- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Frontispiece
- Foreword: Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century
- Preface
- I What We Teach and Why
- 1 Why We Need a New Kind of Higher Education
- 2 Practical Knowledge
- 3 Foundations of the Curriculum
- 4 A New Look at General Education
- 5 Multimodal Communications and Effective Communication
- 6 Formal Analyses and Critical Thinking
- 7 Empirical Analyses and Creative Thinking
- 8 Complex Systems and Effective Interaction
- 9 A New Look at Majors and Concentrations
- II How We Teach
- 10 Unlearning to Learn
- 11 The Science of Learning: Mechanisms and Principles
- 12 Fully Active Learning
- 13 A New Team-Teaching Approach to Structured Learning
- 14 Teaching from Lesson Plans
- 15 The Active Learning Forum
- 16 Building Lesson Plans for Twenty-First-Century Active Learning
- 17 Assessing Student Learning
- III Creating a New Institution
- 18 Building a New Brand
- 19 Global Outreach: Communicating a New Vision
- 20 An Admissions Process for the Twenty-First Century
- 21 Multifaceted Acculturation: An Immersive, Community-Based Multicultural Education
- 22 Experiential Learning: The City as a Campus and Human Network
- 23 A Global Community by Design
- 24 Mental Health Services in a Diverse, Twenty-First-Century University
- 25 The Minerva Professional Development Agency
- 26 Accreditation: Official Recognition of a New Vision of Higher Education
- 27 A Novel Business and Operating Model
- Afterword: For the Sake of the World
- Appendix A: Habits of Mind and Foundational Concepts
- Appendix B: Mission, Principles, and Practices
- Editors and Contributors
- Index
Foundations of the Curriculum
Foundations of the Curriculum
- Chapter:
- (p.45) 3 Foundations of the Curriculum
- Source:
- Building the Intentional University
- Author(s):
Ben Nelson
Stephen M. Kosslyn
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
Minerva’s curriculum is rooted in a set of four design principles: Content should not be the focus; the curriculum must be structured; courses should be seminal; and, students need information and guidance to make wise choices. These principles in turn lead us to construct the curriculum to provide a broad context for material and to provide the conditions necessary for “far transfer”—which occurs when people apply what they learn in one context to a situation in a different time and place. In addition, to help students master the material, the curriculum is scaffolded—the courses build on one another systematically while at the same time broaden the context. This chapter concludes with an overview of why we order the courses as we do, and how our curriculum is structured over the four years of undergraduate education
Keywords: curricular design principles, core curriculum, scaffolded curriculum, far transfer, educational philosophy
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Frontispiece
- Foreword: Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century
- Preface
- I What We Teach and Why
- 1 Why We Need a New Kind of Higher Education
- 2 Practical Knowledge
- 3 Foundations of the Curriculum
- 4 A New Look at General Education
- 5 Multimodal Communications and Effective Communication
- 6 Formal Analyses and Critical Thinking
- 7 Empirical Analyses and Creative Thinking
- 8 Complex Systems and Effective Interaction
- 9 A New Look at Majors and Concentrations
- II How We Teach
- 10 Unlearning to Learn
- 11 The Science of Learning: Mechanisms and Principles
- 12 Fully Active Learning
- 13 A New Team-Teaching Approach to Structured Learning
- 14 Teaching from Lesson Plans
- 15 The Active Learning Forum
- 16 Building Lesson Plans for Twenty-First-Century Active Learning
- 17 Assessing Student Learning
- III Creating a New Institution
- 18 Building a New Brand
- 19 Global Outreach: Communicating a New Vision
- 20 An Admissions Process for the Twenty-First Century
- 21 Multifaceted Acculturation: An Immersive, Community-Based Multicultural Education
- 22 Experiential Learning: The City as a Campus and Human Network
- 23 A Global Community by Design
- 24 Mental Health Services in a Diverse, Twenty-First-Century University
- 25 The Minerva Professional Development Agency
- 26 Accreditation: Official Recognition of a New Vision of Higher Education
- 27 A Novel Business and Operating Model
- Afterword: For the Sake of the World
- Appendix A: Habits of Mind and Foundational Concepts
- Appendix B: Mission, Principles, and Practices
- Editors and Contributors
- Index
