Redirecting...

Air University Teaching and Learning Center Banner

Axon - The Diplomatic Mission of Professional Military Education – Ep6

  • Published

 

Axon Podcast with Prof. Stase Wells

The opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied in this podcast are solely those of the speakers and do not necessarily represent the views of Air University, the United States Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any other U.S. government agency. 

 

Dr. Megan Hennessey

Hello, welcome to the Axon podcast. I am Doctor Megan Hennessey, Director of the Air University Teaching and Learning Center and today I'm super excited because I am with my dear friend and longtime colleague and professional military education Professor Stase Wells.

Professor Stase Wells

Hey, how are you?

Dr. Megan Hennessey

I'm good. It's so good to have you on the podcast. Stase is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Marine Corps University's Leadership Communication Skills Center, the LCSC.  Professor Wells has more than 15 years of experience as a consultant in both civilian and professional military education writing centers, particularly in support of international military officers, which she's here to talk to us about today.

She is also my collaborator on our recent book published through the University Press titled Developing Military Learners’ Communication Skills Using the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Stase wrote her chapter on building trust and success through dialogic feedback and joint PME, so congratulations again, Stase.

The book is now on the shelves, how does it feel?

Professor Stase Wells

It feels great! Thank you so much for all of your hard work on that. It was a really wonderful experience.

Dr. Megan Hennessey

Yeah, it was a lot of fun, and it's nice to see it in print.

Let's focus in on your area of expertise, and I think you wrote about this in the book.  Set the stage for us about how many military students are coming from international partner nations and enrolled at Marine Corps University, in particular.

Professor Stase Wells

Great question, Megan. I do want to underscore that we're talking about a significant portion of students in total. There are 94 students currently representing more than 50 countries at the schoolhouse and among its affiliate programs.

So within the resident degree-granting graduate-level programs at Marine Corps University this year, we have 38 students attending the Command and Staff College, the School of Advanced Warfighting, and the Marine Corps War College.

And then additionally, there are 21 students in residence at the Expeditionary Warfare School. There are nine students enrolled in the Command and Staff Distance Education program, seventeen students at the Basic School, and there are about 9 international students represented at the Staff Noncommissioned Officers' Academy over the course of the academic year.

Dr. Megan Hennessey

That is significant and I know that on the Air Force side, we also have a large international student population.  Help us understand: why does the US offer class seats to international students? What do we have to gain?

Professor Stase Wells

You know, in order to fully understand why class seats are offered to international students, we need to look broadly at the actors in this process, which include Departments of State and Defense in both the United States and our Allied partner nations and the Defense Security Cooperation Agency.

So, the reasons for offering these opportunities to international military students, they transcend the goals of individual schoolhouses. They have much broader global implications for the unit.

It states the international military education and training program has several goals, so providing these educational opportunities as well as English language training assistance, it helps students to better understand the United States, its democratic values, its respect for human rights, and its systems of governance.  The United States can ultimately use this training and education program to establish rapport and alliances between the US military and the militaries of other countries, and it enhances jointness, interoperability, and a shared understanding of international security challenges, which is really important, because we're receiving and helping to educate the future leaders of Allied and partner allies.

And the next time we work with these graduates may very well be on the battlefield.

So the US really stands to gain countless benefits from these educational exchanges—provided, of course, that we cultivate a safe and open environment in which these students feel valued, respected, and comfortable, sharing their perspectives and their ideas with their classmates and their faculty members.

Dr. Megan Hennessey

There's a lot to unpack there.

Can you give us some examples of the tangible benefits of this cooperation, things that you've seen from your own experience?

Professor Stase Wells

So, at Marine Corps University, I've watched us take students beyond the traditional classroom for the purpose of these larger goals.

And so, not only do our faculty give students roles in active learning exercises and roles in war games, but we have, I would argue, a fantastic international military student officer Angela Miller, and she expends significant time and effort to take her international students also on field studies program trips where they get to see democracy at work.

They get to speak with military and civilian leaders and really enjoy the American experience.

So, three years ago, I was fortunate to be invited as a chaperone in support of our international officers and their families on their FSP or field studies program trip to New York City, and it was really an incredible experience seeing the international students engaged in learning while visiting the United Nations, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and getting briefed by leadership in the Council on Foreign Relations.

You know, we really do take the hearts and minds approach literally here at MCU.

