business world. So, there is a natural subject orientation.
The subject is business. But after we acknowledge that, everything else
is different. The curriculum was designed with the 12 cognitive processes
in mind. Let’s see how that was accomplished.
The real issue in learning in any arena of knowledge is getting
better at the cognitive processes that underlie that knowledge. The
processes involved in learning have been with us as long as there have
been humans. School, and subject-based education, is a more recent
invention. To understand how human learning works, we need to
think more deeply about how we can teach these processes.
Real-Life Learning Projects Considered 63
So, we might ask, Where do the 12 cognitive processes get taught
in this MBA program?
First let’s list the cognitive processes again:
Conceptual processes
1. Prediction
2. Judgment
3. Experimentation
4. Evaluation
Analytic processes
1. Diagnosis
2. Planning
3. Causation
4. Judgment
Social processes
1. Influence
2. Teamwork
3. Negotiation
4. Describing
Now let’s consider them one at a time.
Where is prediction taught in our MBA program?
In course 1 (cash crisis), students have to create a financial plan.
Any planning document is a serious attempt at prediction. Prediction
is covered in a different way in course 2. In that course, students need
to predict how users will behave on a website. In course 3, students
need to predict the effects of a marketing campaign and predict what
will work and what will not work in a product launch. In course 4, students
need to predict how changes they make in the supply chain will
improve the process. In course 5, students are developing a business
model, which is in itself a prediction that certain decisions and behaviors
will make money. In course 6, students must predict the effects
of various changes in an organization and must predict the behavior
of the people with whom they will negotiate. In course 7, students
64 Teaching Minds
predict which sales pitches will work as well as predicting various costs
and benefits associated with their product.
In fact, it seems obvious that prediction is at the very heart of this
MBA program. But so are all the other cognitive processes. Students
are always working in teams and are always trying to influence their
peers, their superiors, their customers, and so on. They are in constant
negotiations and they are creating all kinds of plans—financial plans,
marketing plans, and business plans. They are constantly diagnosing
problems in the various stories and constantly creating documents as
work products (describing). They must determine the cause of various
problems in each story and evaluate solutions to those problems. They
make judgments about what to do, and what is working and what isn’t,
in each story and they create models of proposed solutions. Each new
solution they propose is, in effect, an experiment, and they must evaluate
the results of each experiment as they proceed.
Now let’s reconsider what it means to teach and what is important
to teach within the context of a good curriculum. One might
have expected, given that there are 12 cognitive processes that must
be learned, that each project in the curriculum would be put clearly
into one of categories. The schooling mentality naturally leads to the
idea that if diagnosis is important, then we should offer a course in
diagnosis. But you can’t diagnose randomly and you can’t teach students
to do diagnosis in the absence of an acknowledgment of their
real interest and goals independent of a context. While diagnosis is
fundamentally the same process whether you are plumber, a doctor, or
a businessperson, there is also much to learn about the context of the
diagnosis, and real students with real goals will fall asleep while hearing
about diagnosis in one context, whereas they will perk up while
actually doing diagnosis in a context they find fascinating.
We have designed this curriculum to teach the 12 cognitive processes
within the context that was decided upon by the students. No
one is forced to take an MBA program. The students are those who
want to run their own business or work within the context of a large
business. It is the job of the curriculum designer (and the teacher),
therefore, to teach them how to think well within that context.
Now I am not saying that this is not done (or at least cannot be
done) within traditional schooling. Sometimes it is. A good history
teacher does in fact teach about diagnosis and causation and planning.
One can think about the Battle of Waterloo and learn a great
Real-Life Learning Projects Considered 65
deal about planning, and influence, and causation, and teamwork.
But while this could be true of a good history course, it often is
in no way actually the case. If history courses were designed to teach
students to think within the context of history, they would be much
more important than they now are. As long as we think that history is
about getting the facts about who signed what declaration when, we
are missing the forest for the trees from a teaching point of view.
Now, of course, some subjects lend themselves very easily to emphasis
of the 12 cognitive processes. Science courses could, for example,
be entirely about experimentation or diagnosis or causation,
and they would be very useful if they were. But instead we encourage
learning the facts about who did what experiment and we teach formulas
to be memorized and we teach about equations. Experimentation
is indeed a very exciting subject. (Ask any 2-year-old who experiments
with what best goes in his mouth on a daily basis.) But
schooling manages to make it a very dull subject by teaching who did
what experiment when.
One reason that we have managed to create dullness out of material
that can be inherently interesting is the absurd emphasis on testing
that has dominated the world of education in the past years. Below
are three questions (quite typical ones) from an AP psychology exam.
Ivan P. Pavlov is famous for his research on
(A) teaching machines.
(B) perceptual learning.
(C) forward conditioning.
(D) classical conditioning.
(E) backward conditioning.
A stimulus that elicits a response before the experimental
manipulation is a (an)
(A) response stimulus (RS).
(B) unconditioned stimulus (UCS).
(C) generalized stimulus (GS).
(D) conditioned stimulus (CS).
(E) specific stimulus (SS).
66 Teaching Minds
Erikson proposed that trust or mistrust develops during the
(A) muscular-anal stage.
(B) locomotor-genital stage.
(C) latency stage.
(D) oral-sensory stage.
(E) maturity stage.
Psychology is all about experimentation, but the questions here are
about facts about previous experiments, which is very different from
learning to design and perform an experiment about something that
personally interests you. Psychology teachers cannot teach students
how to create a hypothesis and experiment to find out whether it is
true, unless they go around the existing curriculum. Since teachers are
judged by their students’ results on AP tests, this is hardly likely.
