Transforming the Mind

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Transforming the Mind
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Robert Reich, former secretary of labor for Bill
Clinton

• Reich identifies four components of the kind of
  thinking that highly paid workers will
  increasingly need to master
• Command of abstractions
• Ability to think within systems
• Ability to evaluate ideas
• Ability to communicate effectively

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Donald Kennedy, Past President of Stanford, in a
letter sent to 3000 college and university
presidents.

• It simply will not do for our schools to produce
  a small elite to power our scientific
  establishment and a larger cadre of workers with
  basic skills to do routine work. Millions of
  people around the world now have these same basic
  skills and are willing to work twice as long for
  as little as 1/10th our basic wagesWe must
  develop a leading-edge economy based on workers
  who can think for a living. If skills are equal,
  in the long run wages will be too. This means we
  have to educate a vast mass of people capable of
  thinking critically, creatively, and
  imaginatively.

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To Transform the Mind

• we need to understand how ideas are constructed
  in the mind by the mind.

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• The only way we can learn anything is to
  actively construct it in the mind.
• All ideas good and bad are constructed by the
  mind.

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• We need to figure out how we want our students
  minds to be transformed.

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• What do we want our students to be able to do
  with their thinking as a result of our
  instruction?

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Activity

• Make a list of the things you want your students
  to be able to do with their thinking when they
  leave your courses and/or academic programs.

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Activity

• What are you currently doing in your classes to
  foster these skills of thinking?
• What can you do to better foster the development
  of these skills?

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To Transform the Mind

• Students need to actively
• Read
• Write
• Talk
• Hear
• Think
• ideas into their thinking.

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Memorizing Information

• Does not transform the mind

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Engaging the Mind in Constructing Knowledge

• Is the key the learning.

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If You Cant Teach it to Someone Else

• You dont know it.

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Activity

• Discuss the concept of
• Transforming the mind
• What does it mean to you? How can this concept
  transform your concept of instruction?
• To transform the minds of your students, do you
  need to transform your own minds?

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