Seven Essentials for Business Success

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

Seven Essentials for Business Success, by George Seidel. Since we aren’t in the world of business, we found Dr. Seidel’s description of the world of business education, and the philosophy of great professor-teachers in business, to be intriguing.  The discussion is filled with nuggets of thought-provoking, teaching-related information we’d never encountered before, as for example: 

“In 1995, Robert Coles, a professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at Harvard University, published an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled ‘The Disparity Between Intellect and Character.’ He wrote the essay after meeting with a student who was distraught after another student propositioned her on more than one occasion. She recounted to Professor Coles that she had ‘taken two moral-reasoning courses with [the other student], and I’m sure he’s gotten As in both of them—and look at how he behaves with me, and I’m sure with others.’ She went on to note, ‘I’ve been taking all these philosophy courses, and we talk about what’s true, what’s important, what’s good. Well, how do you teach people to be good?’”

Now that’s an important question for us as teachers!

Pat Bowden with a great review of a mystery MOOC

Our favorite MOOC reviewer, Pat Bowden, gives a great review of an awesome new course.  Click the link to find out who stars. 🙂

Class Central Updated Their Best Online Courses of All Time

Here’s the list! (And Barb has five courses on the list. 🙂 )

A visionary approach to mastery learning in K-12 education

We’re happy to announce that we’ve posted our first (optional) interview video for Uncommon Sense Teaching. It’s with Dr. Cory Steiner of Northern Cass School District #97, in Hunter, North Dakota, about his groundbreaking work in shifting the school district over to a mastery learning approach. This is truly a visionary to education, and you’ll love hearing Dr. Steiner’s insights. (Also note Barb’s flustered realization in the outtake that she HAD to film the discussion with Dr. Steiner!)

MOOC of the Month

We’d also like to bring your attention to Professor George Seidel’s masterful MOOC Successful Negotiation, which is amongst Coursera’s most popular MOOCs, with over a million enrollees.  Everybody needs negotiating skills, and learning from a MOOC is actually much easier and better than learning from a book.  Enjoy!

Perfect practice with Linda Langeheine’s “Stop! Attack!” Approach

For those of you who are learning to play a musical instrument, you might find Linda Langeheine’s three minute video on how to tackle and correct mistakes to be useful.  This seems perfectly in accord with how the procedural system learns.

Voice Coaching

One skill that is often not discussed with relation to online learning is the importance of voice. If you suspect your voice might be harsh or grating to listen to (most people are unaware of problems with their voice), you might wish to take a look at Nathalie Andrew’s Heartspark Voice and see if her coaching services might be helpful for you.

Don’t Forget the Fall 2021 One-Day Virtual On Course National Conference!

Barb will be giving the opening keynote for the On Course National Conference on October 8th. The closing session will be given by Jonathan Brennan, author of the excellent Online Teaching with Zoom. Whether you’ve been working with On Course strategies for years or just care deeply about the success of your students, you’ll find this is a powerful professional development conference. 

Register here, and learn!  

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Mindshift—the book behind the MOOC
• The critically acclaimed Uncommon Sense Teaching (and MOOC!)
• The newest on learning: the book Learn Like a Pro (and MOOC!)
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• And Learning How to Learn, a book (and MOOC!) for kids and parents.