Another problem here is that only some of the 12 cognitive processes
are conscious. Others are hidden from our conscious minds.
If school were to actively try to teach diagnosis, for example, soon
enough there would be the 18 principles of diagnosis or a test about
who said what about diagnosis. There probably wouldn’t be much actual
diagnosis unless something drastically changed our conception of
what schooling should look like.
The major problem with how we think about teaching is our conception
of what it means to teach, as well as our conception of what it
means to learn. In school we “know” that one has to learn math and
science and literature. I am asserting here that it is that notion, that
there are these specific subjects to teach, that has ruined our schools.
There are abilities to teach, not subjects.
Academics designed the school system. To them, it seemed natural
that the subjects that they were experts on should be taught in
high school. Such a simple thought has created a major problem. 1
Education ought not be subject-based but, in a sense, we can’t help
but think of it that way because we all went to schools that were subject-based.
Even corporate training, which need not be subject-based,
tends to be viewed in that way as well, simply because that is the way
we have always looked at education owing to our own experiences in
school.
Once you set up the learning question in terms of subjects that need
to be taught, it is very tempting to use the old tried and true, Why
Real-Life Learning Projects Considered 67
don’t we just tell them the facts and any underlying theories? The knowledge
metaphor, the one that says that teachers know some stuff that students
don’t, naturally leads teachers to tell students what they know.
Now let’s consider corporate training.
The companies that contract with my company 2 to build courses
know that we will not use the learning by telling method. Presumably
they are frustrated with the results that the telling method has produced
in courses that have been built for them by others. (In fact, they
refer to it as “death by PowerPoint.”) This is why they come to us. Still
they can’t help but ask the same subject-based question. How could
they not? It is all they know. They went to school. They see the world
in the way that school taught them to see it.
They don’t ask the questions they should ask because they can’t.
We need to transform badly formed educational questions into properly
formed ones. We need to transform subject-based questions into
cognitive process-based questions. This means changing statements
about the need to manage client relationships into statements about
cognition, and statements about product launch into ones about cognition,
and so on. What does it mean to make such transformations?
It means asking what one does when one manages client relationships
or when one launches a product. This is, of course, exactly what we
ask clients in our first meeting with them. For example, we ask: What
does one do when one launches a product?
What I plan to do here is reveal what we do next, namely, the subject
to cognitive ability transformation process. We must do the transformation
properly and then make clear what one does in course design
after one has figured out what really needs to be taught.
Let’s start simple. Let’s imagine we want to train insurance adjusters
to decide what compensation a policy owner is entitled to after a
hurricane hits his property. (Yes, I do live in Florida, but I can’t say I
care much about this process personally.) I found this on the Internet
covering this subject:
Catastrophe Adjusting Refresher
Course Description: This is a course package comprised of three
courses plus a bonus section and downloadable documents.
One of the three courses is this:
68 Teaching Minds
Catastrophe Adjusting Skills and Techniques
Course Description: This is a course package comprised of seven
courses plus two bonus sections and a number of downloadable
documents.
This online class is for individuals who are new to adjusting
catastrophes, such as hurricanes, windstorms, and tornadoes.
The course is broken down into two key sections: “Getting
Prepared for Adjusting” and “The Actual Adjusting Process.”
The first section includes a number of course components and
background knowledge that can be done in preparation for any
catastrophe. The second part of the class takes you through
all the steps and processes required for adjusting residential
properties. This online package includes everything listed under
course topics.
Course Topics:
• Insurance Basics
• Tools of the Trade
• Working with Digital Photos
• Residential Construction Basics
• Claim File Components
• Homeowners Policy Interpretation
• Property Adjusting 101
• Getting organized
• Claim reporting
Course Length: 8 hours
Audience: Property adjusters who are new to processing and
adjusting catastrophe claims and need the knowledge and skills
required to be successful on the job.
One thing that jumps out here is the time. In 8 hours, the above
topics will all be covered.
Wow! Assuming an hour for each subject, this means you can
learn insurance basics, or residential construction basics, in an hour
if you take this course. What this means in practice, I assume, is that
Real-Life Learning Projects Considered 69
there will be some text to read and some questions to answer to make
sure that you have read the text. Personally, I doubt that one could
learn much about any of these subjects by oneself in 8 hours (or even
8 days.) Clearly, they are teaching vocabulary and a few facts. Most of
it will be forgotten.
Now suppose the insurance industry had come to me and asked
my company to build a course that covered these topics. What would
I say? (Apart from: Are you nuts?—not in 8 hours.)
I would start by asking what is hard about insurance adjusting. At
the same time, I would have already assumed that this was basically a
diagnosis task.
Diagnosis is a complex cognitive process that has three important
parts. The most important part is the end result. All successful diagnoses
result in an answer (cancer, stopped up sewer line, misfiring spark
plug, paranoia, etc.). These results are taken from a list of acceptable
answers and typically are not in any way inventive. The second part
is the case. A prototypical case for all possible results typically is compared
with the current case. A match determines the result. The third
part is the evidence. To construct a case, one must gather evidence.
When more than one prototypical case matches the situation, more
evidence needs to be gathered in order to differentiate the cases that
might match. Doctors call this differential diagnosis.
How does one learn to do diagnosis? One must know the prototypical
case, which often takes years for one to acquire naturally
through experience. One must know how to gather evidence, and
what constitutes evidence, and one must know the possible set of results.
