A Miniature Guide For Those Who Teach On How to Improve Student Learning

This guide presents 30 instructional ideas based on the goal of teaching all subjects so that, as a consequence, students take ownership of the most basic principles and concepts of the subject. Most of our suggestions represent possible teaching strategies. They are based on a vision of instruction implied by critical thinking and an analysis of the weaknesses typically found in most traditional didactic lecture/quiz/test formats of instruction. Students should master fundamental concepts and principles before they attempt to learn more advanced concepts. If class time is focused on helping students perform well on these foundational activities, we feel confident that the goals of most instruction will be achieved. Our goal is not to dictate to you, but to provide you with possible strategies with which to experiment. The specific suggestions we recommend represent methods and strategies we have developed and tested with our students. Judge for yourself their plausibility. Test them for their practicality. Those that work (i.e., improve instruction) keep; those that do not work, abandon or re-design.

A former producer of The Diane Rehm Show, Richard Paul is an award-winning independent public radio documentary producer whose work includes Race and the Space Race, about the first African Americans in the space program. Paul was the 2012–2013 Verville Fellow in Space History at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. His feature stories have appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition and PRI’s Studio 360.