“This book is about how to design a stable, high-performing learning environment inside an unstable setting.”
Why This Book
Teaching students through live client projects is not just about solving real-world problems. It is about designing a learning environment where they can engage with real businesses, face real issues, and still learn deeply — all within the pressure of time, uncertainty, and inexperience.
This book shares the system I have built to guide final-year business undergraduates through those conditions. The course is a capstone module typically involving small business owners with transformation challenges. Students arrive with no consulting experience and limited exposure to ambiguity. Yet over 13 weeks, they are expected to deliver implementable solutions that create value for the client.
The method I use produces consistent outcomes regardless of the student’s starting point or how well the project fits their background. It works because it is structured enough to give students the space to think, test, and reflect without getting lost in the mess.
Over time, I have come to call this the Tide Pool Method™. This method shapes the learning environment into a bounded space that lets the real world seep in — just enough to be real, not enough to drown.
This book is for educators who want to design such learning environments. It explains:
- How the method works
- How it is structured across 13 weeks
- What to adapt or avoid
- And how students and clients respond when it is done well
The approach is grounded in practice, but it echoes thinkers like Dewey[1], Schön[2], and Wheatley[3]. These educators believed that structure, reflection, and coherence can exist even in uncertain environments.
I am not claiming this is the only method that works. But it is one that helps students do meaningful work in the kinds of settings that often unravel learning. Before we get to the method, we need to talk about the mess.
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[1] John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1938)
[2] Donald A. Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983)
[3] Margaret J. Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
(San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1992).