Every year, near the end of the semester, I ask my students two questions.
What was helpful?
What do you still remember?
I have been asking these questions for over twenty years, across more than seven thousand students, at universities from coast to coast to coast in Canada and beyond, as I teach many international students. The answers have never stopped surprising me. And they have built everything I do.
The first thing students told me they remembered was not content. It was moments.
They remembered the day I stopped mid-lecture and said: Close everything. Now explain to me what I just said, not to me, to each other. The panic on their faces. The silence. And then, slowly, the discovery that they could not actually explain what they had just heard, and that this was not a personal failure but a structural one, a flaw in how most of us are taught to learn. Another technique I use when I introduce new features in the course is stop-start-continue, which often produces mixed results but gives me some food for thought, allowing me to stop using i-clickers and wiki but keep doing love-care-share and class projects.
A mentor of mine had told me something I have carried ever since: the only proof that you have learned something is your ability to teach it to someone else. Not summarize it. I didn’t recognize it on a multiple-choice exam. Teach it to a real person, with real confusion on their face, asking questions you had not anticipated.
I began building my entire approach around this single truth.
I started using Active Recall, asking students to close their notes and pull knowledge from memory rather than recognize it on a page. The discomfort they felt in those moments was not a sign of failure. It was, I told them, the sound of a neural connection being built.
I tested real understanding with what I called the Feynman test: explain this concept to a ten-year-old, or to an eighty-year-old grandmother, without jargon, without water, on your fingers alone. The students who immediately reached for technical language always failed. The ones who paused, searched for a simpler image, and tried again, those were the ones who actually knew something. Students remember this exercise years later. I have had graduates message me to say they still use it in their workplaces. Now AI can help with that, as well as class debates, but I still encourage students to do it without the use of AI first and then with AI and compare results.
Students also told me they remembered being asked to think, not just to answer.
So I built questioning into everything. I taught Socratic questioning, not as a historical curiosity but as a daily practice. On what is this claim based? How could we test it? What is an alternative view?
I also teach students to question holistically using the 5W+H framework: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How. This is not journalism. It is a complete thinking tool. Before any student makes a claim, presents a case study, or designs a project, I ask them to run it through all six lenses. Who is affected, and who is not? What is actually happening versus what we assume is happening? When did this begin, and when did we stop noticing it? Where does this occur, and where does it not? Why does it persist? And how, how exactly, does it cause harm, and how might it be changed? Students who learn to ask all six questions before offering any answer become practitioners who see situations whole rather than in fragments.
I introduced the AWE question, And What Else?, and made it a classroom ritual. The first answer, I told them, is almost never the real one. It is the answer your brain offers because it is easy and nearby. Ask what else three times. The third answer is usually where the thinking actually begins. Although I do not do what my teacher did to me by constantly asking AWE questions, as it is intimidating, I encourage them to do it as a self-reflection exercise.
Students told me they loved being asked to find counterexamples, to take a position they believed in and immediately try to break it. In what situation would this completely fail? Nothing revealed the hidden edges of an idea more quickly. I taught scaling, asking students to rate their certainty from one to ten, and then asking what lived in the gap between where they were and ten. That gap, I told them, is always where the real question hides. Now I do check-in/check-out exercises in every class, to encourage learning and change them slightly every year based on student feedback and the media they like to use to support their learning, from memoirs, to news articles, YouTube videos, TED talks, podcasts and everything else that they think can help them to understand course readings and supplement their learning.
But thinking alone, I learned, was never enough. Thinking had to leave the room.
I started asking students to post their ideas online, not polished essays, but real thinking. Questions. Arguments they were not sure about. Check in posts, Concept posts. Confessions of confusion. A thought you are afraid to publish, I tell them, is a thought you do not yet fully believe. The audience changes everything. Writing for me, who has to read it, is one kind of accountability. Writing for strangers who choose to engage is another kind entirely.
I began bringing students to conferences (CASWE-ACFTS and International) not to watch, but to present. To stand in front of people who have no obligation to be kind and defend their thinking with their own voice. The students who were most afraid of this are often the ones who thank me for it most, years later.
I ask students to design their own projects, not choose from a list (which they still can do), but design, from a question they actually care about, toward a conclusion they cannot yet see and then publish it. I ask them to compare and contrast sources, to put two scholars in genuine tension with each other. Where do these two disagree, and why? Who is more convincing, and what would change your mind? This single practice, I believe, is the difference between a student who consumes knowledge and one who evaluates it.
