Learning to Teach at MIT: Minimal Instruction, Maximum Exploration in AEC Learning

I was approached by a former professor of mine to teach a design class or design studio that was a mandatory studio within the progression of undergraduate design education at MIT. And he gave me an idea of what he wanted to accomplish and said, okay, go do something with that. And so I built this little mini curriculum, and I'd never really done it before. And this is very true to Angela fashion. I didn't go and read a whole bunch of books about how do you teach I just tried to think about what are the things that you really need to learn? What are the complicated things you need to learn? And I ended up with, actually, I think a lesson plan or structure that I'm still actually kind of proud of today. That was very much about minimal instruction and maximum exploration and learning and also setting it up in a way And I didn't realize until, you know, sometimes when I reflect on this, I didn't realize how this shaped again, the things I do now. It was basically a structure of 4 really short projects. And when I mean short, like 2-week projects, and then one final one at the end. And each one of the 4 focused on a couple of things. One was a very much skill tools kind of thing. And the other one was more thematic around a design problem. So designing an addition to the Philip Johnson House he did for himself as his thesis in Cambridge, and at the same time, learning how to actually draw plans, sections, and elevations. And so those two things you had to learn in those two weeks. So quick intro, and then just a lot of one-on-one critique. And invariably, every student would do really well on one of these. At least, and not so great on one of them at least. But what they got to do with the final piece was to do it again in a different setting and put the pieces together. So it was sort of about practicing the pieces in a, in a safe way where you could fail, and we expected people to not be perfect, but then be able to take those learnings and actually fold them into this bigger thing, then, then weighed much more than everything else. In a lot of ways, looking today at how I think about learning and learning by doing is very much about that. It's the experience of experiencing what it feels like when it's not going well, experiencing that thing you're bumping up against that you have to find a way around. When you do that in theory, you have a very different way of absorbing and then being able to redeploy that kind of knowledge. Than if you're, if you're absorbing it in a lecture format. And so that was pretty formative for me.

Yeah. I, I've come across the phrase desirable difficulty a bunch of times when learning about— so you have, somebody has to reach or stretch. It's like weight training almost. You have to lift something heavier than you've lifted before in order to grow.

Yeah, right. Exactly. It has to be hard.