Metaphors, Free Speech, and How We Learn with Barbara Oakley

Barbara Oakley shares about her course, Speak Freely, Think Critically, and gives practical advice about teaching on episode 592 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

If you look at free speech from a historical and neuroscientific perspective, you can get a much better sense of people’s motivations and the continuing patterns that we see through history of people being really pro free speech until it affects them.
-Barbara Oakley

Really intelligent people find it very hard to be flexible, to change their mind.
-Barbara Oakley

Learning is hard. Your job as a professor, as a teacher, is to help make it understandable, to help make it easier.
-Barbara Oakley

Resources

• Speak Freely, Think Critically: The Free Speech Balance Act
• Sway.AI
• Barbara Oakley – Coursera Instructor Profile
• Learning How to Learn
• Think Critically: Deductive Reasoning and Mental Models
• Barbara Oakley’s Website
• Barbara Oakley – Wikipedia
• Academy of Ideas: The Hidden Neuroscience of Democracy
• A Mind for Numbers, by Barbara Oakley
• Retrieval Practice (retrievalpractice.org)
• Obsidian
• How and Why I Use Obsidian, by Robert Talbert
• SmarterHumans.ai