New Kinds of Smart

Gesturing reflects the close connection between thinking and making – even when the only physical thing you have to make are shapes in the air! (Doodling also helps people attend, think and remember, for the same reason.11)

Education organized around a reasonable number of broad talents and interests, augmented and filled out by serious inquiry into common human problems, stands the best chance of achieving a meaningful equality. Such education, in which students are active co-creators of curriculum, is a truly liberal education for both personal and public life in a

cultivate the pattern-making

Roughly, the more mountainous the brain, the more your trains of thought are likely to be clear-cut, conscious and unambiguous; to follow the most well-worn and familiar grooves; and to travel fast. You respond to situations in a focused, confident and conventional manner. You don’t bother with the fine print and ignore any minor incongruities. But

practical terms it often takes the form of rules of thumb, thinking routines, instructions-to-self, good intentions, planning processes, heuristics, and so on. To make it more likely that high road transfer will occur we need to do the following: practise in as many different contexts as possible (just as with low road transfer but even more import

First, the ideas that come immediately, ‘off the top of your head’, tend not to be the ones that are the most productive.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Imagining means being skilled at using the ‘inner theatre’ as a test-bed for learning. It means being good at ‘mental rehearsal’, able to use visualization as the powerful adjunct to physical practice it has been shown to be.

Through the research undertaken by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger,10 we now have a much better understanding of not just the social elements of learning but also the way in which learning is situated in a particular context. How we learn on a sports field, in a science lab or in a drama studio is heavily influenced by the social situation and by the

Piaget, J. (2001) The Psychology of Intelligence. London: Routledge.