Successful Education

What is Successful Education?

Find us at the permanent location

Successful Education is a new engineering education paradigm developed by Tomasz Arciszewski and proposed in his ground-breaking new book Successful Education: How to Educate Creative Engineers.
The purpose of Successful Education is to educate engineers who are creative and take pride in their work. They are leaders and innovators in society because they posses Successful Intelligence, a term recently created by cognitive psychologist Richard Sternberg as the key concept in his Theory of Successful Intelligence.
Successful Intelligence has three components:

  1. Practical Intelligence- the ability to solve simple, every day routine    problems mostly through the use of heuristics
  2. Analytical Intelligence- the ability to find solutions to complex analytical problems using mostly deduction.
  3. Creative Intelligence- the ability to develop non-routine, (or inventive), patentable solutions mainly through the use of abduction.

Successful Education is necessary in the establishment of a Successful Department, i.e. an engineering department that can educate engineers who are successful not only financially, but who are also leaders in society and who engage in deeply satisfying work. Successful Education is based on the Theory of Successful Intelligence, but also on da Vinci's Seven Principles (discovered and formulated by Michael Gelb), on the concept of the Medici Effect (recently proposed by Frans Johanssen), and on the concept of Creative Region (identified and described by Richard Florida). It is also through the experience, knowledge and leadership of Dr. Arciszewski himself that has led to this new way of thinking about engineering education. The nearly forty years of teaching on three continents, the myriad of academic and professional leadership positions he has held and the hundreds of hours of personal and academic research in the areas of engineering, systems theory, computing and cognitive psychology have resulted in a concise synthesis of the issue. Through his book Successful Education: How to Educate Successful Engineers as well as through his lectures and presentations, Dr. Arciszewski describes with clarity and precision where engineering education is today, how it got there and what concerned departments, instructors and professionals can do to help engineering education reach its full potential in the years to come.

Why Successful Education: Seven Reasons

  • Lost leadership: Engineers are not leaders in modern societies today because they have lost their ability to generate new inspiring ideas, the key ability of a leader.
  • Lost creativity: Engineers are not trained in how to think creatively, and this has a direct impact on their ability to invent.
  • Shrinking education:  Declining graduation requirements hurt our ability to serve society. It also lessens our competitive advantage with respect to other scientific professions, such as medicine.
  • Outsourcing: As the quality of American engineering education continues to decrease, outsourcing of engineering jobs will increase. This trend may be inevitable when it comes to routine engineering jobs. However, by improving American students´ abilities to think creatively, American engineering design and invention positions can be saved.
  • Legacy: Our future requires that the best and brightest students become engineers. Engineering must attract these students by offering meaningful, challenging and creative careers.
  • Systems perspective: Engineering education is a complex, adaptive system which must evolve in response to feedback coming from its environment
  • TRIZ perspective: Engineering education today has reached a state of maturity. In order to continue its evolution, it must undergo a paradigmatic change.

 

No part of the quotes from the book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Successful Education LLC except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews.