Designs for Learning §

Metadata §

• Author: stearnslab.yale.edu
• Full Title: Designs for Learning
• Category:#articles
• Date read: 2022-10-31
• URL: https://stearnslab.yale.edu/designs-learning

Key takeaways §

• In Designs for Learning, he suggests looking at important projects in your field and going for them. He also had an interesting approach when he started several different projects and continued with one that worked.
• If you think about students as future colleagues, your teaching will emphasize active engagement

people learn best when they take ownership of and responsibility for their own education, when they become active agents rather than passive recipients

The idea that guided those designs is that the goal of a teacher is to help students become colleagues as fast as possible. A colleague is an equal, an interested partner who takes responsibility for her own education, an independent agent.

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Highlights §

• Teaching matters deeply both to the students who experience it and to the scholars who do it, for it endows the academic life with a type of meaning not available in research. The balance between teaching and research is an essential element of a satisfying academic career that can be greatly aided by situating that career within the broader context of a balanced life.
• people learn best when they take ownership of and responsibility for their own education, when they become active agents rather than passive recipients.
• He was advising me to use about a quarter to a third of my time in the PhD program to identify and take ownership of the issues that would shape my research,
• He was also advising me not to let the direction of my research and my career be shaped by professors who gave me projects to work on, but to shape it myself. This stance resonated with what I had learned in the three years that I had worked in a corporation: take charge of your own life, take responsibility for your own ideas, and act upon them.

New highlights added November 1, 2022 at 9:44 AM §

• Many think they must work long hours to be competitive; that is not necessarily true. One performs better when one embeds work in a balanced life: professio sano in vitam sanam. Five to eight hours per day of clear thinking and concentrated work five days per week produces more impressive results than the coffee, chit-chat, and various displacement activities that often fill the time of many of those who think they are working seventy or eighty hours a week.
• The idea that guided those designs is that the goal of a teacher is to help students become colleagues as fast as possible. A colleague is an equal, an interested partner who takes responsibility for her own education, an independent agent.
• A typical session of EOV would go like this. I would walk into class, ask them what was important and what they had not understood in the reading, appoint a student to write the answers on the board, then step out for five minutes. When I returned, I would look at the two lists and add anything I thought they had missed. I would then pick a topic, asked who had mentioned it, got them to explain why they thought it was important or what it was that they did not understand, then picked another student at random and asked that person whether they agreed with the explanation of the topic’s importance or could explain what was not understood. We would continue until the lists were exhausted or until time ran out. In the course of a session every student could expect to be called on to explain something.
• What’s wrong with lectures? Well, a curriculum in which some stimulating lectures are artfully sprinkled is not a bad thing. But the lecture format is a structure with an implicit message: the lecturer transmits information that the student passively absorbs. The structure is hierarchical, and by promoting passivity it blocks the development of students as colleagues.