Dunwoody helped shape a model of technical education built around learning by doing. Our work together is building on that tradition by making the learning beneath expert performance more visible, transferable, measurable, and connected to the work graduates will ultimately perform.
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Dunwoody emerged as one of the nation’s distinctive technical institutions, rooted in practical education and real preparation for work.
Its early history is tied to the development of vocational and technical education in the United States, including the influence of Charles Allen Prosser and the shaping of applied technical pedagogy.
Dunwoody helped model a form of education in which theory, tools, faculty expertise, and hands-on performance are brought together in meaningful ways.
That legacy still matters. Dunwoody represents a powerful example of how hands-on education can be rigorous, modern, and closely connected to both industry and the public good.
The next challenge is not simply helping students complete technical tasks. It is helping colleges better understand the learning beneath those tasks so knowledge, judgment, and skill can travel across courses, programs, and careers.
Problem: Faculty experts know far more than they articulate.
This tool surfaces the cognitive, metacognitive, professional, technical, psychomotor, and sensory capabilities embedded in expert performance.
Problem: Colleges can teach a skill successfully in one course without ensuring students can recognize and use it later.
This model identifies where learning stops traveling and helps faculty design more deliberately for near, far, disciplinary, and professional transfer.
Problem: Colleges have grades, completion, enrollment, and employment data, but much less visibility into why students are or are not developing.
This work adds an actionable layer of learning data beneath conventional outcome measures.
Problem: Employers increasingly need graduates who can diagnose, troubleshoot, adapt, communicate, learn continuously, and make judgments.
This system works backward from authentic performance to help develop the capabilities that matter most in professional settings.
My work at Dunwoody began with a practical question: how can we help students — particularly younger students — transition more successfully into college? That question became especially important in the context of Minnesota’s
Postsecondary Enrollment Options (PSEO)
program, which allows eligible high school students, including students as early as 10th grade, to enroll in participating colleges.
The foundation for that work came from my book,
How to Successfully Transition Students into College: From Traps to Triumph,
which examines the often-hidden differences between the academic work students have learned to do before college and the work college requires of them.
What began as an effort to improve the transition into Dunwoody has grown into something broader. The work has given me an opportunity to build on one of technical education’s strongest traditions while helping make the learning beneath expert performance more visible, transferable, measurable, and connected to professional work.
This work extends Dunwoody’s historical role in technical education and its current "Born to Do" ethos.
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