- 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
A New Look at General Education
A New Look at General Education
- Chapter:
- (p.57) 4 A New Look at General Education
- Source:
- Building the Intentional University
- Author(s):
Joshua Fost
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
I summarize our general education model, compare it with other popular approaches, and discuss our approach to common challenges. All students complete the same four freshman seminars; each lasts the year and is fully active: no lectures. Approximately 115 learning objectives span four core competencies: critical and creative thinking and effective communication and interaction. This model differs from the four dominant models found in ~290 representative institutions of higher education. We avoided many challenges by building our plans into the foundations of the university from its inception, using a highly diverse team-based course development and teaching program, and continuing assessment on the learning objectives throughout all four years.
Keywords: core competencies, learning objectives, big questions, formative assessment, liberal arts
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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
