What Five Years of Listening to Students Taught Us About Learning. A Conversation with Chris Gallagher, Kristi Girdharry, and Kevin Smith

For five years, Chris Gallagher, Kristi Girdharry, and Kevin Smith sat down each semester with the same set of twenty Northeastern University students. What began as an analysis of these students’ writing skills evolved into a book on how students often understand the learning process more clearly than faculty recognize. 

Gallagher, Girdharry, and Smith's new book, Getting Learning Right: The Promise of Higher Education, takes aim at some of the myths that circulate in public discourse about college - that students enroll simply for the credential or that everything can be learned online, for example. In this episode, we focus instead on what the students themselves had to say about their own undergraduate experience. These anecdotes and the insights they provide might just be the inspiration we need to reshape the future of higher education. 

Learn more about our guests’ new publication, Getting Learning Right: The Promise of Higher Education (MIT Press).

Other articles mentioned in this conversation: “Not Just Another AI Statement: Modeling Process and Collaboration in Higher Education” (Inside Higher Ed)