This is the essential paradigm shift we seek: do not focus on the subject to be taught, focus on the student (something great teachers have told us all along).
When you focus on the student, do not focus on the personality or on creating excitement; instead focus on fundamentally reducing the pain associated with learning, and enhance the value associated with the outcome of learning.
In other words, get rid of, or reduce dramatically the “fitting-in” process of a new structure onto an existing structure and replace it with an organic growth of ideas within the human mind. This is the engineering of learning.
The engineering of learning:
- Identify the existing thought topology
- Deconstruct the existing content topology
- Create organic associative learning opportunities built around the assimilation of the content ideas into the thought topology.
The pain is then focused on the assumptional limits which are integrated into existing thought topologies and on establishing the logical/ physical-structural linkages between existing ideas and new ones.
This notion of the evolution or replacement of existing paradigms or thought structures within the human mind, with new, more sophisticated or more generalised paradigms which solve newer problems, can be viewed as fundamental to the growth of scientific thought.
What is true for the community of individuals called scientists who are pushing at the edge of knowledge, is also true of every other human being – each of whom is pushing at the edge of his or her knowledge universe, at every instant of learning.