QED™ Design Pedagogy

From the creation of our first QuantumCamp course, we developed a set of founding principles that have guided the subsequent creation of a pedagogy that is helping lead the country into a 21st century education and out of a 19th century education. This means no textbooks, lectures, or digital versions of textbooks and lectures.

QED™ is a new way to teach,
a new way to learn.

QED™ seeks to demonstrate new practices in education that restructure how students and instructors experience the education setting and relate to each other within it.

The student is the focus of the classroom, not the instructor.

Moments of true conceptual synthesis occur when students are given the space to discover powerful ideas for themselves. In our course, "The Periodic Table" students use only the data that Mendeleev had to reconstruct the periodic table. It is in this moment that lasting knowledge is created.

New methods of instruction require new methods of student evaluation.

It took us some time to develop our assessment methodology. We were looking for ways to test long-term conceptual knowledge, not facts and simple skills.

We use our assessments to not only provide feedback to students, but more importantly to improve our performance both on the curriculum side and on the instructional side.

QED for Students™

QED for Students™ creates a space where students can self-actualize in the context of a classroom. Whether they are learning mathematics, science, history, language arts, or any other subject, students deserve the chance to reach their highest level of self in an environment where learning, collaboration, and problem solving become part of who they are as a person.

Below you will find the four cornerstones of how QED works for students. Our intent is to share with parents and other educators how we create courses for children, to provide our instructors with the optimal design protocols from which to create, and to guide all of the processes we train for and employ in implementing our vision for students.

Contextualization

"Why do I have to know this?"

Contextualization creates the relevance and excitement that helps students discover meaning and reason in their quest for knowledge. The way we implement this idea offers the student tangible ways to understand and relate to knowledge.

Hands-on Activities, Activity Linking™, History Flow™, Story Arc™, and Immersion

Conceptual Flow^™

"What are the big ideas that I'm learning?"

Conceptual Flow is unique to QED curriculum and each step was carefully developed by Finnegan and Nurmela well before they created even their first course. It involves precisely sequencing ideas and concepts so that they are optimally absorbed by the student.

Historical Development, Concept Tree, Collaboration, Expertise, Concept Stringing™

Moment of Discovery^™

"I observed... and we concluded that..."

The Moment of Discovery is another aspect unique to the QED design process, and was developed by Finnegan and Nurmela to place the student in the shoes of the scientist by giving them the opportunity to learn problem solving while getting their hands on real equipment.

Challenge/Puzzle, High Quality Experiments, Activity Validation, Arisen Knowledge™, Concept Synthesis

Extension^™

"I can do this skill more easily than before."

Application is where students take the knowledge they have discovered and put it into practice so that stronger conceptual structures are built for that knowledge to exist within. The use of all or some of these techniques can take any student's knowledge to the next level.