Mindware and the Metacurriculum: D. N. Perkins

CREATING THE FUTURE
Perspectives on Educational Change
Compiled and Edited by Dee Dickinson

MINDWARE AND THE METACURRICULUM
D. N. Perkins, Ph.D.

What Is Intelligence "Made Of?"

One of the most fundamental questions that can be asked about intelligence is: "What is intelligence made of?" That is, what in the human mind and brain leads us to think and act more intelligently? Is intelligence simply a more efficient nervous system? Is it a matter of knowing a lot? Is it being a reflective thinker?

All these factors and more certainly appear to contribute to day-to-day intelligent behavior. Yet many people are dogged "nativists." That is, they believe that "real" human intelligence is entirely innate. You are born with certain neural equipment, that neural equipment has a certain mental horsepower measured by IQ tests, and this is the horsepower you have to work with for the whole of your life. Many people believe there is no such thing as becoming more intelligent in any fundamental sense. To be sure, anyone can learn a great deal of practical value in accordance with his or her abilities. But getting smarter in a basic sense? No.
A fundamental challenge to this nativist position has developed in recent years among educators and psychologists. Many are coming to the conclusion that intelligence is, to a substantial degree, learnable. In addition to accumulating knowledge and skills, people can in a fully real and powerful sense become more intelligent.

Neural, Experiential, and Reflective Intelligence

Not everyone agrees on this point. Indeed, a battle has raged among psychologists for several decades about the true nature of intelligence. Some psychologists consider intelligence a matter of the efficiency of the nervous system, genetically determined, not very subject to environmental influence, and adequately measured by IQ tests. They advocate what might be called a neural view of intelligence. Other psychologists have argued that highly intelligent behavior always occurs in a specialty. It involves expertise in a particular area of endeavor, such as violin playing, carpentry, or physics. They advocate what might be called an experiential view of intelligence. Experience and its cumulative lessons count for more than anything else. Still other psychologists emphasize how good thinking depends on good mental management-knowing what questions to ask yourself, using problem-solving strategies, monitoring and striving to direct and improve your own thinking. They advocate what might be called a reflective view of intelligence.
Considered in perspective, the debate appears somewhat misplaced. Proponents of each camp are trying to lay claim to the "one true intelligence," when there is no particular reason to believe that intelligent behavior has a single cause. Indeed, each camp has compelling arguments for the influence of the factors it highlights. It is time to accept this reality and acknowledge that intelligence is not monolithic. Intelligence has multiple principal causes.
I suggest a framework that recognizes three basic dimensions to intelligence: the neural dimension, the experiential dimension, and the reflective dimension. Rather than rivals, these three should be considered contrasting causal factors that all contribute substantially to intelligent behavior. Such a formulation dissolves a fruitless debate and sets the stage for asking what education can do to cultivate these three dimensions of intelligence.
Of them all, reflective intelligence offers the best target of opportunity for education because reflective intelligence is the most learnable of the three. Research evidence suggests that the neural component of intelligence does not change very much with instruction or practice, although there are nutritional and maturational effects. Experiential intelligence in a particular area takes years to build. But better practices of mental management, strategy use, and metacognition can be cultivated in much shorter periods-not overnight, but in months rather than years, years rather than decades.

Mindware

If reflective intelligence is the target of opportunity, then we should examine its nature more deeply. What is it "made of?" Is it a bag of tricks, a bundle of attitudes, a repertoire of habits?
All those things and more. One encompassing way to describe reflective intelligence is to say that it is made of "mindware." Just as kitchenware consists in tools for working in the kitchen, and software consists in tools for working with your computer, mindware consists in tools for the mind. A piece of mindware is anything a person can learn -- a strategy, an attitude, a habit -- that extends the person's general powers to think critically and creatively.
Mindware does three jobs, all of which concern the organization of thought. It works to pattern, repattern, and depattern thinking. Concerning patterning, a student may not have an organized approach to, for example, writing an essay. There are a number of strategies that help to pattern the writing process, not in rigid ways but in flexible and fruitful ways. As to repatterning, a person may suffer from bad thinking or learning practices. For example, many students adopt the strategy of reading something over and over as a way of understanding and remembering it. Research shows that this is not in fact a very effective strategy. Students need to repattern their reading, adopting more powerful strategies.
As to depatterning, a person may suffer from overly rigid or narrow ways of approaching problems and managing situations. For instance, people display a strong tendency to look at situations in one-sided ways. Also, people generally fail to question their tacit assumptions. Brainstorming, assumption identification, and other tactics of exploratory thinking can help people to depattern their thinking, opening it up to more possibilities and evading the ruts of habit and prejudice.

