Deep and Durable Learning

Send us Fan MailI summarize my 10 principles of learning. These principles respect the way God designed the brain to learn. That framework moves from questions that pique our curiosity and motivate exploration of the concrete. This exploration is a search for patterns which the brain constructs as a web of interconnected concepts (which are abstractions). Through this conceptual web we process new experiences and modify the web as we learn more.

Send us Fan MailThe myth of learning styles is a hindrance to deep and durable learning. It plays right into the myth of learning as mere retrieval. While we have individual preferences about the sensory channels we like information to be delivered over, the nature of the thing to be learned determines how it is best learned.

Send us Fan MailThe cognitive power tools of the well-taught beginner create increasingly useful knowledge as the learner's skill level increases through practice that challenges plateaus. This episode makes the case that learning should always be embedded in a way of thinking; thinking like a biologist, a historian, an economist, a mathematician, etc. Learners should engage with authentic problems in a scaled-down junior version of every subject. Pedagogy in the early years of learning that privileges the creation of concepts over the collection of information will pay substantial dividends as the student grows.

Send us Fan Mail"Drill and kill," the mindless and seemingly endless repetition of facts, kills motivation to learn. "Repetition aids learning" is only true with carefully crafted variety in the repetition. "Extended practice" is a better way to approach the need for the brain to wrestle with ideas in an intriguing journey to understanding.This episode will help parents operationalize effective homework that embeds their kids in a stimulating exploration of ideas and their consequences. And, oh yes, the facts their school expects come along as a bonus.

Send us Fan MailHow can you help your child move from being absorbed with taking in information in the classroom to a fixation on understanding ideas? This is key to durable learning that is extensible; learning that you can build on and apply to solving real world problems. This episode operationalizes the creation of robust networks of powerful ideas.

Send us Fan MailMany parents and children view their inability to memorize as their greatest educational weakness. Learning is more than remembering, but it is not less. Today's episode centers on the reality that durable memory is the byproduct of thinking about ideas. Using mnemonics and other gimmicks to bypass the need for thinking is doomed to fail and is boring to boot.

Send us Fan MailMost schools design curriculum around a fact forward approach. Facts are always in the foreground while ideas lurk in the background and generally make only cameo appearances. This is exactly wrong. The role of facts is to support ideas. Facts are organized by ideas and not the reverse. It is ideas that have consequences. While there may be "inconvenient facts," they are inconvenient only to ideas that fail to take them into account. Critical thinking seeks to give structure and meaning to facts and harness them for much greater ends than mere retrieval.This episode seeks to put facts in their rightful place and empower parents to help their children focus on ideas even when the education establishment does not.

Send us Fan MailChildren are all born learners—at least until they go to school. Many children and their parents are frustrated and mystified by the setbacks that are experienced at school and it doesn't need to be this way! This is the first episode of an entire season dealing with why your child may not like school and what to do about it. The season is structured around Daniel Willingham's book, Why Don’t Students Like School? Willingham articulates 10 principles of learning and I interact with his first principle in this episode. Contrary to Willingham, I emphasize the reality that children are born looking for patterns, but they are not good at finding the flaws in those patterns. By asking questions, you as a parent can help correct and solidify their mental categories and help them to thrive in any educational environment.

Send us Fan MailWorldview is the key grid through which we filter and formulate ideas, yet it is not systematically developed in most educational programs. This is particularly likely on the university level. Make no mistake—a worldview is being developed anyway, but likely full of flaws and non sequiturs.

Send us Fan MailNo one wants to kill the joy of learning in a young child, but that's likely with the majority of preschool and elementary pedagogies. This podcast helps you sort through the educational philosophy underlying some major options.

Send us Fan MailAttempting to read the Bible through each year is a source of frustration and guilt to many as they repeatedly fall behind their reading schedule. Is this yearly ritual a spiritual discipline that advances discipleship or does it substitute a false sense of breadth for real depth?

Send us Fan MailThe church is not immune to polarity that all too often leads to contention and division—the opposite of biblical unity. This study in Ephesians aims to transform your understanding of the nature of biblical unity and its priority in the life of each Christian.