To do so, the diplomatic implications of the international military education training program, they help explain why, in addition to coordinating all these learning opportunities, our military student officer also puts on monthly coffees, social engagements for spouses and families.

It's why, in addition to our work with international students at the writing center, I also created the spouses’ English conversation course.

So, I started that over a decade ago and it's still in existence today.

We've expanded the program over the years thanks to a lot of great support from our institution, from our IMSO team, and from our university volunteers.

And we've now added additional Leadership Communication Skills Center faculty instructors for the program, and we formalized the structure with country presentations/graduation.

We've added more programs for the international officers in our LCSC Writing Center, and I think some of that is why we do a little bit more of that side of things really thinking about our larger diplomatic goals.

Dr. Megan Hennessey

Yeah, I've seen it in action and it is really neat to see how something that on the surface is so simple, you know, just basic language instruction, instruction in cultural norms and interpersonal interactions, and how we do things in the US, can have such a profound impact, not just on the individual spouses, but then they go home and they share their experience with their peers and their networks in their own nations.

So, how do we know other than that sort of anecdotal value data that this is a worthwhile investment? Because it sounds very expensive, right? So how do we know it's working?

Professor Stase Wells

You know in terms of the work we do directly with the international students, we do offer student surveys on how they found what we call the International Graduate Communication Preparatory course.

So, we do get formal feedback that way from students. It is more anecdotal and I definitely think we could broaden that to do more focus group interviews and to also take a look at their diagnostic essays at the beginning of the year and how those essays change over the course of the year. Of course, our work with the students would only be one factor.

There's so many factors in student academic performance and success, so I think that's been the limiting factor that work like ours is optional.

And students are, you know, able to choose to work with us or not as their needs, you know, as their needs allow. I think that with the spouses’ course, one thing that I would like to do more in the future is have a sort of alumni network.

So, we have group Facebook pages, you know, kind of private Facebook groups for these spouses and it would be interesting to use that kind of a platform to maybe offer some surveys and see what our, you know, what our spouses think. And now that they've been one year removed, two years removed, five years removed, you know, do they still feel that the language instruction was helpful? Are they still using the English language? And what capacity and what implications have, you know, have they found?

Do they still have lasting friendships with individuals from other countries? And that's something that we've just seen anecdotally through following everyone after they leave here and having that reach-back capability is seeing that, you know, these friendships that are formed in the spouses’ group and in the class are really lasting a lifetime. And these are the spouses of really senior military officers. They go on to become leaders in their country’s militaries, so them having a favorable view of the United States and of their experience here really is important and valuable to the United States.

Dr. Megan Hennessey

Seems like a perfect example of soft power projection, right?

Professor Stase Wells

Yes, many hearts and minds.

Dr. Megan Hennessey

Yes, exactly right. Well, let's dive in: so, as you know, the Teaching and Learning Center at your university is focused on faculty development as well as student support. So, you have so many years of experience in this field in particular. Share your wisdom with us, Stase. What are some of the unique challenges educators in military learning environments face when they're working with international students? And how do they overcome?

Professor Stase Wells

Well, I'm glad you used the word unique here, Megan, as often what comes to mind when we think of challenges associated with educating this population of learners are language barriers and cultural differences in regards to intellectual property and what is considered plagiarism.

And these can be somewhat problematic generalizations, as language barriers do only impact a select portion of students within the category of international military given that we have internationals from not only English-speaking countries in the West, but also in the Caribbean and Asia Pacific region and many of our international military students may have studied English throughout their K-12 or equivalent educational experience. So just as we only see the tip of an iceberg above the surface, I would say there are several, arguably more important and unique challenges that educators need to be aware of that may not immediately meet the eye or come to mind. International students, for whom English is not a first language, who do have language changes may have challenges not only with writing papers or completing assignments, but deeper challenges as well that manifest in the form of issues with their written products: so reading comprehension (keeping up with the reading); understanding assignment prompts; following class discussions, which often move from one topic to another incredibly quickly; or writing in a deductive, thesis-driven style when that may not align with their own educational experience; and finally, understanding or responding to faculty feedback. And so these language-related challenges often compound with existing internal and external pressures to create unhealthy stress levels in these students’ brains.

Fun fact: On the side, I do study neuroscientific approaches to teaching and learning and working with multilingual writers, so I've done some reading on the difference between the toxic, overwhelming stress that we're talking about here and eustress or adrenaline-inducing healthy stress that increases productivity and actually enhances learning.

