I recently received a reference to a well-reasoned, well-referenced analysis exploring why “minimal guidance” during instruction does not work. The article appears in a well-respected educational psychology journal which means there’s specialized nomenclature which does not make it particularly easy reading for an outsider. “Minimal guidance” (as opposed to direct instructional guidance) means that learners, rather than being presented with information, must discover or construct it for themselves. The referent includes discovered based approaches, problem-based learning, inquiry learning, experiential learning and approaches based on constructivist theories of education.

I use an American Heritage dictionary that belonged to my now 97-year-old aunt. She’s descended into dementia and no longer recognizes or communicates sensibly with those of us in this world. But her dictionary is well-used and annotated. An arrow leads from the word “parsimony” to the top margin where she has written “tightwad.” Besides extra synonyms, in some places she tries out the word in a sentence. Near the word “etiology” she has written, “The etiology of conflict in the Middle has a long and sordid history.” Sometimes there are personal admonitions. “Good word! Remember to use it.”

Have you ever wondered how class session duration impacts students and learning? Is it better for students to meet in hour class sessions three times a week, hour-and-a-half sessions twice a week, or once a week for three hours?

I’m knee deep, some days it feels more like waist deep, in the research on student ratings. I’m still on that chapter on ratings for my book. What a sea of information!

As my work on career-long growth and development for college teachers progresses, I continue to fret about the haphazard way we take care of our instructional health. To begin (and this is not our fault), we work hard and are way too busy. Whether it’s teaching five courses a semester or teaching less but having a research agenda that must be moving forward and continuously productive, we have precious little time for another thing other than the strenuous motions required to keep our heads above water.

Fairly early in my editorship of The Teaching Professor, we published an article that drew some comparisons between students and customers. Never before and not since has a piece generated the response that one did. Education is not a product. Students may pay tuition but that money doesn’t buy grades. With education the customer cannot always be right. The notes just kept coming and coming.

Because we know that active engagement in collaborative projects can create a synergy among students that often surpasses what can be learned individually, we find ourselves designing assignments that create opportunities for students to collaborate and learn from one another.

“Do we really need to buy the textbook? It’s so expensive!”
“Can’t you just summarize it for us?”

A recent analysis of teaching award winners in Australia found that the majority were active researchers. That finding may contradict other research that has consistently failed to establish links between teaching effectiveness and research productivity. I wrote about this in a Feb 20th blog note. I’d say the weight of the evidence is still on the side of no relationship, despite this finding. The n here was quite small, and these were exceptional teachers.