All of this takes a long time to learn. But the process itself is very
much the same no matter what you are diagnosing. So, one question
we would ask was whether the students in the course had any experience
diagnosing anything. It is easier to teach diagnosis to people who
have done it before even if the subject matter is different this time.
Another question we would ask is how much the students knew about
the basics of the subject matter since it is easier to teach diagnosis to
those who already know the subject matter.
So when I ask what is hard about insurance adjusting, I have a
good idea of what the answer may be. It is probably in one of these
three things. Is it difficult to learn all the kinds of cases that there are
and what differentiates one from another? This depends on how many
70 Teaching Minds
types of cases there are. Is it hard to gather evidence properly? Probably.
It usually is. Is it hard to know all the possible results? It might
not be. It might be hard to decide on a result, however, since the result
is usually to pay some amount of money, so how much money would
be the key question. All this takes practice, so what we really need to
know is where the main areas of practice should be.
So now we have a real question to ask:
Q1: How can we practice gathering evidence, learning about
prototypical cases, and knowing how to determine the correct
final result in insurance adjusting?
Notice that this is a very different question from asking what an
insurance adjuster knows and then asking how to tell students what
they should know.
Making the transformation from the list of knowledge given above
by the online course offerers into Q1 is the real issue in transforming
subject-based education into cognitive process- based education.
Let’s discuss a different type of example. My company was invited
into a technical college in Peru to discuss how to teach accounting.
Why would you want to teach accounting? I asked. Because the students
need to know it, I was told. Why? I said. Because they need it in their
work. So I changed the subject. I asked, What work do most people do
when they graduate from your school?
It turns out most of their graduates ran fast-food restaurants. Then
why do they need to learn accounting? They need it in order to run a restaurant.
I am sure there is some accounting done as part of running a
restaurant, but surely not every part of accounting is needed. And, I
asked, Do you actually teach how to run a restaurant?
Of course they didn’t. Why not? Because accounting is an academic
subject and managing fast-food employees and ordering meat
are not. They hire an accounting professor and he knows accounting
and knows nothing about running a restaurant. Even a practical technical
school gets caught up in subject-based education in part because
it hires graduates from that system who know only what they themselves
were taught.
What are the cognitive processes involved in running a fast-food
restaurant? Let’s see which are relevant.
Real-Life Learning Projects Considered 71
Conceptual processes
1. Prediction YES
2. Modeling YES
3. Experimentation YES
4. Evaluation YES
Analytic processes
1. Diagnosis YES
2. Planning YES
3. Causation YES
4. Judgment YES
Social processes
1. Influence YES
2. Teamwork YES
3. Negotiation YES
4. Describing YES
Hmm. All of them. How can this be?
Managing a business, any business, requires one to influence employees,
negotiate with suppliers, plan future moves, determine what
isn’t working, teach employees how to work together, make judgments
about people and processes, and so on.
All this should give a hint about how to approach a business that
wants to teach its employees to do their jobs properly. One must teach
each of the 12 processes, but they need to be taught in the actual context
of what people will do when they graduate. This does not mean
that for every problem there are 12 courses that need to be created.
While you might need to predict an employee’s behavior, this does
not mean there should be a prediction course. This is not a problem
because there never is such a course. A businessperson has to make
judgments, and determine causes of problems, and so on, so maybe we
should have courses in each of those processes. But this makes no sense.
We must teach people to deal with the real-life issues that arise
in any situation they are preparing to work in. In other words, the
72 Teaching Minds
designer of a course on how to manage a restaurant must focus on
the typical goal conflict situations that a new manager would have to
confront. The course designer must create a fictional situation where
it is necessary to convince an employee to do something or to find out
why something that was asked of an employee did not happen.
The magic word is scenario. Scenarios are like plays. Things happen
and you have to deal with them. A well-written scenario makes sure
that all of the processes that could be at all relevant to what you want
to teach, occur in this new context. In a reasonable education system,
students would have been practicing all of these processes all of their
lives. But we do not have a reasonable education system. We have
one based in subjects. So our cognitive processes are not rehearsed
over time in different contexts by constant practice. Instead we learn
knowledge about subjects.
To remedy this, a course designer (and a teacher if the teacher has
that freedom) must make sure that as many of the cognitive processes
as are relevant to a situation naturally occur within the scenario being
constructed to simulate what will happen in real life later on. Not every
situation requires diagnosis, but many do. Not every situation has
a goal conflict or forces one to make predictions or plans, but many
do. If what needs to be taught naturally lends itself to working on
any of the 12 cognitive processes, then the training being built must
concentrate on that. If there could be diagnosis, then there should be
training in diagnosis in that context, and that training must supersede
the garnering of facts.
Schools are tough to change. We are trying, but the subject-based
educators have a few hundred years head start. However, in designing
new training, it is quite possible to reorient subject-based courses and
turn them into cognitive process-based courses that are much more
satisfying to both the teacher and the student.
CHAPTER 6
A Socratic Dialogue
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up
every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever
abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.
—Thomas Huxley
Slave Boy: So it really doesn’t matter how you classify a teaching/
learning problem because there are many methods that could
apply, correct?
Socrates: And what follows from this?
Slave Boy: That it is not the classification that matters but the
methods entailed in that classification.
Socrates: And what do all these methods have in common?
Slave Boy: They all involve practice
Socrates: And what else?
Slave Boy: Real experience.
Socrates: And how is experience stored?
Slave Boy: Through cases.
Socrates: Expressed how?
Slave Boy: As stories
Socrates: So what follows from all this?
