CTE Newsletter - Jan/Feb 2003 (Vol 15, No 3)
Hilton Co-chairs Speak on "Memorable" Teaching
Jim Gilmore and Joe Pine, widely known authors and business consultants, jointly hold the Helen LeBaron Hilton Endowed Chair, College of Family and Consumer Sciences, for 2002-03. Their ideas, on how businesses can reimagine their customer relations in the emerging "experience economy," have been adopted by professionals in many fields. Here, Gilmore and Pine answer questions from , Associate Professor of English and CTE Associate Director, on how their ideas might translate to the classroom.
Q. Your book, The Experience Economy, promises to help businesspeople find "new ways to add value to their enterprises." It has been hailed as a blueprint that can be applied in many professional settings. Do you think it's possible to "add value" to the enterprise of classroom teaching by means of the ideas in this book?
PINE: Absolutely! Think about it - being in a college classroom is an experience, or at least should be. Students spend their time anticipating an engaging experience - but is it one? Does the teacher make it memorable? Does he make it fun, or merely pedantic? Is he interested in each individual student, or in merely hear himself speak? What care and attention is given to the classroom environment - to make it a better venue for learning? Do students value being there? Students will learn only when they are engaged, and they will be engaged only when the teacher stages a compelling experience.
Q. One of your suggestions for businesses is to "ing the thing," to make their good or service part of a compelling experience. In your view, should teaching and learning be "inged" things? Or are they already, by definition? Do you have any suggestions as to how teachers can "ing the thing" they teach?
GILMORE: Let's begin by pointing out that experiences are most commonly expressed, in English, in terms of gerunds - fishing, golfing, and skiing, for example. So "teaching" and "learning" are in a sense indeed already inged. Our main point here, however, is that it is the using of any thing that is the experience. Our provocation to "ing the thing" aims at encouraging thinking in terms of ing words when designing experiences. There's a twofold method to do this. First, examine existing ing words that are already part of one's discipline - but that may be easily overlooked - as a rich source for thinking about experiences. Second, introduce new ing words for envisioning completely new experiences. The objective is to help uncover more compelling ways for staging an experience.
PINE: One of my favorite teachers on teaching is Tim Gallwey, author of The Inner Game of Tennis, The Inner Game of Golf, and most recently The Inner Game of Work. We've seen him use "apple-catching" as a means to ing his teaching about how people learn. He'll quickly and successfully teach someone how to catch a ball, by (a) substituting an apple for the ball, and (b) focusing the person on whether each toss was higher or lower than previous one - versus the throw and catch itself. Once they're focusing on the secondary measure of height, the primary task of catching is learned quite easily. All teachers need to be looking for such ways to turn seemingly mundane elements of coursework into better ing experiences. How, for example, can textbook-reading be made a better experience? Paper-writing? Exam-taking?
GILMORE: My father is an English professor. He employs "question-submitting" as a powerful teaching technique. He invites students to submit questions for mid-term and final exams. Questions deemed sufficiently probing or insightful are then included in the exams. Students who craft a question that passes Dad's muster have an obvious leg up on the answer. More importantly, the technique encourages students to master the subject matter.
Q. You mention edutainment as a term describing an experience "straddling the realms of education and entertainment." For some university teachers, edutainment is a fairly innocuous term denoting educational software and the like. For others, though, it's a very negative term. What is your take on "edutainment"; especially at a university?
PINE: Actually, edutainment is a quite powerful term, if understood completely. Those who practice it recognize that an educational experience isn't enough to truly engage students in today's Experience Economy. They also must be entertained, to stay alert - or even awake - long enough to learn. Combining education with entertainment is not something that should be relegated just to software, but to every student interaction. And the more frequently these interactions are mediated via technology, the more important face-to-face experiences will become.
GILMORE: Entertainment has always been needed in education, of course. A bored student is really no student at all - and teachers have always competed against daydreaming and doodling. But laptops and other wireless devices that students increasingly bring into the classroom now offer entertainment options to distract students like never before. So the teachers must entertain in order to educate.
PINE: But even those two are not enough! They focus on absorbing the experience into the individual, either passively with entertainment, or actively with education. There are two other experience realms where the individuals are immersed in the experience: escapist - where they are actively immersed, such as when skiing down a mountain or golfing by the sea, and esthetic - passive immersion, such as walking in a national park or visiting an art museum. The most robust, compelling, and engaging experiences are those that combine not just two, as with edutainment, but "hit the sweet spot" in the middle of all four experience realms. That's the real challenge to teaching today, when students growing up in the Experience Economy are used to encountering such experiences!
Q. What, in your view, should teachers do to co-mingle these four realms in the engaged classroom? How might educators create and maintain such a "sweet spot" for learning?
GILMORE: A shorthand way of thinking about each realm provides a clue: enjoy, learn, go, be. So create a classroom environment where students can be true to themselves, open to discussion, with applications to their own lives - or wannabe lives upon graduation. Engage them with pertinent activities where they immediately apply what they learn - including escaping the classroom to go to other real-world settings. Provide a lecture and discussion that they can enjoy, with entertaining examples and, yes, even outright jokes - but that relate to the lesson, for only then can students learn.
PINE: While it's not easy for a teacher to integrate all four of these realms into one memorable experience, the rewards of doing so will be engaged and therefore educated students.
Q. Later in your book, you mention "mass customization" and offering specific, particular ("customer-unique") experiences to customers. Can the idea of mass customization be applied to colleges and universities, where at least one purpose of education is to prepare students for professions?
PINE: At college as in life, every student is unique, and deserves to get exactly the education he needs to prepare for his chosen profession. Mass customizing its curriculum, classes, lessons, and extracurricular activity is becoming a must. Now, the key to Mass Customization is modularity - a system of modules, like LEGO building bricks, that can be linked together in different ways for different customers. So that means that the college needs to modularize its curriculum - though some modules necessarily would be mandatory to provide the general base learning all students might need - as well as its classes, its lessons across classes, and its extracurricular activities so that they all can be used to create a student-unique college experiences.
GILMORE: One thing every mass customizer needs is a design tool, to figure out what customers need on the one hand, and then get that information back into operations to create different offerings for each customer. A curriculum catalog can be viewed as a rudimentary design tool, but colleges need to do more, particularly in understanding the real aspirations of each individual student, so that the college experience can be mass customized to enable each student to achieve their aspirations. That's really no longer just an experience - it's a transformation, the fifth and final economic offering in our Progression of Economic Value.
PINE: We like how John Quelch, the former dean of the London Business School, put it to Fast Company a few years ago. He said, "We're not in the education business. We're in the transformation business. We expect everyone who participates in the program at the London Business School - whether it's for three days or two years - to be transformed by the experience." Those colleges that follow the LBS' lead need to, first, diagnose their students' individual aspirations with some sort of a design tool, then put together the right set of modular experiences to help those students achieve their aspirations, and then follow-through on that transformation both at school and after graduation. That would then enable the college to maintain a lifelong relationship with each individual student, enable those students to gain lifelong learning, and to give back to the college through lifelong contributions.
