designer of a course on how to manage a restaurant must focus on

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 ev- ery 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. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023818