100th Episode Reflection

Today we reached our hundredth episode milestone. In this episode, we reflect back on several common themes that have emerged in a number of recent podcast episodes. We also discuss changes that we’ve made in our current classes in response to discussions with some of our recent guests.

Show Notes

Transcript

Rebecca: Today we reached our hundredth episode milestone. We invite you to celebrate with us and reflect on how our guests have contributed to how you approach teaching and learning.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

John: Today’s teas are:

Rebecca: Golden Monkey, it’s a celebration day.

John: …and I’m drinking ginger peach black tea. It’s just another day.

We thought we’d start by talking about why we began this podcast series. One of the reasons for this is that we’ve observed that a growing number of faculty were not able to make it to our regular workshops on campus. And w e wanted to find a way to reach out and provide them with some assistance.

Rebecca: We have a lot of faculty who commute or have other family commitments and obligations and a lot of part-time faculty. So, we thought this was a good opportunity to provide on-demand professional development. We both had been really into listening to podcasts at the time, too. So I think that was a motivator. I’m not sure either of us thought we would actually make it to 100 episodes.

John: No, in fact, we were going to try this for a few months to see how it worked. And we both have been, I think, really pleasantly surprised at how well it caught on on our campus and more broadly. We now have listeners in over 100 countries and every US state.

Rebecca: John nudged me a lot at the beginning because I was a little resistant to the idea of doing the podcast. But we’ve been really fortunate to have really wonderful guests and to get to talk to some really amazing people. And it’s really the guests that we’ve had that have made the podcast what it is.

John: The only downside is that every time we have a new guest, I think both of us come up with some ideas that we’d like to integrate into our classes. And there’s a limit just to how much we can do at any given semester.

Rebecca: So, clearly, we need some episodes on prioritization and time management. [LAUGHTER].

John: …and people have often asked us for things on that, but neither of us, perhaps, are as good at that as we could be.

Rebecca: Or maybe the alternative is people who are really good at that don’t want to spend their time doing a podcast.

John: That’s true. Because whenever we’ve had people who we were told were really good at that , they’ve always just said “No.”

Rebecca: We’ve had a lot of informal feedback from our listeners and conversations and emails that really demonstrate that need for on-demand professional development in the way that you can listen to it on the go. But also, we have seen a lot of folks that are using the transcripts and things as well as reference. We had one listener who called in and left us a nice message that captures a lot of the sentiments that we’ve gotten internally. And so we want to share that little clip with you right now.

Carlo: Hi, Rebecca, and John. My name is Carlo Cuccaro. I’m an adjunct instructor… been teaching for 25 years for SUNY Oswego, primarily in the Counseling and Psychological Services, and Extended Learning departments. I also occasionally teach for Curriculum and Instruction. So, while I love teaching, I have to admit that my journey through the process of becoming a teacher has been interesting in that no one taught me how to teach. My role models were my former professors, and I use my own experiences as a student to kind of shape my approach to teaching. But I had to come to the realization that I really needed to become a more reflective instructor and look at a lot of issues around teaching and learning. And over the years, I’ve been able to do that in many ways, kind of on my own. But I have to admit and compliment you in that your podcast has become instrumental in my own journey as a teacher and my self improvement. As an aside, I’m a long distance runner; I run six days a week, on weekends I run anywhere from 16 to 24 miles, I’ve run 50K races and marathons. And so your podcast has kept me company on many a run. And I found myself stopping in the middle of a run to take my phone out and jot down something or record something that I wanted to remember from one of your podcasts, be it about using social media, or technology, or reflecting on attention span in students, or just overall pedagogy. There’s so many things I’ve taken from your podcast that have improved my teaching and I’ve been able to integrate specifically into my courses with really positive student feedback, and a good feeling about how I am growing as a teacher. So I wanted to thank you for all of your hard work, for your great guests, for you’re being just an amazing resource to me and to many others. Congratulations, and keep on keepin on.

