Larry Cuban is taking his sweat time blogging the story of how he reached enlightenment. Don't bother with the first two parts in the series, they are just set up. The third part the link goes to has the punch line: Teaching "thinking skills" devoid of content and context is worthless.
Well Duh!
If, in his youth, Mr. Cuban was wise enough to walk his posterior over to his school's music department, the band/orchestra director would have been happy to explain the facts of life to him. (And considerably shorten his path to enlightenment.) Transferring a skill to a brand new situation is the last step on the road to knowing.
Every student musician in a high school band or orchestra knows the meaning of all the symbols on each piece of music in his folder. Yet it takes hours upon hours of rehearsal to make each piece ready for performance. Why? In each piece all the symbols are in a unique context, and young musicians do not understand the symbols well enough to grasp how they work in the new environment. They need to be assisted in learning the new environment and shown how the symbols work. Thus, lots of rehearsal.
Take eighth notes. In the Standard of Excellence method book (read: textbook), eighth notes are introduced on Page 13. Now a beginning band practice and practice to make Page 13 sound like a heavenly choir. Then when they turn the page, they will revert to back to sounding like fifth graders who picked up their instruments yesterday. Why? Because all the eighth notes on Page 14 are different than the ones on Page 13. The idea of eighth notes is so new that the students can only play them in the EXACT, SPECIFIC piece which they have been taught. In order to play eighth notes anywhere (ie. generalize), students need to be guided through dozens and dozens of different pieces containing eighth notes. Which is why in Standard of Excellence, eighth notes appear on each and every subsequent page.
Good teaching goes from the specific to the general. It's bad teaching that tries to go the other way.
Hey, it ain't rocket science, Batman!
After reading the Larry Cuban piece I think he was describing a larger transference than what you are describing in your piece. I am a licensed to teach both social studies and mathematics. This past year I had a student excel in my geography class, but struggled to pass pre-calculus. What he wasn't able to do was see how the critical thinking and reasoning skills he was honing in geography could be applied to math class. What you are describing is exactly what Cuban took five years to realize, but he was trying to go even more general. It would be like student telling you about the skills they developed as a musician helped them learn Spanish more quickly.
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