I love a good leadership or entrepreneurial challenge, but few others seem to
Why do my students give me reviews like: “This was the best course I ever took at NYU. There is no substitute for doing the exercises. Thinking I understand a concept and actually trying to execute the concept was difficult. Only in working through the exercises was I able to be aware of what I am currently doing. With these exercises, I now have a roadmap for how to be the kind of person I want to be. Thank you for changing my life for the better!”?
I do because when I began teaching, I started learning experiential, project-based learning. I don’t teach through lecture or assigning reading and writing papers. I don’t claim to be the best in the world, but I try to connect with what students want to learn. I teach electives, so I get students who want to learn something about what I teach.
Actually, since I’m teaching people to live by their values and help others live by theirs, whether my class was an elective or not, I can take for granted people want to live more by their values.
Anyway, after evoking their values, I give them exercises to learn to develop them through practice. In the process, they end up researching and learning new facts, numbers, and skills, but not because I have the authority to give them bad grades if they don’t. They learn those things along the way because they realize it helps them achieve their goals. I assign them to write, not to analyze abstract information but to reflect on changes to their lives resulting from their new experiences.
Thus I get reviews like “I enjoyed the classes and indeed got some new techniques that I’m using on a daily basis. It was inspiring even when I was disagreeing on certain topics.”
I’m not writing about my teaching or pedagogy, though. I’m describing them for context for the opposite of my teaching. When I ask my students why they review me like the above, they say because they’ve never taken a class like mine. They expected me to lecture.
I ask them: “How could I teach you to lead or take initiative through lecture?”
They say, “We don’t know, but all our teachers lecture so we expected you to.”
I ask, “Have you ever taken an experiential class before?”
Nearly all say they never have. NYU is one of the world’s premier institutions of higher education, and the latest class I’ve taught was “Senior Seminar in Leadership,” meaning they’re all seniors, so they’re finishing.
The Opposite of How I Teach
All of the above is prelude to what happens when students never learn to live by their values, to challenge themselves personally not just with abstractions.
The clip below is an interview of the producer and director of a movie called Most Likely To Succeed, which is about experiential learning. It shows the results of factual-recall-based teaching. I saw the movie over a decade ago, but it’s been on my mind because I keep facing exactly what they describe: people who are well educated but when I give them a higher-order problem, instead of digging in to figure out how to solve it, they ask, “what should I do?”
This clip describes our world today.
Read my weekly newsletter
On initiative, leadership, the environment, and burpees