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 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.
For this class, I adapted some of the excellent work from my colleague Smiti Nathan's blog, Life Design Log. Smiti is a big proponent of the use of stakeholder maps (as well as the Rose, Bud, Thorn exercise) and uses them regularly in her own courses and presentations. For my students, who are imagining lives... 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 →
I think one of the biggest challenges for college students - particularly in the first year - is formulating a healthy definition of success in college that is aligned with their values and purpose. At a school like Hopkins, most students viewed their high school education solely through the lens of the college admissions process,... 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 →
For my second class, I wanted to get students to reflect on the "why" of their college experience. Not just why go to college, but why choose the very specific experience of a four-year liberal arts education at Johns Hopkins. When I asked them whether they viewed college as career preparation, an venue for self-discovery... Continue Reading →
Education * Designed 