Where did Guidance go?

As a surviving Online / Distance Learning (DL) teacher of the 2018/2019 school year, I am ready and eager to burn through the collective garbage from the past year and hopefully plant some meaningful scaffolds to build my future courses upon it’s charred ashes.
Gone will be 30-page “learning guides” that students must complete (I’m glad you figured out there’s an answer key attached at the back)
Gone will be irrelevant “projects” that are absent of logic and purpose (make a powerpoint of your progress through an interactive game? really?)
Gone will be “unit tests” of 30 multiple choice questions (your answer isn’t listed? Gee, I wonder why?)
The reigning paradigm of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) stands tall and all shall follow suit.

Teaching for Meaningful Learning: A Review of Research on Inquiry-Based and Cooperative Learning.

Barron and Darling-Hammond summarizes how the shift from traditional transmission of knowledge towards obtaining knowledge through experience, namely problem-solving. Much of their reasoning will be familiar to those who have gone through teacher education or teacher training in the last decade or two.

• Current / future demands for employment are more complex, requires problem solving & collaboration skills.
• Traditional instructions do not prepare students for those challenges.
• Various research showing benefits of PBL methodology.
  • Higher (Boaler, 1997, 1998) or comparable standardized test scores (Penuel, Means, & Simkins, 2000).
  • Better mastery of transferable skills, ie. defining problem, hypothesizing, (re)testing, support & argue with rational logic
    (Gallaghers, Stepien, & Rosenthal, 1992; Gallaghers, Stepien, & Workman, 1993; Lundeberg, Levin, & Harrington, 1999; Savery & Duffy, 1996; Williams, 1992).
  • Improve social interactions & collaboration (Cohen et al., 1982; Cook et al., 1985; Hartley, 1977; Ginsburg-Block, Rohrbeck, & Fantuzzo, 2006; Johnson & Johnson, 1989).

The mounting evidence of against guidance-centered learning should be enough for most educators to re-think delivery approach, and consider trading in for the new vehicle of learning. Hush nagging doubts, numerous researchers on this topic cannot be wrong when they all reach the same consensus.

Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching.

Mistakes were made.

“The major fallacy of this [minimal guidance] is that it makes no distinction between the behaviors and methods of a researcher who is an expert practicing a profession and those students who are new to the discipline and who are, thus, essentially novices.” (Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark, 2006).

I’ve often butted heads against my Faculty Associate during my teaching Professional Development Program / Post-Degree Program (PDP). While I’m happy to acquiesce to the current PBL trend, something always felt off about disregarding prescribed knowledge and content in favor of students making their own learning. After reading the article, now I know why.

• If I were a researcher with no experience as an educator, I would obviously use standardized exams as a benchmark for scoring improvements in students’ learning based on the method of instruction. After all, these are the marks should be free of an educators’ individual bias to appear more competent, and should be more applicable across the board. Herein lies my first concern: what exactly do the standardized exams assess, and how does it relate to the teaching style?
  Past Provincials and AP Exams had more questions analogous to worked-examples and fewer problem-based varieties, where as the current Numeracy Assessment exam is the opposite. If PBL students scored comparably or higher in the former scenario, then one can conclude it to being more effectively. Conversely, if traditional guidance students scored more favorably on the latter type, then one can argue that the PBL approach may not be as beneficial as it appears. What would potentially invalidate a research would be students scoring favorably on the exams that reflect the type of learning they received.  Readers, especially educators, need to examine findings from research on learning styles more clearly to see whether the appropriate experiment and analysis has been carried out.
• Students being researched would provide valuable feedback to help support the findings for the research of their learning from experiencing different teaching styles. However, we know the teenage brain is not fully mature until mid twenties (for some guys, even later). Therefore, student reporting contains the issue of Do they know what they know?
  Clark (1982) noted that “less able learners who choose less guided approaches tend to like the experience even though they learn less from it”(Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark, 2006). It’s not surprising that students who dislike traditional guidance would view PBL to be more favorable, it’s designed to be more engaging. This is not to ignore all students’ input, but what they perceive as success may not be the same to teachers, to parents, to administrators, or to researchers. It would be noteworthy to find more recent data that correctly analyzes students’ measure of success in comparison to academic standings.
• More about the brain (B.Sci with a Bio major here): I absolutely love how this article goes into detail about how problem solving cannot occur effectively without a large pool of resource from experience.  As a senior science teacher in high school, I’ve had to extensively grapple with the issue of content-heavy instruction to provide students the tools to solve problem (worked-examples), versus a scaffolded problem scenario for them to slowly work their ways toward the answer. As evidenced in today’s MEd orientation / information overload, the working memory can process less than a handful of novel information as once, and that information is quickly lost if not re-visited promptly. If grown, working adults are struggling to accomplish this, how do we expect our students to do the same in a limited 60-80 minute instruction time? This is why I’ve begun leaning back towards more instruction-centered designs where students need to shown at least one method or example, demonstrate their mastery of it, before being allowed to challenge the higher difficulty, open-ended scenarios; the same conclusion Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006) came to.
• Most educators would agree, expecting a class to hold a meaningful debate is nigh-impossible without participants having some background knowledge to anchor their logic or reasoning and provide supporting arguments from. Here is where the guidance comes shines, and where minimal guidance waits it’s turn.