Stephen M Kosslyn of Active Learning Sciences: 5 Things That Should Be Done To Improve The US Educational System

An Interview With Penny Bauder

… Let’s create two kinds of electives. Students would start their coursework with “toe-in-the-water” short courses (each of which perhaps would be only a few weeks long), which are intended to inform students about a specific topic or area, giving them some real substance with the goal of allowing them to discover whether they find the material interesting, whether they are likely to be good at it, and whether they can see themselves doing it.

As a part of my interview series about the things that should be done to improve the US educational system I had the pleasure to interview Stephen M. Kosslyn.

Stephen M. Kosslyn is the founder and President of Active Learning Sciences, Inc., and is Chief Academic Officer of Foundry College. He previously was the Founding Dean and Chief Academic Officer of Minerva, after having been chair of the Department of Psychology, Dean of Social Science, and John Lindsley Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and, following that, Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and Professor of Psychology at Stanford University.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share the “backstory” behind what brought you to this particular career path?

You asked me about this in the previous interview we did, so — at the risk of being a bit repetitions — I hope you don’t mind if I base what follows on what I said before (the story is what it is). As I said before, my present path really began when I was a high school student, which was during the 60s. Like many others, I became obsessed with how to cure society’s ills. My idea then was that education is the key, and I’ve never let go of that idea. Fast forward to the last few years of my three decades on the Harvard faculty. By that point, I had written four books on how research findings can help us make clear and compelling presentations and better communication graphics. I was increasingly interested in how to apply laboratory findings to real-world problems, and increasingly focused on education. This focus was heightened by my being one of six faculty to serve on a committee to revise general education at Harvard. I immersed myself in the science of learning, which grew naturally out of my research and the four textbooks that I co-authored.

I left Harvard to return to Stanford (where I did my Ph.D.) to run the venerable Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and soon was drawn into the Silicon Valley startup world. When I was invited to join Minerva, a newly minted start-up university, I jumped at the chance. Minerva was a very rare opportunity to lead a team to design a university curriculum from scratch — not only the content, but also the teaching methods. And both the curriculum and teaching needed to be designed for a real-time online teaching environment, which was ahead of its time and very exciting.

Minerva is designed to be an elite university, taking a smaller percentage of applicants than Harvard. After more than five years at Minerva, I decided that I wanted to do something that would improve the lives of many more people. I founded Foundry College to help working adults obtain skills and knowledge needed for jobs that will not soon be automated. This mission seems even more important now, after the pandemic has accelerated changes in the workplace. Because the curriculum and technology at Foundry College were built to be used by thousands of students, we needed to further improve the teaching methods. I continued to do a deep dive into the science of learning and devised new ways to apply it; in particular, my colleagues and I developed new types of active learning and developed new teaching methods that could be easily used with large numbers of students. I have since gone on to devise ways to use what I call “focused active learning” and to do so in hybrid environments.

My efforts to design new teaching methods eventually resulted in a book published in October 2020, Active Learning Online: Five Principles that Make Online Courses Come Alive, and I came to realize that the best way to fulfill my mission in life must include helping others to use these methods to design new, cutting-edge programs and courses. This led me to found Active Learning Sciences, which turned out to be a really good idea.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

This is a different story from the one I told you last time; on reflection, I realized that this incident has had a larger impact on what I’m doing now. As I mentioned earlier, I founded Foundry College to help working adults acquire skills and knowledge for jobs that would not be soon automated. The original idea was to have an accredited Associate’s Degree program. However, it turned out that getting accreditation for this was going to require much more time than our funding would allow. So, I struggled with what value proposition would induce students to take our program even if we weren’t eligible for Title IV funding. By happenstance, a friend told me about a foundation he was working with that was helping high school dropouts learn to fix cell phones as a job. I noted that cells phones change substantially every few years, and asked how that affected these students. I was not surprised to learn that the dropouts often lost their jobs at that point. They had not been taught how to fix the new models, and could not generalize what they had learned about the older ones; the problem is that straight “vocational” education is narrow and brittle. This led me to reconceptualize the Foundry College curriculum: We would end with a sequence of courses that would equip the students to obtain a third-party job-relevant credential, such as Entry-Level Salesforce Administrator or Project Manager. But before they took those courses, students would take a sequence of more general courses on subjects such as communication, critical thinking, and problem solving. The idea was to have it both ways: To give them the vocation-related material so they could get a good job, but to build that on a solid foundation of more general knowledge and skills that would allow them to adapt as the world changes. This appears to be working well.

