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.

The core of your thinking is the combination of point-of-view, motivation (what you are trying to accomplish with the thinking), and questions you think this perspective can help to answer.

Great conversations are driven by empathetic listening that results in good questions. Good questions encourage the other person to open up and share. Good questions give the questioner an opportunity to learn from another person’s life experience.

Principles are the power tools of thinking. Learn how to construct principles that satisfy your need for things to make sense. When something makes sense you won’t have to struggle to remember it or to use it in problem-solving.

Patterns don’t simply emerge on their own. They are the fruit of “creative scrabbling” through Subsidiary-Focal Integration (SFI). SFI is the model of knowing proposed and developed by physical chemist Michael Polanyi as a corrective to the positivism that pervades science. For Polanyi knowledge is a personal journey to reality, not an encounter with impersonal brute facts.

Creativity is just connecting things" was Steve Jobs summary. Learn how to create transformative patterns through connecting concepts.

Finding a pattern in a collection of specifics through induction is the essence of the transformative insight that we call the "aha" moment. Learn how to increase the frequency and wattage of your lightbulb moments.