Blog – Page 4 – ThreeJoy ®

Big Boys Don’t Cry

March 18, 2015/in Coaching/by Emma Schoenfelner

The 21st century transformation of education is profoundly emotional, but why is “emotion” such an uncomfortable subject?:

The idea that we might acknowledge emotion directly in education runs up agains a taboo for men (in many cultures). From an early age, men are urged to suppress their unhappiness, sadness, or other negative emotion that leads to the emotional display of crying. Sometimes this is done with understanding and concern, but oftentimes boys are shamed if they do cry, and the shame continues until they stop.

Jazz & 21st Century Learning

March 14, 2015/in Coaching/by Emma Schoenfelner

David Goldberg shares how learning jazz guitar has shown him new ways to best empower students to learn:

Whereas many music sites and teachers treat their students as largely unmotivated and incompetent, Jimmy trusts that students who come to his site are motivated and competent to take on substantial challenges on their own.

Find out more, here.

Six Minds and Petroleum Technology

March 14, 2015/in Books, News/by Emma Schoenfelner

The Journal of Petroleum Technology recently published a piece by David Goldberg on how the Six Minds of a Whole New Engineer can be applied to the petroleum industry:

Petroleum engineers have played a pivotal role in the rise of the modern engineer, and they can once again join hands to rejuvenate their own discipline and engineering as a thriving whole.

Read the full article, here.

Sign up Now: Facilitating Change that Sticks, 9-11 June 2015 (Tu-Th)

March 6, 2015/in Change, Education/by Emma Schoenfelner

@OlinCollege and @BigBeacon are pleased to announce the short course Facilitating Change that Sticks, 9-11 June 2015 (Tues-Thurs) at Franklin W. Olin College.

This three-day workshop develops participant skills and strategies for creating change that “sticks.” In particular, we dive into a set of personal and organizational skills that will help participants develop both personally and professionally as effective change agents:

Developing coaching & negotiation skills, including noticing, listening, and questioning and 3 critical negotiation distinctions
Design and use of language in change processes, including sticky language, 5 speech acts, and the art and science of narrative analysis and design
Understanding and applying integrated change & culture change models, including those of Kotter and the Heath brothers. The course also introduces and demonstrates application of the Big Beacon Change Model (BBCM) for effective engineering education transformation.
Leading from any chair, leading change both with and without title, authority, and responsibility.
Designing and implementing innovation structures within existing institutions, including incubators, respectful structured spaces, and change artifacts.
Using collaborative design process and facilitation as a change mechanism.
Understanding effectuation versus normal (causal) modes of planning for effective action when uncertainties are high.
Building and using culture and community to sustain change.

Through provocative readings, transformative experiential activities, and lively discussions we develop crucial frameworks for thinking about change, increase participants’ hands-on skills thereby enabling participants to return home as qualified change agents, and increase participants capability to be reflective and supportive in their teaching practice and their change leadership efforts.

More information is available at the link here or write deg@threejoy.com or sharon.breitbart@olin.edu.

Strategic Tracking for Educational Transformation

February 27, 2015/in Change, Of interest/by David E. Goldberg

I put up a post on LinkedIn the other day (here) in which I talked about the Three Speeds of Educational Transformation, and in that post I labeled the three speeds as follows:n:

Speed 1: The NO Track
Speed 2: The SLOW Track
Speed 3: The GO Track

The NO track is, arguably, the most important track of educational transformation, but it is also the most difficult, and the one where most misspent effort is directed. Tenure and other institutional artifacts make contrary faculty members better boo-birds than team members, yet many change efforts spend a lot of time trying to change the minds of those dead set against the effort. Change leaders will array “evidence-based” methods, persuasion, shame, and then coercion against those on the NO track, to little or no avail. All this is natural enough given shared governance and the widely shared notion that all faculty must “buy in” to all innovations. In this way, academic decision procedures are a NIMBY problem (“transformation is great; just don’t change my course.”), and logrolling (“you vote against innovation in your course, and I’ll vote against it in yours”) results in nothing much changing. Making this work: The best approach to NO-track faculty is to simply go around them (with their blessing and ultimate approval), and have them witness genuine student engagement as frequently as possible. We think of NO-track faculty as hard headed and hearted, but my experience is that when they witness genuine student engagement, they soften and change their hearts, then their minds.

The people on the SLOW track are those who want to make transformative change and “buy in” to the conventional wisdom of change (e.g., active learning, PBL, experiential learning, flipped classrooms, etc.). These people are “expert” in change, , and the are likely to resist calls for more extreme measures–to emotion and culture change or to trust and courage leading to deep unleashing experiences (see Chapter 5 of A Whole New Engineer), for example–as much as the NO track resists the idea of any change. This resistance to the ultimate aims of transformation must be skillfully managed. Making this work: Those with an appetite for conventional change are important because they are ready to act, and once they establish micro-cultures of change, these pockets of reform become a locus for both future go-track membership and capture of the old culture with new sets of artifacts, beliefs, and assumptions.

The GO track is for those working who are ready and able to move as quickly as possible to the boundaries of what is possible in educational transformation, but ironically transformation is made more difficult because the process itself misleads practitioners into believing it is easy. The 4 steps to the slow or no track for go-trackers is a s follows:

Confidence. A content-matter expert is successful in a narrow academic discipline.
Underestimation. The expert judges educational change to be easier than mastering his/her discipline.
Shallow reflection & study. The expert grabs at-hand examples–usually conventional and incremental examples–and starts to execution without deep reflection or study of best practices by others.
Poor execution. To make matters worse, the expert executes individually, poorly, using methods aligned with ordinary class routine.

