Maximum effort

Marvin, one of my basset hounds, likes to return home from his morning walk and pull the blanket off of the sofa with his teeth—an action that demands considerable exertion. Toddlers also exhibit an appetite for challenging work, like carrying heavy things, which early years educators sometimes refer to as “maximum effort.”

Back in my teaching days when I attended a Montessori training course in London, a fellow teacher-in-training made this connection out loud and was met with grave disapproval. Our trainer said sternly, “Stop comparing children with animals. Children are NOT dogs.” (This may or may not have led to the insightful individual’s absence from subsequent classes, but who’s to say.)

Contrary to our trainer's response, I don’t believe the observation was harmful. The teacher-in-training had just noticed that toddlers and puppies had similar inclinations at times. In fact, it's a useful practice to draw parallels between seemingly unrelated worlds.

About a year ago, in our pursuit of optimizing the student onboarding experience at Case Western Reserve University, we took inspiration from an unexpected source: Delta Airlines.

We realized that much like the way airlines organize information in their emails, with crucial details at the top and less urgent information towards the bottom, we could enhance the efficiency of the onboarding process—giving the busy students what they needed upfront so they could go and submit documentation and sign up for accommodation, etc., while offering more information and avenues of exploration for those students who had more time on their hands.

This decision came after accepting the fact that higher education marketing can be influenced by the marketing practices of other industries.

Comparison isn't an insult, it's a ladder, helping you move from one viewpoint to another. And who knows, maybe it can even help make writing onboarding emails less ruff (sorry, had to).