I use Think-Pair-Share not as a warm-up activity but as a philosophy: think alone first, because your first thoughts are yours and must not be immediately contaminated by the confidence of others. Then pair, because your thinking must survive contact with someone who sees differently. Then share, because the group deserves to inherit what the pair discovered.
I use STAR to help students reflect on their own experience with precision: What was the situation? What was the task? What specifically did you do? What was the measurable result? Vague reflection, I tell them, produces vague learning. Vague learning produces nothing useful at all.
In my communication courses, I use the Johari Window: not as a diagram on a slide but as a lived experience.
The Johari Window maps four quadrants of self-knowledge: what is known to you and to others: the open self; what others can see about you that you cannot see about yourself: the blind self; what you know about yourself but keep hidden from others: the hidden self; and what neither you nor others yet know: the unknown self. I love seeing students operate on the visible-invisible and voiced-unvoiced continua, and they do it in every course I teach.
I ask students to sit with this framework not abstractly but personally. What are you showing the world that you think you are hiding? What are you hiding that the world might actually receive with care? What have you never looked at directly about yourself because it has always been easier not to? In a communication course, this is not a psychological exercise: it is a professional one. Every social worker, every person who sits across from another human being in a moment of crisis brings all four quadrants into that room. The ones who have never examined their blind self and their hidden self will practice on their clients. The ones who have done this work will practice with them.
The feedback students give me about the Johari Window is consistently among the most powerful I receive. Many tell me it was the first time in their academic career that a course asked them to know themselves rather than simply know the material. Self-reflection is a core component of social work education, which is why I often teach non-social work or introductory courses where I introduce it to my students.
And then there is the question of what to do when you have no one to think with.
Not everyone has a study partner. Not everyone has a mentor available at eleven at night when a concept refuses to come clear. Not everyone has a peer who will patiently receive a half-formed argument and push back on it honestly. This is a real and common condition of learning, and for too long we have simply told students to figure it out alone.
I now teach students explicitly how to use AI as a thinking partner, particularly in those moments when no human partner is available.
The key, I tell them, is to resist the most tempting use of AI entirely. Do not ask it to write for you. Do not ask it to summarize what you should have read. Do not ask it to produce the answer you need to submit. These uses do not build a single neural connection.
Instead, use AI the way you would use the most patient, most available thinking partner you have ever had. Give it your argument and ask it to find the holes. Give it your confusion and ask it to ask you questions rather than answer them. Give it your draft and ask it not to improve the writing but to challenge the thinking. Use the Feynman test with it, explain your concept as if AI is a curious ten-year-old and see where your explanation breaks down. Use 5W+H with it, ask it to probe each dimension of a problem you are working through. Ask it to steelman the position you disagree with most. Ask it to play the role of the person most harmed by the policy you are defending.
AI cannot replace the guest speaker who has lived inside the system you are studying. It cannot replace the peer who looks at you with recognition because they have lived something similar. It cannot replace the professor who has spent twenty years thinking about exactly this question. But at eleven at night, when all of those people are unavailable and the idea still will not come clear, it is there. And if you use it to think harder rather than to think less, it will earn its place in your learning.
I tell my students: the measure of whether you have used AI well is simple. After the conversation, do you understand more than you did before, or have you simply produced more than you would have otherwise?
But none of these techniques, not a single one, makes sense without first asking the deeper question.
Who are you?
Not your GPA. Not your major. Not the story you perform for scholarship committees. Who are you, across all the dimensions that shape how you move through the world?
This is where I introduce the Social G*R*A*C*E*S*, an ongoing excavation across 105 dimensions of human identity and social position. Gender and generation. Race and religion. Age and ability. Class and culture. Ethnicity and education. Sexuality and spirituality. And dozens more, chronic illness, geographic origin, body size, linguistic access, digital inclusion, colonial history, neurodiversity, caregiving status, migration experience. Each one a lens through which power either flows toward you or is withheld from you. I ask students not to catalogue themselves efficiently but to sit with each dimension honestly. Where am I privileged here? Where am I marginalized? What do I carry that I have never named?
The mapping is never finished. That is the point. Identity is not a destination: it is a practice of continuous, honest inquiry. Students return to this framework for years after they leave my classroom. Some have told me it changed how they understood their own families.
Knowing who you are is not enough without knowing what you value.
This is where I slow down. I do not rush past values the way so many curricula do, treating them as a brief introductory unit before the “real” content begins. For me, values are the real content. Everything else is application.
I introduce the Seven Grandfather Teachings, not as cultural content to be consumed from a distance, but as living wisdom to be tested against one’s own life.
