ABSTRACT
The revelations had mind-boggling implications for teaching, but what cognitive science is uncovering conflicts with long-standing assumptions and with the basic approaches to teaching. Teaching engenders an array of emotions that are often suppressed and ignored. It rests on unchallenged assumptions that make it hard to improve and even harder to change given what cognitive science now documents about learning. Two approaches underlie how learners usually think, talk, write, and practice teaching. There is teaching as performance that connects maturing generations to the best solutions and accomplishments of the past, and there is teaching as a didactic transmission of culture to new generations. A major source of the ideas about the role of design in teaching comes from the artificial intelligence community's attempt to create intelligent machines that could function and survive in the world. The downside of the coaching mode of teaching is the large amount of time and effort involved in both designing and conducting such practice.
