Kurt Lewin (management scholar) once noted there’s nothing so practical as good theory. That said, there’s a lot of bad theory out there. Professors at universities are paid to add to the pool of knowledge in the world. There are thousands of professors, each with their own VABEs (Values, Assumptions, Beliefs, and Expectations about the way the world is or should be) struggling to find something new and important. Some of them use bad ideas, some use bad research techniques, some of them even lie about their results. Blind reviewed journals are the main way the academy tries to sift through it all. And most practitioners in management that I knew over 40 years never read the academic journals. They would read the popular business books—which were summaries of research studies. For example, In Search of Excellence, Good to Great, Seven Habits (not research based but very popular), Leadership Challenge and several others.
So, these professors in class push their preferred theories. I was in class listening to Steve Covey teach his “7 habits” of highly effective people long before he published his best-selling book. But whether its management or STEM or astrophysics, professors profess—and they profess the theories they know and (maybe) understand. AND the usual method of professing is lecturing. THAT is generally the kiss of death to learning because it’s one way, often monotonic, and goes at the pace of the instructor, not the students.
At Harvard Business School and Virginia’s Darden School we used case method extensively because we believed that when students do most of the talking, when students are presented with actual current problems and wrestle with them aloud, when students read theory that could apply to the day’s problem(s), and when students’ peers react to what one say, people are highly engaged, learning as fast as they, not the instructor, can, and likely to remember more in what one author calls “deep learning.”
“Practical Life” includes launching missiles and satellites, building autonomous vehicles, processing food, managing waste liquids, watching the climate and its effects on humans, etc. All of which are full of theories, some solid, some not so much. One develops a theory about how something works and then tests it. Throwing virgins into volcanoes proved to be a bad theory about how to affect the weather. We encounter theories everyday in everyday life.
A good education will help you sift through them and settle on the ones that have repeatable, demonstrable data to support them. No system is 100% efficient, even education. Lifelong learners have to listen to some junk while searching for the true nuggets in life. Rather than being bored by someone else's theory, learn to think logically and critically and see if you can understand and then debunk or appreciate by apprehending it.
Theory and practice are inextricably intertwined.
So, these professors in class push their preferred theories. I was in class listening to Steve Covey teach his “7 habits” of highly effective people long before he published his best-selling book. But whether its management or STEM or astrophysics, professors profess—and they profess the theories they know and (maybe) understand. AND the usual method of professing is lecturing. THAT is generally the kiss of death to learning because it’s one way, often monotonic, and goes at the pace of the instructor, not the students.
At Harvard Business School and Virginia’s Darden School we used case method extensively because we believed that when students do most of the talking, when students are presented with actual current problems and wrestle with them aloud, when students read theory that could apply to the day’s problem(s), and when students’ peers react to what one say, people are highly engaged, learning as fast as they, not the instructor, can, and likely to remember more in what one author calls “deep learning.”
“Practical Life” includes launching missiles and satellites, building autonomous vehicles, processing food, managing waste liquids, watching the climate and its effects on humans, etc. All of which are full of theories, some solid, some not so much. One develops a theory about how something works and then tests it. Throwing virgins into volcanoes proved to be a bad theory about how to affect the weather. We encounter theories everyday in everyday life.
A good education will help you sift through them and settle on the ones that have repeatable, demonstrable data to support them. No system is 100% efficient, even education. Lifelong learners have to listen to some junk while searching for the true nuggets in life. Rather than being bored by someone else's theory, learn to think logically and critically and see if you can understand and then debunk or appreciate by apprehending it.
Theory and practice are inextricably intertwined.
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