And I can tell you from what I know of the learning brain and my own experience supporting the students that this toxic stress can absolutely inhibit students’ ability to learn. It can limit their working memory capacity and their ability to store information in their long-term memory.

For example, my international students from past years have shared in our reading workshop how long it takes them to complete the assigned reading, compared to maybe their peers, and these are incredibly motivated students, so they're often cutting significantly into their sleep time in order to get the reading done before class. I could spend an entire podcast on the importance of sleep and the impact the lack of sleep has on our memory, storage, and retrieval processes.

So you likely have students who are tired, stressed, overwhelmed, living in a foreign country, completing a master's degree program in a language other than their first, dealing with the internet service provider, trying to find a reliable car, dealing with housing issues and the health and wellness needs of maybe their spouses and children who are also starting a new experience in a foreign country and foreign school environments, and perhaps trying to navigate how to meet cultural and religious obligations, and we want them to fully engage in a fast-moving seminar discussion in a language other than their first.

While all of this is swirling inside their brains (and I can only begin to empathize what they're going through, you know, thinking back to when I was a military dependent living overseas in a country where I maybe knew 10 words in the native language upon my arrival) and from a neuroscientific perspective, studies have found it's technically impossible for most learners to hold that much information in their working memory at once. And a great book (just a plug) that explores this topic is Uncommon Sense Teaching by Beth Rogowsky, Barbara Oakley, and Terry Sejnowski.

So that's a really good one that helps explain what I'm talking about here. And then there's the added pressures of this being a military environment. So, this student population is likely used to being at the top of the class among the top tier selected for a program like this and they may not feel as comfortable expressing vulnerability or sharing their challenges in these areas with senior military and civilian faculty members. And as faculty, we don't know what we don't know, and we can't offer tailored support if we don't fully understand the root of the problem.

And at this level, we typically don't expect to provide overly directed instruction to students.

This is a master’s program, but with students operating with potentially a limited working memory capacity due to maybe stress studying in a foreign language or a combination of the above, we may need to make our instruction and our feedback more directive than we would think.

We would need to, at the beginning of the year--you know, essentially students have a virtually unlimited bank of knowledge buried in their long-term memory, and international military students have an incredible database from which to make connections to the course material given their unique military experiences and their educational backgrounds maybe being a little different--but we, as faculty, have the added challenge of helping students recall that information and drawing from it 0ut of them. And I would say an added challenge for faculty working with international military students in classroom environments is also managing the classroom discussion to avoid other students, or even ourselves, tokenizing these students.

And what I mean by that is we want to be careful not to word questions in such a way as to ask internationals to speak on behalf of their entire country and/or military. You gave a great podcast interview on this topic, I believe, on the topic of diversity, inclusion, and tokenism back in 2019. That was really…

Dr. Megan Hennessey

With Stephanie Erwin. Oh, and Dr. Brandy Jenner.

Professor Stase Wells

Yes, incredibly valuable. I really liked that one and I thought it spoke well to this challenge that faculty commonly face, you know, so at the end of the day, these are individuals who may, at their career levels, not have, you know, the big picture for their nation's military or for their country writ large. So they may feel uncomfortable speaking for their country, which may provide a deeper explanation for the common challenge faculty see of students’ seeming unwillingness, right, to engage in class discussions. And ultimately, I would say our greatest challenge in educating IMS is the same challenge facing educators across the globe right now: it's determining how, if and when necessary, we lower barriers to access, but not the bar.

We don't want to lower the bar. We don't want to lower rigor in in quite a challenging program that has really important implications for future war.

Dr. Megan Hennessey

Oh, Stase, you used the “R” word. Rigor. Yes, this is like a pet research project of mine. I've written about it a few times in respect to reading load and PME's obsession with page counts as a proxy for rigorous programming.

So, give us some of your thoughts in terms of authentic assessment, which is also a hot topic in PME and how that works in relation to rigor and the international student experience.

Professor Stase Wells

The biggest difficulty, in my personal opinion and experience, is that rigor, I don't know at this level and with the types of things we need to measure is quantifiable, and I say that because we need to understand the student as a complete person, and there are so many factors involved in academic success and what we can pull out of students’ brains to demonstrate that they have critical/creative thinking, innovative thinking, strategic-level thought.

I think that actually a lot of what we're doing right now with wargaming is incredibly valuable and maybe something we need to explore further in terms of an assessment tool.