Slave Boy: That the methodology entailed in each classification of
learning types is not the real issue.
Socrates: And what is the real issue?
Slave Boy: Practice
Socrates: And?
Slave Boy: Dialogue
Socrates: Why dialogue?
Slave Boy: Because it is through dialogue that stories are solidified
and indexed
Socrates: So the classification of learning types doesn’t really matter
then, does it?
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74 Teaching Minds
Slave Boy: Oh no, dear teacher, I beg to differ. The classification helps
us think about the real issues in education.
Socrates: Indeed.
CHAPTER 7
Knowledge-Based Education vs.
Process-Based Education
Diagnosis is not the end, but the beginning of practice.
—Martin H. Fischer
In our society we have set up schools to teach knowledge. We concern
ourselves with what facts children know, we test to make sure they
know them, and then we complain that the schools are failing when
they don’t. This idea is so ingrained in our way of looking at schooling
that when people like me complain about it, we are seen as people
who are rambling around muttering to ourselves.
There are so many people having anxiety attacks about what kids
know, it seems one can find an article about it in every news segment
on education.
I happened on an article in Huffington Post written by someone
named Schweitzer who is listed as “having served at the White
House during the Clinton Administration as Assistant Director for
International Affairs in the Office of Science and Technology Policy.”
Here is a piece of what he said:
The health care debate cannot be understood in historic context
because many Americans have never heard of Thomas Jefferson.
Extrapolating from state surveys, only 14% of American high
school students can name who wrote the Declaration of
Independence. Nearly 75% do not know that George Washington
was our first president. . . . We can say that our educational
system has failed when the vast majority of American students
do not know enough to pass an exam to qualify as American
citizens.
This is an astonishing statement.
75
76 Teaching Minds
Why do we have such a failed system? Could it be the policies of
presidents like Clinton, who pursued a policy of never offending the
teachers unions by doing anything threatening to them, like changing
the curriculum?
Or, could it be that people such as this writer define education
in terms of random facts they wished everyone knew? The problem
is not that people don’t know who Thomas Jefferson was. If citizens
knew who he was, would that mean that they could think clearly and
not be influenced by all the special interests who were trying to tell
them what to think? If they knew who George Washington was, what
exactly would they know about him? That he could never tell a lie?
This is obviously untrue, and many have written about what a good
liar he actually was. That he was a brilliant general? There is lots of
evidence against that. That he owned 300 slaves? This is not usually
mentioned. That he married a rich woman probably so he could get
her land? Historians discuss this. Schools never do. Nevertheless, people
are upset because our students don’t know our national myths and
some random facts.
The real issue in the healthcare debate is that the general public
can’t think clearly. That would have a simple explanation. The schools
don’t even try to teach people to think clearly.
I mentioned President Clinton above, but really all U.S. presidents
are culpable. It may not be their fault. Certainly they are given terrible
information.
Lamar Alexander, former Secretary of Education (under George
H.W. Bush) was speaking in the U.S. Senate recently on restoring
teaching history to its “rightful place” and making sure that history
was part of the NCLB act. Here is a quote from him from 2006:
Just one example of how far we are from helping our children
learn what they need to know. The fourth grade national
report card test asked students to identify the following
passage, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men
are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life,
Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Students were given
four choices: Constitution, Mayflower Compact, Declaration
of Independence, and Articles of Confederation. Less than
Knowledge-Based Education vs. Process-Based Education 77
half the students answered correctly that that came from the
Declaration of Independence. Another question said, “Imagine
that you landed in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776. Describe
an important event that is happening there.” Nearly half
the students couldn’t answer the question correctly that the
Declaration of Independence was being signed.
Politicians never seem to get it about education. What history do
students “need to know”? None, actually, unless they plan on being
historians, or maybe senators. Now I realize this is a radical point of
view, but history is not something anyone needs to know.
Why not?
Because knowing what happened in Philadelphia in 1776 does
not in fact make you a better citizen, no matter what Alexander says.
Random historical “facts” do not make one a critical thinker about
history nor do they promote clear thinking about current political
issues. Such “facts” are almost always used by politicians to justify
whatever it is they already believe. Understanding how human events
typically flow is, in fact, quite valuable, but that has more to do with
understanding human nature and prior circumstances than it does
with memorizing facts that politicians deem important to know. A
good citizen would be one who carefully considered the issues when
voting. That would mean being able to diagnose problems and evaluate
proposed solutions. But that would produce a citizenry that could
ask hard questions of politicians, which is probably not what these
politicians are aiming for.
In 1776 we had a bunch of politicians who, if the present set are
any example, surely were voting for their own special interests. The
fact that we, as a country, feel the need to make them into folk heroes
does not make it one bit more likely they were any better or worse
than the current people who govern us. What Alexander is really arguing
for is more indoctrination—more informing students what to
think instead of teaching them how to think.
It would be nice if one simply could point a finger and say it is all
the politicians’ fault. They really don’t want people to think all that
clearly. But politicians are only part of the problem.
Recently, a report was issued about the teaching of mathematics,
stating:
78 Teaching Minds
Students who complete Algebra II are more than twice as
likely to graduate from college compared to students with less
mathematical preparation. 1
The natural assumption here is that we must hurry up and teach
more Algebra II, of course. Except that obviously is not what is going
on; it just serves the interests of those who wrote the report to put it
that way. Here is another statement from that report:
Students who depended on their native intelligence learned less
than those who believed that success depended on how hard
they worked.
The claim is simply this: If you work harder, you get into college.
