Deep and Durable Learning

Send us Fan Mail Lifelong learning is not necessarily deep. Here we chronicle such a learner as she allows herself to be challenged to go deeper personally and eventually in her pedagogy with senior high students.

Send us Fan Mail Success in business comes through embracing "a way of thinking" that seeks to answer compelling questions using a complex interdisciplinary set of concepts. Students can be taught this mindset in the classroom through a query-focused approach.

Send us Fan Mail Sam Saldivar grew up in a migrant farm worker's large family but went on an educational journey leading to a PhD in Old Testament. Now an professor, his Bible classes aim for deep and durable understanding and not mere memorization.

Send us Fan Mail Harmonizing personal freedom and the biblical law of love through the discipline of public health.

Send us Fan Mail Public health has extended life spans in the U.S. by 30 years over the past 125 years through things like clean water and childhood vaccines. We'll explore the transformative effects of this little known discipline.

Send us Fan Mail History is misunderstood and often maligned by outsiders as trivia collection. Learn what motivates historians and how the questions they seek to answer lead to cause-effect explanations that satisfy our curiosity. Yes, really!

Send us Fan Mail History seems to be something you either love or hate with almost no middle ground.  Names, dates, events—trivial pursuit. Is that your view of history? What if history is really the assembly of facts into a compelling narrative? Our minds love stories! Join historian Brenda Schoolfield as she narrates her journey to a pedagogy that engages students in thinking like a historian.

Send us Fan Mail Pedagogy is often viewed as a personal choice and untouchable—a kind of third rail. The SITS model aims to transform faculty into clear incisive thinkers who embrace transformed pedagogy in order to optimize deep learning in their students. This episode is an interview with the Track 2 faculty cohort in the Summer Institute in Teaching Science 2023.

Send us Fan Mail The 3-legged stool is the compact embodiment of a comprehensive model of teaching and learning. In this episode we explore the development of clear thinking teachers through an interview with Dr. Timothy Tittiris, a participant in Track 1 of the Summer Institute in Teaching Science 2023.

Send us Fan Mail The 3-legged stool view of teaching and learning has become three intensive summers of faculty development in the Summer Institute in Teaching Science (SITS) at Bob Jones University.

Send us Fan Mail Three university faculty began a quest to reform teaching and learning at their institution. The result was a three-legged stool which has proven to be a powerful tool in faculty and curriculum development at all educational levels.

Send us Fan Mail Answering a question isn’t complete until there is a thorough questioning of the near-term implications and the long-term consequences. Deep understanding requires cognitive harmony between explanations, answers, implications, and consequences.

Send us Fan Mail The most powerful strategy for answering questions is asking questions. This query approach especially probes assumptions, ideas, and the relevant fact base. It sharpens thinking considerably and moves us toward deep understanding because we’ve come to know what our answer is based on.

Send us Fan Mail Nothing is more fundamental to deep and durable learning than compelling questions. In this episode I’ll show you how to use point of view and a recognition of your motive—what you are trying to accomplish with your thinking—to craft big questions. The best questions are a quest for principles which unlock our understanding and give us the power to act and to predict the consequen...

Send us Fan Mail   Questions are the engines that drive thinking. The better the question the deeper the resultant learning because you really care about unearthing the answer. Exploration through questioning is native learning mode—just remember your 4-year-old self—and you can go back!   

Send us Fan Mail Real thinking involves chewing on a compelling question. Powerful answers invoke cause and effect. Those answers have immediate implications as well as long-term consequences and both of those lead to actions.

Send us Fan Mail Thinking is driven by questions. Questions are answered through the interaction of necessary assumptions, a fact base to which thinking is accountable, and—most of all—a conceptual framework. Conceptual frameworks harness the power of patterns to look for parallels that leverage past learning to solve present problems.

Send us Fan Mail Every area of human endeavor is an outworking of a way of thinking. We all default to a particular way of thinking, usually without recognizing it. This episode is designed to help you be intentional about where your conclusions are coming from. The core of your thinking is the combination of point-of-view, motivation (what you are trying to accomplish with the thinking), and ques...

Send us Fan Mail Great conversations are driven by empathetic listening that results in good questions. Good questions encourage the other person to open up and share. Good questions give the questioner an opportunity to learn from another person’s life experience.  In this episode my guest, Laura from Asia, characterizes being a good questioner as showing hospitality in search of personal connect...

Send us Fan Mail Principles are the power tools of thinking. Learn how to construct principles that satisfy your need for things to make sense. When something makes sense, you won’t have to struggle to remember it or to use it in problem-solving.

Send us Fan Mail Patterns don’t simply emerge on their own. They are the fruit of “creative scrabbling” through Subsidiary-Focal Integration (SFI). This episode will operationalize SFI.

Send us Fan Mail "Creativity is just connecting things" was Steve Jobs summary. Learn how to create transformative patterns through connecting concepts.

Send us Fan Mail Finding a pattern in a collection of specifics through induction is the essence of the transformative insight that we call the "aha" moment. Learn how to increase the frequency and wattage of your lightbulb moments.

Send us Fan Mail Pattern-recognition is the most extraordinary capability of the human brain. We use induction to formulate these regularities as our concept categories. This episode will demystify inductive reasoning to enable better thinking.

Send us Fan Mail The inability to remember much of anything before our third year of life shows us what must happen to enable lasting learning as adults.