We’re whole people. You may have heard the term “work-life balance” before. Personally, I don’t like the use of the term “balance” here because it implies that work and the rest of our lives are somehow opposed to each other. Instead, let’s focus on nourishing our entire beings: physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. Work/school aren’t in opposition to the rest of our lives – they’re a key aspect of who we are!
Rather than designing my courses in a one-size-fits-none approach, I choose to give my students the agency they deserve to select the activities that best move them toward their goals (both in my course and in life). Moreover, by giving a community-generated menu of options, students are able to learn new ways of approaching school (and life) from each other.
The Six Pillars of Success for Students
I like to call the menu of tasks students can select from the Six P’s (alliteration is nice, and using P reminds me of Pillars):
- Planning – life is complicated. Success doesn’t happen by accident, it happens by following a plan that actually works for you. This category of activity is all about creating a plan for how you’ll spend your time most effectively to move all aspects of your life forward.
- Preparing – learning requires intention. Extracting maximum value from each class session requires a commitment to arriving prepared. This category of activity relates to the small, but meaningful actions you can take before class sessions to get the most out of the experience – and save time in the long run.
- Participating – learning is not a spectator sport. The sooner you stop viewing yourself as a passive recipient of information, the sooner you’ll find yourself feeling ahead of the game and in control of your own growth. This category of activity relates to what you can be doing as a member of our learning community – both during class and between sessions. The more you connect, the better you’ll do – likely with less overall time and effort!
- Processing – new ideas pass into and out of our brains quickly. This category of activity is all about the small things you can do after a class session to make sure you’re cementing the key new ideas you’ve encountered. Students who make a practice out of processing recent class experiences tend to learn faster, with fewer frustrations.
- Practicing – most subjects involve both new information and new skills. Watching someone perform a skill , and even being able to describe how to do it, is far different from performing the skill for yourself. This category of activity is all about getting your hands dirty – building skills by doing them in progressively more and more complex situations.
- Playing – you’re a whole human. No amount of motivation and drive can sustain you through a semester-long grind without breaks. In fact, “turning off” is a key aspect of learning. Much like growing the muscles of your body, you learn through alternating cycles of overload followed by rest. It’s during rest that we actually solidify gains. This category of activity is all about acknowledging your humanity, and giving yourself permission to invest time recreating in your passions and hobbies.
Learning Reports
This semester, the out-of-class assignments (traditionally called “homework”) will be called “Learning Reports.” In them, students are offered a menu of actions they can take which will enhance all aspects of their lives, including their mastery of the learning objectives for the course. Rather than grading using a rubric based on quality of deliverables, we need to create assignments that celebrate the truth: we learn best from failure as long as we’re in a safe space to do so. To that end, students’ grades for the “homework” portion of the course are self-determined, based on the number of tasks they complete. This is a concept borrowed from contract grading.
How to earn an “A” on Learning Report:
- Review the list of actions for each of the 6 P’s and consider which are most relevant to your current needs
- Select 2 actions from each of the 6 P’s and do them
- Report what you did
How to earn a “B” on Learning Report:
- Review the list of actions for each of the 6 P’s and consider which are most relevant to your current needs
- Select 1 action from each of the 6 P’s and do them
- Report what you did
How to earn an “C” on Learning Report:
- Review the list of actions for each of the 6 P’s and consider which are most relevant to your current needs
- Select 1 action from 4 of the 6 P’s and do them. Note: one action must be from “Practicing,” and it is highly recommended that you solve the problems supplied by your professor.
- Report what you did
Note: we can take a deeper dive into how many tasks students should complete. The goal is to balance their time with the the efforts which will move them forward in the best way.
I’ve brainstormed a list of potential actions for each of the 6 P’s based on what I’ve seen successful students doing in the past. In my courses, this document is editable and students may suggest additional actions that they find helpful. Over time, the goal is to create a single document of “best practices” for real students who want to succeed.
Pilot:
I’ll be piloting this approach during the summer of 2022 on a technical engineering course called Statics (the physics of systems which are not accelerating, such as structural analysis and objects moving at a constant velocity). I’ll be sure to report how it goes, with a focus not only on student mastery of learning objectives but also on their level of stress and joy. Hopefully we can start using “homework” as a way to reinforce curiosity and passion, rather than as a chore to earn points by jumping through a set of generic predetermined hoops! Wish us luck…
A sample menu of actions students can take to earn credit in courses I teach:
- Planning – life is complicated. Success doesn’t happen by accident, it happens by following a plan that actually works for you. This category of activity is all about creating a plan for how you’ll spend your time most effectively to move all aspects of your life forward.
