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!

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.

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.

My favorite article in the April issue of The Teaching Professor is written by two faculty members at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan. One of the two, an engineer, decided to take a history class from the other. It doesn’t sound like they knew each other prior to this time. They write back and forth about the experience and their perspectives on what was happening. The part I like best is when the “student” faculty member describes how worried she was about her performance in the class. She tried harder than most students because she was afraid she’d lose face in front of her colleague. The colleague writes back that she never gave a thought about how her colleague would perform. She was too busy worrying what her colleague was thinking about her teaching and how she conducted the class.

I never quite believe how long and how hard my husband is willing to work on pieces of junk—old relics that have long given up the ghost. One time it was an old milk truck without brakes and multiple loose parts that flew­­ off when it careened around corners the few times it actually ran. Another time it was a $25 motorcycle. We have two 45 year-old, huge and rusty Allis Chalmers Crawlers—one runs, sort of, the other is for spare parts. Most recently it’s a 1963 International Scout that came with a snow plow that I’ve dubbed POS (piece of, you know, the s word). For starters, POS has almost no body parts; no windshield, dash, windows, doors, or roof. A few parts like fenders have been cobbled together from cast-off pieces of sheet metal.

Recently I worked with a group of faculty who teach cohort groups. Students start this professional program as a group and they move, lockstep, through the curriculum. So, the same students are together for every class. We talked some about the assets and liabilities of this kind of cohort association for teachers.