Co-authored Blog Posts

Reaching for the future

Reaching for the future Angela Saulsbery ‘NU 15 and Jim Stellar Students make decisions all the time about what course to take, what major to pursue, and what career path to follow. Like all of us, they make … Continued

Education That Works:

The Neuroscience of Building a More Effective Higher Education

by James Stellar

This book on higher education, experiential learning, and the brain is now available here in pre-order form. The book is based on the ideas discussed by so many of us in this blog. Thank you colleagues, and thank you for the ongoing blog conversation. -JS

Guest Papers by Students, Staff, and Faculty (edited by JS)

Bringing experiential education techniques to the “flipped” Classroom, undergraduate-professor partnership, and student engagement

Bringing experiential education techniques to the “flipped” Classroom, undergraduate-professor partnership, and student engagement Agata Buras QC’16 and Jim Stellar This blog post explores how experiential education ideas could be applied right in the classroom as course-based teaching … Continued

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News

New book

A new book is out – Education That Works: The Neuroscience of Building a More Effective Higher Education by James Stellar. It is available here

WACE Research Conference

I just came from a great WACE June ’16 conference at U. Victoria with researchers from all over the world (http://www.waceinc.org/uvictoria2016/index.html). Also, check out #WACE2016 on Twitter

WACE meeting – Fuji Xerox talk on Aug 19 2015

At this conference in Kyoto. The Chairman’s talk is all about their new service-oriented business plan and the need to co-create with universities more mature employees who are better matched to the company through college internships, etc. This is what we are writing about.

Recent blog at Scholastic.com about primate vs. mammalian brain in education

On August 6th this blog came out from Scholastic.com that looked at higher education and K-12 ideas from our blog. Check it out here.

Smith College Executive Education for Women Webinar on 7-15-15

Jim gave a webinar on the upcoming book. You can see it here in the archive

Jim Stellar just interviewed by Civitas Learning

Here is the link to the interview. It largely deals with an incredible service learning program, the CUNY Service Corps, on which a group of us gave a paper at a past WACE conference in Sweden.

Economist run Higher Education forum on prep for the workforce

Check out this great forum run by The Economist. It is part of a national trend that fits very much with the topic of this blog.

Recent Gallup article of interest

8-19-14 Check out “College Is Worth It, But Only if we Make the Most of It,” by Brandon Busteed, Executive Director, Gallup Education. He writes about the power of experiences such as connecting with mentor. We would add that this is one of many types experiences colleges could broker for their students that we write about here. Get his blog by clicking here and read our postings.

Amygdala, faces, and trust

Here is an interesting new paper on the amygdala and how very fast we can judge trustworthiness of faces even when we are unaware of doing it. This point relates to the unconscious decision-making processes that we think play a role in learning from experience in higher education.

Who We Are

Who We are and What We Do

The blog began as a partnership between an older (Jim Stellar) and a younger (Shwen Gwee) guy. Then when Jim began doing research for the book, he was helped by one of the first blog co-authors (Adrienne Dooley) who became a project manager for a team of researchers, ranging from students to professionals who worked to develop the book and continue to talk in an on-line forum. Now, the three of us have added a third section of short papers that examine topics in greater depth than possible in a blog.

The whole idea of the website is to discuss experiential education programs and learning with a focus on what can be taken from neuroscience, cognitive, and social science research. We believe that this research is showing that the brain is built to operate and make decisions in two ways – in conscious rational decision-making mode and in unconscious instinctive decision-making mode. We think that this dual view, which applies to economics, also applies to higher education. It suggests important and natural ways that learning from direct experience can powerfully complement the classical classroom-based curriculum to improve student outcomes in and after college.

For more, click on the About link at the top

The Other Lobe