Dr. Valerie Coffman shares her personal struggles with infertility and loss which threatened her identity as a woman. More importantly, she reflects on the opportunities for spiritual growth through profound disappointment.

Cardiothoracic surgeon, Dr. Nathan Smith, as a college sophomore experienced the liberation that comes with transformational learning. In this podcast he explains how a focus on understanding and deep learning informs his Christian faith as well as his life as a surgeon.

The essentials of learning are the same for homeschoolers and medical residents. Dr. Joy Smith, pediatrician and internal medicine specialist distill the essentials of learning.

What if students could enter college already immersed in the disciplines and joys of deep learning?

A proper view of business is centered on the biblical concept of stewardship. Join me as we explore this vital idea.

Sam Saldivar is the child of migrant laborers who picked cotton and packed thirteen people into a house with one real bedroom.

Harmonizing personal freedom and the biblical law of love through the discipline of public health.

Public health has extended life spans in the U.S. by 30 years over the past 125 years through things like clean water and childhood vaccines. We'll explore the transformative effects of this little known discipline.

History is a means of answering why questions about human events through an examination of documents and artifacts. These are pieces of evidence that are used to construct a compelling explanatory narrative. We all love a good story and history reconstructs the ones that actually happened (as close as possible)!

History is not advanced Trivial Pursuit! Rather, history is a way of thinking about the past that seeks to construct an objective, verifiable narrative. You may not think you like history, but we all love stories!

Pedagogy is often viewed as a personal choice and untouchable—a kind of third rail. The SITS model aims to transform faculty into clear incisive thinkers who embrace transformed pedagogy in order to optimize deep learning in their students.

Teaching as delivery of information is the expectation of students and the default for faculty. But telling is not teaching. Real teaching engages students’ minds and transforms them.

The 3-legged stool view of teaching and learning has become three intensive summers of faculty development in the Summer Institute in Teaching Science (SITS) at Bob Jones University.

In this episode the three founders (aka three musketeers) of SITS discuss the influences that moved them away from transmission (teaching as telling) and to teaching as cognitive transformation.

Answering a question isn’t complete until there is a thorough questioning of the near-term implications and the long-term consequences. Deep understanding requires cognitive harmony between explanations, answers, implications, and consequences.

The most powerful strategy for answering questions is asking questions. This query approach especially probes assumptions, ideas, and the relevant fact base. It sharpens thinking considerably and moves us toward deep understanding because we’ve come to know what our answer is based on.

In this episode I’ll show you how to use your point of view and a recognition of your motive—what you are trying to accomplish with your thinking—to craft big questions that provoke deep learning that leads to satisfying explanations.

Questions are the engines that drive thinking. Exploration through questioning is native learning mode—just remember your 4-year-old self—and you can go back!

Real thinking involves chewing on a compelling question. Powerful answers invoke cause and effect. Those answers have immediate implications as well as long-term consequences and both of those lead to actions.

Thinking is driven by questions. Questions are answered through the power of patterns recorded in our conceptual frameworks. Our concepts, in turn, are accountable to our assumptions and fact base.