University DB

I always wondered why people make stupid decisions. It seemed like so much of the time we just ignore consequences of our actions or think that somehow they won’t catch up with us. And in our ever-so-politically-correct society, God forbid we tell someone what they’re doing is wrong. So whenever I would see or hear about someone making an obviously stupid decision, I ended up just wanting to march up onto a soap box and scream, “THINK! Just think about what you’re doing, really. Think about the thoughts that are leading you to make that decision. Think about the consequences. Please, just think for yourselves!” (Myself) It somewhat comforts me to know that discovery learning, which promotes this novel concept of thinking for yourself, is being used in some classes on the university level. It makes me genuinely happy to say that I have even discovered this teaching technique in a class other than this one on campus!

If any of you are in the business school, I’m sure you are or soon will be taking MIS 301. I hope that you have Patton if/when you do (Eric can back me up on this). One of the very first things we learned was Perry’s Scheme of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years (what a mouthful, huh?). You can look all the specifics up here if you want, but I’ll go through some basics that reminded me of discovery learning.

The lowest level of development is called dualism, where the world is viewed in black and white, right and wrong. You would ask questions like, “So what is going to be on the test tomorrow?” because you would think that “passively receiving knowledge” and then “parroting back the instructor’s version of a concept” is the only ‘right’ answer there is in the world (Bump, 343 D). Professor Patton told us to NEVER just ask her what was going to be on the test. If we only look at the world as having one right and one wrong answer, we will miss a lot of possible answers that lead to innovations and growth, both of which discovery learning actively promotes.

One of the highest levels of development is referred to as Commitment Foreseen (under Commitments in Relativism, if you’re looking at the site). This stage reflects a shift from the belief that there is only one right answer to the belief that “knowledge is not something that is external and definite but something that each individual constructs according to his/her experience” (Pugh, website). This sounds awfully familiar to Prof. Pritchard’s statement about his discovery learning English class at Amherst that “the world outside us ‘we now understood to be chaos, without pattern or design, awaiting only our human strategies – verbal ones – for running lines of order in it’” (Varnum, 343 F). So to move to a higher stage of development in our thinking, we need to realize that we must think for ourselves because no one teacher, or parent, or friend, or counselor, or psychiatrist knows exactly what answers are ‘right.’

I am so glad that teachers are finally teaching us to learn…for ourselves. After so many years of the hand-fed method of learning, it might be difficult to adjust to this discovery learning technique, but while we won’t be using calculus for anything in five years, we’ll have to think for ourselves for the rest of our lives.