Regarding the lessons I learned from this experience: It’s important to pause and take a step back and consider the reasons why you are teaching something. Is it just to convey information? Is it just to get someone a job? In thinking about this, I realized that I wanted to convey knowledge and skills that students can use to improve their lives over the long run. If that’s the goal, then you need to devise a curriculum that does more than prepare someone for the jobs of today; you need to impart the general knowledge and skills that will help them grow and flourish as jobs change.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Let me focus on three. In one, we are in the final stages of helping to develop a new master’s of science degree in community medicine. This is the first such degree of its type, which views the “patient” not as the individual but as the community itself. The program is designed primarily for students from underserved communities, many of whom do not have a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) background. We are designing all of the courses in the program to exploit active learning in an asynchronous environment, to make what could be a dry grind into a fun, engaging journey. This is easier said than done, and it’s enormously stimulating to grapple with the challenges posed by this sort of educational environment.

In another project, we are working with a foundation to devise a center for “essential skills” (which includes traditional “soft-skills” such as communication, critical thinking and problem solving, as well as courses on financial literacy and the like). This project is based in India, and is aimed at students who are receiving technical undergraduate degrees. Some of these students are from impoverished backgrounds, and it is gratifying to think about the ways that our courses can help them to navigate their professional lives after graduation.

In a third project, we have developed a set of workshops that cover cutting-edge topics in education. We not only explain key facts about the science of learning, but also explain how active learning techniques draw on that science and how to apply them in the classroom. We also cover topics ranging from when it’s best to use specific forms of hybrid education to the various apps that purport to enhance learning. When we discuss the technologies, we evaluate them and — for the good ones — explain what can and cannot be accomplished with the free versions. We have already begun to give these workshops to various audiences (e.g., people who work in ministries of finance all over the world, medical students). It’s exciting to see how we are really filling a need by boiling down such information and explaining it in ways that help people to use it to accomplish their own goals.

Can you briefly share with our readers why you are authority in the education field?

As I explained in my backstory, I’ve been working in this field for decades. I began in traditional academia, and spent most of my career on the faculty at Harvard, and then at Stanford. I then was Founding Dean and Chief Academic Officer at Minerva, and then founded Foundry College. As I’ve gone along, I’ve published over 350 papers and 14 books on topics related to learning and memory (and, more recently, on education per se).

Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the main focus of our interview. From your point of view, how would you rate the results of the US education system?

Mixed. We generally are very good with graduate education, and have more variable results with undergraduate and K-12 education.

Can you identify 5 areas of the US education system that are going really great?

1) Graduate research education

Graduate education in the US remains superb; although other countries have pockets of excellence, graduate research education in the US is at least a notch or two above the average anywhere else.

2) Professional education

Professional education, such as in medical, business and law schools, continue to do well in the US.

3) Undergrad programs at “Research 1” institutions

R1 schools are generally large and sometimes impersonal — but they also generally provide solid courses in a wide range of topics and provide an opportunity for students to work closely with faculty on research. These institutions seem to be doing well even in the face of the pandemic.

4) Expanded outreach

Efforts to reach underserved populations seem to be increasing and increasingly effective. Yes, there is a long way to go, and we definitely need to do much more, but many funders, faculty and administrators appear to be aware of this and are sincerely trying to make progress.

5) Adaptivity

Most institutions of higher education appear to have been resilient and adaptive in the face of the pandemic. I’m impressed by the speed with which many such institutions have recognized and adjusted to major challenges.

Can you identify the 5 key areas of the US education system that should be prioritized for improvement? Can you explain why those are so critical?

1) Structure of the curriculum

The curricula of all Western liberal arts colleges and universities are organized into three components:

First, general education is supposed to provide a broad foundation that students can lean on for the rest of their lives. But this component usually just requires students to “select two courses from each of three columns” (one for Natural Sciences, one for Social Sciences, and one for Arts and Humanities), with no effort to structure the courses or show how the subject matter interacts.

Second, the major is supposed to give students a focus. Such majors typically are organized around departmental structures, which are research-focused and typically reflect historical divisions.

