Deep and Durable Learning artwork

Deep and Durable Learning

55 episodes - English - Latest episode: 6 days ago - ★★★★★ - 14 ratings

Most learning is superficial and fades quickly. This podcast will equip you to move to learning that is durable because it is deep. Deep learning lasts because it respects the way the brain works. Inquiring minds want to know "how" and "why"—not just what!

How To Education learning deep durable brain teaching development improvement lasting unforgettable concept
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed

Episodes

Discerning Your Calling

March 23, 2024 04:00 - 1 hour - 41.4 MB

Vocation should not be chosen pragmatically based merely on opportunity. Vocation is literally a calling to use your unique giftedness for the glory of God. Dr. Scott Whitmore, a researcher in retinal diseases, shares his wrestling to discern God's call.

Ideals Collide With Identity

March 09, 2024 05:00 - 45 minutes - 31.1 MB

Ideals are commendable but how we implement ideals can corrupt our true identity. Susanna Hindman shares her story of life in a disadvantaged community in West Baltimore, Maryland.

Healthcare Is Its Own Worst Enemy

February 24, 2024 05:00 - 1 hour - 42.3 MB

Healthcare is better at treating disease than at creating and maintaining health. Dr. Daniel Hindman of the Johns Hopkins hospital system argues that medical professionals fail to grapple with the real determinants of patient health. Healthcare presumptuously treats even foreseeable physical dysfunction or limitation within a human lifespan as a problem it is working to solve.

Growing Through Infertility and Loss

February 10, 2024 05:00 - 48 minutes - 33.1 MB

Dr. Valerie Coffman shares her personal struggles with infertility and loss and reflects on the opportunities for growth through profound disppointment.

Learning by Heart is Not Mere Memorization

January 27, 2024 05:00 - 41 minutes - 28.7 MB

Cardiothoracic surgeon, Dr. Nathan Smith, as a college sophomore experienced the liberation that comes with transformational learning. In this podcast he explains how a focus on understanding and deep learning informs his Christian faith as well as his life as a surgeon.

Essentials of Learning

January 13, 2024 05:00 - 25 minutes - 17.6 MB

Pediatrician & internal medicine practioner, teacher of medical residents, and homeschool mom, Dr. Joy Smith reflects on an early experience of transformative learning and distills from it timeless principles of lasting learning.

Lifelong Learner Goes Deeper

December 02, 2023 05:00 - 34 minutes - 23.8 MB

Lifelong learning is not necessarily deep. Here we chronicle such a learner as she allows herself to be challenged to go deeper personally and eventually in her pedagogy with senior high students.

Getting Down to Business

November 18, 2023 05:00 - 41 minutes - 28.6 MB

Success in business comes through embracing "a way of thinking" that seeks to answer compelling questions using a complex interdisciplinary set of concepts. Students can be taught this mindset in the classroom through a query-focused approach.

Poverty and a PhD

November 04, 2023 04:00 - 45 minutes - 31.5 MB

Sam Saldivar grew up in a migrant farm worker's large family but went on an educational journey leading to a PhD in Old Testament. Now an professor, his Bible classes aim for deep and durable understanding and not mere memorization.

Your Freedom Ends Where Your Neighbor's Nose Begins

October 21, 2023 04:00 - 45 minutes - 31.6 MB

Harmonizing personal freedom and the biblical law of love through the discipline of public health.

Transforming Your Health and Extending Your Life

October 07, 2023 04:00 - 37 minutes - 25.5 MB

Public health has extended life spans in the U.S. by 30 years over the past 125 years through things like clean water and childhood vaccines. We'll explore the transformative effects of this little known discipline.

Thinking Like a Historian and Loving It

September 23, 2023 04:00 - 53 minutes - 36.7 MB

History is misunderstood and often maligned by outsiders as trivia collection. Learn what motivates historians and how the questions they seek to answer lead to cause-effect explanations that satisfy our curiosity. Yes, really!

Don't Know Much About History

September 09, 2023 04:00 - 47 minutes - 32.3 MB

History seems to be something you either love or hate with almost no middle ground.  Names, dates, events—trivial pursuit. Is that your view of history? What if history is really the assembly of facts into a compelling narrative? Our minds love stories! Join historian Brenda Schoolfield as she narrates her journey to a pedagogy that engages students in thinking like a historian.

Transformed by the Third Rail

July 29, 2023 04:00 - 36 minutes - 25.3 MB

Pedagogy is often viewed as a personal choice and untouchable—a kind of third rail. The SITS model aims to transform faculty into clear incisive thinkers who embrace transformed pedagogy in order to optimize deep learning in their students. This episode is an interview with the Track 2 faculty cohort in the Summer Institute in Teaching Science 2023.

Content Delivery or Personal Transformation?

July 15, 2023 04:00 - 35 minutes - 24.5 MB

The 3-legged stool is the compact embodiment of a comprehensive model of teaching and learning. In this episode we explore the development of clear thinking teachers through an interview with Dr. Timothy Tittiris, a participant in Track 1 of the Summer Institute in Teaching Science 2023.