John: We thank Carlo for his feedback. And we’re glad that this has been working for him and so many other people who’ve commented on how they enjoy the podcast on their drives, while they’re exercising, while they’re doing household work, and so on.

Rebecca: It’s that kind of feedback that I think motivates us to continue doing the podcast, there’s days when we’re overwhelmed and have too much to do and it can seem daunting to take on another interview or another episode. We certainly get a lot out of interviewing the guests, but it’s even more meaningful when we know that what everyone’s learning is improving classrooms for a lot of students.

John: We last did a reflection in Episode 62, and we talked about some of the major things we had taken away. But we thought now that we’ve had so many podcasts it might be useful, just to reflect back on some of the themes that have been bubbling up in our more recent episodes.

Rebecca: One of the things that we’ve heard from faculty in our conversations, but also from a lot of our guests as we’ve been chatting, is how underprepared a lot of faculty feel when they enter the profession to be a teacher.They’re prepared to be a researcher or an artist or what have you, but don’t necessarily feel prepared to help students learn effectively. They can do the same things that they’ve seen before, but don’t necessarily know the most effective strategies.

John: That’s partly because of the incentives that graduate schools face. They often get their prestige measured by how well they place their graduates in R1 institutions… and the tools that they need in R1 institutions are generally research skills. And there’s not always a lot of effort there on teaching either, on the part of the faculty or in the training of graduate students. There have been some notable exceptions and we’ve talked about some of those in past podcasts.

Rebecca: In Episode 84—Barriers to Active Learning, Lindsay Wheeler and Hannah Sturtevant talk a lot about their observations or the observations that their research team made of faculty in the classroom and the kinds of activities they were actually doing, and made observations that although faculty might even report that they’re doing active learning, it’s kind of limited. And so not knowing different ways to implement those strategies is often a barrier.

John: As our classrooms have become increasingly diverse in terms of the mix of students, with more first-generation students and a wider mix in terms of students from various socio-economic status groups, we need to be better prepared to provide a more inclusive environment that works for all of our students, and not just the traditional students of past decades. We had a very interesting discussion of the new MOOC that Cornell has put together, where Melkina Ivanchikova and Mathew Ouellet talked about the development of that MOOC. We also had a great discussion with with Amer Ahmed on inclusive pedagogy.

Rebecca: And some of the things that I thought were really exciting are some of the episodes that talked a lot about moving away from a traditional lecture format, and offered some other ways of thinking about operating in the classroom. Some of my favorites were episodes 74: Uncoverage by David Voelker, and Episode 70: Dynamic Lecturing by Christine Harrington. Both of those offer different ways of thinking about what content should actually be covered or uncovered in the classroom, and also ways to mix things up in the classroom so it isn’t just straight lecture.

John: And in particular, Christine Harrington basically reminded us that lecture can be effective when it’s done well, which involves making it much more interactive. But there’s also been a lot of podcasts recently that remind us that most students enter our classrooms knowing very little about how they learn. So quite a few of our episodes have been addressing metacognition, and how we can help students become more effective in their learning.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that we’ve had a lot of conversations about just as we’re picking potential guests to reach out to or with our colleagues on campus, is how important helping students learn how to learn is. They’re in our classes and we expect them to already know how to learn, and we don’t take the time to meet students where they’re at and know that that’s something that we actually need to talk about, and help them develop and nurture them through that journey of figuring out what it means to be a learner, and to be an independent learner. And so, I think a lot of the episodes that we’ve had that talk about metacognition… that’s really what’s at the heart there… is finding ways that we can start helping students recognize ways that they can be more effective learners. And the onus isn’t always on the teacher to be an effective teacher, but also to just make sure that students know how to learn and how the class is structured in a way that can help them learn.

John: Because the development of those goals will help them not only in their current class, but in future classes and throughout their life. One of our most recent episodes was Developing Metacognition by Judith Boettcher. And she talked about how that could be done in an online framework with project-based learning and problem-based learning.

