Document Text Content
Teaching Minds
How Cognitive Science
Can Save Our Schools
Teaching Minds
How Cognitive Science
Can Save Our Schools
ROGER SCHANK
Teachers College, Columbia University
New York and London
Published by Teachers College Press, 1234 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY
10027
Copyright © 2011 by Roger Schank.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-0-8077-5266-1 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-8077-5267-8 (hardcover)
Printed on acid-free paper
Manufactured in the United States of America
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Milo (who can now read this) and for Max, Mira, and Jonah
Contents
Preface
1. Cognitive Process-Based Education
2. Teaching Kids to Walk and Talk
3. What Can’t You Teach?
4. Twelve Cognitive Processes
That Underlie Learning
5. Real-Life Learning Projects Considered
6. A Socratic Dialogue
7. Knowledge-Based Education vs.
Process-Based Education
8. New Curricula for a New Way of Teaching
9. How to Teach the Twelve Cognitive
Processes That Underlie Learning
10. Defining Intelligence
11. Restructuring the University
vii
12. How Not to Teach
13. How the Best Universities
Inadvertently Ruin Our Schools
14. What Can We Do About It?
Notes
About the Author
Preface
My father always told me that I would be a teacher. He didn’t mean
it in a nice way. My father talked in riddles. As the only child in the
house, I had plenty of time and opportunity to figure out what he was
really saying. This was it: I am afraid that like me, the best you will be
able to do in life is to be a civil service worker. He was also saying: If he
had realized he was going to be a civil service worker, at least he could
have been a teacher, which he might have enjoyed. He wasn’t really
talking about me at all.
I never had any intention of being a teacher. I didn’t particularly
like school and later, when I became a professor, the part of the job I
disliked the most was the teaching. One might wonder how I wound
up being a professor if I disliked teaching, and one might wonder why
I am writing a book about teaching if I dislike teaching. One also might
wonder whether I still dislike teaching. Yes. And no. It depends on what
one means by teaching, which is, after all, what this book is about.
The other day my 3-year-old grandson Milo told me he was going
to teach me how to throw rocks. It seemed an odd idea. What could he
mean by this? To Milo, “teach” means to tell someone what to do and
how to do it and then have the person do it too. Teach is part of tell
plus imitate for Milo. Milo is 3. It is not too surprising that this is what
teach means to him. It is a little surprising that he thinks he should
be his grandfather’s teacher, but that is another issue. But it is really
no shock that Milo thinks this is what teach means. It is what nearly
everyone thinks teach means. The commonly accepted usage of teach
is tell and then have the person who was told, do what he was told.
This certainly is not what teach ought to mean, or more important, is
not what good teaching is. And, every good teacher knows this. The
problem is that the system that employs teachers doesn’t know it and
more or less insists that Milo’s definition be the one that is followed.
Actually, I am being too generous here. Milo’s view, namely, that
after he tells me, I will do what he has said, is a better definition of
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x
Preface
teaching than the one actually employed commonly today. Milo at
least thinks that the end result will be the student doing something
that the teacher did. In school, teach usually means helping the student
to know something that the teacher told him. Milo doesn’t know
about that definition of teaching yet since he hasn’t been to school,
but, unfortunately, he soon will.
I have been thinking about teaching for more than 50 years. First
I thought about it when my father said that was what I was going to
be. Then I thought about it as I watched my teachers teach me and, no
less important, watched my father teach me.
My father eventually retired from his civil service job and became
a junior high school teacher in Harlem. He loved his new job and, I
have to assume, became a good teacher. I say it that way because he
was certainly not a good teacher for me, at least not when he thought
he was trying to teach me. I remember him trying to teach me algebra
and it making no sense to me whatever. I remember him teaching me
sports and I mostly think of him as being totally frustrated with my
inability to perform as well as he had hoped. (Being a jock was a big
thing to my father.)
I did fine in algebra without his help and, in fact, became a math
major in college. But, as I look back at it, my father was my first and
best teacher. Why do I say this after all the bad things I have just said?
Because my father was at his best when he wasn’t teaching but was
just saying what was on his mind and arguing. He often talked about
history because he liked history. And when he talked about history
and I asked questions, he became a good Socratic teacher. He forced
me to think and question in our discussions. The conversations were
often very heated but also were a highlight of my intellectual life at
that time. My father didn’t teach me anything except how to think.
