Stanley Kaplan, in his memoir Test Pilot, wrote something that has stuck with me over the years.  He wrote this about students:

I wanted them to love learning as much as I loved teaching. I used everything imaginable to stimulate the students — arguing, joking, teasing, cajoling, listening, deciphering, and probing. I dug deep into my bag of tricks and pulled out mnemonic devices… flash cards, scrawled blackboard diagrams, and flailing animated gestures.

What is interesting about this quote is the juxtaposition of “affect” and “technique.”  Towards the end of the quote, he opens up his “bag of tricks” and lists a number of techniques for getting students involved in their education. But notice how he started the quote: “I wanted [students] to love learning as much as I loved teaching.  He didn’t start with, “I wanted students to learn everything that I know.”  (Although, I am sure he did!)   He didn’t start with, “I wanted students to buckle down and become good students.”  (Although, I am sure he did!)  No, he leads with the affective dimension: love learning!

Was he just waxing poetic? I don’t think so.  Lots of contemporary writing about the scholarship of teaching and learning focuses on the affective dimension of the human being as a key to successful learning.  James Zull in The Art of Changing the Brain describes how fear and biological responses of deep structures of the brain can make the conditions for learning difficult.  Parker Palmer, in The Courage to Teach shows us with poignant examples, about how fear can shut down learning and teaching from both the student role and the teacher role.  Palmer shows how fear can, in fact, become more than biological responses as it is becomes embedded our culture, in behavior and in norms and values.

What Stanley Kaplan gives us, today, in that one thin sentence is a touchstone: The student-led revolution in higher education will start in the heart — in the hearts of teachers and in the hearts of students!

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Will deBock is the Associate Director and Founder of Kaplan University’s Innovations Lab. The Innovations Lab is a teaching-and-learning centered initiative focused on empowering teachers to bring sustainable innovations into their teaching and their classrooms. The Innovations Lab Blog is a publicly available resource for educators all over the globe!

I am very pleased that my most recent book, “Harnessing America’s Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning” (Jossey-Bass, Jan, 2010) was published in January. Writing the book has been a journey for me: changing me in the writing and changing the book as a result of the intellectual ferment created. I have come to understand this technological revolution as more  than a set of linked events with a cumulative widespread impact on almost every facet of our lives. Indeed, I now understand it as a new ecology, a new environment for information and intellectual activity which cannot be controlled by existing hierarchical structures, such as universities and governments. continue reading

In last week’s Newsweek, there were two articles that heralded the need for change in higher education. Yet, sadly, they promised more than they delivered. First Senator Lamar Alexander led with the cover story, “Why College Should Take Only Three Years.” This is a great idea, one that the European Union has embraced in its “Bologna Process”, among others. But then, instead of developing the educational rationale and suggesting a model for the three year BA, Alexander, a legitimate educational reformer as Governor of Tennessee, falls back on bromides: “college is expensive so let’s do it faster”, and “a three year degree is cramming four years of courses into three years”.

Then, a round-table discussion group promised us thoughts on “The Role of Higher Education” in the 21^st century. Again, sadly, the promise is clouded by disagreements about whether students need to know more or less these days, with opinions that varied from no, to yes, to reducing the four year BA would be bad. Through it all, Bob Zemsky and Michael Crow carry the heavier water, arguing for rethinking the enterprise, not just re-packaging it.

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A Los Angeles Times story about President Obama’s recent White House meeting with a former professor from Occidental College, where the President spent his first two collegiate years, illustrates that those of us who teach are in the deferred gratification business. continue reading