Now the question is: Why are the writers of this report claiming that
the thing that students have to work harder at is Algebra II?
It is easy enough to see why this panel decided that. At stake was a
$100 million federal budget request for Math Now, and the people who
were on the panel were people who would receive that funding. University
professors issue reports asking for grant money to be approved
that state that the nation will not succeed without that grant money.
Vested interests are nothing new. I am sometimes amazed that no one
points this stuff out, however. It is well established that everyone must
know algebra. The fact that this is well established by those who make
money on the teaching of algebra is never brought up by the New York
Times, which published a lead article on the report, or by anyone else,
it seems.
My favorite part of the Times article was the following:
Dr. Faulkner, a former president of the University of Texas at
Austin, said the panel “buys the notion from cognitive science
that kids have to know the facts.”
Dr. Faulkner, let me point out, is a chemist, and I am pretty sure
he doesn’t really know much about cognitive science. But cognitive
science has been used of late to justify a great deal of what is wrong
in education. E.D. Hirsch, an English professor at the University of
Virginia, made a career of making lists of stuff every kid should know.
When cognitive scientists trashed this work as nonsense, he cited the
Knowledge-Based Education vs. Process-Based Education 79
idea that one needs background knowledge in order to read, which is
both true and a product of various works in cognitive science.
Hirsch was made to look like a fool so often that he resorted to hiring
a cognitive science professor at Virginia, who has written a book
justifying the same nonsense with more cognitive science facts. 2
There is plenty of work in cognitive science that shows that background
knowledge helps people interpret the world around them, and
thus reading, for example, is facilitated by having knowledge about
the world about which you are reading. This idea, however, does not
imply that ramming facts down a kid’s throat is the way for them to
acquire that background knowledge. Knowledge acquisition is a natural
result of engaging in cognitive processes that are being employed
to satisfy a truly held goal.
If you are trying to find your way around a city, you will learn the
streets of that city and develop what is called a cognitive map. If you
try to memorize those same streets, it simply won’t work. Real knowledge
is acquired as a natural part of an employed cognitive process in
service of a goal. But Hirsch and Willingham know nothing about cognitive
processes. They only know, and talk about, how best to acquire
more facts. Politicians listen to them and there are more tests to make
sure those facts have been acquired. No one remembers Algebra II or
much about the Founding Fathers because that stuff is mostly facts
acquired independent of any real goals that will employ those facts.
Knowledge is not the real issue in education or in mental life. The
real issue is developing facility with doing various cognitive processes.
Knowledge comes along for free with practice of these processes in
specific domains.
There is no evidence whatsoever that accumulation of facts and
background knowledge are the same thing. In fact, there is plenty of
evidence to the contrary. Facts learned out of context, and apart from
actual real-world experience that is repeated over and over, are not
retained.
Why don’t kids like school? Because we teach them knowledge
that they know they won’t need. How do they know this? They know
that their parents don’t know this stuff—that is how. Many kids don’t
like math much and it is clear why. They find it boring and irrelevant
to anything they care about doing. If we think math is so important,
then why not teach it within a meaningful context, where it actually
is used? There is plenty of evidence that shows that teaching math
80 Teaching Minds
within a real and meaningful context works a whole lot better than
shoving it down their throats and following that with a multiple
choice test. But for the vast majority of citizens, Algebra II is never
used.
There is no evidence whatsoever that says that a nation that is
trailing in math test scores will somehow trail in GDP or whatever it
is we really care about. This is just plain silly, but we keep repeating
the mantra that we are behind Korea in math as if it has been proven
that this matters in some way. Nothing of the sort has been proven.
What is true is that there are a great many vested interests that need
to keep teaching math: tutoring companies, testing companies, math
teachers, book publishers, and many others who make lots of money
when people are scared into thinking that their kid won’t get into college
because he or she is bad at Algebra II. Nearly every grownup has
forgotten whatever algebra he or she ever learned to pass those silly
tests, so it is clear that algebra is meaningless for adult life. Any college
professor who is honest will tell you that algebra almost never comes
up in any college course, and when it does come up it usually needn’t
be there in the first place.
So, math isn’t important and history isn’t important. What is
important?
Tests. Tests are very important. Not to me, of course, but my vote
isn’t being counted.
The past two presidents have been obsessed with raising test scores.
I am assuming this is true because some political analysts somewhere
have determined that the general public believes in the significance of
raising tests scores and will vote for politicians who are able to show
that they have done it. There can’t be any other reason. Try taking
those tests. Most of them are available online. See how well you can
do at them.
But what could really be wrong with testing and emphasizing test
scores?
TESTING TEACHES THAT THERE ARE RIGHT ANSWERS
The problem is that in real life, the important questions don’t have answers
that are clearly right or wrong. “Knowing the answer” has made
school into Jeopardy. It is nice to win a game show, but important
Knowledge-Based Education vs. Process-Based Education 81
decisions are made through argumentation and force of reason—not
by knowing the right answer. People who know a lot are generally
quite smart. I could do well at Jeopardy as could most professors, I
would think. But we are not successful intellectuals because we know a
lot of facts. We know a lot of facts because we are successful intellectuals.
People have got this backwards.
Consider athletes. A great baseball player and a great basketball
player, it can be assumed, also will be very good at lifting weights. But
they did not become good at lifting weights and then become great
athletes. It was the other way around. They had a natural talent for
hitting a ball or shooting baskets and then they had to get stronger in
order to compete with others who had the same talents. The talent is
the reason—not the weightlifting. Michael Jordan, a really great athlete,
couldn’t become a successful baseball player because he couldn’t
hit a curve ball. That talent had nothing to do with the athletic ability
that made him a great basketball player. Hitting a curve ball is a
different kind of talent. His weightlifting ability was the same either
way. I know a lot of facts and I am talented at designing educational
software. The facts I know do not help with the talent. But the more
educational software I design in different domains of knowledge, the
more facts I pick up.