- A starter list of actions: adding key class dates to your calendar, creating a time budget, making a list of the commitments you’ve made for the coming week, developing a morning routine, mapping out your finances for the semester, making a daily/weekly plan, learning new time management/productivity skills, creating workflows for repetitive tasks such as homework and class prep or studying for an exam, mapping out your entire degree program/year/semester, making a todo list for the day/week, updating your Gantt Chart
- Preparing – learning requires intention. Extracting maximum value from each class session requires a commitment to arriving prepared. This category of activity relates to the small, but meaningful actions you can take before class sessions to get the most out of the experience – and save time in the long run.
- A starter list of actions: reading the book or other published materials before class, writing down a list of questions to ask based on recent experiences, addressing (or scheduling a time in the future to) personal issues so you can better focus during class, watching videos or other online content related to upcoming class topics, doing a brain dump of all your prior knowledge/experience for upcoming class session topics, reviewing stated learning objectives for the course and how they relate to the upcoming session, eliminating distractions from your learning environment, communicating your needs for the upcoming class session to cohabitants, finding a buddy to participate with for the class session
- Participating – learning is not a spectator sport. The sooner you stop viewing yourself as a passive recipient of information, the sooner you’ll find yourself feeling ahead of the game and in control of your own growth. This category of activity relates to what you can be doing as a member of our learning community – both during class and between sessions. The more you connect, the better you’ll do – likely with less overall time and effort!
- A starter list of actions during class: arriving to class early and setting up your learning space, asking a question in class, taking notes, solving problems, working with a group, anticipating steps in a solution, employing/testing strategies for remaining focused during class, interacting with your classmates/professor via WebEx or Discord during class
- A starter list of actions outside of class: posting a question on Discord, answering a question on Discord, working with a classmate on homework or study, attending your professor’s office hours, sharing resources you find, finding a real world application for something you’ve recently learned in class, organizing and/or attending a study group with your classmates, comparing notes with a classmate
- Processing – new ideas pass into and out of our brains quickly. This category of activity is all about the small things you can do after a class session to make sure you’re cementing the key new ideas you’ve encountered. Students who make a practice out of processing recent class experiences tend to learn faster, with fewer frustrations.
- A starter list of actions after a class session: write down the “muddiest” point and a list of questions you might ask/research to gain clarity, write a 1 paragraph summary of the key ideas from the class session, identify steps from examples that confused you, find an example of what you just learned about in real life, talk to a classmate about the ideas you learned, compare notes with a classmate, rewrite your notes and color code them, rework and example from class without looking at your notes
- A starter list of actions after an assignment: reflect on your process and what caused you to succeed/fall short of your goal, reflect on your time management and how it impacts your approach to learning, review a complicated problem and identify the key steps you took, make a flowchart for the process of doing an entire assignment, make a flowchart for the process of solving an individual problem, rate your confidence at the topic and find additional problems to work if you’re uncertain, review the course learning objectives and map the skills used in the assignment to those listed as important course outcomes, compare solutions with a classmate and decide on the best approach, rework one problem with detailed annotations as if it were a textbook example, pick a problem you’re proud of or stuck on to share with your professor, reflect on how long it took and whether you were fast/slow compared to the standard of 2-3 hours per credit per week, attend a session with a life-coach/therapist/counselor
- A starter list of actions after an assessment: reflect on your overall approach to the course using a 3-step process (what should you keep doing, stop doing, start doing?), provide your professor with feedback using a 3-step process (what should you keep doing, stop doing, start doing?), identify which problems/concepts gave you the most trouble and ask whether it was a “study issue” or a “learning issue”, adjust your overall plan for the course based on what’s working and what isn’t, review the amount of time you’ve invested in the course and compare to expectations
- Practicing – most subjects involve both new information and new skills. Watching someone perform a skill , and even being able to describe how to do it, is far different from performing the skill for yourself. This category of activity is all about getting your hands dirty – building skills by doing them in progressively more and more complex situations.
- A starter list of actions: solve examples from the book using their steps as guides only when you’re stuck, solve homework problems suggested by your professor, solve additional problems for topics you need extra practice on, find and analyze real-world examples of the ideas from class
- Playing – you’re a whole human. No amount of motivation and drive can sustain you through a semester-long grind without breaks. In fact, “turning off” is a key aspect of learning. Much like growing the muscles of your body, you learn through alternating cycles of overload followed by rest. It’s during rest that we actually solidify gains. This category of activity is all about acknowledging your humanity, and giving yourself permission to invest time recreating in your passions and hobbies.
- A starter list of actions: spend time doing your hobby, go for a walk/run/swim/ride/hike, go see nature, go to dinner with people you care about, cook a fresh meal, exercise, get 7 or more hours per sleep, take a weekend getaway, watch a movie or TV show, play a video game, work on your car, work on your home, make something new using what you learned in class