That’s better than algebra, actually. For this I am grateful.
So, I thought about teaching then and I thought about it again
when I went to college. As part of my father’s conversations with
me about life, he talked a great deal about his own experiences. His
mother sent him to New York City to live with his aunt in Brooklyn
and to go to college. He was 15 and had, until that time, spent his
entire life on a farm/hotel run by his parents in upstate New York.
He was unprepared for the city, had no money, missed his family,
and had no idea why he wanted to go to college at all. Did I mention
that he was 15? He had graduated first in his class (a class of 16, I
Preface
xi
think) and had skipped a few grades on the way. Suddenly he found
himself at New York University, which in those days was located in
the Bronx.
This is what he remembered most about college in 1923: Apart
from the poverty stories, the “how hard he had to work to support
himself” stories, the stories about watching the Yankees from the elevated
train and wishing he could go to a game, he remembered that
teachers lectured, that you had to memorize what they told you and
then tell it back to them on a test. He thought college was stupid, but
he assured me (in 1960) that college surely had changed by now and
that teachers wouldn’t still be doing this. Oh yeah? In 1962, when I
entered college, they were doing exactly that. And, in 2000, when I
retired from 32 years of professoring, not that much had changed.
So I was thinking about teaching before I got to college and I was
thinking about it while I was a professor and I am thinking about it
now that I have, for the most part, finished teaching. To make sure I
have been thinking about it correctly, I asked former Ph.D. students of
mine, (now tenured professors mostly and some industry executives)
what they had learned from me while they were spending 4–7 years
studying with me. I thought their answers might help me think about
teaching in a new way. I sent an e-mail to maybe 20 former students
whose e-mail addresses I happened to have, and most responded. Here
are some excerpts.
1. I remember quite specifically a homework presentation I
made in your class. When I presented it in class, I was a junior
in college, and all the other students in that class were grad
students. When I was done you smiled at everyone (a rare
event) and said, “Anyone care to follow that act?” Your clearly
heartfelt endorsement of my little research product was a key
moment in my coming to trust my own ideas. I just submitted
a $16.7 million proposal to NIH that would create the first allcomputational
genome center. The kind of chutzpah embodied
in that proposal is one consequence of my experience with you.
2. The way you assigned me to a project—you sent me to each
existing project for 2 weeks until I hit on a project with a good
fit (I was enthusiastic and coherent talking about it). I used this
technique when I was assigning people at Accenture.
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Preface
3. You taught me to teach by telling students stories that are
meaningful to you. I think to be a real teacher you have to let
yourself be vulnerable. So the students can see that you are a
human with feelings and fears and goals. And then being able
to say to the students: This is the way I do it; it fits who I am; it
helps me be successful; and don’t let anyone tell you that you
can’t do something.
4. You taught me that not everyone will like you no matter what
you do and no matter how hard you try. I came back from a
Deloitte course evaluation, and the deans just hated me. Instead
of being upset with me, you assured me that you have to just say
what you believe, and some people won’t like you, and oh well.
5. You taught me to start by collecting data. I recall watching
most of your papers start by collection of data. I recall watching
your criticisms of work that was just abstraction on abstraction,
with no data at its roots.
6. You once told me to imagine that my mother was my
audience—if I could explain it to my mother, I could explain it
to anyone. Incredibly, this seems to work for every audience out
there. So I’ve passed that tip along to my students and it seems to
work for them too.
7. I remember that you used to tell us we need to be excited to
get up and go to work in the morning, that that was the most
important thing. For some people, it’s because of the people
you will be with. For some, it is because of the passion about
whatever it is. But, in general, I still give people that advice (and
it is advice I’ve also been giving my own kids). You have to love
what you are doing.
This is just a sample but it reflects what these former students, now
all in their 40s and 50s, remember about what I taught them. Hadn’t
they learned any facts from me? Didn’t I teach them some real stuff?
Some said in passing that they had learned the actual content of the
subjects I taught as well, but that that wasn’t as important to them as
the things they chose to write about. Why not?
Preface
xiii
There are two important answers to this question and those answers
are what this book is really about. My father offered these same
answers to me, not explicitly by any means, when I thought about the
good and bad of having him as my teacher. When he tried to teach me
facts, I learned nothing much. When he engaged my mind, I learned a
lot. As a professor I never forgot this lesson. I rarely tried to teach facts,
upsetting many a student along the way. I just argued with them, or
encouraged them. I never told them much, except maybe some good
stories.
