New Curricula for a New Way of Teaching 107 new predictions, and be prepared for these predictions to fail. This is what thinking looks like no matter which cognitive process is being thought about and practiced. DIAGNOSIS Now let’s talk about diagnosis. Again I will start with a story. This is one I have been telling for a long time because it informs us about how the mind works. I was discussing with my colleague (Bob Abelson) how it could be that my wife could not seem to make steak rare (as I like it—she is no longer my wife, but not because of this). Bob responded that he couldn't get his hair cut as short as he wanted in England 20 years earlier. This seems on the surface to be a rather odd response, but when we look deeper we can see that I was saying something like, She could do this right if she wanted to, and he was thinking, Maybe she thinks the request is too extreme, as happened to me with a barber in Eng- land many years ago. Matching odd situations to other odd situations and seeing the similarity is what creative thinking is all about. Bob was trying to di- agnose a problem that had been on his mind for a long time, and my new story provided him with new evidence to think again about what the proper diagnosis might be. This is what thinking looks like. It is also what reminding looks like. People get reminded precisely because they are trying to match a new situation to one they already know about and thereby determine what to do next. To put this another way, diagnosis depends on prior diagnosis. We constantly are trying to improve our diagnostic capability because we always strive to make better decisions no matter what arena these decisions are in. The fact that the improvement of diagnostic capability is not explicitly part of each and every curriculum in school is scandalous. When we design new curricula, we need to ground them in some realistic framework that will enable students to practice things that they might end up doing in the real