Learn by Doing

Abstract

There is a wonderful story in David Bayles and Ted Orland’s Art and Fear about learning by doing. An art instructor tells his pottery class that the left side of the classroom will be graded on the total weight of the pots they create during the semester. At the end of the course, the teacher said he’d bring in his bathroom scales and weigh their pots: fifty pounds of pots would be an “A,” forty pounds a “B,” thirty pounds a “C,” and so forth. The right-hand side of the class would be graded on the quality of only one pot. Their job was to make the best pot they could and to turn it in for a judgment on quality alone.