Cultivating Curiosity

CHAPTER 2SHAPING THE METHODOLOGY

The origins of what grew into the Doreen Nelson Method of Design-Based Learning with its 6½ Steps of Backwards Thinking™ was rooted in my conviction that students could learn to express themselves and become decision-makers able to envision the future and advocate for a healthy, equitable society. What I had to figure out first, however, was key: how to teach students to access the higher-level thinking associated with creative and critical thinking so that they would achieve Non-Specific Transfer of Learning, agilely using and reusing concepts and big topics in different settings. (Much later, I faced a bigger hurdle: how to teach what I had discovered to other teachers.)

I researched learning theory for ...