Third, electives are supposed to allow students to drill deeper into areas of interest or explore new topics. However, in most cases electives are whatever the faculty feels like teaching, often based on their research specialty, with no regard for what students might actually want to learn.

Taking a step back and looking at the structure of the curriculum from a student’s perspective leads me to propose a different approach:

First, let’s create two kinds of electives. Students would start their coursework with “toe-in-the-water” short courses (each of which perhaps would be only a few weeks long), which are intended to inform students about a specific topic or area, giving them some real substance with the goal of allowing them to discover whether they find the material interesting, whether they are likely to be good at it, and whether they can see themselves doing it.

Second, for a major, we can substitute deeper, more substantive and intensive courses on the same topics. Students would not be restricted to taking courses in a single area. Rather, they would be encouraged to combine different topics into novel interdisciplinary majors. This makes sense in part because the cutting edge of scholarship and research often lies where fields rub up against each other. Advisors would ensure that there is coherence here (as is done at the Gallatin School at NYU, which focuses on such interdisciplinary, custom-made majors). “Coherence,” as I’m using the term here, can be operationally defined as a set of courses that prepare the student for a specific post-graduation niche, such as a particular type of graduate program or job.

Third, for general education, we should take seriously the idea of providing skills and knowledge that students can use for the rest of their lives. These tools would cover foundational material, such as specific aspects of communication, critical thinking, and problem solving. We could introduce such material in “just in time” modules that are inserted into a course when they are relevant; the material covered in these modules would help students address whatever comes next in the course, so students can immediately see not only why that material is relevant but also experience specific examples of how it can be used. We would not ask students simply to take on faith that the material might be relevant later in their lives. If students have already had the module in another course, they can “test out” of it if they encounter it again.

This approach would allow students to discover their path and to forge it in a way that makes sense, both for them personally and for society writ large.

2) Content delivery

There was a period of time when the flipped classroom was extremely fashionable in education circles. In the flipped classroom, students are supposed to acquire content on their own prior to class, and then are supposed to work with that knowledge during class. I taught at an institution that had a version of this method, and one summer I took out to lunch about a dozen of our students, who were doing internships nearby. We had a relaxed and freewheeling discussion, which was facilitated by the fact that I had just left the institution and was no longer in the “chain of command.” At one point I asked how many of them actually did the assigned preparation work (reading, watching videos, listening to podcasts) prior to class. Suddenly all eyes were pointed down at the table. One particularly fair young woman actually turned scarlet with embarrassment. One student ventured that he “tried to skim through” the material in advance of class. I was of course disappointed, but not terribly surprised. This did explain the uneven nature of some of those discussions.

On reflection, it makes sense to me that students wouldn’t do the work in advance of class, and not simply because they are lazy or don’t care about learning: As a student, it’s really hard to know what’s important and hence what should be foregrounded, and it’s really hard to know what’s related and should be organized into higher-order concepts. When students are coming at material for the first time, how should they know this?

Instead of a flipped classroom, I think it’s worth considering what I’ll call an “inverted classroom.” Use class time for two purposes: First, lecture. The lectures should highlight what’s most important in the content and give students the cognitive structures to organize the material appropriately. Second, use active learning to consolidate such knowledge and skills. What about the out-of-class part? I suggest that we ask students to do the readings, watch the videos etc. after class. In this approach, the point of the assigned material is to flesh out the bones that were presented in class. Students will be equipped to make sense of the readings, videos etc. following what they learn in class. And if they know that they will be tested on this material, they will be motivated to do this work!

In some ways, this inverted classroom idea may seem like the traditional approach. Many college students don’t do the readings until the last minute, when they are preparing for a test. I think we need to avoid this: a large literature documents that cramming is a terrible way to learn (practice that’s spaced over time is much better). The inclusion of active learning would help, but so would frequent low-stakes tests, which require students to keep up with the material and not do massive cramming before high-stakes exams.

3) Active Learning

And now it’s time for me to beat my favorite drum: We need much more active learning in all types of courses. The literature on this is absolutely clear: Students learn a lot (really a lot!) better when they use skills or knowledge in some way than when they simply listen and write it down.