When we look at people who are knowledgeable and confuse that
with people who can think well, we totally miss the point about education.
Education ought not be focused on imparting facts any more
than athletic training ought to be focused on weightlifting. You learn
to hit a ball by hitting one and you learn to think clearly by thinking.
Focusing on the 12 cognitive processes I have outlined, rather than
focusing on fact acquisition, helps one learn to think.
TESTING TEACHES THAT SOME SUBJECTS ARE MORE
IMPORTANT THAN OTHERS
The tests are small in number. If there were thousands to choose from,
then perhaps people could get tested in fiber optics instead of history.
But the system has determined which subjects are the most important.
The system made that determination in 1892. Some things have
changed in the world since then. There are a few new subjects—psychology,
computers, medicine, business, and law, for example. Many
82 Teaching Minds
new sciences and social sciences came into being after 1892. But none
of those will ever make it into the sacred group of math, science, English,
economics, and history because everyone seems to think that the
big five were handed down on tablets to Moses.
And everyone is sure that their favorite subject is the most important
one, be it history, literature, math, or science. Math and science
are having a big moment as I write this. We hear that the nation does
not produce enough students interested in math and science. Something
must be done.
I was a math major in college. I got 98 on every math Regents test
offered. (I lived in New York where testing ruled in the world in the
1950s too.) My mother always asked where the other two points went.
I grew up to be a computer science professor. I am not a math phobe.
But neither am I a math proponent. I have never used math in my
professional life.
I always start any discussion on education by asking if the person
I am talking with knows the quadratic formula. One out of one hundred
knows it. (The last few times I asked, the people included the
head of a major testing service, the governor of a U.S. state, various
state legislators, and 200 high school principals.) Then why do we
teach this obviously useless piece of information to every student in
the world? Because math is important, of course.
Why?
As a person who was involved with graduate admissions for 30
years at three of the top ten universities in the country, I know what
this hysteria is actually about. Nearly all applicants to graduate computer
science programs (which is what I know—but it is true in most
fields of engineering and science) are foreign nationals. We wonder
why American kids aren’t interested in these fields—which is a reasonable
enough question. But then we have come up with an extraordinary
answer.
What we say is that we must teach math and science better in high
school when what we mean is that it would be nice to have some more
American-born scientists.
Do we really believe that the reason that there are so many foreign
applicants to U.S. graduate programs is that they teach math and science
better in other countries? China and India provide most of the
applicants. They also have most of the world’s people. And many of
Knowledge-Based Education vs. Process-Based Education 83
those people will do anything to live in the United States. So they cram
math down their own throats, knowing that it is a ticket to America.
Very few of these applicants come from Germany, Sweden, France, or
Italy. Is this because they teach math badly there or is it because those
people aren’t desperate to move to the United States?
U.S. students are not desperate to move to the United States, so
when you suggest to them that they numb themselves with formulas
and equations, they refuse to do so. The right answer would be to
make math and science actually interesting, but with those awful tests
as the ultimate arbiter of success, this is very difficult to do. Math and
science are not important subjects. There, I said it. Start the lynching.
One can live a happy life without ever having taken a physics course
or knowing what a logarithm is.
But being able to reason on the basis of evidence actually is important.
You cannot live well without this skill (or any of the other
cognitive processes I have been writing about). Diagnosis is science
as it actually is practiced by scientists. Science is not a bunch of
stuff to be memorized. It is the fact-based tests that cause this problem.
We don’t need more math and science. We need more people
who can think.
TESTING FOCUSES TEACHERS ON WINNING NOT TEACHING
Many teachers are extremely frustrated by the system they have found
themselves a part of. They cannot afford to spend time teaching a
student or getting a concept across if the issues being taught are not
on the tests. They are judged on the basis of test scores. So any rational
teacher gives up teaching and becomes a kind of test preparation
coach. Testing has become a kind of contest between schools, much
like football. I like football. But the football mentality that envelops
our concept of schooling is a disaster.
Take a look at this excerpt of an article taken from my local
paper. What our educators are worrying about is winning the game.
Unfortunately, the game has nothing to do with educating students
and everything to do with test scores, which are probably less valuable
than football scores in predicting anything about the future of
children’s lives.
84 Teaching Minds
Martin County School District won’t settle for B
July 27, 2007
STUART—The Martin County School District was just short
of earning a perfect report card from the state in late June.
But the district, which earned 18 A’s and one B, has a chance
to earn straight A’s. School officials are appealing J.D. Parker
School of Science, Math & Technology’s B grade. The Stuart
elementary school had enough points to be considered an “A”
school, but because the lowest 25 percent of the school’s students
didn’t make learning gains, the state dropped the grade to a B.
. . . .
Martin had the second-highest percentage of A schools
among the state’s 67 counties. Gilchrist County had the highest
percentage of A’s, though the county in northeastern Florida only
has four schools.
The district is also filing an appeal for Warfield Elementary
in Indiantown. The school received an A, but did not make
adequate yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind
Act, state data shows.
The result of all this is that teachers are now being “held accountable”
for their teaching, which is another way of saying, Get those test scores
up or else.
