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The history of religion in American higher education can be divided into three periods or phases: Protestant, Privatized, and Pluriform. During the Protestant era (from the colonial period to about 1900), religion and character formation were central concerns even for schools not associated with a specific church or denomination. During the Privatized era (most of the twentieth century), religion was generally pushed into the private sphere of personal preference as the work of teaching and learning focused increasingly on objectivity and practicality. We are now living in a new Pluriform era in which various types of religion are prominent in cultural discourse. Religion’s “return” has been facilitated by several broad developments within higher education, including new emphases on multiculturalism, professional studies, and student-centered learning. The increasing religious diversity of the nation has also been a factor in making religion more visible on college and university campuses.

We offer a working definition of active learning in which learning is active to the extent that it engages the cognitive processes known to be involved in comprehension, reasoning, memory, and pattern perception; it is not the same as student-centered or collaborative learning. To maximize students' opportunities for active learning, we use a variety of pedagogical techniques and technological supports. Pedagogically, we often use "engagement prompts," which are questions or challenges for all students to consider for the duration of an activity, even when they are not contributing. We also use collaborative learning in small groups; short, summative reflection essays; and fast-paced relay-style activities that require students to attend very carefully to the substance of their classmates' contributions. Technologically, we record the amount of time each student speaks to ensure that we call on all students approximately equally, and we use a tagging system to track the technique used in every activity so that later programmatic assessment will be more robust.

In 1977, when the OC program was brand-new, and for a number of years thereafter, we shared the excitement and the work, both as parents and as teachers. We are now living in different states, working in very different kinds of schools. Judy is a high school principal in a large public high school in Washington State. Mimi is a fourth-grade teacher in an independent school in South Carolina that is associated with a major school-restructuring initiative (the Coalition of Essential Schools). In our efforts to contribute to reform in our classrooms and schools, we find that we are returning, about 20 years later, to the basic philosophy that directed our OC experience. In many ways, what we learned in the OC, both in terms of instructional practices and in terms of change processes, is giving us the confidence we need to proceed in our new settings. Personal experiences and the general principles of the OC—along with increasingly compelling research about how children learn that questions the way schools are traditionally organized and how we think about curriculum and instruction—have helped us organize and promote new programs on both sides of the country. The changes we are working on are not simple ones. We are looking at ways to integrate across disciplines, combining English, physics, and history into an integrated block. Instead of chopping school days into isolated blocks of time, we are exploring ways of lengthening these blocks of time and trying more flexible schedules. We are looking at designing work for children that covers fewer things in greater depth, through more focused inquiry. Believing that children will learn better if they can make connections, we seek ways to challenge students not just to memorize material but to apply it as well. We are working to make it possible for individual students to carry out research and to present their work before a critical audience. These changes have the potential to challenge the sacrosanct purpose of most schools: to prepare students for the next level and to get them into colleges.

We have learned many lessons in the course of implementing the Minerva curriculum and pedagogy. One of the most striking lessons is how important it is for both faculty and students to be open to unlearning many previous assumptions and habits. For example, we have identified what we call the “illusion of learning”—which occurs when faculty and students believe that the more notes students take during a lecture, the more they have learned. Yet, the evidence is clear: Lectures are not an effective way to learn, and pale in comparison to active learning. Although active learning often takes more time than lectures and requires much more intellectual engagement from both faculty and students, it provides lasting benefits. Similarly, we have discovered that active learning requires a different view of what is an appropriate goal for in-class experiences–not information transmission and memorization but rather the internalization of skills, concepts and ways to use knowledge. In this chapter, we summarize many of the assumptions and habits that both faculty and students need to unlearn in order to learn effectively at Minerva.

An enormous amount is now known about how humans process and store information. This chapter organizes that knowledge into a set of 16 principles, which we have used systematically to help students master the material they are taught. The principles are organized under two very general maxims: Think it Through (the more you think something through, paying attention to what you are doing, the more likely you are later to remember it) and Make and Use Associations (associations not only help us organize material so that it is easy to store in memory but also give us the hooks that will allow us later to dig the material out of memory, to recall it). The 16 principles can be invoked in different combinations by using different application techniques, such as mnemonics and explaining material to yourself.