Discussion on educational methodology for insurance adjusting and fast‑food restaurant accounting training

70 Teaching Minds types of cases there are. Is it hard to gather evidence properly? Prob- ably. It usually is. Is it hard to know all the possible results? It might not be. It might be hard to decide on a result, however, since the result is usually to pay some amount of money, so how much money would be the key question. All this takes practice, so what we really need to know is where the main areas of practice should be. So now we have a real question to ask: Q1: How can we practice gathering evidence, learning about prototypical cases, and knowing how to determine the correct final result in insurance adjusting? Notice that this is a very different question from asking what an insurance adjuster knows and then asking how to tell students what they should know. Making the transformation from the list of knowledge given above by the online course offerers into Q]1 is the real issue in transforming subject-based education into cognitive process- based education. Let’s discuss a different type of example. My company was invited into a technical college in Peru to discuss how to teach accounting. Why would you want to teach accounting? I asked. Because the students need to know it, I was told. Why? I said. Because they need it in their work. So I changed the subject. I asked, What work do most people do when they graduate from your school? It turns out most of their graduates ran fast-food restaurants. Then why do they need to learn accounting? They need it in order to run a res- taurant. Iam sure there is some accounting done as part of running a restaurant, but surely not every part of accounting is needed. And, I asked, Do you actually teach how to run a restaurant? Of course they didn’t. Why not? Because accounting is an aca- demic subject and managing fast-food employees and ordering meat are not. They hire an accounting professor and he knows accounting and knows nothing about running a restaurant. Even a practical tech- nical school gets caught up in subject-based education in part because it hires graduates from that system who know only what they them- selves were taught. What are the cognitive processes involved in running a fast-food restaurant? Let’s see which are relevant. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023816