38. Reflective practice

Now that we have been on summer vacation for a while, we thought it would be useful to take a break from our usual interview format to reflect on the previous semester and our plans for the fall. We also provide some recommendations on summer reading related to professional development.

Show Notes

  • Sue, D. W. (2016). Race talk and the conspiracy of silence: Understanding and facilitating difficult dialogues on race. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Guffey, E. (2017). Designing Disability: Symbols, Space, and Society. Bloomsbury Publishing.
  • Evans, N. J., Broido, E. M., Brown, K. R., & Wilke, A. K. (2017). Disability in higher education: A social justice approach. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Hogan, Lara (2016). Demystifying Public Speaking. A Book Apart (https://abookapart.com/products/demystifying-public-speaking)
  • Hoffman, Kevin H. (2018). Meeting Design: For Managers, Makers and Everyone.  Rosenfeld Media.
  • Openpedagogy.org
  • Schwartz, D. L., Tsang, J. M., & Blair, K. P. (2016). The ABCs of how we learn: 26 scientifically proven approaches, how they work, and when to use them. WW Norton & Company.
  • Cavanagh, S. R. (2016). The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion. West Virginia University Press.
  • McGuire, S. Y. (2015). Teach students how to learn: strategies you can incorporate into any course to improve student metacognition, study skills, and motivation. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
  • Parkes, J., & Zimmaro, D. (2016). Learning and assessing with multiple-choice questions in college classrooms. Routledge.
  • Lewis, M. (2016). The undoing project: A friendship that changed our minds. WW Norton & Company.The Undoing Project – Michael Lewis
  • Tea for Teaching podcast: 15. Civic Engagement – a discussion with Allison Rank about the Vote Oswego project.
  • DeRosa, Robin (2017). “OER Bigger than Affordability” Inside Higher Ed. November 1.
  • Tea for Teaching podcast: 30. Adaptive Learning
  • Videoscribe
  • Flipgrid
  • Miller, M. D. (2014). Minds online: Teaching effectively with technology. Harvard University Press.
  • Learning How to Learn MOOC
  • Oakley, B. A. (2014). A mind for numbers: How to excel at math and science (even if you flunked algebra). TarcherPerigree.
  • Oakley, B. (2017). Mindshift: Break through obstacles to learning and discover your hidden potential. Penguin.
  • Oakley, B. (2018). Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School without Spending all your Time Studying; a Guide for Kids and Teens. Penguin.
  • Brown, P. C., Roediger III, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick. Harvard University Press.
  • Dweck, C. S. (2008). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House Digital, Inc..
  • Lang, J. M. (2016). Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Teaching in Higher Ed – Bonni Stachoviak
  • Teach Better – Doug McKee and Edward O’Neill
  • Email addresses: john.kane@oswego.edu and rebecca.mushtare@oswego.edu

John: Now that we have been on summer vacation for a while, we thought it would be useful to take a break from our usual interview format to reflect on the previous semester and our plans for the fall.

[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.

[Music]

John: Today our teas are:

Rebecca: …a mix of seven different kinds of tea, and it’s not really describable at this point.

John: After I’ve had many different types of tea today, I have Twinings’ Wild Berries herbal tea.

Rebecca: Finally dropping the caffeine after a long day?

John: …after many teas earlier in the day, yes.

Rebecca: So, I start my reflective practice while grading during finals week and for me it’s a really effective and productive procrastination technique. As I’m reading assignments or looking at projects and making notes about things that clearly did not work or “Wow, I really should cover these skills better” or “This really worked…” and I have a running dialogue with myself while I’m grading them and I use that for planning for the fall. What are your practices like, John?

John: I’d like to do that a bit during grading week but during grading week I’m generally busy working on the workshop schedule for our workshops here…

Rebecca: What?

John: … and also working on plans for various presentations at the SUNY Conference on Instructional Technology and so forth… and then getting ready for my trip down to North Carolina for the summer. So, I try to do it as I’m going during the semester so that I keep in my blackboard folder for each course a hidden folder where I list any problems… and I’ll do that for the course overall, as well as within individual modules. That way, when I go to refresh the course in the future I’ll have a list of things in general I want to do differently as well as specific recommendations in specific components of the course.

Rebecca: Have you ever accidentally made one of those hidden files not hidden?

John: I have not, no. [LAUGHTER]. I’m much more likely to leave something hidden that the students have as an assignment, but they’re usually pretty good at reminding me of that as we go through.

