A Design Thinking Approach to Higher Education
Welcome to the blog of my site, Education * Designed. This is where I will be posting the thoughts, ideas, and prototypes that I am working on in my role as Senior Director of Undergraduate Education at the Life Design Lab at Johns Hopkins University. My colleagues and I continue to reimagine the future of... Continue Reading →
A crucial aspect of any summer experience is connecting with not only co-workers at your organization, but also with individuals outside of your organization who may be a part of your industry or share another connection to your personal and professional ambitions. The process of identifying, building, and maintaining these connections (what sociologists refer to... Continue Reading →
A newly-released report out of Oxford University, confirms what many of us already suspected. Namely, that a humanities education provides students with a set of skills that prove to be invaluable over the course of their lives and careers. These include not just familiar skills like communication, critical and strategic thinking, empathy, creative problem solving,... Continue Reading →
In his new book, Your Future Self: How to Make a Better Tomorrow, Today, Hal Hershfield illustrates the ways in which insights from the psychology of relationships can be applied to your future self. Building off of Art and Elaine Aron’s concept of “inclusion in the self,” Hershfield and his colleagues found across several studies... Continue Reading →
I recently came across the idea of a premortem when reading Steven Johnson's wonderful book, Farsighted. Cognitive scientist Gary Klein coined the term in a 2007 Harvard Business Review article. Drawing on research that found that imaging that an event has already occurred increases the ability to identify future outcomes, Klein and his colleagues developed... Continue Reading →
I recently wrapped up teaching Designing Your Georgetown, a course I have taught for the past three semesters to incoming transfer students at Georgetown's Capitol Applied Learning Labs (CALL). The CALL allows me a lot of freedom in how I structure and teach the course, and each semester I take the opportunity to try out... Continue Reading →
Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com In a new piece for The Point, titled “Art is for Seeing Evil”, philosopher Agnes Callard discusses the central role that art, in particular narrative fiction, has occupied in her course syllabi over the years. To answer why, Callard offers the simple yet provocative theory that “art is for seeing... Continue Reading →
I'm a big fan of the Fall Experience Journal activity, and now regularly assign it in all of my courses for first-year and transfer students at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown, even if the course is taught during the summer or spring. For me the assignment compels students to put themselves out there in a very... Continue Reading →
Justin Lorts For any career or "intro to college" class that I teach, I love beginning with a values activity. I find that having students articulate their values early on in the process not only puts them in the right frame of mind, but also gives them a reference point that they can use throughout... Continue Reading →
Photo by Burak Kebapci on Pexels.com Reframing is one of the key mindsets within Design Thinking and something we address in almost all of our classes and workshops here at Johns Hopkins. My colleague, Dr. Patrick Brugh, has a wonderful LinkedIn article that outlines the approach to reframing that he has used in his courses... Continue Reading →
Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich on Pexels.com A former student of mine, who know works on mentoring initiatives for PeopleGrove, recently shared an article that really got me thinking about how little we do to help students conceptualize what they want out of their career. For our Life Design Summer Institute curriculum, we use Johann Neem's... Continue Reading →
Education * Designed 