When I say “active learning,” I have something specific in mind. I don’t mean just “learning by doing.” An unstructured, free-form discussion and amorphous discovery-based learning are examples of “learning by doing,” but the amount of learning such activities produce is hit-or-miss. Rather, I think of active learning as “learning by using.” This approach requires students to focus on particular aspects of the to-be-learned content in order to use that material in some activity, such as preparing for a debate, solving a problem, or creating a work product (I provide dozens of examples of such active learning exercises in my most recent book).

This conception of active learning requires having clear Learning Objectives from the start; each Learning Objective specifies a particular nugget the instructor wants the students to learn. It’s the Learning Objective that should dictate what content should be delivered, and it’s the Learning Objective that should dictate how students use that information in active learning: An active learning exercise should be designed to lead students to use specific aspects of the content in order to achieve a particular Learning Objective.

For example, if the Learning Objective is “Analyze figurative language,” an initial lecture would review the nature and uses of metaphors versus similes and then the active learning would require students to use metaphors and similes appropriately in specific scenarios.

Good active learning requires a lot of preparation and a lot of thought on the part of the instructional designer. But the payoff is immense.

4) Faculty training

Most faculty in higher education are not actually taught how to teach. Instead, they just teach the way they were taught (for better or for worse). In contrast, teachers in K-12 typically have to be certified on the basis of their teaching skills. In my view, instructors in higher education should be taught how to teach effectively and should be certified as being competent to do so.

5) Metric-based decisions

We should collect data on all aspects of education, down to the amount of time students look at specific displays and how often they talk and what they say. We should use such data when making decisions about changing a curriculum or pedagogy, or any other aspects of the learning environment. In my view, the driver of most such decisions should be measures of how much students have actually learned and how motivated they are to continue the learning journey. Moreover, such data can help us evaluate the efficacy of faculty; yes it’s important that faculty be inspiring and engaging, but when the smoke clears, what really matters is how much students learn and how motivated they are to continue this process. We can measure all of these things and isolate which aspects of the content, teaching methods, and general situation underlie positive results.

How is the US doing with regard to engaging young people in STEM? Can you suggest three ways we can increase this engagement?

The US is not doing as well as it should do with regard to engaging young people in STEM. Here are suggestions of three simple interventions that might increase engagement in STEM:

1) Make science more accessible at earlier ages

The key is not just to create snazzy demos and entertaining lectures. Teachers should make it clear what an adventure science is, how creative it is, and just how much fun it is. The focus should be on ideas, not on procedures.

2) Teach it effectively

The first idea relies on teachers being able to convey STEM material effectively. It might help to have special programs to train teachers on how to focus on the ideas that lie at the heart of science, and the fact that it is a stab into the unknown with all the adventure and allure associated with that.

3) Be clear about where STEM education can lead

Science often may seem just like an abstract, meaningless game that scientists play for their own amusement. It’s worth tying science to technology, and making it clear how both can help or hurt us — both as individuals and as a society.

Can you articulate to our readers why it’s so important to engage girls and women in STEM subjects?

Consider two points:

1) First, take the societal point of view: Half the workforce is female. Thus, for society writ large we need to engage them in STEM.

2) Next, take the individual point of view: STEM not only can lead to the joy of discovery, but has huge career possibilities for the individual. There are many opportunities in STEM-related fields, which can lead to a satisfying and full life.

How is the US doing with regard to engaging girls and women in STEM subjects? Can you suggest three ways we can increase this engagement?

In my view, the US could do much better if it adopted three practices:

1) Role models. We need to make role models more visible and more accessible.

2) More effective teaching. Clearly, there’s a lot of room for improved teaching. One thing I didn’t mention before is that we know a lot about human motivation, and knowledge about motivation can be put to good use in teaching. In particular, we know that people in general want to feel competent, autonomous, and be socially connected. We also know that people respond to incentives. STEM can be made a lot more attractive if these factors are taken into account.

3) Vivid illustrations of STEM careers. As I just noted, STEM careers should be attractive! We should make the day-to-day life in such careers vivid and accessible; we should help students “see themselves” in such careers.

As an education professional, where do you stand in the debate whether there should be a focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) or on STEAM (STEM plus the arts like humanities, language arts, dance, drama, music, visual arts, design and new media)? Can you explain why you feel the way you do?

For starts, it’s difficult to overstate the effects of STEM on daily life — and I can only see that importance growing over time. Thus, we do a disservice if we don’t teach the basics of STEM to all students, if only to help them to understand forces that shape culture and their lives.

