Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know by Adam Grant (best e book reader for android txt) 📗

lecturing in my own classes. I just think it’s a problem that lectures remain the dominant method of teaching in secondary and higher education. Expect a lecture on that soon.

In North American universities, more than half of STEM professors spend at least 80 percent of their time lecturing, just over a quarter incorporate bits of interactivity, and fewer than a fifth use truly student-centered methods that involve active learning. In high schools it seems that half of teachers lecture most or all of the time.* Lectures are not always the best method of learning, and they are not enough to develop students into lifelong learners. If you spend all of your school years being fed information and are never given the opportunity to question it, you won’t develop the tools for rethinking that you need in life.

Steve Macone/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank; © Condé Nast

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF REPEATING

There’s only one class I regret missing in college. It was taught by a philosopher named Robert Nozick. One of his ideas became famous thanks to the movie The Matrix: in the 1970s, Nozick introduced a thought experiment about whether people would choose to enter an “experience machine” that could provide infinite pleasure but remove them from real life.* In his classroom, Nozick created his own version of an experience machine: he insisted on teaching a new class every year. “I do my thinking through the courses I give,” he said.

Nozick taught one course on truth; another on philosophy and neuroscience; a third on Socrates, Buddha, and Jesus; a fourth on thinking about thinking; and a fifth on the Russian Revolution. In four decades of teaching, he taught only one class a second time: it was on the good life. “Presenting a completely polished and worked-out view doesn’t give students a feel for what it’s like to do original work in philosophy and to see it happen, to catch on to doing it,” he explained. Sadly, before I could take one of his courses, he died of cancer.

What I found so inspiring about Nozick’s approach was that he wasn’t content for students to learn from him. He wanted them to learn with him. Every time he tackled a new topic, he would have the opportunity to rethink his existing views on it. He was a remarkable role model for changing up our familiar methods of teaching—and learning. When I started teaching, I wanted to adopt some of his principles. I wasn’t prepared to inflict an entire semester of half-baked ideas on my students, so I set a benchmark: every year I would aim to throw out 20 percent of my class and replace it with new material. If I was doing new thinking every year, we could all start rethinking together.

With the other 80 percent of the material, though, I found myself failing. I was teaching a semester-long class on organizational behavior for juniors and seniors. When I introduced evidence, I wasn’t giving them the space to rethink it. After years of wrestling with this problem, it dawned on me that I could create a new assignment to teach rethinking. I assigned students to work in small groups to record their own mini-podcasts or mini–TED talks. Their charge was to question a popular practice, to champion an idea that went against the grain of conventional wisdom, or to challenge principles covered in class.

As they started working on the project, I noticed a surprising pattern. The students who struggled the most were the straight-A students—the perfectionists. It turns out that although perfectionists are more likely than their peers to ace school, they don’t perform any better than their colleagues at work. This tracks with evidence that, across a wide range of industries, grades are not a strong predictor of job performance.

Achieving excellence in school often requires mastering old ways of thinking. Building an influential career demands new ways of thinking. In a classic study of highly accomplished architects, the most creative ones graduated with a B average. Their straight-A counterparts were so determined to be right that they often failed to take the risk of rethinking the orthodoxy. A similar pattern emerged in a study of students who graduated at the top of their class. “Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries,” education researcher Karen Arnold explains. “They typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.”

That’s what I saw with my straight-A students: they were terrified of being wrong. To give them a strong incentive to take some risks, I made the assignment worth 20 percent of their final grade. I had changed the rules: now they were being rewarded for rethinking instead of regurgitating. I wasn’t sure if that incentive would work until I reviewed the work of a trio of straight-A students. They gave their mini–TED talk about the problems with TED talks, pointing out the risks of reinforcing short attention spans and privileging superficial polish over deep insight. Their presentation was so thoughtful and entertaining that I played it for the entire class. “If you have the courage to stand up to the trend towards glib, seamless answers,” they deadpanned as we laughed, “then stop watching this video right now, and do some real research, like we did.”

I made the assignment a staple of the course from then on. The following year I wanted to go further in rethinking the content and format of my class. In a typical three-hour class, I would spend no more than twenty to thirty minutes lecturing. The rest is active learning—students make decisions in simulations and negotiate in role-plays, and then we debrief, discuss, debate, and problem solve. My mistake was treating the syllabus as if it were a formal contract: once I finalized it in September, it was effectively set in stone. I decided it was time to change that and invite the students to rethink part of the structure of the class itself.

On my next syllabus, I deliberately left one class session completely blank. Halfway