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. This episode is an interview with the Track 2 faculty cohort in the Summer Institute in Teaching Science 2023.

The 3-legged stool is the compact embodiment of a comprehensive model of teaching and learning. In this episode we explore the development of clear thinking teachers through an interview with Dr. Timothy Tittiris, a participant in Track 1 of the Summer Institute in Teaching Science 2023.

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.

Three university faculty began a quest to reform teaching and learning at their institution. The result was a three-legged stool which has proven to be a powerful tool in faculty and curriculum development at all educational levels.

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.

Nothing is more fundamental to deep and durable learning than compelling questions. In this episode I’ll show you how to use point of view and a recognition of your motive—what you are trying to accomplish with your thinking—to craft big questions. The best questions are a quest for principles which unlock our understanding and give us the power to act and to predict the consequences of our actions.

 Questions are the engines that drive thinking. The better the question the deeper the resultant learning because you really care about unearthing the answer. 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 interaction of necessary assumptions, a fact base to which thinking is accountable, and—most of all—a conceptual framework. Conceptual frameworks harness the power of patterns to look for parallels that leverage past learning to solve present problems.