116 Teaching Minds

116 Teaching Minds Never been to college but have been to high school? These are situa- tions that happen to people. They usually assume that one is like the other. While this assumption may not work out all that well, it is the best a scriptless person can do in the situation. A teacher, therefore, can take advantage of this human desire to see unknown A as being like known B. People do this all the time. They assume the girl they just met will behave like the last one they went out with. They assume that their teacher will behave the way their last teacher did. They assume that their new car works the way the last one did. They do this with situations as well. What it means is that people predict on the basis of experience and it is the job of the teacher to help students understand which of their prior experiences is most relevant when they are confused. Doing this is not so easy. But it is possible and it is a proper area for a teacher or a course to focus on. Here is the process. Students need to be asked what to do in a situ- ation that is new to them. Their natural response would be to rely on prior experience. The teacher’s job is to make that reliance explicit. To ask students to say which experience they will rely on for help in the new situation and ask why they think that that particular choice will be helpful. To ask them to analyze the differences between the current issue and the prior script and to predict where the prior script might not work. To ask them to think of alternative scripts that might help. What I have described here is the basic process of indexing cases and matching cases, which is critical to thinking—especially original thinking. No case is really exactly the same as one that came before. We are used to partial matches when we use an old case to help with a new one. What we are not used to is a discussion of why one match was correct and why another was less helpful. Making case matching a conscious process helps us understand something that we normally do without much conscious thought. People need to learn to rely on partial matches and they need to know how to determine which par- tial match is most likely. I have referred to this process as case-based reasoning in many prior publications.* But I have not spoken about how to teach case-based reasoning. This is where post hoc discussion is very important. An example of such a discussion can be found in a book written by Harvard government professors® on the failure of President Ford to choose the right cases to reason from in a crisis. Usu- ally this kind of analysis is done as kind of an afterthought. However, teaching people to do it actually is critical to teaching people to pre- dict properly. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023862