Send us Fan MailTransformational discipleship is redundant. Discipleship is intrinsically transformation into increasing Christlikeness. This is a case study of Ephesians that speaks with biblical authority to the current polarization within the church.

Send us Fan MailDiscipleship is more than a targeted learning process, but it is not less. Deep and durable learning of scripture results in personal transformation, but most churches follow a flawed process. Join me as I consider the discipleship gap and how to close it.

Send us Fan MailWhat does wisdom say about beverage alcohol consumption? I cut through the cultural cachet of alcohol and look objectively at its documented effects on the human body.

Send us Fan MailDaniel L. Smith, Professor of Nutrition Sciences, is a self-professed skeptic about nutritional science. He takes us on a journey through how science works and helps differentiate healthy skepticism (aka critical thinking) from corrupting cynicism.

Send us Fan MailThe elusive teachable moment is not endangered. In this episode we talk about how to orchestrate and leverage teachable moments to catalyze deep and durable learning

Send us Fan MailYoung learners are motivated by curiosity and wonder. This generates "why" questions that are answered by looking for patterns in the particulars  they encounter. Would this were true for adult learning!

Send us Fan MailMany people feel stuck in their careers. At the root this is because they lack clarity about who they are and what they were made to do. Clarity emerges on the heels of questioning your erroneous assumptions about vocation.

Send us Fan MailVocation should not be chosen pragmatically based merely on opportunity. Vocation is literally a calling to use your unique giftedness for the glory of God. Dr. Scott Whitmore, a researcher in retinal diseases, shares his wrestling to discern God's call.

Send us Fan MailIdeals are commendable but how we implement ideals can corrupt our true identity. Susanna Hindman shares her story of life in a disadvantaged community in West Baltimore, Maryland.

Send us Fan MailHealthcare is better at treating disease than at creating and maintaining health. Dr. Daniel Hindman of the Johns Hopkins hospital system argues that medical professionals fail to grapple with the real determinants of patient health. Healthcare presumptuously treats even foreseeable physical dysfunction or limitation within a human lifespan as a problem it is working to solve.

Send us Fan MailDr. Valerie Coffman shares her personal struggles with infertility and loss and reflects on the opportunities for growth through profound disppointment.

Send us Fan MailCardiothoracic surgeon, Dr. Nathan Smith, as a college sophomore experienced the liberation that comes with transformational learning. In this podcast he explains how a focus on understanding and deep learning informs his Christian faith as well as his life as a surgeon.

Send us Fan MailPediatrician & internal medicine practioner, teacher of medical residents, and homeschool mom, Dr. Joy Smith reflects on an early experience of transformative learning and distills from it timeless principles of lasting learning.

Send us Fan MailLifelong learning is not necessarily deep. Here we chronicle such a learner as she allows herself to be challenged to go deeper personally and eventually in her pedagogy with senior high students.

Send us Fan MailSuccess in business comes through embracing "a way of thinking" that seeks to answer compelling questions using a complex interdisciplinary set of concepts. Students can be taught this mindset in the classroom through a query-focused approach.

Send us Fan MailSam Saldivar grew up in a migrant farm worker's large family but went on an educational journey leading to a PhD in Old Testament. Now an professor, his Bible classes aim for deep and durable understanding and not mere memorization.

Send us Fan MailHarmonizing personal freedom and the biblical law of love through the discipline of public health.

Send us Fan MailPublic health has extended life spans in the U.S. by 30 years over the past 125 years through things like clean water and childhood vaccines. We'll explore the transformative effects of this little known discipline.

Send us Fan MailHistory is misunderstood and often maligned by outsiders as trivia collection. Learn what motivates historians and how the questions they seek to answer lead to cause-effect explanations that satisfy our curiosity. Yes, really!

Send us Fan MailHistory seems to be something you either love or hate with almost no middle ground.  Names, dates, events—trivial pursuit. Is that your view of history? What if history is really the assembly of facts into a compelling narrative? Our minds love stories! Join historian Brenda Schoolfield as she narrates her journey to a pedagogy that engages students in thinking like a historian.

