A Design Thinking Approach to Higher Education
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 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.
History Futures in a new series based on interviews conducted with History PhDs who are pursuing interesting and fulfilling careers outside of the tenure track. The idea for this series came out of a series of conversations with current doctoral students in the Department of History at my alma mater, Rutgers New Brunswick. It is... 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 →
“I love commencement for many reasons, but there is one reason that is special. On that day, all students are successful. They may have taken a thousand paths to get to that moment, but they are united by ritual, celebration, and uniform… For those brief hours, everyone – graduates, parents, faculty, friends, family – all... Continue Reading →
In this lesson, I tried to lay the foundation to help students connect their ideas about the meaning and purpose of college ("Collegeview") with a set of values that shape their understanding about the larger world ("Worldview"). Even with the Worldview activity and the various analog and digital values sort activities out there (I used... 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 →
Education * Designed 