Deep and Durable Learning: Recent Episodes
Michael Gray
Most learning is superficial and fades quickly. This podcast will equip you to move to learning that is durable because it is deep. Deep learning lasts because it respects the way the brain works. Inquiring minds want to know "how" and "why"—not just what!
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I summarize my 10 principles of learning. These principles respect the way God designed the brain to learn. That framework moves from questions that pique our curiosity and motivate exploration of the concrete. This exploration is a search for patterns which the brain constructs as a web of interconnected concepts (which are abstractions). Through this conceptual web we process new experiences and modify the web as we learn more.
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The myth of learning styles is a hindrance to deep and durable learning. It plays right into the myth of learning as mere retrieval. While we have individual preferences about the sensory channels we like information to be delivered over, the nature of the thing to be learned determines how it is best learned.
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The cognitive power tools of the well-taught beginner create increasingly useful knowledge as the learner's skill level increases through practice that challenges plateaus. This episode makes the case that learning should always be embedded in a way of thinking; thinking like a biologist, a historian, an economist, a mathematician, etc. Learners should engage with authentic problems in a scaled-down junior version of every subject. Pedagogy in the early years of learning that privileges the creation of concepts over the collection of information will pay substantial dividends as the student grows.
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"Drill and kill," the mindless and seemingly endless repetition of facts, kills motivation to learn. "Repetition aids learning" is only true with carefully crafted variety in the repetition. "Extended practice" is a better way to approach the need for the brain to wrestle with ideas in an intriguing journey to understanding.
This episode will help parents operationalize effective homework that embeds their kids in a stimulating exploration of ideas and their consequences. And, oh yes, the facts their school expects come along as a bonus.
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How can you help your child move from being absorbed with taking in information in the classroom to a fixation on understanding ideas? This is key to durable learning that is extensible; learning that you can build on and apply to solving real world problems. This episode operationalizes the creation of robust networks of powerful ideas.
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Many parents and children view their inability to memorize as their greatest educational weakness. Learning is more than remembering, but it is not less. Today's episode centers on the reality that durable memory is the byproduct of thinking about ideas. Using mnemonics and other gimmicks to bypass the need for thinking is doomed to fail and is boring to boot.
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Most schools design curriculum around a fact forward approach. Facts are always in the foreground while ideas lurk in the background and generally make only cameo appearances. This is exactly wrong.
The role of facts is to support ideas. Facts are organized by ideas and not the reverse. It is ideas that have consequences. While there may be "inconvenient facts," they are inconvenient only to ideas that fail to take them into account. Critical thinking seeks to give structure and meaning to facts and harness them for much greater ends than mere retrieval.
This episode seeks to put facts in their rightful place and empower parents to help their children focus on ideas even when the education establishment does not.
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Children are all born learners—at least until they go to school. Many children and their parents are frustrated and mystified by the setbacks that are experienced at school and it doesn't need to be this way!
This is the first episode of an entire season dealing with why your child may not like school and what to do about it. The season is structured around Daniel Willingham's book, Why Don’t Students Like School? Willingham articulates 10 principles of learning and I interact with his first principle in this episode. Contrary to Willingham, I emphasize the reality that children are born looking for patterns, but they are not good at finding the flaws in those patterns. By asking questions, you as a parent can help correct and solidify their mental categories and help them to thrive in any educational environment.
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Worldview is the key grid through which we filter and formulate ideas, yet it is not systematically developed in most educational programs. This is particularly likely on the university level. Make no mistake—a worldview is being developed anyway, but likely full of flaws and non sequiturs.
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No one wants to kill the joy of learning in a young child, but that's likely with the majority of preschool and elementary pedagogies. This podcast helps you sort through the educational philosophy underlying some major options.
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Attempting to read the Bible through each year is a source of frustration and guilt to many as they repeatedly fall behind their reading schedule. Is this yearly ritual a spiritual discipline that advances discipleship or does it substitute a false sense of breadth for real depth?
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The church is not immune to polarity that all too often leads to contention and division—the opposite of biblical unity. This study in Ephesians aims to transform your understanding of the nature of biblical unity and its priority in the life of each Christian.
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Transformational discipleship is redundant. Discipleship is intrinsically transformation into increasing Christlikeness. This is a case study of Ephesians that speaks with biblical authority to the current polarization within the church.
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Discipleship is more than a targeted learning process, but it is not less. Deep and durable learning of scripture results in personal transformation, but most churches follow a flawed process. Join me as I consider the discipleship gap and how to close it.
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What does wisdom say about beverage alcohol consumption? I cut through the cultural cachet of alcohol and look objectively at its documented effects on the human body.
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Daniel L. Smith, Professor of Nutrition Sciences, is a self-professed skeptic about nutritional science. He takes us on a journey through how science works and helps differentiate healthy skepticism (aka critical thinking) from corrupting cynicism.
The elusive teachable moment is not endangered. In this episode we talk about how to orchestrate and leverage teachable moments to catalyze deep and durable learning
Young learners are motivated by curiosity and wonder. This generates "why" questions that are answered by looking for patterns in the particulars they encounter. Would this were true for adult learning!
