Narrative: telling stories about the topic and the people involved with it (e.g., the story of Charles Darwin for evolution or of Anne Frank for the … - Howard Gardner

He knows everything but he lacks inexperience.

Levers of Change and Tipping Points Classically, change takes place through compulsion, manipulation, persuasion, or through some combination thereof. In this book I have directed attention to deliberate and open attempts at mind change. I have also stressed the classic forms of persuasion: talk, teaching, therapy, and the creation and dissemination of new ideas and products. We must recognize, however, that in the future, these low-tech agents may well be supplanted by new forms of intervention: some will be biological, involving transformation of genes or brain tissue; some will be computational, entailing the use of new software and new hardware; and some will represent increasingly intricate amalgams of the biological and the computational realms. Perhaps the greatest challenge is to determine when the desired content has in fact been conveyed and whether it has actually been consolidated. Alas, there are no formulas for this step: each case of mind changing is distinctive. It is helpful to bear in mind that most mind change is gradual, occurring over significant periods of time; that awareness of the mind change is often fleeting, and the mind change may occur prior to consciousness thereof; that individuals have a pronounced tendency to slip back to earlier ways of thinking; but that when a mind change has become truly consolidated, it is likely to become as entrenched as its predecessor. Every example of mind changing has its unique facets. But in general, such a shift of mind is likely to coalesce when we employ the seven levers of mind change: specifically, when reason (often buttressed with research ), reinforcement through multiple forms of representation, real world events, resonance, and resources all push in one direction — and resistances can be identified and successfully countered. Conversely, mind changing is unlikely to occur — or to consolidate — when resistances are strong and most of the other points of leverage are not in place.

"Children not only think better as they mature; they also become capable of thinking about their own mental processes. Memory capacity may not expand in any real sense, but children (and adults) learn how to boost their recall by various strategies, ranging from the ways in which they group or store things to the kinds of tally systems they utilize on paper or in their heads. Children also learn to think about their own problem-solving activities: How can I best handle a new challenge? Which system or which tool would be useful? Who can I turn to for help? What is relevant and what is irrelevant to a problem I am trying to solve or a principle I am seeking to discover or master? Often these lessons are learned by watching others reflect on their memories or their thinking processes, by mastering practices common in the culture, or by following oft-repeated adages; even left pretty much to their own devices, however, in seems reasonable to assume that nearly all youngsters will improve somewhat in the "metacognitive" areas between the age of seven and adulthood (which itself begins at markedly different ages across cultures)."