This article explores the field of educational psychology as seen through the eyes of the early twentieth-century American scholar and pedagogue, Boyd H. Bode. A thorough summary is given of his book Conflicting theories of learning (1929) and its revised version How we learn (1940). The central thesis of his work is that having a well-articulated "theory of mind" is essential not only for researchers in the field of educational psychology, but especially for classroom teachers who are the actual practitioners of education.