Rebecca: I think that episode happened in a really critical moment for me in particular… that I immediately started having students set goals and do all kinds of things right at the beginning of the semester that I maybe hadn’t fully intended to do, because I became more and more aware that I’ve been trying to do things to help students develop their metacognition, but that had some specific tips and tools that worked really well for the kinds of things that I was already doing. And it felt like a really good way to integrate it.

John: …and another episode that I think had a lot of influence on you, particularly, was the episode I’m specifications grading with Linda Nilson. Could you tell us what you’ve done in response to that episode?

Rebecca: Yeah, I went all in this semester. So I’m not out so far, I’m unscathed in the approach, but I decided to go all in and structure my class so that it has specifications grading as the key way that I am doing grading on individual assignments and projects. I use some of the bundling techniques that she talks about, but not for the whole course. So there’s an essential bundle that everyone has to do at the beginning of the course. And then there’s a big project that students can choose different sets of specifications that they can meet in these collaborative projects for two-thirds of the class. And so far, that initial bundle that everyone’s required to do, all the students, although they were a little concerned and a little panicky about the idea that we have to keep doing it until they got it right. We’ve been doing a lot of revision, and students are really developing those fundamental skills that they’re going to need to do a more complicated project. And so that seems to be really effective.

John: And that podcast works very nicely or ties very nicely to the other podcast we did with Linda Nilson on Self-Regulated Learning, which focuses on how we can help students improve their own skills at learning.

Rebecca: I know that you’ve talked a lot about the ways you’re trying to raise students awareness of metacognition in your own classes. Were there some episodes more recently that have changed how your practices worked at all?

John: One topic that we revisited in our more recent podcasts is open pedagogy, particularly with the episode by Jessica Kruger on her Just-In-Time textbook, where she had a whole class write a textbook. I like that so much, I did it in my spring 2019 class. But I also have students in my introductory class this term working on a podcast project. So, I’m really excited about that. And many of the students are excited… many of them are really, really nervous about it. But I think they’ll get through that. I think open pedagogy is a topic that has come up as a method of really increasing student learning as well as student engagement. And my perception is that they are learning the topics much more deeply when they have to write about them and present them in a public form.

Rebecca: That goes to the idea of teaching others and so you’re going to be more prepared if you have to explain to someone else because you have to practice so I can see how students might actually develop those metacognitive skills in a sneaky kind of way in those contexts, because they might feel embarrassed if they aren’t successful if it is in public.

John: In terms of developing students skills, Michelle Miller provided two podcasts for us since our last reflection. One on her Attention Matters module, which is a module that they’ve used at Northern Arizona University and many other schools to help students learn about attention and focus and to improve their learning skills by focusing their attention. And Michelle also talked about retrieval practice in Episode 65, which was a really nice overview of the importance of retrieval practice in learning, as well as the discussion of a wide variety of techniques that people can easily introduce in their classes to help improve their learning.

Rebecca: And a good overview of a lot of these evidence-based practices was introduced in Episode 64 – How Humans Learn by Josh Eyler. Metacognition certainly comes up there as well, but also a lot of these other evidence-based practices to help students develop their learning skills.

John: One other theme that came up in many of these podcasts was the importance of reflection, we had an episode by JoNelle Toriseva: Episode 93 on Reflective Writing, which talked about this very nicely.

Rebecca: That episode had a lot in common with Episode 98, that we already mentioned (Developing Metacognition with Judith Boettcher), because there’s a lot of focus on goal setting, and I was really excited to see how effective setting goals was for students and how seriously they actually take that activity. So if you’re a little skeptical, I’d encourage you to check out both of those episodes and think about how to get your students to reflect on their learning and to set some goals.

John: More broadly, a lot of our episodes, since our last reflection, have focused on creating a positive environment within our classroom that provides students with an environment that’s conducive to learning for all the students in the class. A really good discussion of much of that occurs in our interview with Sarah Rose Cavanagh on Emotions and Learning, and the importance of emotions for learning and how we can use that to improve the amount that students learn.