Rebecca: I think my greatest fear of having notes like that would be that I would make them really public and then probably have some sort of snarky comment in my hidden files. [LAUGHTER]

John: So, we thought maybe we talked a little bit about our lists of plans and then make some general recommendations of things that we found useful. So, Rebecca would you like to go first?

John: Sure, I think both of us have a fairly aggressive reading reading dream list. I don’t know how much either of us will get through that list, but my list includes Race Talk and [the] Conspiracy of Silence by Derald Wing Sue… which jDerald Wing Sue’s coming to our campus in the fall to give a talk based on this book… and we’re gonna have a reading group again. So, I want to make sure I’m on top of that.

John: That’s also on my list. I started reading it earlier, but I got buried in the semester, so it’s on the top of my summer reading list.

Rebecca: Yeah, I read the first chapter but then that’s as far as I got. I’m also planning to read… I started reading but I didn’t have time to finish a book called Designing Disability: Symbols, Space, and Society by Elizabeth Guthrie. It’s a really interesting book about the history of the wheelchair symbol. So, it’s related to design, obviously, which is my area of teaching… but also my interest in accessibility, which I’ve been working on a lot on campus. Related to that, I also am planning to read Disability in Higher Education: a Social Justice Approach by Nancy Evans. I started reading that during this semester and read a few chapters here and there but didn’t get all the way through. It’s a pretty hefty read. So, I’m hoping to get through a lot of that this summer… and then I have two other books that are not so much teaching related but come out of the design field. One of them is Demystifying Public Speaking, by Laura Hogen, which is from a series called A Book Apart… it’s made for designers, so I’m hoping to read that book and pull out some nuggets that might be helpful for students who get a little nervous about public speaking… or see whether or not it’s a good recommendation for our advanced students in our program… and then the other one that comes from a designer is Meeting Design for Managers, Makers, and Everyone by Kevin H. Hoffman. I’ve seen Kevin speak and have had some conversations with him in the past about designing meetings, so that meetings are actually productive and useful rather than unproductive and something that could maybe have happened in an email. So, I’m looking forward to reading a fuller version of his process. What are you hoping to read, John?

John: Well, several these I’ve already started again but haven’t gotten too far but they’re enough so that they’re on my Kindle or I have the books very handy… and I plan to read them as soon as I can. One is The ABCs of How We Learn by Daniel Schwartz. I actually made it, I believe, through letter L before I had to put it down to get caught up on some other things.

Rebecca: Yeah, I remember getting some updates in the various letters and it did kind of fizzle out.

John: So, I will finish that fairly soon, I believe. The Spark of Learning is a book I’ve heard wonderful things about from Sarah Rose Cavanagh. I’m hoping to read that this summer. It’s also on my Kindle app. The Teach Students How to Learn book by Saundra Yancy McGuire and Thomas Angelo is a really good book that talks about ways of improving student metacognition. Again, I’ve read a little bit of that just to see that it is something I really want to continue with. Another thing I’d like to look at, since I teach large classes where I use a lot of multiple-choice questions, is a book that I heard about on a couple of other podcasts on teaching and learning… in particular, the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, which is Learning and Assessing with Multiple-Choice Questions in College Classrooms by Jay Parkes and Dawn Zimmaro. That’s something I haven’t started yet, but I do have a copy of that and I’m looking forward to reading it. Another book that somewhat on the border between teaching and learning and my work in economics is The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis. It’s a book on the early development of behavioral economics by Kahneman and Tversky, and the reason why it’s on the border of economics and teaching is that behavioral economics explains why people don’t always behave as rational agents… and certainly that’s important in trying to understand how people work from an economics perspective… but when we’re dealing with students and faculty we observe that people don’t always behave, perhaps,in an optimal fashion. We don’t see people engaging in activities that are in their long-run self-interest, and they often will prefer short-run benefits over long term benefits, even though they know they’d be better off doing their work a bit earlier and so forth. So, it overlaps between those two interests. I’m looking forward to that I guess that’s it for my books.
So, what are your plans for redeveloping or redesigning some of your courses?

