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 Director of Life Design for the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. Over the next weeks and months, my colleagues... 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 →
Next week marks the start of the Fall semester at Johns Hopkins. A lot has changed on campus over the past several months and this Fall semester - even more than previous Fall semesters - offers the opportunity for students to reimagine both themselves as well as their Hopkins experience. With this sense of possibility in mind, I would like to offer five Life Design-inspired tips for approaching the Fall semester.
The following is the transcript of an interview conducted with Dr. Karen Thomas, Staff Historian and the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in January 2021 as part of the History Futures series. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Justin Lorts: I’m delighted to welcome Karen to this conversation. I've... Continue Reading →
Photo by Ekrulila on Pexels.com Lately, I've been thinking a lot about how the knowledge and expertise of those who work in co-curricular spaces is understood, organized, and shared with students and the broader university community. I know from my own experience that there is a wealth of knowledge across campus, often hiding in unexpected... Continue Reading →
Education * Designed 