Rebecca: Although that’s the only one that has emotion in the title, I think one of the things that’s really interesting that’s come up in a number of episodes is that emotions aren’t separate from learning. Emotions impact learning, and I think that’s something that a lot of faculty might be resistant to on a surface level. It might be something you immediately take pause to and think “Wait, that doesn’t apply to what I do.” We’re thinking we want to be rational and have debates that are based only on facts, but emotions play into how we interpret and interact with our environment and with information. And a lot of episodes talked about the role that emotions play. In Episode 77 with Lisa Nunn, not only was there a lot about metacognition, but there’s a lot about emotion and thinking about some of the anxieties and things for someone who’s new to a particular kind of learning environment, like a college setting, or how that setting might be really different from high school.

John: Cyndi Kernahan talked about ways of building a comfortable environment for discussing difficult issues involving race in Episode 89.

Rebecca: In that episode, and also in 82: Geeky Pedagogy by Jessamyn Neuhaus, there’s a lot of conversation about identity and the role that your identity as a faculty member, as well as identities of students play in these conversations, that has bigger implications and bigger complicated conversations that might be difficult or challenging to have. But understanding that we all have identities… that crossover and a lot of different places is important in our conversations. That was also true in Episode 96 – Inclusive Pedagogy.

John: One of the interesting things pointed out in Geeky Pedagogy is that the personalities and interests and motivations of faculty are not necessarily the same as those of our students. So she provides a really nice discussion of how we can use our own personality effectively in teaching students who might have very different motivations and incentives than us. Because the people who choose to become faculty are not random selections of people from the college body. And it’s sometimes a difficult adjustment in working with students who have very differ ent personalities, motivations, and interests.

Rebecca: Although I can’t point to a particular episode, one of the things that has been bubbling up in a lot of the conversations we’ve had on the podcast, but in also some of the other work that I’ve been doing with colleagues related to accessibility. And it ties into what you’re talking about, about that particular episode, is all these assumptions that we have. And we just don’t even realize that we have them, but they’re built into our environment, and they’re built into the Academy. And as we recognize what those assumptions are, we can start to figure out ways to dismantle those structures that prevent students from being successful or even prevent us as instructors from being successful in the classroom.

John: When we’re talking about classroom climate, we’ve also had quite a few episodes that have dealt with classroom climate in online, hybrid, or HyFlex courses. And specifically, in Episode 79 on Self-Learning versus Online Instruction, Spiros Protopsaltis and Sandy Baum talked about the importance of interaction within the online environment. That was also emphasized by Flower Darby in her discussion of her book Small Teaching Online, in which she talked about a wide variety of methods that we could use to keep our online classes much more engaging, and much more interactive and effective. And in last week’s episode, Judie Littlejohn talked about how HyFlex courses can also be used to provide students with a more flexible environment to meet the needs of students who cannot accommodate a traditional face-to-face course schedule.

Rebecca: And Episode 87: Social Presence in Online Courses is another one with Allegra Davis Hannah and Misty Wilson-Merhtens.

John: And I’d also recommend their podcast, The Profess-hers, which I listen to regularly, and it’s quite good.

Rebecca: There’s also a wide smattering of episodes that we can’t possibly detail out here. But one that stands out is Episode 73: The Injustice League by Margaret Schmuhl that talks a lot about ways to get first-year students to feel engaged and part of the larger Academy and getting them involved with activities, getting them integrated into the community, and the role that a faculty member should perhaps play in helping students become a member of that bigger conversation.

John: …creating that emotional engagement, again, that was discussed in these other episodes.

