By: Joel Zantingh on January 25, 2024
I love the rich visual imagery in liminality, crossing a threshold from one room to another and embracing the experience of the known past, gathering it with the unknown future. As I read “Overcoming Barriers to Student Learning”, I appreciated that Jan H. F. Meyer and Ray Land did not explain the nature of any…
By: Daren Jaime on January 25, 2024
High school and college all-nighters were a constant in most of our educational upbringing. It feels just like yesterday. The agonizing thoughts surrounding an upcoming paper in that subject you were shaky in, or even worse, that dreaded midterm or final exam. Those memorable, miserable thoughts of reading, rereading, cramming, comprehending, anticipating, sweating, and then…
By: Jennifer Eckert on January 25, 2024
I did not find the topic of threshold concepts particularly exciting, certainly not one I would study by choice, but I understood the idea. After numerous starts and stops, and with a bit of prayer and coaching from my spouse, I opted to illustrate my notion of concept thresholds as it applies to social services,…
By: Adam Harris on January 25, 2024
Before moving into my current position as an associate Pastor, I had a bizarre, but incredibly powerful dream. According to Daniel Lieberman, and several stories in Jewish-Christian history, dreams can be an effective vehicle for the subconscious or God to get our attention. [i] This dream may have been the Spirit speaking through my subconscious or…
By: Kari on January 25, 2024
I looked at the required reading for this week. The overwhelming feelings were familiar, yet distant. Vague, yet far too real. Was it panic? Overwhelm? Annoyance? Resolve? As I skimmed the table of contents, looked at the chapter summaries, and started to read, déjà vu hit me. In fast-paced flashbacks as saw large colorful volumes:…
By: Elysse Burns on January 25, 2024
Bonjour. Je m’appelle Elysse. Je viens de Californie et j’ai étudié le français à Neuchâtel, en Suisse, pendant 10 mois. Hello. My name is Elysse. I am from California, and I studied French in Neuchatel, Switzerland for 10 months. This short introduction became my go-to presentation whenever I met someone during my time in Switzerland.…
By: Russell Chun on January 25, 2024
מלחמות ושמועות מלחמות (pronounced: melchamot veshemuot melchamot) – Aramaic for Wars and rumors of wars. Part 1: Introduction Part 2: What lessons I took from Annabel Part 3: Impact on GoodSports Ukraine Selah Introduction: Matthew 24:6-7 (New King James Version): “And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not…
By: Dinka Utomo on January 25, 2024
Leaders make a difference. They move people to new places – physically, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually – that they could not have achieved alone. They provide inspiration, courage, conviction, hope, and comfort. -Annabel Beerel- About a week ago, I saw a news ticker on one of our national television networks. The news ticker contains news…
By: Scott Dickie on January 24, 2024
Like all of you, I had to decide on what part of Beerel’s book, Rethinking Leadership (1), I was going to interact with and blog on. This is the kind of book where I might prefer to take one chapter a week over this next semester and deepen my leadership learning on each inter-connected topic…
By: Jonita Fair-Payton on January 24, 2024
Defining Culture I read a book about 20 years ago for one of my Graduate Programs. The book, Culture Matters, is a collection of essays written by social scientists, scholars, journalists, and practitioners. I read it from cover to cover, long before inspectional reading was introduced to me. It is worth mentioning that it was…
By: Cathy Glei on January 24, 2024
“Leaders need to have complex cognitive structures so that they can adapt to, accommodate, and transcend challenging circumstances. On the one hand, they need strong egos to tolerate the tension of standing alone and not being easily overwhelmed. On the other, they need to be sensitive to their inner drives and ego defenses and be…
By: Diane Tuttle on January 24, 2024
When reading about threshold concepts, the song “Toyland” began playing in my head. “Toyland, toyland little girl and boy land. While you dwell within it you are ever happy there.”[1] It is not a song that has been part of my repertoire. Several times I tried to push it aside not really wanting to be…
By: Nancy Blackman on January 24, 2024
As soon as I began reading this book, my mind traveled back in time to elementary school where I excelled in some subjects and struggled miserably in others. Then, as I made my way through middle school, I still excelled in the same subjects and struggled with others, mainly the math and science classes. In…
By: Pam Lau on January 23, 2024
Praxis leaders[1] Dave Blanchard and Andy Crouch presented a webinar in the Summer of 2020 called, “Leading Without a Forecast: What to Do When You Really Don’t Know What’s Coming,”[2] on the heels of their timely article, “Leading Beyond the Blizzard: Why Every Organization is Now a Startup.”[3] In their introduction, Andy tells the story of the…
By: Christy on January 23, 2024
Threshold concepts (as described by Meyer and Land in Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding)[1] are often studied by educators [2], however, the impact extends far beyond the scope of academia into most domains of life. Reflecting on my own experiences, I realized how threshold concepts played a pivotal role in reshaping my worldview, challenging preconceived…
By: Graham English on January 23, 2024
As a child, I was told by several teachers and other adults that, “Curiosity killed the cat.” Memorize. Practice. Regurgitate when tested. Asking questions meant that you were not grasping the subject, or worse stupid. So, I kept quiet. This was drilled into me as a child and a mindset I carried with me into…
By: Debbie Owen on January 23, 2024
I vaguely remember being in the choir room at the church where I grew up in northern NJ. The folding chairs were on risers where the choir members sat and rehearsed on Sunday mornings, including my parents. I remember peering cautiously beneath the risers, wondering if I could hide underneath them. I must have been…
By: Adam Cheney on January 23, 2024
I’ll be honest. The idea this week regarding threshold concepts was itself a threshold for me. It took me a while to wrap my head around the concepts of thresholds and liminality presented. Yet, when I made the idea a bit more abstract and took it away from the educational examples that were given, I…
By: Glyn Barrett on January 23, 2024
I enjoyed the overarching theme of the book Threshold Concepts, which revolves around transformative, integrative, and irreversible concepts that, once grasped, lead to a new way of thinking within a particular discipline. Meyer and Land argue that certain concepts are gateways to deeper understanding and disciplinary expertise. The very idea that there are transformative and…
By: Shela Sullivan on January 23, 2024
When I first flipped through the pages of the book, Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge, a wave of questions inundated my mind. The initial thought that struck me was, how will I navigate through the contents of this book? Can I retain all this information? What insights am I expected…
