It’s been a couple of days since I initially wrote up some notes about preparing to co-teach Sustainability Design Thinking this summer. Another thought just popped up. It relates to the YCISL equation:
KI + EI -> LI
For this equation, we posit that the limiting factor is EI (emotional intelligence) which explains why there is so little LI (leadership intelligence) around. KI (knowledge intelligence) is relatively abundant, but variable in quantity and quality (thinking for a moment about Salman Khan’s idea about teaching for mastery as well as Jef Raskin’s thoughts about issues with knowledge).
That said, if we are to push EQ with regards to the course, we need to utilize the students’ existing KI as a base resource. There are two channels we could use: (1) academic learning, especially recent learning, and (2) personal experience. We should have students list their academic topics in the past year (active recall) and significant personal experiences in the past few months (waggle dance reasoning). Students could then research any of the items on the list to deepen their understanding. This may quickly lead to a useful KI so that we can move on to focus on EI.