Three Legs Morph Into Three Tracks

July 01, 2023 04:00 - 44 minutes - 30.2 MB

The 3-legged stool view of teaching and learning has become three intensive summers of faculty development in the Summer Institute in Teaching Science (SITS) at Bob Jones University.

3 Musketeers Synthesize 3-legged Stool

June 17, 2023 04:00 - 38 minutes - 26.5 MB

Three university faculty began a quest to reform teaching and learning at their institution. The result was a three-legged stool which has proven to be a powerful tool in faculty and curriculum development at all educational levels.

Questioning Our Conclusions

May 06, 2023 04:00 - 23 minutes - 16.1 MB

Answering a question isn’t complete until there is a thorough questioning of the near-term implications and the long-term consequences. Deep understanding requires cognitive harmony between explanations, answers, implications, and consequences.

Answering Questions by Asking Questions

April 22, 2023 04:00 - 28 minutes - 19.4 MB

The most powerful strategy for answering questions is asking questions. This query approach especially probes assumptions, ideas, and the relevant fact base. It sharpens thinking considerably and moves us toward deep understanding because we’ve come to know what our answer is based on.

Formulating Compelling Questions in the Core

April 08, 2023 04:00 - 20 minutes - 14.1 MB

Nothing is more fundamental to deep and durable learning than compelling questions. In this episode I’ll show you how to use point of view and a recognition of your motive—what you are trying to accomplish with your thinking—to craft big questions. The best questions are a quest for principles which unlock our understanding and give us the power to act and to predict the consequences of our actions.

Why Do You Ask?

March 25, 2023 04:00 - 26 minutes - 18.2 MB

 Questions are the engines that drive thinking. The better the question the deeper the resultant learning because you really care about unearthing the answer. Exploration through questioning is native learning mode—just remember your 4-year-old self—and you can go back!   

A Way of Thinking: Answers and Actions

March 11, 2023 05:00 - 21 minutes - 15.1 MB

Real thinking involves chewing on a compelling question. Powerful answers invoke cause and effect. Those answers have immediate implications as well as long-term consequences and both of those lead to actions.

A Way of Thinking: Chewing on Questions

February 25, 2023 05:00 - 23 minutes - 16 MB

Thinking is driven by questions. Questions are answered through the interaction of necessary assumptions, a fact base to which thinking is accountable, and—most of all—a conceptual framework. Conceptual frameworks harness the power of patterns to look for parallels that leverage past learning to solve present problems.

A Way of Thinking: Perspective Produces Questions

February 11, 2023 05:00 - 19 minutes - 13.7 MB

Every area of human endeavor is an outworking of a way of thinking. We all default to a particular way of thinking, usually without recognizing it. This episode is designed to help you be intentional about where your conclusions are coming from. The core of your thinking is the combination of point-of-view, motivation (what you are trying to accomplish with the thinking), and questions you think this perspective can help to answer.

Generous Enlightening Conversations

January 28, 2023 05:00 - 31 minutes - 21.6 MB

Great conversations are driven by empathetic listening that results in good questions. Good questions encourage the other person to open up and share. Good questions give the questioner an opportunity to learn from another person’s life experience.  In this episode my guest, Laura from Asia, characterizes being a good questioner as showing hospitality in search of personal connection.  

It’s the Principle of the Thing

January 14, 2023 05:00 - 23 minutes - 15.9 MB

Principles are the power tools of thinking. Learn how to construct principles that satisfy your need for things to make sense. When something makes sense, you won’t have to struggle to remember it or to use it in problem-solving.

Learner's Mind: The Whole Enchilada

November 26, 2022 05:00 - 26 minutes - 18 MB

Patterns don’t simply emerge on their own. They are the fruit of “creative scrabbling” through Subsidiary-Focal Integration (SFI). This episode will operationalize SFI.

Creativity Through Connectivity

November 12, 2022 05:00 - 23 minutes - 16.3 MB

"Creativity is just connecting things" was Steve Jobs summary. Learn how to create transformative patterns through connecting concepts.

Creativity Through Connectivity

November 12, 2022 05:00 - 23 minutes - 16.3 MB

"Creativity is just connecting things" was Steve Jobs summary. Learn how to create transformative patterns through connecting concepts.

Insight Through Induction

October 29, 2022 04:00 - 22 minutes - 15.7 MB

Finding a pattern in a collection of specifics through induction is the essence of the transformative insight that we call the "aha" moment. Learn how to increase the frequency and wattage of your lightbulb moments.

Introduction to Induction

October 15, 2022 04:00 - 21 minutes - 14.6 MB

Pattern-recognition is the most extraordinary capability of the human brain. We use induction to formulate these regularities as our concept categories. This episode will demystify inductive reasoning to enable better thinking.

