How to Teach the Twelve Cognitive Processes 127

How to Teach the Twelve Cognitive Processes 127 Thus, when we teach planning, there is either a lot to undo, or we must start from the beginning. We can try to explain why each and every old plan is not really helpful in a new situation, or we can teach a series of plans that are relevant. In other words, if you are trying to teach people to write a business plan, you need to start with a lemon- ade stand and work up. If you are trying to teach financial planning, you need to start with a child’s allowance and work up. If you want to teach battle planning, try a tug of war first. This is what should have occurred in childhood. If it didn’t, it needs to be restarted that way for adults. We need to use, again and again, plans in different situations that are simple and begin to analyze why they fail. (And these plans must fail, at least in simulation, or no real learning will occur.) Planning is very difficult. It must start simple and be practiced simply for a while or it never becomes second nature. Plans must fail, at least in simulation, because analysis of what went wrong is a critical part of planning. If you aren’t analyzing what went wrong, you aren’t learning to plan. Your case base will not end up having been indexed well enough to enable you to pick and choose appropriate plans in the future. HOW TO TEACH CAUSATION At the root of diagnosis and planning is causation. Detecting cause is an essential part of diagnosis, and anticipating cause is an impor- tant aspect of planning. Causation must be understood in order to do many things in this world. One needs to know what causes what. Sci- ence courses in school attempt to teach causation by having students memorize F = ma, or having them imitate chemistry experiments, or having them dissect a frog. While there is nothing wrong with any of that in principle, it really doesn’t teach causation in a way that is particularly useful to a functioning adult. While diagnosis and planning may not be recognized as critical skills by schools, causation is, although not under that word. Cau- sation is understood as being what science is all about, and when schools endeavor to teach science, they are in fact trying to teach causation. This is true for social science as well. History is about cau- sation, as is psychology. The fact that these subjects are not talk- ed about in this way indicates something important about them. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023873