Wisdom, carried by the Beaver. Bravery, carried by the Bear. Love, carried by the Eagle. Respect, carried by the Buffalo. Honesty, carried by Sabe. Humility, carried by the Wolf. Truth, carried by the Turtle.
I ask students to bring each teaching into their own week. Where are you practicing wisdom right now? Where are you failing honesty? When did you last choose courage over comfort? These teachings are the ethical soil beneath everything else I teach. And I have found them deeply resonant with the Ukrainian values of my own heritage and my family, both in Ukraine and in Canada, who taught me the same fierce communal ethics that allowed people to survive oppression by learning to care for one another without being asked.
Love. Care. Share. Three words I have carried for years as a kind of personal compass: simple enough for a child, deep enough to organize a life’s work.
In my practice courses, everything comes together through what I call the Architecture of Care: a framework for understanding not just what social services do, but what philosophy of human worth is embedded in how they do it. I deconstructed from my mentor, Len Kaminski, who taught me social policy.
I describe six fundamental approaches. The Privatized Way, which trusts the market and expects individuals to purchase their own survival. The Provisional Way, which offers a cautious minimum to preserve stability rather than dignity. The Pragmatic Way, which balances market and state with evidence and democratic process. The Progressive Way, which commits to structural transformation. The Performative Way, and here I always pause, which speaks the language of justice while delivering tokenism, which hangs the right posters and writes the right mission statements and changes almost nothing.
And the Predatory Way, which I named only recently, watching it emerge in real time in policy documents and budget decisions. The Predatory Way does not merely fail to help, it actively dismantles. It uses the language of reform to erode what exists without replacing it. It blames individuals for structural failures. Students recognize it immediately when I describe it. Several have told me they recognized their own workplaces in it.
Beyond these six I am currently working on three wider worlds still being built: the Prefigurative, which builds the future now without waiting for permission; the Planetary, which refuses to separate social justice from ecological survival; and the Postcolonial, which begins with the recognition that reconciliation is not a program or a service delivery model but a complete reimagining of whose land, whose knowledge, and whose ways of knowing matter.
To evaluate how any service embodies, or fails to embody, its stated values, I offer students the A+ Framework.
Eleven dimensions that are keeping expanding, each beginning with A, each cutting into a different layer of how care is delivered or withheld.
Availability. Accessibility. Affordability. Acceptability. Appropriateness. Accountability. Approachability. Accuracy. Appreciativeness. Adequacy.
And finally, Awesomenimity, my own word for the moments when a service transcends evaluation entirely, when justice and creativity and dignity meet in a way that makes people feel, for a moment, that the world is capable of being what it should be.
I ask students to take any social service they have encountered, as a user, as a volunteer, as a placement student, and run it through every dimension. The assignments that come back are consistently among the best I receive. Several have been published. Several have been presented at conferences. All of them have changed how the student sees the world.
Invisible No More did not begin as a forum. It began as a question I kept asking in community development courses year after year: what would happen if students did not just study change but actually made some?
Over many years of teaching community development, I watched students design projects that were real, not simulations, not hypotheticals, but actual initiatives conceived, implemented, and evaluated within the span of a single course. Students discovered something in those projects that no lecture could give them: the particular confidence that comes from having built something meaningful with your own hands, in your own community, with people who actually needed what you made.
That tradition grew into what is now the Invisible No More Forum, a student-led initiative where the voices most absent from academic spaces are deliberately centred and amplified. Guest speakers come not as objects of study but as teachers. Students do not just listen: they lead, organize, design the questions, and carry the work forward. The forum is theirs. It was always meant to be.
Alongside this, the Love-Care-Share Scholarship grew from the same root. Students who are caregivers, who come to class having already given hours of themselves to a parent, a child, a sibling, a partner before the lecture even begins, carry a weight that most institutional structures simply do not see. The scholarship exists to see them. It is funded in part through student-led fundraising connected to the forum, and in part through a practice I build into every course I teach.
In every class, I ask students to dedicate four hours during the semester to something of their own choosing, something they do for themselves, for someone else, or to raise funds for the Love-Care-Share Scholarship. This is week 13 of the courses I design to teach (most courses now are designed to have 12 classes, but I always ask students to keep learning beyond the required schedule). The choice is entirely theirs. Some students use those four hours to rest, genuinely and without guilt, for perhaps the first time in months. Some volunteers. Some organize. Some fundraise. What students have told me about those four hours, semester after semester, is that they are among the most valuable hours of the course, not because of what they produced, but because of what they remembered about themselves.
I believe deeply that people learn differently, and I build that belief into every course I design.