Rebecca: Well, I have a new class that I’ll be offering in the fall that’s related to some other special topics I’ve taught before on experience design… and in that class we’re gonna do two community projects: one is called “recollections storytelling through mementos“ which is the design of an interactive exhibit that will travel to multiple adult care facilities in central New York. It’s the second exhibition in a series. The last one we did was a couple of years ago… and so the design and development of that will happen partially through the summer and then in my class in the fall… and then the exhibit will go up and travel next year in 2019… and then the other project that we’re gonna work on is our very famous [LAUGHTER] regular guest Allison Rank, who’s talked about her project Vote Oswego. My students will be working on that project as well, doing some design work with her class. We scheduled our two classes so that they would be at the same time slot, so that they could collaborate a little bit easier this time. so I’m looking forward to working with Allison a little bit this summer to make some specific plans for that for the Fall. So, I’m doing that and then revisiting my web design courses like I do every year: a) the content generally changes because standards and things and web change but I’m also… I had my little list, as I was grading, of things that I want to make sure that I’m doing and some of that means integrating more reflective practice opportunities I think it’s really important and I always plan on doing that and then somehow it gets cut. So, I decided I really need to just actively decide to cut something else out, so that there is actually that room and that’s not what gets cut in the future.

I’m also working on some new accessibility modules and I’m also really thinking of… I’ve been doing a lot of quizzes based on our reading groups and things that we’ve been talking about for retrieval practice… but I’m really thinking about switching to trying some in-class polls even though my class is relatively small and mixing in some practical exercises and I was doing both of those kinds of things in the quizzes and I think spreading those out a little bit will actually help with engagement, and also make it so it doesn’t take up as much class time.

John: In terms of the use of polling in small classes… for the last five or six years now I’ve been using polling in classes that I teach at Duke where generally there are between sixteen and twenty students, and it works just as well in small classes as it does in large ones. In some ways it works a little bit better.

Rebecca: Yeah, I can imagine that and I know that you’ve talked about that in the past, so you’re wearing on me. [LAUGHTER]

John: It’s a good practice.

Rebecca: Yeah, how about you?

John: Well, I’ve got a number of things planned. One is, I’ve been wanting to adopt an OER for a long time, but I’ve been somewhat tied to the adaptive learning tools and so forth provided by publishers, as well as the array of materials they provide… but, I want to explore some OER options for my large introductory class.

Rebecca: For those that aren’t familiar, what’s an OER.

John: Open educational resources… basically things that are released under Creative Commons licenses… and there’s two major advantages of that: one is that it would be free for students… students would also have access from the first day of class, and we’ll be talking about that more in future episodes… and another thing I’d like to do more is explore some alternatives to publisher provided adaptive learning tools so that it might be possible to find some ways of integrating OER with it, or to investigate ways in which OER materials can be used with adaptive learning systems that can work in classes where you want to have enough variety in the question so students can’t just look them up on the internet…

Rebecca: …and if you’re a little more interested in OER and the kind of big impact that that can have on students, you may want to check out Robin Derosa’s article in Higher Ed “OER Bigger than Affordability.” …and then we also have a previous episode that’s about adaptive learning that people might want to check out if they’re curious about that.

John: I believe was episode 30. Another thing I’d like to do, along the same lines, is I had written an econometrics text that I’ve been using in class for a while. I’d like to rewrite that as an OER text, and one of the things I need to do is update some of the old videos I’ve created. Last winter, when I was at the OLC conference in Orlando (at Disney World) I saw a presentation on Videoscribe and I had seen some videos created by that and it just looked really really cool and so I purchased a subscription to that and now I actually have to actually learn how to use it… and it does involve a bit of work… and there’s a bit of start-up costs in that, but it’s a very powerful tool and it looks like a really good way of presenting technical material.

I’d also like to explore a little bit of Flipgrid just because i’ve used voicethread now and I keep hearing really good things about Flipgrid, so I’d like to look at that and compare the benefits of the two systems.

Rebecca: What’s a Flipgrid?

John: Flipgrid is very much like Voicethread except the videos are provided in a grid. In many ways, it’s very similar to Voicethread except your class shows up as an array on the screen. You can click on any of the boxes for the students and hear or see their responses.

Rebecca: So, it sounds like the interfaces may be the big benefit there.

John: I believe so. I need to explore it more. It’s something I’ve been hearing a lot about from a lot of people who do some really good work, so I’d like to see how it compares.

Rebecca: You know all your talk of OERs and open education resources reminded me that one of the key things I have on my to-do list is to explore all the available resources that are available on openpedagogy.org. After hearing Robin DeRosa talk about it at CIT, the conference that John and I were at in late May, I got really excited about some of her teaching techniques and I just really want to see what else is out there and what’s available. So, who knows, it might really overhaul something.

John: I was at the same talk and we were both so impressed by it we went down and we talked to Robin at the end and we’ve invited her to come back to Oswego in the fall to give a presentation here, and there’s a good chance that she will appear as a guest on a future episode of the podcast. So, there’s also some things we’d like to recommend to others: books and tools that we found really useful. So, would you like to start?

