The text may give the impression that learning theorists believe that there is only one good way to organize instruction and that the job of teachers is to find that one way in order to deliver instruction effectively. That is not at all the case. Carroll (1990) advocates a set of teaching strategies that can be referred to as a minimalist approach - minimal in the sense that learners receive the bare minimum of instruction needed to get them "up and running" on the task to be learned. (Note that this Carroll is a different person than the Carroll who developed the model of school learning described earlier in this chapter. It was poor educational psychology for their parents to give them both the same last name and first initial.)
Carroll emphasizes three major factors in minimalist instruction:
1. Allowing learners to start immediately on meaningfully realistic tasks.
3. Helping to make errors and error recovery less traumatic and more pedagogically productive.
As he elaborates on these factors, Carroll develops eight guidelines:
1. Learners should get started on projects involving meaningful activity as quickly as possible.
3. Learners should be encouraged to reason about what they are doing. They should create new insights, not merely consume instructional material.
4. Reading material should be designed to be read in almost any order.
5. There should be strong linkages between training materials and opportunities to apply the training.
6. Errors during performance should be anticipated and turned into learning experiences.
7. The learner's prior knowledge should be incorporated into the new learning.
8. The specifics of the actual situation in which the learning is to occur should be considered and exploited.
Carroll summarizes the overall logic of the minimalist approach in this way: "Presenting real tasks that learners already understand and are motivated to work on, helping them to get started rapidly on these tasks, allowing them to rely on their own reasoning and improvising, reducing the instructional verbiage they must passively read, organizing material to support skipping around and to facilitate the coordination of attention between the training and the system, and addressing important user errors can produce better training material than the current state of the art." (p. 183)
Minimalist strategies are especially useful in settings where learners already possess many of the skills needed to perform a task or where the skills are intuitively obvious and where the learners can easily benefit from feedback that occurs whenever they make errors. These strategies have been most widely researched in commercial and industrial settings, where it is important that workers rapidly become capable of employing new strategies or using new equipment, such as computers or word processing programs.
In schools, the minimalist method is most obviously applicable in situations that resemble business and industry, such as using computers. However, the strategies can also be used to teach a large number of physical skills, including the use of laboratory equipment in science classes and a very large number of skills in art, music, and physical education. In addition, minimalist techniques can help develop non-physical skills, such as the use of library reference materials, development of ideas in paragraphs and essays, and numerous social skills. In any case where the teacher is teaching things where the learner already is partly competent and confident, the minimalist approach may be effective.
The minimalist approach avoids two extremes: under-teaching (assuming that students already know the material or can learn it on their own) and over-teaching (boring students with unnecessary information or with material that would be more useful at a different time). The minimalist approach is least likely to be useful in settings where the material is highly structured or the learners are likely to miss important information unless the instruction is deliberately thorough. In many cases, a combination of minimalist and more systematically complete instruction can be combined to offer the most productive learning experience.