Crescendo
A mini-workshop experience for instructors
The Crescendo of EML
a mini-workshop experience designed to delight and surprise
The Crescendo of EML offers your campus face-to-face or virtual sessions on entrepreneurially minded learning (EML)!
Explore the compelling reasons why EML is so transformative for students, student engagement, and learning outcomes. Learn multiple examples and techniques for building EML into any classroom.
Download the Crescendo catalog.
- Each session can be offered as a modular, 50-minute experience. This offering is 100% complimentary from The Kern Family Foundation.
- Each topic is self-contained. Instructors are welcome to attend sessions according to their availability and interest.
Plus, many of these sessions will appeal to a wider audience beyond engineers! For example, The Curious Power of Curiosity, The Student Perception of Value, and The Science of Student Attention all contain ideas, pedagogy, and applications that apply to the general higher-education classroom. Please feel free to invite other departments (science, math, education, etc.) as your location and interests allow.
Get Started
- Contact Ranen McLanahan to schedule an in-person workshop day on your campus, complimentary of The Kern Family Foundation.
- Mix and match 3-5 topics from our modular 50-minute topical collection below.
- Schedule topics around instructor teaching schedules.
- Invite instructors to participate according to their availability and interests.
- Watch instructors be surprised and delighted by a selection of sessions that are 100% unique, engaging, and impactful.
Crescendo Catalog
The Value Proposition of EML
A quick start guide for why EML is so transformative for students, student engagement, and learning outcomes. Learn about innovations by bisociation, hear the Kern Family Foundation story, see the engineering gulf, and discover the power and external resources in the acronyms KFF, KEEN, EU, and EUFD. This session contains novel ideas and perspectives on EML. It is appropriate for those at all EML experience levels.
The Curious Power of Curiosity
How often do we realize the transformative power of a single curious question? This premier session offers actionable classroom techniques to nurture student curiosity. During the session, you’ll engage in hands-on “experiential learning” to better explore your own brain’s mechanisms of curiosity, and elevate your teaching by fully tapping into this essential human drive.
The EML Innovation Creation Workshop
What makes something EML? How do you change the way students think while also still teaching technical skills? This highly interactive session will present some rules of thumb, ideas, and methods for creating your very own EM learning intervention for your own course. Note: although this session can be completed in 50 minutes, an extended 75-minute session will give instructors more time to co-create together.
The Student Perception of Value
If different students care about different things, what does that mean for creating value in the classroom? In this DEI-friendly offering, come learn about the student perception of value, and how we can use perception to create teaching leverage for ourselves and our topics.
The Surprising Consequences of Self-Awareness
Did you know there are two distinct types of self-awareness and that these can be understood entirely independently of each other? Also, does an increase in expertise and power make someone more self-aware or less self-aware? Come learn about the four categories of self-awareness, how it can change the trajectory of a career, the surprising consequences of expertise and power, and the data-driven recommendations about what it can mean for you, personally, as well as what it means for your students.
The Less-Stress Grading Structure
This more advanced topic is recommended as a later topic, or even scheduled as a virtual lunch-and-learn in the months following a face-to-face workshop day.
Does it matter what grading structure you choose? For example, can the choice of a grading structure:
- Put the emphasis on learning rather than on merely passing tests, quizzes, and exams?
- Improve general assessment accuracy?
- Increase the percentage of on-time student submissions?
- Substantially reduce the instructor's grading workload?
- Easily provide students with useful, instant feedback?
- Get the lower quartile to actually look at where they made a mistake on homework?
- Reduce student stress throughout your entire course?
Come learn about this novel method, the theory behind it, and the lessons learned from its implementation.
The Science of Human Attention
Student attention can be slippery to pin down. It flows and ebbs throughout the day, week, and semester. Sometimes, when we need to capture it most, it also becomes the most vaporous and difficult. So, what are the mechanics behind human attention? Are there ways we can capture it consistently through EML? And how can we use EML in our face-to-face and virtual classrooms? This highly experiential session explores the science of human attention in a variety of ways.
Escaping the Classroom Mindset
Every setting, from the dentist's chair to an airport lounge, evokes distinct feelings and behaviors. Similarly, university classrooms often summon a predefined "classroom mindset" in students. But what is this mindset, and does it hinder dynamic learning? This workshop delves deep into understanding these ingrained patterns and equips you with innovative techniques to liberate your students from conventional classroom confines.
Sample Agenda
Meeting Location: [insert campus here]
Meeting Room: [insert meeting room here]
Sample Day I Schedule
- 4:00 p.m. The Value Proposition of EML
- a highly interactive session with EML stories, unique perspectives on what EML is, and how EML is so transformative for students, classrooms, and universities.
Sample Day II Schedule
- 9:00 a.m. The Curious Power of Curiosity
- the exploration of the two unique types of curiosity through interactive “experiential learning” activities along with actional classroom techniques.
- 10:00 a.m. The Science of Student Attention
- a visual exploration of the neuroscience of human attention with experiential activities (through art, music) with EML intervention ideas that are applicable to any classroom.
- 11:00 a.m. The Student Perception of Value
- a curious exploration on how student perception impacts engagement and learning with DEI-infused teaching strategies.
About the Speaker
Dr. A. L. Ranen McLanahan is a program director at the Kern Family Foundation. He started in industry working on a floating factory ship in Alaska in 1999. From there, he’s done computational modeling work, micro-electrical mechanical system design, and R&D work through a device prototyping and innovation center that he co-found in 2013. He has served as a faculty member of general and mechanical engineering for 12 years with the UW-Platteville Engineering Partnership and worked as an industrial consultant and research affiliate through his company Critical Flux LLC for the last six.
In 2016, Ranen was invited to the Wisconsin State Capitol to give a workshop on Solidarity to the Wisconsin Legislators at the state capitol. Ranen has earned multiple educational awards and nominations for his teaching, outreach, and innovations.