A Design Thinking Approach to Higher Education
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'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 →
Photo by Anna Tarazevich on Pexels.com This semester, I am asking students in my Arrive and Thrive course to create and submit a Resume of Failures as a way to help them embrace and learn from their failures over the past year and a half: the schools they didn't get into, the clubs from which... Continue Reading →
Over the past year, I've led a number of Life Design workshops for doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers at Johns Hopkins University. In that time, I've found that while Design Thinking works well for this group, many of them have trouble moving past their focus on a tenure track position in order to embrace the... Continue Reading →
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com The first several weeks of the fall semester is absolutely critical for first-year students, as it is during this period that they develop the relationships with faculty, staff, and peers that will connect them to campus and (hopefully) lay the foundation for a life-long affinity for the institution. At a... Continue Reading →
Photo by Sindre Stru00f8m on Pexels.com In his 2019 book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, journalist David Epstein turns our perceived wisdom about careers on its head. Despite the common belief that to be successful one must commit to a path early and devote as much time and energy as possible to... Continue Reading →
Photo by fauxels on Pexels.com In my last activity post, Re(Design) Your Summer Internship, I shared ways that students could employ design thinking to reimagine their summer so that they can continue to build their way forward and advance their career goals in spite of the COVID-19 restrictions. But what if you have no idea... Continue Reading →
Education * Designed 