54 Teaching Minds and at school. Parties to those agreements have the right to complain if obligations are not met. Learning to make a contract, legal or not, is a big part of being a rational actor. To make a contract one must negotiate it. Negotiation often is seen as something only politicians and high-powered business leaders do. But, actually, we negotiate with waitresses for good service and we negotiate with our children when we give them an allowance. Learning how to negotiate can be done only by trying and learning from failures. The techniques tend to be context-independent, but there is, of course, special knowledge about real estate and politics (for example, the relevant laws) that makes one a better negotiator in each situation. Again, practice with coaching is the ideal. 4. Describing: Creating and using conscious descriptions of situations to identify faults to be fixed When problems exist in any situation, we need to be able to de- scribe and analyze them. We need to be able to describe them in order to get help from people who may know more about the situation than we do. We need to learn to focus on the critical issues. In order to do this, we need also to be able to analyze these situations to see what was supposed to happen and why it isn’t happening. Consultants who try to fix failing businesses do this sort of thing all the time, as do doctors when consulting on difficult cases. Creating a careful description of a situation is a skill that can be learned only through practice. This sometimes is described as learning an elevator speech to tell someone succinctly what you are doing. This ability is a very important part of understanding and helping others understand. Now let’s see what we have. First let’s list again the types of cognitive processes that underlie learning: Conceptual processes 1. Prediction 2. Judgment 3. Experimentation 4, Evaluation HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023800