The result is a fairly shallow, poorly diffused, and unsustainable change effort. Thus, a key difficulty in transformative change is unleashing go-trackers and preventing overconfident NO- or SLOW-trackers from hijacking the ultimate aims of the transformation effort. Making this work: Several things help get the GO track moving at top speed. First, carefully assess the individuals and organizational units involved in transformative change to understand both their aspirations and readiness for transformation Ontological assessment helps do this by listening to units and individuals in units along key dimensions of change (What is education? What is change?). Then, put align individuals with there ability to move ahead, NO, SLOW, or GO. Finally, train GO and advanced SLOW trackers in the methods of personal and organizational change (using a ThreeJoy training (here) courses along the lines of Facilitating Change that Sticks here) and then unleash them to work with willing students in a number of little bets with the goal of obtaining a sequence of small wins.

Thinking and acting in this way will accelerate the conversion of NO to SLOW to GO tracks and boost both the speed of transformation and the chances of its continuing and sustainable success.

David E. Goldberg is president of ThreeJoy, the founder of the non-profit Big Beacon, and also a noted computer scientist, entrepreneur, civil engineer and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He resigned his tenured professorship in 2010 to work full time for the transformation of engineering education. He can be reached at deg@threejoy.com.

Goldberg published A Whole New Engineer: The Coming Revolution in Engineering Education earlier this year (with co-author Mark Somerville and writer Catherine Whitney). The book is available from ThreeJoy Associates and in hardcover and all major e-book formats.

Studies of Expert Engineers Show Us Why Engineering Education Needs to Change

January 26, 2015/in Books/by Emma Schoenfelner

Misunderstandings about what it means to be an engineer are outlined in James Trevelyan’s “The Making of an Expert Engineer”— a book based on extensive studies of several hundred engineers in four countries, several of them true experts in their own domains.

An unfortunate reality exposed by this research is that engineering education has become almost completely divorced from practice:

The separation of practice from the curriculum allows students to develop many misunderstandings, partly because real stories about practice are absent, and partly because of myths that are repeated without being questioned or critically examined.

Learn more about these misconceptions, here.

Meet E²S² – the Engineering Education Students’ Society

January 6, 2015/in Education/by Emma Schoenfelner

In the fall of 2014, three passionate University of Calgary students formed the Engineering Education Students’ Society (E²S²).

We felt by creating a formal network, we would be able to increase and improve collaboration with others who have expressed interest in connecting. Currently, E²S² has about 20 members, including graduate students, undergraduate students, professors and academics. Nationally and internationally, there are also a dozen people who have requested to remain in touch through E²S² initiatives.
Within E²S² we have three main branches of focus: Beakerhead, Maker and Professional Development. The goals of these branches range from connecting those interested in engineering education and keeping everyone up to date on current research, to offering supplementary activities for students that provide hands-on opportunities to put into practice some of the newer research concepts in engineering education.

Learn more about E²S² and their three branches of focus, here.

The Coming Revolution

December 2, 2014/in Books, Education, Media/by Emma Schoenfelner

Olin College admissions officer Grant Hooton reviewed Dave Goldberg and Mark Somerville’s A Whole New Engineer.

The purpose of the book is to give insight on how to bring about change successfully, and explain and justify the necessary changes. These are captured in the five pillars of education transformation: ‘joy,’ ‘trust,’ ‘courage,’ ‘openness,’ and ‘connectedness, collaboration, and community.’ The authors propose that letting these pillars guide our instruction, we will produce the kinds of constructive education experiences that are necessary for tomorrow’s engineer. This should not be surprising to Oliners, because we live and breathe these pillars in all aspects of our lives.

Women in Space and Engineering

November 16, 2014/in Education/by Emma Schoenfelner

What’s largely missing in space and engineering? Women.

Demand for engineers in the UK has never been stronger with Engineering UK predicting a requirement of 87,000 new engineers per annum for the next decade. In this context, it is difficult to understand why the UK’s engineering workforce still only contains 7% female staff. The number of female engineers in the UK represents the lowest percentage in Europe and is quite disheartening. There is however a positive light ahead as more awareness is being made on this topic and resources are being created with a focus on increasing the number of females in different types of jobs in engineering.

For more information on how to empower more women to join the field, read here.

Self Judgment & Its Discontents

October 30, 2014/in Coaching/by Emma Schoenfelner

“What a jerk!”
“I’m an idiot”
“WTF?”
“Yes, but…”
“That’s not the correct way!”
“It ought to be like this.”
“How could I be so stupid?”

We tell these things to ourselves and others on an all too regular basis, to the point where it affects our productivity at work and in everyday life. How can we make our self-talk healthier? David Goldberg leads us to question the source of our discontent:

What is the judgment about? Whom is the judgment about? To what extent is judgment of others mixed with judgment of self. What is the balance between positive and negative judgment? To what extent does the judgment serve the client? To what extent does the judgment lead to useful action? To unproductive action? A key in bringing it to light is to not judge the judging, but to be curious about it, wonder about its purpose, consider its sources, and the degree to which it serves the client.

Read here for more ways to handle critical self-talk.