Effective interaction, the fourth core competency, is how you listen, collaborate, lead, and navigate disagreement. The competency most schools leave entirely to chance — assuming students will somehow absorb it, is integrated tightly throughout the entire Minerva curriculum.
If you can think, speak, and write well, nothing and no one can get in your way. The third Minerva core competency is effective communication. Learning to think and write clearly or speak confidently — understanding one’s audience, structuring one’s argument, and adapting one’s message to context.
The second core competency in the Minerva curriculum is creative thinking. Creative thinking involves generating original ideas, reframing problems, and finding connections across disciplines. It can be taught. It can be practised. At Minerva it is integrated across all subjects from the outset.
Attended my first international school event yesterday. It was an interesting experience. Over 4,000 people attended the event. Here’s a photo from the pre-setup of our table at the event.
The first of Minerva’s four core competencies is critical thinking, which involves evaluating claims, analyzing inferences, weighing decisions and analyzing problems. Not a personality trait — a teachable skill. One that compounds with every subject, every year, if you build a curriculum around it.
Jensen Huang’s “task and purpose” framework: reduce or automate routine tasks like coding; humans focus on and provide purpose. The Minerva Baccalaureate’s four competencies — critical thinking, creative thinking, effective communication, and effective interactions — develop exactly those real-world, purpose-driven skills. But why these four in particular? Next post!
“The purpose of a software engineer is to solve known problems and to find new problems to solve. Coding is one of the tasks. If your PURPOSE is to code, then maybe you will be replaced by AI. But most of our software engineers, their goal is to solve problems” -Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO. tinyurl.com/4zmjdzn5
How can we help students develop into leaders, innovators, and adaptive learners? Kosslyn and Nelson went with the following core skills: 1) critical thinking, 2) creative thinking, 3) effective communication, and 4) effective interactions. I’ll explore each of these skills over the next few posts.
In a fully active learning, radically flipped classroom, valuable and limited class time can shift from mere information transmission to helping students actually LEARN to USE the information in different ways, developing real skills in the process. What real skills? We will answer that tomorrow.
How is such a high engagement level attained? In short, via a “radically flipped classroom”. In a typical flipped classroom model, homework is done in class and lectures are provided before class. In a radically flipped model, BOTH are done pre-class! So, what exactly is done IN CLASS? Next post…
What does fully active learning look like? We are all familiar with active learning. Fully active learning is radically different. The requirement is that 100 percent of students in a class are engaged at least 75 percent of the time. How is this achieved? We answer this in the next post tomorrow.
Minerva students scored in the 99th percentile on critical thinking tests after just 8 months — outperforming seniors at other institutions. What were they doing differently? No lectures. Fully active learning. Every class, every day. Next post we answer the question: What is fully active learning?
Differentiated Instruction in the Language Classroom
My posts for Nat Geo Learning’s InFocus blog are up now:
A fundamental challenge in education: students learn content in one place and skills somewhere else, and rarely connect them. The more powerful approach integrates both from the outset — every concept taught as something to think with, not merely to know. This is the approach that Minerva went with.
Kosslyn’s diagnosis: higher education is too expensive, too ineffective, too entrenched to change in any fundamental way. He wrote this in 2017. Helen Parkhurst said the same about schools a century ago when she formulated the Dalton Plan. Some problems are stubbornly old.
Building something new
What would a school look like if it were designed around how people actually learn? That’s the heart of Building the Intentional University by Kosslyn & Nelson. For anyone building something new in education, it is essential reading and particularly relevant here in Asia.
Currently reading: Building the Intentional University Minerva and the Future of Higher Education by Stephen M. Kosslyn 📚