So here are the answers:
The first is:
Teaching isn’t what outsiders to the profession think it is.
The profession I am referring to here is, of course, the teaching
profession.
The second is:
Learning isn’t what outsiders to the profession think it is.
In this case, the profession I am referring to is not teaching at all.
Let’s start with teaching.
A professor friend of mine once asked her class what they thought
a professor’s biggest fear was while teaching a class. They all agreed
it was not knowing the answer to a question a student might ask.
When she told this story to a group of professors, they all laughed
out loud.
Why am I telling this story? Because a student’s view of teaching
varies greatly from a teacher’s view. No teacher worries about not
knowing the right answer to something a student will ask. You can
always fake it (say—What do you think? or, Class, can you help here?) if
you think it is important, but answers don’t matter very much. Teachers
are not supposed to be encyclopedias. They are supposed to be
something else. The question is: What?
My students’ responses above give a hint. Teachers are supposed
to be people who help students find their interests in life, think about
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Preface
how to make decisions, understand how to approach a problem, or
otherwise live sensibly. Teachers are never shocked to be asked to provide
personal or professional advice to a student having a problem—
any problem. If one takes one’s job seriously, teaching means being
available to help. But this important advisory job is confused by lesson
plans, and class hours, and lectures, none of which matter very much.
Why do I say that these things don’t matter very much? This is the
essence of what this book is about—the move from content-based instruction
to cognitive-based learning, assisted by good teaching. This
means we will have to define this “new” kind of learning (it’s not really
new, of course, just new to schools) and the “new” kind of teaching
that is a natural consequence of using this new learning method.
Most teachers understand and appreciate that delivering the required
material is not their real job, at least it is not the reason they
signed on in the first place. The employers of teachers, on the other
hand—administrators, governments, department heads, and so on—
expect certain material to be covered. Exciting students is not on their
worry list. This is a big problem for teachers and for students, and one
that we will address here.
But my more serious concern is our conception of learning, not
teaching. Teaching follows one’s conception of learning so getting
learning right is of prime importance. When I said earlier that outsiders
to the learning profession wouldn’t get the real point, I was being
ironic. There is no learning profession. Why not?
In 1989, I moved from Yale to Northwestern to establish a new
institute, funded by Andersen Consulting, devoted to issues of changing
training and education by the use of new technologies. I needed a
name for the institute and came up with The Institute for the Learning
Sciences. I made up the term learning sciences. There was no such field
in academia. Most people thought I meant we were planning to work
on how people learned science. The only academic fields that “studied”
learning were psychology and education. Psychology, being an
experimental field, allows faculty to work only on experiments about
learning that provide data in a controlled environment. Education
faculty study how schools work and very rarely think about learning
outside of the school context or in a way different from the paradigm
already extant in schools. I wanted to create a learning profession. In
1989, there certainly didn’t seem to be one.
Preface
xv
Today this is less true. Cognitive science, a field I also had a big
part in creating, has become more important in the academic world.
Training, and e-learning, the first new field to come about as a result
of our work at my new institute (for better or for worse, I am not too
fond of most e-learning work) have become more important to think
about within the academic context, in part because online courses are
seen as potential revenue producers.
So, while there is still no learning profession per se, there is much
interest in what learning is about. This book is meant to address the
issue of what learning really is, in or out of school, and to answer the
question: How does learning really work? The questions that follow
from the answer to that question are:
• What kinds of learning situations occur naturally?
• How can we focus education (and training and
e-learning) on those types of situations in a new
paradigm?
• What would teaching look like in this new paradigm?
• If what we know about how learning works is antithetical
to how school works, then what can we do?
Answering these questions is one goal of this book.
Another goal of this book is to think seriously about what it means
to teach. Typically, we look at teaching in precisely the way that our
system forces us to look at it. There are subjects and there are experts,
and experts talk about their subjects to students who listen to what
they have to say. This idea is not only archaic—it is wrong. In the history
of humankind, teaching could never have looked this way.