The following is from an article on the front page of the New York
Times (December 23, 2007):
Mr. Obama, for instance, in a speech last month in New
Hampshire denounced the law (NCLB) as “demoralizing our
teachers.” But he also said it was right to hold all children to
high standards. “The goals of this law were the right ones,” he
said.
When Mr. Edwards released an education plan earlier this
year, he said the No Child law needed a “total overhaul.” But he
said he would continue the law’s emphasis on accountability.
And at the elementary school in Waterloo, Mrs. Clinton said
she would “do everything I can as senator, but if we don’t get it
done, then as president, to end the unfunded mandate known as
No Child Left Behind.”
Knowledge-Based Education vs. Process-Based Education 85
But she, too, added: “We do need accountability.”
Accountability must play well in Peoria because every politician is for
it.
Accountability must mean to voters, I assume, that teachers will
be measured by how well they teach their students. Political candidates,
always willing to hop on an uncontroversial point of view, are
all quite certain that the voters know what they are talking about. No
matter how stupid NCLB is, no matter how mean spirited, no matter
how awful for both teachers and students, its very horror rests on the
premise that no one seems to be disputing that the federal government
has the right to tell the schools what to teach and to see whether
they are indeed teaching it.
How is this premise wrong?
• It assumes that all schools should teach the same
subjects.
• It assumes that some subjects are more important than
other subjects.
• It assumes that all important subjects can be easily tested.
• It assumes that seeing who did better than whom in
school is an intrinsic part of the educational process.
• It assumes that all children have the same educational
needs.
Let’s take them one by one.
ALL SCHOOLS SHOULD TEACH THE SAME SUBJECTS
Why is this wrong?
First, it is wrong because subjects aren’t what should be taught.
But even if one follows the view presented in this book that the issue
is cognitive processes and not subjects, cognitive processes need to be
applied to actual domains, that are relevant to the life of the student..
Kids in New York come from, and will live in, a different world than
their compatriots in New Mexico. In New Mexico, I was asked whether
we could teach casino management and land use. Yes, we could, but
not if there is federal accountability about algebra and 20 other subjects
that make it impossible to fit these subjects in.
86 Teaching Minds
SOME SUBJECTS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN OTHER
SUBJECTS
Yes, we have electives. But they don’t matter. Because accountability
means making sure that we first teach what does matter. What matters
is the stuff that we are holding people accountable for. Since this
seems to be math and science these days, for no good reason I can
discern, this means that we will get to the stuff that would excite kids
and keep them in school, and might teach them some job skills, after
we are done with the important stuff. But I am certain that none of
the politicians mentioned in the Times article knows the quadratic
formula or the elements of the periodic table, which is, of course, the
stuff of accountability since it is so easy to test. Then how can that be
the important stuff?
ALL IMPORTANT SUBJECTS CAN BE EASILY TESTED
Yes, there are right answers in math. But are there right answers in
whether we should have invaded Iraq? No? Does that mean we can’t
teach how governments actually work and how to get reasoned arguments
to be heard? Is there a right speech political candidates should
make? Does that mean we can’t ask students to give speeches because
we can’t easily assess them? Do we teach only subjects for which there
are clear right answers? We do now, which is one reason why school
is a deadly experience for one and all and will remain so as long as accountability
is the key word in government.
SEEING WHO DID BETTER THAN WHOM IN SCHOOL IS AN
INTRINSIC PART OF THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS
It really is all about competition, isn’t it? Bush, both Clintons, and
Obama are all the winners of the school competition. They went to
Ivy League schools, which seems to be the real issue for most parents.
I taught at Ivy League schools and I was profoundly unimpressed
with the test- taking, grade-grubbing students I found there. The goal
of education is not to say who won, and it is not to tell Harvard
whom to admit. The goal is provide real-world skills, some of which
Knowledge-Based Education vs. Process-Based Education 87
may not be so easy to assess until the graduate actually shows up in
the real world.
ALL CHILDREN HAVE THE SAME EDUCATIONAL NEEDS
There is more than a 50% dropout rate in many high schools because
we have forgotten that not everyone is going to Harvard and that
going to Harvard is not the goal of education. Some children simply
need to learn about ethics and business and child raising and how the
legal system works, how to take care of their health and how to understand
when politicians are saying things that make no sense. Why
wouldn’t those subjects be critical? No politician seems to think any
of those are more important than math and science. How about the
student who has a passion for the environment, or doing social good,
or being a good parent, or running for office? Does every student’s
school life have to be the same?
STUDENTS LEARN THAT MEMORIZATION IS MORE IMPORTANT
THAN THINKING
In an answer-obsessed world, “go figure it out for yourself” or “go try
it and see what happens” are replaced by more memorization. Giving
kids a chance to fail helps them learn. Actively preventing failure by
telling the right answer just helps kids pass tests. In each of the cognitive
processes that I presented in Chapter 4, failure is not only an
option—but it will happen all the time. One’s first hypothesis will be
wrong. One will plan badly or botch a negotiation. These processes are
all about failure, not right answers. Recovering from failure, getting
better next time, is what learning is all about. Learning entails failure
and cannot happen without it. The kind of failure I have in mind here
is expectation failure. This means that we can fail even when we succeed,
because we didn’t expect things to happen quite like they did.
Our predictions are often wrong. We work at getting better at making
them and explaining to ourselves why we were wrong. This process of
expectation failure followed by explanation is at the heart of learning.
That’s what learning is all about. Memorization has nothing whatever
to do with learning, unless you want to become a singer.
