Tag: effective assignments

Design Thinking and Vocational Exploration

Sometimes a simple approach to incorporating vocational exploration works. I learned that the amount of instruction time devoted to vocation can be minimal and still give significant returns.

Sometimes we try too hard to make vocational exploration fit into our curriculum. Or we easily assume that it does not have a natural place within our particular discipline. But I would encourage us to look again. For me, the right fit was hiding in plain sight as the solution to a challenging situation.

Continue reading “Design Thinking and Vocational Exploration”

Please steal this assignment.

As I discussed in a previous post, while we rarely use the word “vocation” among our students at Blackburn, vocation nevertheless stands as a General Education Program Student Learning Outcome. Each semester, I teach two courses that fit within this outcome, and I love it. I constantly tinker with the content of these classes to try to find one more reading, one more tool, or one more high impact moment to reach students and help them more deeply engage in the mystery of their personal calling. In this post, I want to share my very best assignment, the one that has proven to prompt the most growth for the most students the most quickly. I share it here for two reasons. First, I encourage you to steal it and use it with your students if you think it could work for you as well as it has for me. Second, I want to explain it as an exercise in stating some of the reasons I believe it has been so effective.  Continue reading “Please steal this assignment.”