Childhood Amnesia Points the Way to Durable Learning

October 01, 2022 04:00 - 22 minutes - 15.7 MB

The inability to remember much of anything before our third year of life shows us what must happen to enable lasting learning as adults.

Developing Learner's Mind: Embracing "Puzzler's Mind"

September 17, 2022 04:00 - 22 minutes - 15.4 MB

The purpose of exploration is to shake things up—to encounter new ideas which may initially be puzzling but which may hold the key to answering the compelling questions you care about.

Developing Learner's Mind: Focused Exploration

September 03, 2022 04:00 - 25 minutes - 17.6 MB

Focused exploration is the third disposition of Learner's Mind. Exploration need not be time inefficient. We explore the story of Watson and Crick in their pursuit of the structure of DNA. This is an example of the power of exploration to quickly solve a problem that appeared insoluble.

Developing Learner's Mind: Purposeful Persistent Perception

August 20, 2022 04:00 - 23 minutes - 16 MB

Developing Learner's Mind requires an openness to and a curiosity about the world around you. Curiosity is manifested by a willingness to pay attention to what exploration uncovers followed by the cultivation of perception through which you really start to listen.

Developing Learner's Mind: Cultivating Attention

August 06, 2022 04:00 - 18 minutes - 13 MB

Learner's mind begins with curiosity and curiosity begins with paying attention to the world around you. Paying attention broadens options and leads to better conclusions. Learn how to cultivate attention.

Caring is Crucial to Deep Learning

July 16, 2022 04:00 - 38 minutes - 26.4 MB

Caring about students means prioritizing their needs as learners. This includes centering courses on a manageable number of core concepts as well as considering prior knowledge and what role the course will play in their future learning. Students need to participate actively without fear that their contributions will cause them to be judged.

Wrestling with Rusting: Rooting Courses in a Compelling Question

July 02, 2022 04:00 - 33 minutes - 23.2 MB

Great courses are designed to engage the curiosity of students. In this episode Dr. David Gardenghi explains how he roots his chemistry for engineers course in the central engineering problem of corrosion.

Stories: Compelling and Practical

June 18, 2022 04:00 - 38 minutes - 26.6 MB

Dr. Amy Tuck teaches the functioning of the human immune system through a logically connected narrative. Immunity is due to an intricately interconnected multilevel system designed to assure our survival in a hostile world. Listen as Dr. Tuck shares her strategy for creating deep and durable learning that answers real life application questions.

Transforming Teachers to Transform Learning

June 04, 2022 04:00 - 39 minutes - 27.4 MB

The Summer Institute in Teaching Science (SITS) is a four summer program of ten weeks per summer. The aim of SITS is to transform discipline-specific knowledge experts into effective teachers who are able to take their knowledge apart to create an optimal path for learning. In this episode recent SITS graduate, Dr. David McKinney, reflects on his personal transformation through SITS.

The 7 C's of Cognition: Achieving Coherence

April 30, 2022 04:00 - 28 minutes - 19.9 MB

The 7C's of Cognition: Curiosity, Conceptualization, Connectivity, Constrained Capacity, Chunking, Consolidation, and Creativity. Creating Coherence.

Let Me Sleep On It!

April 16, 2022 04:00 - 23 minutes - 16 MB

Your brain is never off duty. While your body sleeps your brain actively and purposefully retrieves prior knowledge to sharpen it and harmonize it with new learning through the process of consolidation.

Constrained by Capacity

April 02, 2022 04:00 - 30 minutes - 20.7 MB

Learning is sabotaged when the cognitive load of the task is too high as well as when it is too low. Learn how to optimize cognitive load.

Chunks: A Creative Cognitive Strategy

March 19, 2022 04:00 - 27 minutes - 19 MB

Chunking removes the obstacle of our extremely limited working memory by leveraging the hard-wired pattern making of the brain to create networks of powerful, logically-linked concepts.

Forgetting is Fortunate

March 05, 2022 05:00 - 34 minutes - 23.8 MB

The brain ruthlessly discards information, but relentless forgetting allows us to remain flexible as learners. 

Patterns of Patterns

February 19, 2022 05:00 - 30 minutes - 20.8 MB

New concepts don’t float around but are logically negotiated into an appropriate place in our mental framework of concepts.

Constructing Concepts

February 05, 2022 05:00 - 35 minutes - 24.3 MB

The process of concept (idea) formation in the brain is the universal mechanism for learning with understanding.

Curiosity Fuels Learning

January 22, 2022 05:00 - 30 minutes - 21.2 MB

Curiosity is essential and is the foundation of learning.

How The Human Brain Learns

January 08, 2022 05:00 - 25 minutes - 17.8 MB

Knowledge of the human brain enables us to optimize learning. Exploring the 7 C's of Cognition.

Who Needs Experts?

November 27, 2021 06:00 - 35 minutes - 24.4 MB

There is currently a mood of dismissal and even denigration of experts. "Strongly held opinions should be granted the status of facts," say some laypeople. This episode explains why learning requires transformative expertise outside oneself.