Send us Fan MailPedagogy is often viewed as a personal choice and untouchable—a kind of third rail. The SITS model aims to transform faculty into clear incisive thinkers who embrace transformed pedagogy in order to optimize deep learning in their students. This episode is an interview with the Track 2 faculty cohort in the Summer Institute in Teaching Science 2023.

Send us Fan MailThe 3-legged stool is the compact embodiment of a comprehensive model of teaching and learning. In this episode we explore the development of clear thinking teachers through an interview with Dr. Timothy Tittiris, a participant in Track 1 of the Summer Institute in Teaching Science 2023.

Send us Fan MailThe 3-legged stool view of teaching and learning has become three intensive summers of faculty development in the Summer Institute in Teaching Science (SITS) at Bob Jones University.

Send us Fan MailThree university faculty began a quest to reform teaching and learning at their institution. The result was a three-legged stool which has proven to be a powerful tool in faculty and curriculum development at all educational levels.

Send us Fan MailAnswering a question isn’t complete until there is a thorough questioning of the near-term implications and the long-term consequences. Deep understanding requires cognitive harmony between explanations, answers, implications, and consequences.

Send us Fan MailThe most powerful strategy for answering questions is asking questions. This query approach especially probes assumptions, ideas, and the relevant fact base. It sharpens thinking considerably and moves us toward deep understanding because we’ve come to know what our answer is based on.

Send us Fan MailNothing is more fundamental to deep and durable learning than compelling questions. In this episode I’ll show you how to use point of view and a recognition of your motive—what you are trying to accomplish with your thinking—to craft big questions. The best questions are a quest for principles which unlock our understanding and give us the power to act and to predict the consequences of our actions.

Send us Fan Mail Questions are the engines that drive thinking. The better the question the deeper the resultant learning because you really care about unearthing the answer. Exploration through questioning is native learning mode—just remember your 4-year-old self—and you can go back!   

Send us Fan MailReal thinking involves chewing on a compelling question. Powerful answers invoke cause and effect. Those answers have immediate implications as well as long-term consequences and both of those lead to actions.

Send us Fan MailThinking is driven by questions. Questions are answered through the interaction of necessary assumptions, a fact base to which thinking is accountable, and—most of all—a conceptual framework. Conceptual frameworks harness the power of patterns to look for parallels that leverage past learning to solve present problems.

Send us Fan MailEvery area of human endeavor is an outworking of a way of thinking. We all default to a particular way of thinking, usually without recognizing it. This episode is designed to help you be intentional about where your conclusions are coming from. The core of your thinking is the combination of point-of-view, motivation (what you are trying to accomplish with the thinking), and questions you think this perspective can help to answer.

Send us Fan MailGreat conversations are driven by empathetic listening thatresults in good questions. Good questions encourage the other person to open up and share. Good questions give the questioner an opportunity to learn from another person’s life experience. In this episode my guest, Laura from Asia, characterizes being a good questioner as showing hospitality in search of personal connection.  

Send us Fan MailPrinciples are the power tools of thinking. Learn how to construct principles that satisfy your need for things to make sense. When something makes sense, you won’t have to struggle to remember it or to use it in problem-solving.

Send us Fan MailPatterns don’t simply emerge on their own. They are the fruit of “creative scrabbling” through Subsidiary-Focal Integration (SFI). This episode will operationalize SFI.

Send us Fan Mail"Creativity is just connecting things" was Steve Jobs summary. Learn how to create transformative patterns through connecting concepts.

Send us Fan MailFinding a pattern in a collection of specifics through induction is the essence of the transformative insight that we call the "aha" moment. Learn how to increase the frequency and wattage of your lightbulb moments.

Send us Fan MailPattern-recognition is the most extraordinary capability of the human brain. We use induction to formulate these regularities as our concept categories. This episode will demystify inductive reasoning to enable better thinking.

Send us Fan MailThe inability to remember much of anything before our third year of life shows us what must happen to enable lasting learning as adults.