So, taking a seminar discussion, you know, having students write on it, which is what's traditionally done in the form of a written essay or product demonstrating students’ knowledge and learning, but then also having a mixture of maybe oral examinations where a lot of these details can be teased out of students to figure out what they know and what they're able to apply to a problem-based exercise.

I think that wargaming can actually in itself become an assessment tool for PME, and it really could be beneficial to see what students are able to pull out under pressure.

Dr. Megan Hennessey

And for our listeners, I swear I'm not paying her to say these things. I have known Stase for a long time, but we've been through a lot of the same experiences and so it's validating for me to hear that. You have similar thoughts in terms of solutions that we can apply to our PME challenges. Let's switch tracks a little bit and talk about the enlisted perspective.

So what do you see as anything important to keep in mind in terms of difference or similarities between the officer and enlisted perspectives for international students?

Professor Stase Wells

So, when I look at our policy documents for professional military education within the Marine Corps, I look at the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Vision and Guidance for PME and Talent Management.

I look at the Officer Professional Military Education Policy, and I look at the Enlisted Professional Military Education Policy.

And all three of these documents are using the words “globally integrated” a lot when speaking of joint operations.

You know, really as we look to our current and future threats to global peace and security, the enlisted are incredibly important to this joint force, and it's important for them to understand that we are stronger when united with our allies and partners and to know how to operate jointly, and this is listed in Joint Learning #3: Joint, Interagency, Intergovernmental, and Multinational Capability.

These are within the enlisted PME policy, so enlisted students must understand the value of joint perspectives and the value added in combining our capabilities with those of our allies and partners.

I would like to see just personally much more integration of international students within the enlisted schoolhouse, and I would love to see closer collaboration with, you know, joint PME writing centers, maybe a topic for the Writing Center Consortium group.

I know there are things in the hopper related to enlisted education and communication, and I do think that this is a really important aspect for the enlisted to have a greater sense of understanding of our international officer population and joint operations, and in many ways, many already do, right?

So, this is just a continuation of all the great work that's already happening.

Dr. Megan Hennessey

Thanks for the plug, and I'll double down on it. There is a call out for chapter proposals for the second volume of the book that I mentioned earlier, Developing Military Learners’ Communication Skills, specific to the enlisted perspective.

So, if you're interested, you've got until Memorial Day to submit a chapter proposal, and feel free to send me an e-mail and I'll get it to the right place for our listeners who are interested in submitting. But I want to dive a little deeper into your word choice, Professor Wells.

OK, regarding what you just said, so I heard you say things like understanding, feeling closer, and connection. Lots of affective domain word choice from your response.

Is there, can you share just your opinion on how this works in terms of joint PME's thoughts about acculturation and jointness across branches? Like is there potential for considering acculturation across international partner nations as an assessable thing? I know that’s something that the J7, the Military Education Coordinating Council, the Assessment Working Group, they're all looking at how do we measure acculturation. If we're going to go so far as to dictate a certain number or mix of branches in, for example, the degree-granting PME programs, how do we know that it's paying off and that we should keep doing it?

So do you see a synonymous sort of situation on the international inclusion side?

Professor Stase Wells

I do see a lot in policy documents. You know, the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Vision and Guidance for PME and Talent Management really does clarify that the character and conduct of war is evolving and this, they argue, demands coordinated efforts between the US and its allied and international partners.

So much of that is already in the language with the Joint Chiefs requiring the students in programs to understand the value of multiculturalism, allied perspectives, and trust between partner nations and the impact of these on our strategic thinking and innovation.

And we do see this in in the Officer PME policy as well, you know, with the importance of integrating allies and key US and international partners in learning environments where they argue professionalism, trust, and cognitive interoperability are valued as far as assessing this.

That is incredibly difficult. I would say more needs to be done with again, with alumni networks, and I know that's a project in the making in a lot of registrar departments throughout PME institutions. I do think that we need a reach-back survey. We need to potentially do focus groups with students that later work jointly on operations with the students they went to school with.

You know, kind of tracking that better. Again, I know everybody's so over tapped and there's so much to be done and so many irons in the fire.

But I do genuinely think that this is work worth doing and we do see actually even just in articles. For example, in Leatherneck Magazine, there's a great article on the benefits that international military students bring to US students at Marine Corps University, written by Sarah Bock. It was a 2020 issue. And we talk about students that say they're still friends with internationals today, right, that IMS regional perspectives and unique military experiences are incredibly valuable for US students who are then inspired and encouraged to open their minds to new ideas and challenge their own assumptions and biases.

