46 Teaching Minds What I mean by this, is that there is stuff we can do mentally, and that learning just means doing that stuff and getting better at it. Learning is not any one process, but many processes, depending on what you are learning. What are the cognitive processes that make up learning? If we wish to teach people, it is important to ask what cognitive capabilities we want them to have when we are done, not what we want them to know. In other words, we want to understand what we have to do in order to make them better able to think. In this chapter, we will discuss the kinds of cognitive processes that people can (and must) learn to do well. Later we will discuss how to best approach learning and teaching these processes. There are 12 types of processes outlined here. There may be more types than these, but with these we pretty much can cover the ground of what human learning looks like. I have divided them into three groups: conceptual processes, analytic processes, and social processes. No- tice first that all the types are types of processes. Thinking is a process. It is something we do. We need to see what that doing is like. All these processes require practice in order to master them. You cannot learn to master a process without practicing it again and again. Feedback and coaching help one learn. CONCEPTUAL PROCESSES 1. Prediction: Making a prediction about the outcome of actions This is experiential learning about everyday behavior in its most common form—it includes learning about how to travel or eat or get a date, for example. In its complex form it is how one learns to be a bat- tlefield commander or a horse race handicapper. One learns through experience by trial and error. The cognitive issue is building up a large case base and index that case base according to expectation failures, as I described in Dynamic Memory. We learn when predictions fail. When they succeed, we fail to care about them because most of the predic- tions we make a