This site offers research-proven strategies and tips for teaching effectively in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. We wrote Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide (Jossey-Bass, 2016, 2024) and many papers and presented hundreds of teaching workshops and seminars on that subject. We’re happy to share with you some of what we’ve learned in our combined 90+ years of teaching, educational research, instructional development, and educational program evaluation. To find out more about us, click here. For a complete bibliographic listing of papers and columns we’ve written with links to copies of most of them, click here.
Return to the Blog
So, we finished the last blog post we wrote, took a break to grab some coffee and scones, took care of a few minor work-related tasks, got back to the Blog, and submitted two new posts a couple of weeks ago. No big deal, right?
OK, if you insist on dragging in trivial details, the last post we wrote before our coffee break was submitted in January 2021 and we’re now in July 2024. Our work-related tasks are extremely complex and we’re slow coffee drinkers—so sue us!
Actually, a couple of exciting events took place in the education world while we were sipping. In January 2021 the Covid-19 pandemic had erupted ten months earlier and most of us were still triple-scrubbing our kitchen counters, trying to find places to order dozens or hundreds of toilet paper rolls, going everywhere in breathing-resistant masks, and if we were teachers, becoming online instructors whether we wanted to be or not. Students have now begun returning to their classrooms in large numbers, but for various reasons including economic ones, online instruction is not about to go away.
Then in November 2022, just as some brilliant scientists began to get Covid under control, the artificial intelligence explosion occurred. Even in its still primitive state, AI now has tools capable of getting correct solutions to almost every problem we assign and creating stunningly articulate completions of our writing assignments, and it’s starting to provide pretty impressive tutoring. These days many of us in the education business are frantically trying to figure out how to deal with all that. (For example, the idea of giving students high grades for excellent work done by their robots is not popular among educators, but avoiding doing so is far from trivial.)
So, we’ve got a bunch of hopefully interesting nuggets of information to share with you in our resurrected Blog (see the blog link adjacent to the book link at the top of this page). When we post a few new entries, we’ll announce it on Linked-In and Facebook, and if you don’t frequent either of those, check the Blog out occasionally. We promise that the interval between posts will be significantly less than it was when we took that 3½-year coffee break.
What’s new?
The new edition of our book is out!!! Click here to read more about it!
Click on our Blog to read our latest thinking on teaching and learning STEM.