Hi Zellie- thank you for your personal connection to this week’s readings when discussing stress, anxiety, and empathy. I agree wholeheartedly that schools should be doing more to address student mental health.

We ask professors to think more holistically about curriculum, so shouldn’t schools think more holistically about student mental health and well-being? You see special programs like the therapy dogs that come to campus during finals week and you wrote about the student counselling services, but neither of those meet the full student needs which can only be partially addressed through a patchwork of programs and healthcare offerings.

Some institutions have decided to develop their own tool-kits for students/trainees in distress. This broader approach will better enable campuses to meet the needs of their student populations, which should improve student interactions, communication, focus, empathy, and everything else that mental health and well-being are related to.

Hi Medha- Like you, I found myself in engaged and in agreeance with many of Godin’s points. The first point that you called out has so much potential to change educational access and quality: if students can access SMEs from across the world, that could seriously improve the quality of current lectures. It could also bring down the cost of education by making it possible for a consortium to pay for a speaker and recording the lecture once and updating it yearly.

As an aside: The Economist just had an article about technology in the international grade-school classrooms as a way to mitigate challenges with teacher performance, which may be of interest (https://www.economist.com/international/2018/11/17/in-poor-countries-technology-can-make-big-improvements-to-education).

On the second point that you raised, I must disagree (partially). I worked in civil works engineering and heard from one of the older project managers that the current engineers would literally not be able to design a civil works infrastructure project on paper if they ever needed to. Maybe this will never happen due to technology, but my one concern with doing away with all memorization is the creation of a “garbage in, garbage out” phenomenon whereby students can only create using technology and can’t create without it. One still needs to be able to check their work, so to speak.

Hi Anna- thank you for sharing the quote about institutions and for raising the aspects of Godin’s talk that you did. I am in agreement that we are no were near where we should be related to teaching, and we are still practicing for too much “processing” of students. With that said though, don’t you think that if every school were to reduce the “no more memorization, as anything worth memorizing should be looked up anyway” approach to education by a significant percentage that we would be much further along? A lot of discussion has been generated this week about STEM and humanities, and it seems the crux of much of it is that the coursework requires significant rote memorization that you and I and Godin see as having been long since made useless by Google. Curious to hear your thoughts.

It’s interesting that you used the phrase “inappropriate ways”. I’m curious, is it just inappropriate because they are violating the pledge or is it inappropriate because of the type of sites that are being visited/activities undertaken? Is there something inherently inappropriate about not paying attention if the student is paying to be here?

I much more like your direction of “establishing my students as responsible for their own education and discussing choices, consequences and accountability” because this is more focused on a teachable skill/outcome/way of thinking about the world. There are consequences in the work world for using your cellphone in certain types of meetings, and some people will only learn by being pulled aside or called out in front of a room full of professionals (the latter of which I’ve unfortunately had to).

It’s ironic that you wrote “In this context, technology is my best friend,” in a time when it seems technology — and social and digital media in specific — have for some replaced actual friends. While you’re point in this paragraph was about technology as an aid in your discipline, your opened with the other role technology is having – coming with us everywhere since many of us can no longer be present quietly.

There is a growing body of emerging research on how our relationship with technology affects our emotional health and development (https://www.anxiety.org/smartphone-use-and-its-relationship-to-anxiety-and-depression). Dr. Shalini Misra (UAP) studies technology impacts on relationships and decision making and information overload in professions like first responders. I anticipate that as we learn more, policy on technology in both classrooms and workplaces will evolve.

On the engineering pedagogy, you’ve raised several important points. The discussion around problems is one of the best points because too often material is framed as right answer/wrong answer without the nuance that one finds when working in the field or for a client with real problems that have multiple solutions with different tradeoffs. Thank you for raising these points this week.

The Environmental Engineering example is great, and from my background extremely relate-able. During my MS, my professors weren’t researchers, they were technical practitioners. The type of learning that happens beyond the page, and problem set, can be taken into the world and used heuristically when viewing projects and decisions. Getting students to think about the other implications of their work — the community considerations — is vital. This goes beyond teaching engineering ethics, but can reorient the subject matter completely to a more triple-bottom line approach or towards what students may find when trying to meet NEPA and SHPO rules for a project.

Hi Jake, Thank you for sharing your deeply personal and troubling experiences. Looking back, would you engage students from your early experiences differently or more? Do you think that there were students that you could have had more success with, based on your own growth? Would you encourage other first and second year students to engage more, or wait to engage? It’s challenging to be part of a community where students are not being checked, but I also recognize the need for allies to help in that process. I’m curious if there were bystanders, and whether you think that bystander intervention could have helped in your experience or if you think it would have worsened matters. Thank you for so thoughtfully engaging this week.

Hi Devin- You have made a series of valuable points this week. The idea that we are preparing students for work outside of a classroom, where problems are nuanced, means that we are shortchanging them if we don’t teach decision analysis and other means of decision making under uncertainty and where there are multiple options with unique trade-offs. Also critical is your discussion of assessing performance improvement and seeing the thought that goes into problem sets. This is also something that came up in Pink’s talks — incentives most negatively effects the bottom performers. Assessing around improved performance encourages growth, allows students to fail more safely, and also looks more like the real world. Finally, the point you’ve made about improving performance could also be framed as an equity argument, bringing the lowest performing students closer to their better performing peers.

Hi Kathleen- Thank you for bringing ideas about solutions to the table in this week’s blog. It’s interesting that you note that our society is built around not breaking things, and end with an argument about disruption in the education space. Really, I think that there are components of society that want to maintain the status quo, but there are also large segments of disruptors. The tech space is one of these. Which also ties into what you’ve identified as a potential solution – learning not dependent on geography. The 1) new tactics, 2) trial and error, and 3) dynamic nature of problem solving are the backbone of programming and creating new products.