Rebecca: We’ve talked a lot about metacognition and classroom climate bubbling up as interesting themes. And neither of those are necessarily things that first come to mind, I don’t think, for faculty about what professional development as a faculty member is. So, I think that that’s kind of interesting that those are topics that come up and just about any conversations that we’ve been having. So John, where do you want to go next? What are some things that you’re hoping that we start talking about in the future?

John: Well, where I want to go now is to Disney World… I mean to the Online Learning Consortium conference in November, where I think you’ll be going, too. But in terms of future podcasts, there’s a lot of things that are left to explore, there’s so many new studies coming out that we’d like to talk to some of the authors of and there’s so many people doing interesting things that we’d like to talk more to.

Rebecca: I know that one thing that we’ve started having some episodes on, but not nearly enough is really about the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. All of the things that we’re talking about in evidence-based practices obviously come out of scholarship and come out of research. But we don’t always talk a lot about how faculty can start doing some of their own research in their own context with students. And I think that that’s an area that faculty are interested in, but don’t always know how to get started in.

John: We did have a nice episode on that, that we reflected on earlier with Regan Gurung. But that is an area that we should investigate more. And at the very least, it would be nice to talk to some of the people doing the research studies to find out more about how they did it and how perhaps other people might extend that research or where future research can go. So what are you doing next, Rebecca?

Rebecca: So, I’m going on sabbatical. And I’m really excited about studying accessibility further. I’ve been collecting data over the last year and a half in my classes about how students engage with, or relate to, the concept of accessibility and how they implement accessible practices in the design work that they do. So I’ve been collecting data… have done a very minimal analysis of it to see that things looks like they’re going well. But I’ve done a number of different interventions each semester, so I can do some comparisons. And so I’m looking forward to exploring that as well as putting together some resources for faculty who are doing projects where students are making things in public. So similar to some of the open pedagogy things, there’s a lot of people putting stuff out in public and having their students create things in public. But they don’t always think a lot about audience. And when they’re thinking about audience, they’re often not thinking about people with disabilities… or who might listen or interact with materials in a way that they don’t. How about you, John? What’s next for you?

John: Well, I’m actually doing two things new this semester. One is I have switched over to Lumen Learning’s Waymaker package, which is a personalized learning system, which we discussed in an earlier episode with Steve Greenlaw, who actually developed much of the economic material. And that’s been working really well, students are generally liking it. But I’m building a lot of materials week by week to supplement it and to flesh it out a little bit more. And the other thing I’m doing new is, in my online class, partly inspired by the open pedagogy podcast we’ve had before and presentations by Robin DeRosa and others, I used an open pedagogy project this spring. And we actually talked about that in an earlier podcast. And one of the things that, to me at least, came through was just how excited and engaged the students who were involved in that work. They really enjoyed putting work out there… something that they could show to their families, their friends, and so forth. And they learned about the topic much more deeply than if it was just a disposable assignment at the end of the class where no one other than the instructor would ever see that again. So, this time, I’m having students do podcasts on applications of introductory microeconomics. And I’m giving them the option of either keeping them within the class or sharing them more publicly. And some students are really nervous about that, b ut others are really excited about it. It’s early on right now. And I’m trying to scaffold the project to make them more comfortable. And I’m really looking forward to what they produce. And if it works well, this will be a publicly shared podcast that will involve applications of basic concepts in microeconomics to things in the news.

Rebecca: That sounds exciting… sounds like a future episode could be discussing that potential project.

John: We’ll see how it goes. I’m cautiously optimistic about it.

Rebecca: Sounds really similar to a lot of responses we get when we ask faculty to talk about the projects we’re working on.

John: it’s always easier to do it in retrospect, but so far, I’ve been really pleased with what students have been doing.

Well, thank you all for listening. We have some really great guests lined up for the next few months. We’re looking forward to our next reflection episode,

Rebecca: …and maybe one of our next guests will be you.

Most importantly, I think we need to thank all of the guests for the first 100 episodes because without those guests, we wouldn’t have a podcast and we wouldn’t have really great conversations or way too many things to do in our classrooms.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.