How We Think: A Theory of Goal-Oriented Decision Making and Its Educational Applications

Teachers try to help their students learn. But why do they make the particular teaching choices they do? What resources do they draw upon? What accounts for the success or failure of their efforts? In How We Think, esteemed scholar and mathematician Alan H. Schoenfeld proposes a groundbreaking theory and model for how we think and act in the classroom and beyond. Based on thirty years of research on problem solving and teaching, How We Think provides compelling evidence for a concrete approach that describes how teachers, and individuals more generally, navigate their way through in-the-moment decision making in well practiced domains. Applying his theoretical model to detailed representations and analyses of teachers at work as well of professionals outside education, Schoenfeld argues that understanding and recognizing the goal-oriented patterns of our day-to-day decisions can help identify what makes effective or ineffective behavior in the classroom and beyond.

Alan H. Schoenfeld is the Elizabeth and Edward Conner Professor of Education and Affiliated Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.