Ladies & gents, my name is Brandon Stover, and I’m the founder of Plato University. Welcome to Theory into Action.
Theory into Action is designed to help you turn your wisdom into actionable education. Learn how to create online courses, design learning experiences, and build educational programs so your knowledge can impact thousands of people.
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The core pedagogy of Plato University (fancy word for how we teach) is Mastery Based Learning. We'll cover MBL later but today I want to help you understand the 3 phases of learning embedded in our pedagogy so you can use it too.
The 3 phase of learning are:
These phases actually map onto an ancient way of learning that gave us a model for how to learn anything.
In classical education, which was first used in ancient Greece, people learned concepts by going through grammar, logic, and rhetoric, as explained explained in Plato's dialouges. These later became known as the trivium during the Middle Ages.
In the trivium:
Why would we use something based on a teaching method from over 2000 years ago?
You mean, besides the fact that it helped teach cultures that became the bedrock of western civilization...
Or the fact that this is how the brain creates neural networks of concepts in our head...
Because this method not only teaches you what to learn, but how to learn it, and more importantly WHY to learn it.
Education should not just teach students what they should know, but to teach them how to learn things and ask relevant questions about the world around them.
And then take that even one step further, where most education falls short, of actually applying that learning in real life for your problems, your families problems, your works problems, your communities problems, your countries problems, your planet's problems.
Theory into Action - what is the concept, how does it relate to the me and the world, how do I apply it.
Before we dive deep into how to apply the 3 phases, let’s look at the high level. When you're creating a learning plan or outline for a course, organize your material into the 3 phases of learning:
Now let’s discover how each phase can be developed in our courses.
Your student's learning journey begins in the explore phase where they learn foundational knowledge.
Foundational knowledge is the knowledge that all other knowledge and understanding stems from, the basic building blocks or key principles of a skill or concept that will be used over and over and over again.
The main goal of the explore stage is to let them get their feet wet and develop some hands on feel for any skill or topic that they are learning.
If you remember back to the Trivium of classical education, this is known as the grammar of a subject, which answers the question of the who, what, where, and when of any subject.
Why start with exploration?
To design exploration into your courses, take the following steps:
All of these items become the base of what is included in your course.
The second phase of your student's learning journey is engage, where students are actively recalling knowledge, practicing skills and engaging in experiences that form relationships between foundational concepts.
The goal at this stage is to understand concepts one level deeper. Focus switches from getting a feel for the topic to studying how things work to build up progressively more accurate mental models of core concepts that they can apply later. They understand not only how to use a skill, but also how and why that skill is constructed the way.
In the Trivium, this is known as the logic, which answers the why of a subject and establishing valid relationships among facts yielding a systematic understanding of the subject.
Why have students engage with the material?
To design engagement into your courses, take the following steps:
First, present foundational concepts with the use of active learning techniques.
Next, have students practice their new knowledge or skills through exercises, projects, or activities, strengthening neural connections of previously learned material, moving it from short-term memory to long-term memory.
Finally, have them practice the foundational material first and start building associations with new material as they continue learning, creating a larger neural network in your brain.
Your student's third phase is execution, where the emphasis is on mastery, applying skills to higher level concepts, new contexts, and producing new and original works.
In the classical Trivium, this was known as rhetoric, which provides how knowledge and understanding of a subject are applied.
Why have students execute skills and demonstrate mastery?
While students engaged in deliberate practice of foundational concepts in the last phase, they were converting declarative knowledge (facts, concepts, words) into procedural knowledge (steps that can be repeated over and over again in application).
The process of becoming an expert of a domain, or a master, requires converting a lot of declarative knowledge into automatic, unconscious procedural knowledge.
But the true master is not only able to apply their knowledge in the context in which they learned it, but can apply it in entirely novel situations which is known as transfer.
So by having students demonstrate they can apply the skill to a new situation, we can be pretty confident they have grasped the information and will be able to use it in their life, work, society, ect.
To design engagement into your courses, take the following steps:
Have students continue practicing the skill until they are able to retrieve information easily and apply the skill to solving problems and reaching goals in real life.
Next, have students complete a final project associated with an outcome they care about:
Any of those would be examples of engagement.
We've learned each phase, why they matter, and maybe how we might use them. Let's pull it all together now. How would we design a course with these?
I'll walk you through the example of how we might build a course teaching students about Web 3.0.
Recall our 3 phases: Explore, Engage, Execute.
To help them explore, I'm going to teach them the foundational concepts about Web 3.0
Next, to help them engage with this material, I'm going to create lessons with activities to practice theses concepts like:
During this practice they are learning specific relationships such as how to use specific blockchain protocols to create smart contracts, to illicit an outcome from a groups of users
Finally, to have them execute on the material & demonstrate mastery of it, I would have them solve a problem in real life that they care about.
For example, maybe they care about the governance of the United States of America. They could do a project using the blockchain to develop a token which persuades people to organize together into a DAO in order to take a collective action like purchasing the constitution of the United States of America.
(By the way, that was a real thing.)
In this example we have moved our students from learning the foundational concepts of Web 3.0, how they interact with each other, and how they might apply these concepts in real life to create an outcome they care about.
Figuring out how to structure your course so that students can actually learn and apply the material can be confusing.
If you remember the 3 phases: Explore, Engage, Execute, you can rest assured your course will make an impact.
If you want help creating a course this way, use the link below to schedule a free call with me and I can help you to turn your wisdom into actionable education.
Let's build something great together.
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