88 Teaching Minds
How can we offer new curricula and new ways of learning if no matter
what we do children must pass algebra tests? Each administration
says over and over again that science is important, but since science
in high school is defined for the most part by boring tests of vocabulary
terms and definitions, who would be excited to learn science? If
a really good scientific reasoning curriculum were created, the schools
could not offer it unless it helped kids pass the very same tests that
that curriculum was intended to replace.
We must make radical change. The only way to do that is to stop
focusing on teaching subjects and stop using the fact-based tests are
the natural end result of that focus on subjects.
An education system based on cognitive processes would look
very different indeed.
CHAPTER 8
New Curricula for a
New Way of Teaching
A smart man makes a mistake, learns from it, and never
makes that mistake again. But a wise man finds a smart man
and learns from him how to avoid the mistake altogether.
—Roy H. Williams
How do we put all this into practice? First, let’s make sure we avoid
creating departments around each of the 12 cognitive processes. The
organization around subjects, which is the basis of how our schools
are organized, is the source of the problem in both universities and
high schools.
Subjects create departments. Departments in universities are a serious
problem for students and administrators. They represent silos
where decisions are made that will help the department prosper. Departments
lobby for their courses to be required so they can hire more
faculty. They make sure majors in their departments follow certain
rules for graduation that are intended to make students scholars in
their field rather than practitioners. Departments are the reason students
graduate without job skills. Faculty are almost always against
practical training. English departments have to be forced to teach students
to write. Computer science departments have to be forced to
teach students to program in a way that would make them hirable by
industry. Psychology departments avoid teaching clinical psychology,
which is really what students what to learn more about.
For about 10 years I have been building new online story-centered
curricula. The idea behind a story-centered curriculum (SCC) is that a
good curriculum should tell a story. That story should be one in which
the student plays one or more roles. Those roles should be those that
normally come up in such a story. These curricula are intended to
teach students how to actually do something. The roles students play
89
90 Teaching Minds
in the story are ones that a graduate of such a program actually might
do in real life or actually might need to know about (possibly because
he is likely to manage or work with someone who performs that role).
Stories have been at the center of human consciousness for a long
time. People tell stories, and the stories they tell shape who they are.
People hear stories and remember those that resonate deeply with
them. And, people live stories. The stories they live become part of
them in a deep way. While we may easily forget everything about a
traditional course we took in high school, we can hardly forget the
roles we have played in real-life experiences, especially when those
roles went on for a long time and had emotional impact on us.
The central argument here is that good education requires good
stories—not solely stories that one is told, however. A good education
relies on the creation of stories that a student can participate in and
feel deeply about. This means that those stories must include others
who are playing roles the student will have to deal with on the job,
and that the roles the student plays in the stories must relate to the
current or future roles that the student intends to play in his or her
career.
The SCC is inherently goal-based. The goals must be those that a
student has already. For small boys, for example, it can be assumed
that the idea of building a truck or designing an airplane is an activity
that would grab their interest. For older students, these would be
ones like current or future job assignments. In an online world, it is
quite possible to create hundreds or thousands of choices and allow
students to pick what they want to do—not what they want to study,
but activities that genuinely excite them.
The SCC is inherently activity-based. The tasks that constitute the
SCC must relate to goals that the student has and the tasks that people
actually perform in the roles that the student will play when the training
is completed. Thus, an SCC is made up of a set of real-life types of
tasks that make up the bulk of the work done by the student, and a set
of events that occasionally interrupt or augment those tasks.
Thanks to a grant from the Kauffman Foundation, we built a fullyear
(all day, every day) high school curriculum in health sciences.
This would be, ideally, used in a high school that offered perhaps over
100 full-year curricula. Students would choose four that they liked and
after completing them would graduate from high school. All of the
curricula would teach what it is like to live in a part of the real world,
as well as allowing for practice in the 12 cognitive processes. It takes
New Curricula for a New Way of Teaching 91
a while to build these SCCs and they are quite expensive to build, but
they cost less than building a new school, so the money could easily
be made available.
Let’s look at the health sciences curriculum we built.
The year in health sciences comprises nine “rotations,” each lasting
3 to 4 full-time weeks on average, in which students experience
what it is like to solve the kinds of problems real professionals solve
in various specialized fields related to biology and healthcare. These
experiences are set in realistic stories in which the students play a
leading role. The rotations are conducted consecutively. Students primarily
work on assigned projects in teams, although each rotation has
independent tasks as well. Each of the rotations was created with the
assistance of an expert in each of the respective specialties.
One goal of the curriculum is for students to discover that practicing
science is fun and relevant to real-world problems. They also
should develop a sense of what it would be like to work as a practitioner
in the various health sciences fields, so they can decide whether
they might someday like a career in healthcare or biology. Of course,
the real goal is to enable practice in the 12 cognitive processes. Let’s
see how that happens.
The rotations in the year in health sciences are:
1. Internal Medicine—Students diagnose and develop a treatment
plan for a fictional patient who has a major illness and
ultimately requires an organ transplant as a part of his
treatment. Students also make judgments about ethical issues
related to transplants, following a principled approach to
ethical reasoning.
2. Nutrition Advisor—Students coach fictional nutritional
advisors on their management of teenage clients’ nutritional
concerns and issues. During the process they also develop
nutritional plans for themselves and for a peer.
3. Super Worm—Students work for a fictional philanthropic
billionaire who asks them to invent ways of modifying the
common earthworm so it can more efficiently improve soil to
better supply the world with food.
4. Sports Medic—Students diagnose and develop treatment plans