Tag Archives: higher education

Planning for Fall: Pandemic Workshops and Consulting

New workshops from José Antonio Bowen offered virtually. Contact me for more info. Read Is Higher Ed Asking the Wrong Questions? in InsideHigherEd. OR watch my new TED talk on the New 3Rs.

Teaching 1/2 Naked: Preparing for Uncertainty

How can you prepare to create the most significant learning experiences possible for students this fall, regardless of the mode? Most faculty have neither the time nor expertise to create either an online course that utilizes the best new technology or the ability to pivot quickly to online in the case of a campus outbreak. Here is a way to plan for whatever comes and continue to support your students while also taking care of yourself. There are a few technical tricks, but mostly it is about setting up flexible communication channels, designing learning that motivates students, focusing on the most powerful experiences, and prioritizing your own efforts. Here are ways to lower stress and reframe rather than replace. Nimble design can prepare you for excellent teaching whether you are home (with no pants or 1/2 naked…) or in the classroom.

Pandemic Strategy: Planning for Uncertainty

The hope for stability is a powerful cognitive bias. With uncertainty comes fear. For leaders that brings the fear of missteps and a bias to reassure and delay. If we just had a little more information, we could make a better decision. Covid-19 is an ambiguous threat. We do not know for how long it will continue and we certainly do not know how it will change people’s behavior. This is not the time to stay the course and downplay. Hope is not a strategy and there is no best rational response. There is no knowable “new normal,” only more chaos, volatility, stress and disorder to come. We like plans, but what we need is nimbleness. Efficiency becomes a vulnerability during rapid change: the more efficient supply chains of milk and toilet paper, for example, were not easily adaptable. Humans have a bias to wait for more certainty, but when new information is almost certain to be contradictory and random, we are waiting in vain. We need optionality and asymmetric opportunities. Leaders need to accept that we will make mistakes, but still act with urgency, transparency and honesty that you do not know the future and then iterate.

Virtual Leadership

A crisis reduces motivation, creativity and cognitive bandwidth—for everyone. An ambiguous threat, like Covid-19, only intensifies the uncertainty that reduces performance. Loss of choice, only compounds this; so being forced to work from home is further demotivating. Virtual leadership requires new definitions of process, purpose and permission. Relationships, care and belonging matter more, but so does the opportunity to experiment. How can we create new ways for people to add value? Variety and extreme examples become more valuable during a time of uncertainty, so we need to create more potential for meaningful and creative work. Given the opening, anyone can become a hero in a time of crisis; now is a great time to support and encourage agency and forward thinking.

Crisis and Innovation

One of the first things to go in times of crisis is innovation. This happens both because we are out of bandwidth, but also because we falsely perceive that now is not the time. There is a tendency to focus on the tactical (making sure people can do their jobs from home), but disruption is the time when market share moves the MOST. There is much more opportunity for strategy when a situation is fluid, especially if the basic business model seems to be failing.

Innovative ideas start as subtle, awkward ideas, but they benefit from disorder. In a chaotic situation, it is impossible to predict which new idea or which plan may be most useful in advance. But more options, more experiments and the ability to respond quickly are essential to thrive. We will explore a process for greater tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty.

From Professor to Cognitive Coach

Leave a reply

The next of my commentaries on education on WYPR

Learning is a bit like fitness. The person who does the work gets the benefit.

So the best teacher is not necessarily the one who knows the most, in the same way that the best fitness coach is not the one who can DO the most push-ups. Watching someone else do push-ups, even intellectual push-ups, is not nearly as useful as doing push-ups yourself.

While it is tempting to think that the best gym is the one with all the latest technology and the coach with the largest muscles, like knowledge, exercise equipment is only beneficial if you use it. You need to be motivated to get on and pedal faster.

So a good fitness coach or teacher starts by asking: why are you here? Understanding what motivates you and what you already know (or fear) about a subject is essential. (If I don’t know you are afraid of water, my swim lessons will be much less effective.)