Practice Does Not Make Perfect

While the notion of mindware to pattern, repattern, and depattern thinking may sound like inevitable common sense, it actually strikes a sharp contrast with a common misconception about developing thinking: the "practice makes perfect" notion. Many efforts to cultivate thinking do little more than encourage youngsters to engage in a lot of hit-or-miss attempts at thinking, through collaborative learning activities, class discussions, project work, and so on.
Such initiatives are fine as far as they go. Certainly we should applaud any effort to make classrooms more thoughtful settings. Surely this is a necessary condition for any progress in this promising area of learnable intelligence. But necessary conditions are not always sufficient conditions. In this case, there is reason to believe that practice alone is not enough. Indeed, mere practice can lead youngsters to entrench their old patterns of thinking rather than repatterning and depatterning to develop more effective thinking.
This is where reflective intelligence truly lives up to its name. Mere practice is not a very reflective process. In contrast, activities in which people think about their thinking, learn good ways of patterning, repatterning, and depatterning, and adapt this "mindware" to their own needs or even invent their own mindware, are much more likely to develop thinking. Better thinking typically means not just smoother, faster thinking, which practice alone would yield, but fundamentally reorganized thinking, which requires pointblank attention to mindware.

Toward the Metacurriculum

The examples of mindware that I have given so far are rather general. What about the subject matters? Many psychologists have argued in recent years that general skills of thinking are no substitute for knowledge in particular subject matters.
I agree with this strongly. Moreover, each subject matter brings with it not only important "content" to master but its own specialized mindware. For example, any discipline has problem-solving strategies of special importance to it-in physics, such methods as energy balance equations; in literature, attention to fundamental dimensions of stories such as plot, character, and setting; in writing, such strategies as free writing; and so on.
Likewise, any discipline has its distinctive ways of explaining and justifying ideas, ways which differ somewhat from subject matter to subject matter. Mathematics highlights formal deductive proof; the sciences emphasize empirical evidence from experiments; history depends on evidence from primary sources; and so on. In summary, every discipline has its distinctive "mindware," consisting of those problem-solving strategies, ways of validating ideas, and other practices that help to pattern, repattern, or depattern thinking in fruitful ways.
Unfortunately, what schools principally teach is a curriculum of content -- the facts and procedures of a subject matter. Overwhelmingly, textbooks purvey the facts of history, the algorithms of arithmetic, the formulas of science. There is little explicit attention either to general purpose mindware or to the distinctive mindware for each of the subject matters. What is missing, one might say, is the metacurriculum -- the "higher order" curriculum that deals with good patterns of thinking in general and in the subject matters.
How, then, to develop such mindware in students? One solution is to offer special courses focused on the art of thinking. In my view, well-designed interventions of this sort are worthwhile. But they are not likely to prove feasible on a wide scale in the already crowded school curriculum. And they are not enough. Abundant research shows that the subject matters desperately need a direct injection of thoughtfulness, a "mindware booster shot." I am an advocate of what is often called infusion -- integrating the teaching of new concepts in a deep and far-reaching way with subject matter instruction.
The challenge to education therefore becomes one of envisioning, articulating, and bringing alive the metacurriculum to go with the curriculum. Appropriate mindware for mathematics should be as much of a presence in the mathematics classroom as are number facts or the quadratic equation. Thoughtfulness about how we know and test historical claims should be as much of a presence in the history classroom as the story of the U.S. Civil War. The marriage of curriculum and metacurriculum can provide students with the mindware to make the subject matters more understandable, thought-provoking, and connected with their lives.

About: David Perkins

Dr. David. Perkins, the author of Outsmarting IQ, is concerned with what he calls "the new science of learnable intelligence." He calls learnable intelligence "mindware" because he believes that better thinking depends on mental tools for organizing our thoughts. According to Dr. Perkins, the mind is not a muscle that you can make stronger by mere exercise. Practicing old patterns just entrenches them with little improvement.
An entertaining and thought-provoking presenter at our conferences, Dr. Perkins has offered educators new perspectives on the roots of intelligence. Having received his Ph.D. in mathematics and artificial intelligence from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he became a founding member of Project Zero at Harvard, and since 1971 has served as codirector of the project.
He participated in the design and testing of a course to teach thinking skills at the seventh grade level in Venezuela for their Intelligence Project. Published in English under the title Odyssey, it proved to be highly effective and is now being used in a number of middle schools in the United States.
As an associate of the Educational Technology Center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, he undertook research leading to the development of supplementary materials that enhance students' learning of computer programming. He is currently involved in the design of interventions that integrate the teaching of thinking with subject-matter learning. One such project, called Thinking Connections, provides elementary school teachers with a systematic approach to integrating key thinking skills across several disciplines.
Dr. Perkins has been a speaker and consultant to educational groups throughout the world. He is a standing member of the organizing committee for the International Conferences on Thinking. He is also the author of Smart Schools: Better Thinking and Learning for Every Child, of The Intelligent Eye, which explores the connections between art and thinking, and of several other books.