Many people feel stuck in their careers. At the root this is because they lack clarity about who they are and what they were made to do. Clarity emerges on the heels of questioning your erroneous assumptions about vocation.
Vocation should not be chosen pragmatically based merely on opportunity. Vocation is literally a calling to use your unique giftedness for the glory of God. Dr. Scott Whitmore, a researcher in retinal diseases, shares his wrestling to discern God's call.
Ideals are commendable but how we implement ideals can corrupt our true identity. Susanna Hindman shares her story of life in a disadvantaged community in West Baltimore, Maryland.
Healthcare is better at treating disease than at creating and maintaining health. Dr. Daniel Hindman of the Johns Hopkins hospital system argues that medical professionals fail to grapple with the real determinants of patient health. Healthcare presumptuously treats even foreseeable physical dysfunction or limitation within a human lifespan as a problem it is working to solve.
Dr. Valerie Coffman shares her personal struggles with infertility and loss and reflects on the opportunities for growth through profound disppointment.
Cardiothoracic surgeon, Dr. Nathan Smith, as a college sophomore experienced the liberation that comes with transformational learning. In this podcast he explains how a focus on understanding and deep learning informs his Christian faith as well as his life as a surgeon.
Pediatrician & internal medicine practioner, teacher of medical residents, and homeschool mom, Dr. Joy Smith reflects on an early experience of transformative learning and distills from it timeless principles of lasting learning.
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.
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.
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.
Harmonizing personal freedom and the biblical law of love through the discipline of public health.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 consequences of our actions.
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!
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.
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.
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 questions you think this perspective can help to answer.
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 connection.
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.
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.
"Creativity is just connecting things" was Steve Jobs summary. Learn how to create transformative patterns through connecting concepts.
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.
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.
The inability to remember much of anything before our third year of life shows us what must happen to enable lasting learning as adults.
The purpose of exploration is to shake things up—to encounter new ideas which may initially be puzzling but which may hold the key to answering the compelling questions you care about.
Focused exploration is the third disposition of Learner's Mind. Exploration need not be time inefficient. We explore the story of Watson and Crick in their pursuit of the structure of DNA. This is an example of the power of exploration to quickly solve a problem that appeared insoluble.
Developing Learner's Mind requires an openness to and a curiosity about the world around you. Curiosity is manifested by a willingness to pay attention to what exploration uncovers followed by the cultivation of perception through which you really start to listen.
Learner's mind begins with curiosity and curiosity begins with paying attention to the world around you. Paying attention broadens options and leads to better conclusions. Learn how to cultivate attention.
Caring about students means prioritizing their needs as learners. This includes centering courses on a manageable number of core concepts as well as considering prior knowledge and what role the course will play in their future learning. Students need to participate actively without fear that their contributions will cause them to be judged.
Great courses are designed to engage the curiosity of students. In this episode Dr. David Gardenghi explains how he roots his chemistry for engineers course in the central engineering problem of corrosion.
Dr. Amy Tuck teaches the functioning of the human immune system through a logically connected narrative. Immunity is due to an intricately interconnected multilevel system designed to assure our survival in a hostile world. Listen as Dr. Tuck shares her strategy for creating deep and durable learning that answers real life application questions.
The Summer Institute in Teaching Science (SITS) is a four summer program of ten weeks per summer. The aim of SITS is to transform discipline-specific knowledge experts into effective teachers who are able to take their knowledge apart to create an optimal path for learning. In this episode recent SITS graduate, Dr. David McKinney, reflects on his personal transformation through SITS.
The 7C's of Cognition: Curiosity, Conceptualization, Connectivity, Constrained Capacity, Chunking, Consolidation, and Creativity. Creating Coherence.
Your brain is never off duty. While your body sleeps your brain actively and purposefully retrieves prior knowledge to sharpen it and harmonize it with new learning through the process of consolidation.
Learning is sabotaged when the cognitive load of the task is too high as well as when it is too low. Learn how to optimize cognitive load.
Chunking removes the obstacle of our extremely limited working memory by leveraging the hard-wired pattern making of the brain to create networks of powerful, logically-linked concepts.
The brain ruthlessly discards information, but relentless forgetting allows us to remain flexible as learners.
New concepts don’t float around but are logically negotiated into an appropriate place in our mental framework of concepts.
The process of concept (idea) formation in the brain is the universal mechanism for learning with understanding.
Knowledge of the human brain enables us to optimize learning. Exploring the 7 C's of Cognition.
There is currently a mood of dismissal and even denigration of experts. "Strongly held opinions should be granted the status of facts," say some laypeople. This episode explains why learning requires transformative expertise outside oneself.
Educational curricula are obsessed with information. Rigor means more information is covered. Learn how to overcome the systemic prioritization of information over real knowing.
Knowledge requires a human knower. A person can be said to know something when they believe it to be true and they can justify that belief using reason and evidence.
Information and Knowledge are not the same thing. Learning is much more than collecting information! Join me as we explore how data is used to create information and information is used by human knowers to create knowledge.
Information is readily available, but so is misinformation. Don't believe everything you see on your screen. Actively resist your native confirmation bias that shops for prepackaged opinions that square with your preconceptions/tribe. Learning requires intellectual humility that assumes a willingness to be taught.