Transformational Education > A new way of teaching
Howard Stevenson on studying Orth's Book
Transcript
It seemed like a fun game. I remember going back my first day after they handed me the big case package, and saying, "They can't be serious because it's too much work. You can't possibly do this all." And so you figured out how you played the game. There was a book called The Learning Climate, the First Year Section, or The First Class at Harvard Business School by Charlie Orth. And you went over and read that and said, "Oh, this is the game they want you to play. Let's learn to play the game."
It was well-circulated. I think a lot of people read it but didn't believe it. I believed it. [Laughs] It made it a lot easier. Instead of struggling to learn the rules sort of inductively you said, "Okay, this is the game they want you to play." You'd better be prepared to start off the class. You don't need to do everything in-depth, but you'd better be able to respond to a question in-depth. And if you don't—if they don't ask the question you want, you can sometimes show depth and they'll—you can lead the class in a different way.
Then you'll learn to read the blackboards, and see some of the people like C. Roland Christensen set up the blackboard in such a way you could see he'd left a hole. The game was to figure out what he'd filled in in the hole. So there were a lot of different signals that were sent that made it a very fun game to play.