The wide toolbox theory explains a pedagogical innovation that students have developed to close the gap between how they learn and how teaching is conducted. This innovative approach to learning enhances how students access information, and acquire knowledge and skills because they take ownership of the design of their education. This model of learning frees them from the constraints of the typical university education model that focuses on professors pouring information into students in a classroom setting. Under the wide toolbox rubric, students complement their formal education through self-teaching by using university facilities and personnel. This supplemental learning results in a personally relevant body of knowledge and experiences. As active-learners, they are assuming personal responsibility for what, why, how and when they learn. By strategically taping into the intellectual, physical, or financial resources of the university this cohort can achieve its educational goal which is to engage in deep learning that is curiosity-driven. 

“Side learning” is the phrase an informant used to describe how self-directed learning works for him. He explained that he first understood the importance and utility of self-directed learning when he was an associate in a Wall Street investment bank. One of his managers emphasized the importance of understanding a client’s business from the client’s perspective. His manager instilled in him the belief that quality investment banking went beyond raising capital or doing debt restructurings; it involved, for example, gaining a thorough understanding of esoteric accounting rules surrounding a debt restructuring: this is “side learning.” The scope of one’s knowledge, in this instance, goes beyond knowing how to do the required investment banking tasks.

By the time he came to Yale to attend one of its professional schools, he knew the value of learning things on the side. He recognized that side learning translated into many areas. Quoting Ben Franklin, he said “Don’t put off to tomorrow what you can do today.” He continued, “You are not going to learn it tomorrow. If you really care about this stuff you will do it now.” He realized there is but so much knowledge that someone can give you. You have to learn stuff on your own. On the value of taking structured classes he said: “You can go into a structured class and not get a lot out of it in terms of what you want to learn to do. I did not want to come to school to memorize more things.”

Another example of side learning at Yale is HackYale, a student-led organization whose mission is a pedagogical one: to engage in peer-to-peer teaching and learning involving how to code. This organization conducts its workshop weekly out of the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design. This is perhaps one of the only extracurricular groups at Yale that is solely engaged in pedagogy, says a professor who is familiar with HackYale.

On the other hand, a professor told me that the prevailing attitude among faculty is: “We know what is best for students. They should trust us.” Additionally, he said, the predominant view among faculty is that “We are here to train students how to think critically, not to prepare them for a job.” Yet my student-informant’s view is that only 20% of what was taught in the typical class applied to him. While you might quarrel with the percentage he used, can you quarrel with the fact that because of the access that students have to information through the Internet that many of them come to college or professional school with a better understanding of what interests them or what they want to focus on than prior generations of students? This knowledge and experience is an aspect of self-directed learning that they have been engaged in prior to college or professional school. So then we return to a core question: What is the role of a college or university in the 21st century?

Perhaps the answer to this question lies, in part, in the pedagogical tool project-based or problem-based learning that I wrote about last week. It is a bridge between the values of a traditional liberal education and preparing students for the real world. This pedagogical method, is a form of self-directed learning because students define the problem, then choose the path to pursue to find the answer. Citing Harvard professor George Whitesides, a Yale professor asserted that project based learning reaffirms the value of a liberal education, yet underscores the university’s responsibility to give students “structured and supervised opportunities to approach real world problems,” and he added “with a deep and wide toolbox.”