So maybe that's the way we do assessment, right is we assess how has your mind been opened?

How have you challenged and grappled with your previous assumptions and biases about other cultures about individuals from other countries, about best practices in warfighting, for example, and that sort of grappling is really a skill that is also addressed in our new Training and Education 2030. So, it is incredibly important. We know that policy is telling us to do this.

But how to assess that it's working, right? You know, from what I found watching relationships develop between US and international military students, it is really profound, and I wish there was a way and I'm sure there's a way we could somewhat codify that, but I've seen US and international students develop a deeper empathy for the lived experiences of others, to form bonds and friendships that last much longer than the academic year, to help each other out in situations post-graduation, and this not only benefits the students as human beings and as military leaders, but also as successful academic writers and speakers.

So maybe, you know, I do often see in my line of work that when US students are more aware of external audiences in the classroom, they are also likely to be more aware of the broader joint audience they may be writing for and speaking to in their follow-on career.

So what would this actually look like if we assessed it? We could see individuals learning to avoid overuse of jargon and acronyms, or being more aware of the need for a counterargument in their written essays. And these sorts of skills, if we assess them correctly, are really beneficial as we produce graduates who will undoubtedly need to embrace whole of government, joint approaches and multinational approaches to global security challenges.

Dr. Megan Hennessey

OK, Stase, if you had an endless budget to explore as many research projects in as much depth as you like, what would you tackle first in regards to international military students?

Why and how would you do it?

Professor Stase Wells

That is a great question. Uh, I think that one thing I would want to study, certainly I've already, for the past couple of years, I've been diving into the world of Mind, Brain, and Education science and evidence-based best practices for working with students, you know, particularly international military students, but really broadly students in professional military institutions, and I've been especially interested in the impacts of stress and sleep on memory consolidation and on our ability to learn.

I think there's so much that we have available in terms of technology with, you know, EEG and brain scanning that I would be really interested in doing a more formal study on what actually is a good amount of a reading to assign an international student per evening.

What is the best way for a student to prepare for a seminar in a language other than their first?

So, I've also been interested in the concept of neuroplasticity, our brain’s really fascinating ability to significantly change its own structure and function in response to what we learn and what we experience, and thus how to adjust really my own instructional practice to foster this change for the benefit of our internationals learning English as a foreign language.

So when I started to implement these teaching strategies and shared this brain science with my students in class for the purpose of really empowering them to improve their academic success, I found an unexpected benefit that I'd really like to explore further in a formal study. I found an increase in, as we talked about the effects of the feeling side, an increase in student trust, willingness of students to share their challenges and their successes, and overall improved relationships between our faculty and the students who voluntarily attend our support workshops, our courses, our classes, and our individual sessions.

So, when I hit the books to better understand this kind of unexpected success factor, I found a gap in existing research on faculty assessment and joint professional military education institutions as it pertains to faculty-student interpersonal relationship building.

So, I'm currently exploring just with secondary data factors impacting students’ academic achievement, and I'm looking at this through kind of a unique lens through John Bowlby's attachment theory to see what connections we can make between the attachment styles that we've had since childhood and the ways in which they impact relationships between adult military classmates and between military students and their instructors, particularly international military students. My research really would aim to more deeply explore this unique aspect of the human element of teaching and learning, as informed by neuroscience and cognitive psychological science, as well as my own instructional practice.

So maybe collaborating with psychologists and with neuroscientists, you know, and really taking the pilot course we've already been doing. It's a conversation course at the LCSC or the Leadership Communication Skills Center for international military students who are attending resident Command and Staff College, and the course is designed to improve their academic success through relationship building by creating a safe space for these international students to learn English and to build healthy academic study skills while being able to ask us questions about American cultural norms, values, traditions, holidays, you know, things that don't seem to really matter to the academic side of things, but they create a sort of safe space for students in which to ask questions about academic challenges.

So, we started it last semester. We're continuing it this semester due to student interest and given that anecdotal responses have been really positive so far.

I would like if, you know, money and time weren't an issue, I would love to conduct a more formal study on the program's effectiveness within the next couple of years, really including, you know, neuroscientific studies and IRB support and collaborative work with experts in the field to really make sure that, you know, within our lane, we're fully understanding the factors that improve student success academically.