Obviously, the only difference between STEM and STEAM is that “A”, which largely covers arts and humanities. I’m not going to argue that such material isn’t important. For many of us, such material is what makes life worth living. As such, I again argue that we do a disservice if we don’t teach the basics to students, if only to give them a sense of factors that have shared their culture and can shape their lives.

I realize that emphasizing strengths of each approach may sound like a copout, but I am struck by how both STEM and STEAM have been mischaracterized by their detractors. STEM is sometimes portrayed as a grind, suitable only for nerds, and STEAM is sometimes derided as soft and squishy, with the humanities piece undermining or distracting from the “real” substance. I think both of these cartoons are off the mark.

If you had the power to influence or change the entire US educational infrastructure what five things would you implement to improve and reform our education system? Can you please share a story or example for each?

Let me focus just on higher ed, which is a big enough challenge to consider.

1) Student funding

The current system for funding students is clunky and inefficient. The “sticker price” of tuition rarely corresponds to the actual price, and the politics of discounts (i.e., “scholarships”) are often opaque. We might look to Europe for other models that are more efficient and are better both for society (by encouraging all who are qualified to go to college) and for the individual (by making it clear that all educational opportunities are within financial reach).

2) Institutional funding

Related to student funding is how the institutions themselves are funded. We should consider colleges and universities as national resources, which create seed corn for each generation. It’s not an accident that thriving tech hubs, such as around Palo Alto and Menlo Park in California and Austin, Texas are anchored by world-class universities. As such, universities are worthy of more government support.

I taught in France for a year, and was impressed by how well colleges functioned even though they largely depended on government funding. There are many ways to do this, and we should try various approaches and see what works best in our context — but the basic idea is that education is a societal good, and should be treated as such. At the same time, we need variety in what colleges and universities offer; we don’t want a situation where in exchange for funding the institutions all would have to follow the same, very detailed and restrictive, playbook.

3) Variety

Let me expand a bit on my point about the need for variety in what colleges and universities offer. Too many course catalogs look almost identical. We should encourage a wide variation in both content and form — what is taught and how it is taught. Both Minerva and Foundry College were founded in part in order to offer curricula and teaching methods that were not cookie-cutter replicas of what could be found elsewhere, to give students and faculty a choice. It is only by having a wide variety of options, and measuring how effective they are, that we can identify best practices, disseminate them, and thereby enhance the functioning of the system as a whole.

4) Better online offerings

We should strive to have world-class online programs, accessible from anywhere. Too many online courses are either check-the-boxes-and-get-through-the-lesson or are dry and poorly taught. One of the reasons I wrote Active Learning Online is that it’s clear to me that the science of learning really can make such courses come alive — and be much more effective as a result.

5) More competency-based

I have often been struck by the injustice of being paid by the hour. When I was an undergraduate, I worked my way through college partly by being a paid research assistant. One of my jobs was to run rats in a maze (really!), being paid by the hour. I discovered that I was making far less than another research assistant who did exactly the same thing I did, but was much slower. It struck me as an injustice that I was essentially being penalized for being efficient. I feel the same way about standard practices for assigning college credit, which are based on “Carnegie Seat Time” hours. It shouldn’t matter how much time you put into it — it should matter what you learn!

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Lately I’ve found myself thinking of Yogi Berra’s famous advice “When you come to a fork in the road…. take it.” At first glance, this may seem nonsensical. But on reflection, it leads me to think about the fallacy of the excluded middle and of false dichotomies. It’s rarely the case that there are only two alternatives, or two choices. It may be presented that way (the fork in the road) but there are probably other paths, such as walking straight down the middle or to the left or right of those forked paths! When faced with a fork, I want to take a step back and ask how many additional branches can be created — and do this before even beginning to evaluate the choices. This is the approach I’ve taken in working on Minerva, Foundry, and now Active Learning Sciences.

We are blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

Ms. MacKenzie Scott. I would love to talk to her about the importance of educational innovation that is based on the science of learning and the need for empirically driven experimentation to devise new and better educational programs.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

I’m a guest on various podcasts. We’ll be posting those on our website (www.activelearningsciences.com).

Thank you so much for these insights! This was so inspiring!