A good fitness coach adds value because she understands YOU and can get YOU to do more push-ups. It is a design problem. Classes work the same way. If I can design structures and assignments that you find more motivating and engaging and you do more work, you will learn more. The role of the teacher as “professor” (with a focus on “professing” and conveying content) needs to be reimagined as more of a cognitive coach (with a focus on the process that will both inspire the student to do the work).

[This shift from more content to more process and how we can design better learning environments and schools is the subject of the new book I am working on this year:A New 3Rs: Using Behavioral Science to Prepare Students for a New Learning Economy due from Johns Hopkins University Press in 2020.]

Expanding Comfort with Discomfort

Leave a reply

Here is the text of my latest public commentary on WYPR: https://www.wypr.org/post/bowen-expanding-comfort-discomfort

Some tolerance for ambiguity is essential for learning, change, and growth. When we encounter a new idea, technology or method, it feels strange at first. That is almost the definition of new: something foreign to what we already know.

Goucher College requires all students to study abroad. And when students ask where they should go to study abroad, the answer is simple. Go to the place that makes you as uncomfortable as you can stand. Learning to be comfortable with your discomfort is a key aspect of learning. All creative people and self-regulated learners have learned to expand their own comfort with discomfort.

If I reject all ideas that are foreign, I will miss opportunities to change. But if I accept all new ideas as better, I will simply substitute one set of assumptions for another. Learning is about creating a space, at least temporarily, for what might be true.

Learning is also about making distinctions. All the music we hate sounds the same. OR more accurately, the less we know about something, the more it seems to all be the same. As we learn, we distinguish, and things become more complex. Knowledge is also always changing: new discoveries will change what we thought we already knew.

Our tolerance for ambiguity is useful because it mirrors how knowledge is assessed and accumulated. The answer to most good questions, is “it depends.”

Discovering your Accent with Study Abroad

Leave a reply

My series of public commentaries on WYPR continues here

Here at Goucher, we require all students to study abroadbefore they graduate. We do this in part because employers want graduates who can navigate working with people from different cultures and backgrounds, but also because study abroad provides an almost unique opportunity for self-discovery, reflection, and growth.

One of the first things we notice when we leave home is that everyone else in the world speaks with an accent. Then we realize that we too have an accent. Upon further reflection, we get the big reveal—that everyone has an accent. There is no neutral way of speaking, and everyone speaks in a way conditioned by culture, geography, and experience.

This is equally true for how we all think—everyone also has a thought accent and study abroad brings us face to face with our assumptions and how they differ from those in our new surroundings. We can exchange one thought accent for another—just as we can learn a new spoken accent—but the insight that we all have assumptions that are invisible to us is fundamental to critical thinking.

Initially, this can seem crippling, especially for students whose high school experience was all about a single truth or a single right answer. But understanding that different is often just different is a critical path to many things. Study abroad is not just about visiting difference, it is about encountering your own difference, your own assumptions and learning that everyone thinks with an accent.

The 3Rs and Self-Regulated Learners

Leave a reply

My series on WYPR continues here

If we want our new technological society to be more inclusive, we will need a new model of education geared toward a learning economy, where learning continues aftergraduation. Good teachers have always known that our job is to make ourselves obsolete. If we do our jobs well, then our students will move into the future, able to learn and integrate new knowledge by themselves, without teachers telling them what is important. It is like the old saying that you can either give someone a fish, or teach them how to fish. If college is really about creating self-regulated learners, then we need to focus more on that process and less on content.

You remember the old three Rs, reading, writing, and arithmetic. These content areas still matter. But if we want to prepare graduates to think for themselves in a quickly changing world, then we need to understand the new science of learning, which suggests that the focus of education could fruitfully be reimagined around a new 3Rs of Relationships, Resilience, and Reflection. Relationships because learning is always mediated through context, resilience because failure is always a part of learning, and reflection because the point of new experiences and insight is that it offers the potential to change us.

Where there is no change, there is no learning—only storage. Unlike the original 3rs of content, these 3Rs are about process—they articulate a process of how students can learn to think for themselves.