From Jo Nelson A quote from David Perkins in his 1992 book “Smart Schools” (as quoted in Art of Focused Conversation for Schools) — “There is an important connection between a pedagogy of understanding and this notion of mental images ……What do people have in their heads when they understand something? Contemporary cognitive science has a favourite answer: mental images (many psychologists would say “mental models” to mean the same thing). Roughly defined, a mental image is a holistic, highly integrated kind of knowledge. It is any unified, overarching mental representation that helps us work with a topic or subject….. Mental images…concern very basic things such as the layout of your home or the shape of a story. But mental images can also concern very abstract and sophisticated matters.”