Until recently, teaching always meant apprenticeship. We are set
up to be apprentices, to learn by doing with help from a mentor. We
have done this since the beginning of time. When learning became
academic in nature, when students were expected to become scholars,
all this changed—and it didn’t change for the better. Teaching started
to mean talking, and talking is a terrible way to teach. People aren’t
really that good at listening, after all. Small children don’t listen to
their parents. They may copy their parents. They can be corrected by
their parents. They may be impeded from doing something by their
parents. But listen? Not really. We listen in order to be entertained, not
in order to learn.
xvi
Preface
This lack of understanding about what learning really is like, and
what teaching must be like in order to be useful, has caused us to set
up school in a way that really does not work very well. When students
complain about school, when politicians say school isn’t working, we
understand that there is a problem. But we don’t understand what
the problem is. We think we can fix schools by making them more
friendly, or safer, or paying teachers better, or having students have
more say, or obsessing about test scores, but none of this is the case.
The problem with schools lies in our conception of the role of
school. We see school as a place to study academics, to become a
scholar, when in fact very few students actually want to become scholars
or study academics.
As a society we have gotten caught up in a conception of school
from the late 1800s that has failed to change in any significant way,
despite the fact that universal education has made the system unstable.
Universities dominate the discussion, and everyone listens to
what academics have to say because they don’t see the alternative or
know whom else to listen to. But, if we understand how learning actually
works, and how teaching actually should work, the alternative
becomes much clearer.
It is establishing that clarity that is my goal in this book.
CHAPTER 1
Cognitive Process-Based Education
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember
from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be
taught.
—Oscar Wilde
Learning begins with a goal. However, when we think about education
and school, we often forget this. Someone, somewhere, decides that a
student must learn about Napoleon, but fails to ask how such learning
might conform to a goal that the student consciously holds. We don’t
forget this when we try to teach a child to walk or talk, because we
know that the child does want to learn to do these things. When we
teach a child to hit a baseball, we usually determine beforehand that
the child wants to learn to do this. But, we forget this simple idea of
goal-directed learning as soon as we design curricula for schools. Who
cares if the child wants to learn long division? Make the child learn it.
It is very important. Full speed ahead!
Somewhere along the way, many students get lost. They may get
lost in high school, or in college, or in job training. But somewhere
they learn to shut off their natural learning instincts, the ones that
drive them to improve because they really want to accomplish something.
Instead they try hard to do what they were told to do—they
study, they pass tests, and eventually their love of learning is gone.
The feedback that they previously have gotten from accomplishing a
real goal, one that they truly had held, has been replaced by pleasing
the teacher, or getting a good grade, or progress in their goal of getting
into a “good college.”
Designers (and teachers) of courses must contend with this truth:
The students that you have may not want to learn what it is that you
want to teach.
What to do?
1
2 Teaching Minds
First, we must establish whether students can learn whatever it
is that you want to teach. I always wanted to teach my daughter to
throw a ball properly. She threw a football astonishingly well at the
age of 6. But, she never got it about how to throw a softball. I don’t
know why. She just couldn’t learn to do it right. She can’t do math
either. Believe me, I tried.
Second, we must determine whether what you want to teach can
be taught. Not everything can be taught. It is hard to learn to be a
nice guy if you are inclined to be nasty. You can learn to be nicer, or
at least to fake it, perhaps, but certain things are hard to learn after
a certain age. You can teach a 2-year-old to be nice—a 22-year-old is
another story.
Third, we must figure out what method of learning actually would
teach what we want to teach. This is an important question that is
made more important, in part, by the fact that the learning methods
available in schools tend to be of a certain type. The things that
schools desire to teach are of a type that conforms to the available
methodologies for teaching. Content that lies outside the range of the
currently available methodologies typically is not considered something
worth teaching.
Fourth, we must decide whether a selected learning methodology
actually will work, given the time constraints and abilities of the students,
and other constraints that actually exist. This is, of course, the
real problem in education. It is easy to say that students would learn
better if they had real experiences to draw upon. This isn’t that hard to
figure out. What is hard is implementing this idea within the time constraints
of the school day and the other demands of the school year.
Fifth, we must determine a way that will make what you want to
teach fit more closely with real-life goals that your students actually
may have. By real-life goals I mean things like walking and talking
(and later driving). Why is it that teachers, or more accurately school
systems and governments, want to teach things that are not in accord
with a student’s real interest? While we argue about how best to
teach algebra, no one ever asks what to do if a student doesn’t want to
learn algebra. The question is so weird; the possibility that you could
skip algebra because it doesn’t interest you is so remote that we don’t
even think about this in any way. What is the real cause of this problem?