Dr. Megan Hennessey

I cannot wait for you to brief this at the Military Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Forum.

Professor Stase Wells

Thank you. I hope so. And just to plug, I am planning to share more about at least the beginning research for this and the class that that we've been doing in an online faculty workshop hosted by the Writing Center Consortium for Graduate-Level PME on March 1st.* So that's been an incredible faculty series of workshops. There's been many wonderful ones so far, and I'm very grateful to be a part of that.

Dr. Megan Hennessey

Oh, perfect. I mean, I have to ask and I'm asking you a lot of verbiage questions because you and I are both English majors. The phrase “safe space.” What do the Marines think about that?

Professor Stase Wells

I do think that in the wake of a pandemic, and as we look to new, uncertain threats in the future warfighting environment, I think honestly it's become more common for Marines and students to speak about feelings and about how emotions play a role.

This has also come with really supportive leadership, who read a lot of these books, you know, and people really understanding. For example, Brené Brown has a lot of great information, and a lot of people are reading this now. We are seeing also neuroscientific evidence that would share really the principles about how emotions play a role and how stress plays a role in learning, and so knowing that it's incredibly important to our students’ learning experience, we have to recognize it and we have to talk about it.

Emotions play a key role in memory consolidation in what we learn in our fight, flight, or freeze responses which not only happen in, you know, deployment environments, but they do happen in the classroom as well as that can be a stressful experience.

So I think that I've definitely encountered a lot of support in this type of research so far, and I think that we're really trending that way. So I'm excited to see what the future holds.

You know, for an environment that really does feel more safe, and to that I would add actually, if you're faculty, remember, at any level of PME, you are bound to encounter students with different educational and cultural backgrounds than yours, with different views, perspectives, with different first languages, and I think it's important to note that these students don't only fall into the international military student category. So I encounter more and more American military students every year for whom English is not their first language.

When I offer LCSC writing studio classes, courses, and workshops that are designed for those who seek and identify themselves as needing additional support, internationals are not the only demographic represented among the participants.

And so my point with all this is I use the words “safe classroom environment” a lot, and what I mean by that is an inclusive classroom environment in which not only must students feel comfortable sharing their experiences and alternative viewpoints, but that kind of environment will likely foster the kind of openness necessary for others you might not expect in your classroom to speak up and to add valuable insight to the discussion.

So, it's this kind of environment that allows us actually not only to make people feel good, but it allows us to be innovative, creative, critical of ourselves and of our current ways of doing things.

And at the end of the day, whether you're an international military student or an American student, when our students feel valued as contributors of knowledge, when they feel heard and seen and cared about in the classroom by other adult learners, I found in my experience and I hope to support with data one day in a future research study that they will be more likely to take risks to succeed academically in ways they didn't believe possible, and to become the kinds of leaders that we need to fight in the uncertain wars of the future.

Dr. Megan Hennessey

Super well said, and I don't think anyone would disagree with you there.

Professor Stase Wells, thank you so much for joining us on Axon today. Is there anything else you want to leave us with before we sign off?

Professor Stase Wells

I just want to thank you so much for having me. I want to really thank Air University Axon podcast for having me as a guest.

I also have appreciated the previous podcast episodes, and I think this is a really worthwhile endeavor to really make sure that we have evidence-based best approaches to teaching and learning.

You know, I really appreciated Major Dan Kaiser's thoughts on neurodiversity and military education on a previous episode of the podcast, and I would add that evidence in the field absolutely supports the idea that, you know, brains are as unique as human faces, the ways in which international and American individuals process information are unique based on a variety of factors.

And so, you know, I really would challenge faculty: If you have not studied brain science yet, if you've not started down that rabbit hole, you know, I would say that it's a really great game changer for tailoring instructional methods to the learners in a way that engages students,  improves memory consolidation, you know, makes our learned concepts stick, and ultimately lowers barriers without lowering the rigor needed to develop future military leaders.

So, I'm more than happy to chat more with anybody who's interested. You're welcome to contact me or any member of our team on the Contact Us section of the LCSC page on the Marine Corps University website, and we also have an official Facebook page.

So, feel free to join us over there on facebook.com/lcscfaculty if you're interested.

Dr. Megan Hennessey

Thanks, Stase. Thanks everyone for listening today.

Professor Stase Wells

Thank you.

 

*NOTE: The date of this workshop has been postponed to 29 MAR 2023.