Here’s a post to my students, motivating them to use class time well. It’s especially important that they do, in a setting where they’re not seated in rows and passively listening to me lecture for two hours. Perhaps this will motivate other professors to experiment with the “guide-on-the-side” approach.

Emphasizing facilitating over lecturing, I give you personal and group time in class for study, writing, and discussion (group and class). Use these opportunities well, rather than squandering them. Raise the bar and jump higher, rather than doing the minimum. Enjoy comradery, but don’t fritter away each other’s time. Leave early if you must, but meaningfully participate as best you can. No topic our textbook presents to you, along with consulting outside sources, can be exhaustively discussed and written about in one class period. Given this pedagogical approach, you’re free from having to endure propaganda and indoctrination posing as lectures; and in grading by completion, equity grading, you need not fear viewpoint reprisals. 

Effective collaboration requires keeping yourself and your peers on task, in your groups. While socializing sometimes adds levity, student tuition is paid to learn and develop; productively functioning groups provide a good return on that investment. Respectfully and honestly challenge one another’s positions, assumptions, definitions, textual interpretations, alleged facts, and arguments; this approach, in the spirit of academic freedom, engages and enhances one another.

While the divide-and-conquer technique efficiently dispatches tests and group assignments, it undermines thoughtful collaboration, cheating group members of a quality learning environment. Make it a group effort, not a fragmented, individualistic one. Collaborative learning, with the instructor facilitating rather than continuously pontificating, counters the negative effects we’ve lived through from the martial-law-type lock-down (isolation, mistrust from being told to report on one another, censorship, cancel culture, surveillance tracking, demonizing political or cultural opponents…). Given this approach, you’ll get out of it what you put into it; so, keep each other on task, while enjoying the comradery.  Handling the inevitable viewpoint-diversity in group-work requires intellectual integrity and emotional maturity. 

Use the textbook’s text-to-audio feature, if you’d like it to be regurgitated to you; I won’t bother doing that in my lectures. Rather, I’ll draw from my own background and knowledge, forming analogies and broadening the material to related topics. My experiences include: seven years as a professional musician (including selling Hal Leonard books from my website, promoting “Guitars in the Classroom” to public schools), seven years of teaching Motorcycle Safety Foundation courses, M.A.’s in Analytic Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, and Systematic Theology, Assoc. Pastor, blogging and podcasting and music production….  

I require links to experts beyond our textbook, in your posts, further expanding learning beyond our textbook’s and my information and opinions. With each chapter of our book delving into a separate area of business expertise, no one lecturer could teach them all with authority. On any topic we cover, you’re likely to learn from business professionals with credentials far exceeding my own.