Why can’t we just let students learn what interests them? Are the
people who run schools simply out of touch with how learning really
works or how actual students behave when faced with something they
Cognitive Process-Based Education 3
don’t want to learn, or is something else more complex going on?
I will summarize these five issues as follows:
ABILITY
POSSIBILITY
METHODOLOGY
CONSTRAINTS
GOAL ALIGNMENT
School is subject-based and, further, those subjects are predefined and
agreed upon by those in charge. Without giving a history of how this
state of affairs came to be, 1 or why it is an issue, it is first necessary to
note that it is the case. I say this because when we were students in
school, we accepted the fact that school was the way it was, and we
assumed that it was the way it was supposed to be. We may not think
each subject we learn is valuable or interesting, and perhaps we long
to learn different subjects, but never do we hear people suggest that
there shouldn’t be subjects in school at all. This is a very difficult idea
to swallow. There have always been subjects. What else would there
be? What would it mean to not have subjects?
Answering this question is the aim of this book. We need to understand
what goes on in schools and what might be preferable. The issue
really is not schooling at all. The real issue is how learning actually
takes place in the human mind.
Ask a student how he is doing in school and he will tell you the
subjects he likes. I like English but I am bad at math, he might say. This
is such a normal sentiment among students that we never think about
how weird a sentiment it really is. We don’t ask: How are you doing at
life? We could ask that of a teenager and she might say: I am good at
dating but bad at driving.
But, actually, you would never hear teenagers say something like
that. This is weird because, in general, dating and driving are much
more important subjects in a teenager’s world than English and math.
But they don’t talk about whether they are good at it or bad at it in
the same way.
They continue to practice and get better at those things because
they care about them. Saying, I am bad at math, means, in essence,
. . . and I don’t care and have stopped trying because I don’t see the point.
Saying, I am good at English, typically means, I am getting a good grade
in English. This state of affairs defines the main problem in education:
4 Teaching Minds
There are subjects that are school subjects and there are subjects
that are life subjects and teenagers can tell the difference. They
work harder at the life subjects.
And, what is the difference between these two kinds of subjects? Goals.
It is as simple as that.
Instead of simply saying what is wrong with schools and what
teenagers are really like in school, I want to take a different tack.
Some teenagers wake up in the morning wanting to learn history
or algebra but they are a very small minority of the school population.
There is no minority, however, when it comes to dating or driving for
teenagers. They all want to do these things. So the question I want to
ask is:
Are there other things that all teenagers want to do and are those
things connected in some way with learning?
Or, to put this another way, if school had been designed around
something other than subjects, what would it have been designed
around? Driving and dating, which we know are winners in a teenager’s
world, could be seen as subjects, or they could be seen as instances
of something else, and that something else might be something
important to learn.
Students everywhere might want to learn whatever that is and they
would work hard to learn it. If we can turn the question around in that
way, maybe we can design better learning situations for everybody.
So, the question is:
What are driving and dating instances of, with respect to learning?
Or, to address this from the cognitive science point of view:
What is it that students are doing when they learn to drive
and date that they might be getting better at while doing those
things?
Can we view whatever it is they are getting better at as an example
of the kinds of things we should want to teach and that students
should want to learn? Answering these questions will allow us to
Cognitive Process-Based Education 5
look at education in a new way. We need to think about how people
actually learn, regardless of the subject, in order to address them.
Let’s think about dating, then. I was never any good at it as a kid.
I know how the non-cool guys feel. But, later on, much later on, I got
very good at it. So, I must have learned something. What?
What was I bad at as a kid? Meeting girls, for one thing. Other kids
could do it easily. I always needed to be fixed up.
Talking to girls, for another. I hardly knew any girls. I went to an
all-boys high school. I was 16 when I went to college and the other
freshmen were 18, so that didn’t help either. In other words, I had no
confidence.
But mostly, I had no idea what to say to a girl. What did they talk
about?
And, one more thing. I really didn’t get the point. I didn’t know
why one wanted to go out with girls anyway. I mean I eventually got
the idea, at least I think I did.
Why am I saying it this way? I am trying to get an insight into the
learning process and I am a fine example. I didn’t know how to do it
and then I did. I didn’t get the point and then I did, sort of. So I must
have learned something between the ages of 16 and 60. What?
Here are some things I learned:
• Human relationships are important, but they aren’t easy
to establish or maintain. They require work.