Notes from Dr. Evans’s 3M Fellow Lecture on Teaching Innovation

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend a workshop by an award winning professor, Dr. Greg Evans, about his lessons learned about teaching. In this post, I attempt to summarize the key takeaways for educators to apply in their own teaching. You can find his full lecture slides at the bottom of this post or here.

His workshop lecture was broken down into two big buckets – my path and our path.

My Path in Pedagogy and Course Design as an Educator

Dr. Evans began the lecture by reflecting on his own journey as an educator and what he learned about pedagogy and course design. The key takeaways from this reflection were;

• educators must learn about learning
• active learning is a teaching pedagogy works
• instead of quantity of content educators must focus on the quality of experience around the content
• educators should focus on integrated learning experiences rather than force-feeding content

Our path as educators

Near the end of the lecture, Dr. Evans, shifted the focus from his class to the broad landscape of education. He shared his learnings and guidance for educators to innovate for the future of education.

The key takeaways from this part of his lecture were;

• society wants more broadly prepared students
• there is no such thing as higher or “hire” education
• we can maintain our competitive advantage against new entrants entering the field

Dr. Evans concluded by emphasizing the fact that there is no denying that the higher-education landscape is evolving. To change for the better, we must closely look at how we teach, what we teach, and who we want to graduate.

He remained optimistic that there are many opportunities for physical brick-and-mortar schools to innovate and remain relevant to students. However, did accept and acknowledge that the cultural change of shifting from delivering knowledge to facilitating learning for professors remains a challenge.

Download: Dr. Greg Evans 3M Fellow Lecture Slides (PDF)