Rebecca: Alright, so most of our recommendations are publications that have highly influenced our show. So one of those is Minds Online by Michelle Miller, a great cognitive psychologist. The book is about being online, but all the things she talks about works in in-person classes too, so I highly recommend that book.

John: Michelle Miller, after I had read her book, so impressed me that I invited her to come up to campus to give a workshop here… and people were so impressed by that that we created our reading group series here. Our first one was Michelle Miller’s Minds Online and participants were so enthused about that they insisted that we bring her back again at the end of the reading group and she was a wonderful speaker as well as a very good author.

Rebecca: Yeah, and a great facilitator too. We also want to recommend Barbara Oakley’s Learning How to Learn MOOC. It’s a great way to learn the basic cognitive science behind the evidence-based practices. So, if you’re not familiar, that’s a great way to follow along and get involved and her videos are fantastic.

John: It’s also the most popular MOOC in the world…

Rebecca: …and it’s the biggest one too, right?

John: and it’s the biggest one and she’s got hundreds of thousands of students taking it. It’s a four-week experience and I encourage all my students to take it.

Rebecca: …and if you’ve never done a MOOC, what a great experience to take one of the best MOOCs in the world.

John: It also provides very good examples of effective practice for online teaching that are very scalable. So, there’s a lot of good reasons to do it.

Rebecca: She also has some other great books including: A Mind for Numbers, Mind Shift, and Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School without Spending all your Time Studying; a Guide for Kids and Teens. That last one is a new one that’s directed specifically at middle school and high school students.

John: Another book, I think, that we’d both strongly recommend is Make it Stick. We used that as our second reading group here at Oswego a couple years ago, and Peter Brown came up and presented on that. but it’s by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel. Peter Brown is a novelist and Roediger and McDaniel have done a tremendous amount of work in studying how people learn.

Rebecca: We can’t go without mentioning Carol Dweck’s Mindset book as well. We often see who we might traditionally think of as being quote unquote good students, “A” students maybe who hit something in college where they realize that they have to struggle a little bit and they don’t know what to do, because everything’s always come easily to them… but they struggle because they don’t have a growth mindset. So, this is a great way to learn more about the differences between fixed and growth mindsets and maybe put some strategies in place to help all of our students move more towards a growth mindset in the courses we teach.

John: The next thing we recommend is Jim Lang’s Small Teaching. it covers much of the same material as Minds Online and Make it Stick but it does it in a somewhat different way. It focuses on small techniques that you can change in your classroom that pay off very substantially. So, for people who don’t want to substantially revise their courses, it’s a very effective way of making small modifications… activities that take five to ten minutes in a class… that have a very large impact without requiring a dramatic overhaul or restructuring of your course.

Rebecca: Yeah, and the faculty here have responded very well to this book and have made a lot of small changes to their classes in the last year and had big success.

John: Another thing we’d like to mention are some podcasts that we listen to that have some really good coverage of topics related to higher education. The first one is Teaching in Higher Ed by Bonnie Stachoviak. The other one we want to recommend is Teach Better by Doug McKee and Edward O’Neill and you might remember Doug McKee from a previous episode.

Rebecca: So, we usually conclude by asking what’s next, but if you really want to know you could just listen to this episode again. We made a lot of references during this episode to a lot of great material and I can’t imagine that you wrote it all down, especially if you’re driving in your car, right? So, remember to check the show notes will have specific links and details so that you can find all these resources so that you can also enjoy some of these during your summer.

John: If any of you have any recommendations for topics for the show, please write to either of us. Our email addresses will be in the show notes.

Rebecca: We also wanted to take a couple minutes and just reflect on the podcast itself. We really appreciate the community of listeners that we’ve gained. We never expected this to even go on this long. It was a little experiment that we had that we wanted to try out in the fall and now we’re on Episode… oh, I don’t know what episode we’ll be on.

John: We’ve been really impressed by how many listeners we’ve reached across the U.S. and throughout the world. We were expecting we’d mostly get people listening from our institution and perhaps some of our colleagues in other places. So, we very much appreciate all the support you shown.

Rebecca: …and please let us know if there’s other things that we can cover that you’re really interested in or really need some professional development in.

John: We hope you’re enjoying your summer vacation. Enjoy the rest of your summer!

[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. Theme music by Michael Gary Brewer. Editing assistance from Nicky Radford.