Thanks for the writeup, and an excellent article. Note that the students do still live together, in quasi-dorms—a smart move for motivation and for network-building. I believe the students are supposed to spend a significant amount of time in the other locations Minerva is opening around the world: a year here, a year there, and so on.
I find Minerva an exciting experiment. Law schools have a similar, if much lower-tech, philosophy about classes. In law school, ideally classes focus less on covering content (which you must do prior to class) and more on questioning and debating. This “Socratic method” often works less well in practice than in theory, but when done right it’s far more exciting and stimulating than most undergraduate classes.
Hey, thanks for the comment! I have never had been in a law school classroom, but I remember reading about the law school experience in Shulman’s (2005) signature pedagogies in the professions article; he argues that law school, medical school, clergy school, design school, etc, have unique educational approaches because these facilitate learning of the skills and dispositions valued by each profession (e.g., the back-and-forth, often harsh exchanges characteristic of a law school classroom train you to “think like a lawyer”, to handle conflicting views/interpretations, and to make an abiding distinction between legal reasoning and personal moral judgements.
I thought it was a cool article in general, but I especially liked how he pointed out the one thing they all have in common: “Pedagogies nearly always entail public student performance; without it, instruction cannot proceed.
…this emphasis on student’s active performance reduces the most significant impediments to learning in higher education: passivity, invisibility, anonymity, lack of accountability. So much depends on student contributions… there is an inherent uncertainty associated with those situations (direction of discussion jointly produced by the instructor’s plan and the students’ responses), rendering classroom settings unpredictable and surprising, raising the stakes for both students and instructors. Learning to deal with uncertainty in the classroom models one of the most crucial aspects of professionalism, namely, the ability to make judgements under uncertainty.”
Thanks for the writeup, and an excellent article. Note that the students do still live together, in quasi-dorms—a smart move for motivation and for network-building. I believe the students are supposed to spend a significant amount of time in the other locations Minerva is opening around the world: a year here, a year there, and so on.
I find Minerva an exciting experiment. Law schools have a similar, if much lower-tech, philosophy about classes. In law school, ideally classes focus less on covering content (which you must do prior to class) and more on questioning and debating. This “Socratic method” often works less well in practice than in theory, but when done right it’s far more exciting and stimulating than most undergraduate classes.
Hey, thanks for the comment! I have never had been in a law school classroom, but I remember reading about the law school experience in Shulman’s (2005) signature pedagogies in the professions article; he argues that law school, medical school, clergy school, design school, etc, have unique educational approaches because these facilitate learning of the skills and dispositions valued by each profession (e.g., the back-and-forth, often harsh exchanges characteristic of a law school classroom train you to “think like a lawyer”, to handle conflicting views/interpretations, and to make an abiding distinction between legal reasoning and personal moral judgements.
I thought it was a cool article in general, but I especially liked how he pointed out the one thing they all have in common: “Pedagogies nearly always entail public student performance; without it, instruction cannot proceed. …this emphasis on student’s active performance reduces the most significant impediments to learning in higher education: passivity, invisibility, anonymity, lack of accountability. So much depends on student contributions… there is an inherent uncertainty associated with those situations (direction of discussion jointly produced by the instructor’s plan and the students’ responses), rendering classroom settings unpredictable and surprising, raising the stakes for both students and instructors. Learning to deal with uncertainty in the classroom models one of the most crucial aspects of professionalism, namely, the ability to make judgements under uncertainty.”
Thanks for the paper, and that’s a fantastic quote.