For each class, I offer two or three readings and two or three videos. Students choose what they engage with. Some read everything. Some watch everything. Some do both. Some find one piece that unlocks the whole unit and go deeply into that. I never require a particular path because I have learned, across twenty years and seven thousand students, that the path that was required is often the path that was resented, and resentment is the enemy of genuine learning.
I remind my students that learning can happen at any time. It can happen the semester after a course ends, when something in your life suddenly illuminates what you read in week four. It can happen years later, when you are sitting with a client and a framework from an old syllabus rises unbidden and finally makes complete sense. When you are ready to learn, and willing to put in the time, I tell them, the learning will be there waiting for you. It does not expire.
This is also why I approach grading the way I do, and why it sometimes makes students uncomfortable before it makes them free.
I do not assign grades that pretend to represent the totality of what a student knows. A grade is a photograph, not a portrait. It shows what you demonstrated, at this moment, with the time and energy and experience you had available. It is not a verdict on your intelligence or your potential or your worth as a thinker. It is a starting point.
I rarely assign A+ grades. Not because I do not value my students’ work, I value it enormously, but because I do not believe any of us have reached the ceiling of what we are capable of. Instead I assign average numbers at each grade level, numbers that acknowledge what has been demonstrated while leaving visible the space still available for growth. At every level there is more to learn. At every level there are more readings, more practice, more time that could deepen and extend what is already there.
Some students push back on this. They want to know where they lost points. I gently correct the framing: you did not lose anything. A grade of 65% is not the story of 35% missing. It is the story of 65% already known, and an honest map of where more learning lives. We always gain points, I tell them. Learning only moves in one direction. The student who earns 65% today and keeps going is not behind. They are exactly where learning begins.
And when it comes time to evaluate the learning journey as a whole, I ask students to grade themselves. I tell them: assess what you actually did, what it cost you, what it changed in you, and assign yourself the grade that honest reflection earns based on the current grading rubric. Then I grade their submission, and we either agree on the grade, or I show them where to improve through collective feedback, with an opportunity to resubmit for the first submission, or I work on their self-esteem and on the way I assign grades. For the class project, I honour the student’s grade choice within our grading rubric. Not as a gesture of permissiveness but as an act of profound respect, because a student who has been trusted to evaluate their own growth with integrity is a practitioner who will carry that same integrity into every assessment they ever make of another human being.
My classroom has never lived in one place.
Some students sit in front of me. Some attend through Zoom from living rooms and kitchen tables, from other cities, from hospital waiting rooms when caregiving will not wait. Some take the course as directed studies entirely on their own, building their learning schedule around the realities of their lives. And yet they are all in the same cohort. They read each other’s discussion posts. They respond to each other’s questions. They carry projects that belong to all of them.
I have watched students who have never met in person challenge each other to think more carefully, comfort each other through difficult weeks, and celebrate each other’s presentations with a generosity that puts many in-person classrooms to shame. The cohort model teaches something that no syllabus item can capture: that learning is not a solitary act. It is something we do together, or we do not fully do it at all.
What unites every student: the one in the front row, the one in the Zoom grid, the one working through modules alone at midnight, is that they are all asked to demonstrate their learning. Not perform it. Not simulate it. Demonstrate it, in a way that is real and visible and genuinely theirs.
I want to say something that I mean with everything I have built over these twenty years.
My students are not the recipients of my teaching. They are its architects.
Every discussion post a student writes teaches me something about how an idea lands in a real life. Every question in an email teaches me where my explanation broke down and where I need to try again. Every moment of confusion in a classroom teaches me what I assumed and should not have. Every student who pushed back, who disagreed, who asked but why do you believe that, every one of them made me a better teacher than I was the week before.
Seven thousand students. Twenty years. And I am still learning.
I keep the readings students tell me they loved. I retire the ones they tell me did not reach them. I redesign assignments around the projects students invented that were better than the ones I had planned. I build new courses out of the questions students asked that I could not answer well enough the first time.
Every student who has passed through my classroom has left something in it. A question I still think about. A perspective that recalibrated my own. A piece of writing that reminded me why this work matters. A human being who trusted me with their becoming, even briefly, and whom I carry forward into every class I will ever teach.
I am still building this.
I am looking for a university willing to let me design something entirely from what these seven thousand students have taught me, not from what has always been done, but from what has actually worked, across twenty years, across disciplines, across every beautiful and complicated version of who my students have been.
The institution that says yes will receive something rare: a complete architecture for education that begins with identity, builds through values, tests through practice, evaluates through justice, and grows, always, always, through the voices of the students themselves.
I am ready when they are.
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