62. 2018 Reflections

We’ve had over a year of inspiring guests and great information on the Tea for Teaching podcast. We thought it would be fun to spend our time today discussing the tools and techniques that we’ve put into practice.

Show Notes

Tea for Teaching podcast episodes referred to in this podcast:

Other citations:

  • Miller, M. D. (2014). Minds online: Teaching effectively with technology. Harvard University Press.
  • Sue, D. W. (2016). Race talk and the conspiracy of silence: Understanding and facilitating difficult dialogues on race. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Dweck, C. S. (2008). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House Digital, Inc..

Transcript

Rebecca: We’ve had over a year of inspiring guests and great information on the Tea for Teaching podcast. We thought it would be fun to spend our time today discussing the tools and techniques that we’ve put into practice.

[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.

Rebecca: Today’s guests are John and Rebecca.

John: And today’s teas are…

Rebecca: Christmas Tea.

John: And I am having Christmas Tea.

Rebecca: Really?

John: I am.

Rebecca: We didn’t plan that. Well it’s the end of your reflections—guess it’s in the season. So, John, what are some of the things that you’ve tried that made a big impact on your class this year?

John: One thing that was really influential was the metacognitive cafe low-stakes online discussion forum that Judie Littlejohn developed and developed and presented in our second episode. This discussion forum allows students to collaboratively work together to improve their metacognition and to become more effective in learning. The student response has been so positive in the online classes where Judie and I have both introduced it that I’m going to try to introduce it into my large introductory face-t-face introductory classes. It’s going to be a little more challenging trying to come up with a scalable way of doing that that would work with classes of 3 to 4 hundred students, but I think the benefits make it worth the attempt.

Rebecca: That episode inspired me a little bit too and although I don’t have that specific set up in our capstone class, we started asking students about the workspaces that are most effective for them and in design there’s a lot of open-space studios and then those that might have more private space, and so we’ve been talking a lot about that and so things that they might intuit to be more comfortable or more productive environment for them or making them be far more reflective and precise about… and so that same practice of being intentional and thinking through that has been really effective and useful.

John: Another thing that had a large impact on me was Jeffrey Riman’s discussion in episode 10 on VoiceThread. Up until then I had been playing with VoiceThread every few years, occasionally giving workshops to demonstrate it to faculty but he convinced me to actually try it and I used it last spring and it worked very well in my online labor economics class. I was very pleased with how it worked. I actually used this in the metacognitive cafe discussions in my online labor economics class, but I used a text based discussion for the weekly content discussions. One of the interesting things is that after hearing all of the students’ voices in the metacognitive cafe discussions, when I was reading their other discussions, I could hear their voices and it created a little bit more sense of presence and connection, and the students responded the same way… that getting to hear each other’s voices made them feel a little bit more connected and gave them more of a sense of community.

Rebecca: I can imagine that it might also help students hear the inflection and the intention of some of the words and written content a little more clearly so they know that maybe a student had a good intention about what they said rather than assuming a bad intention just based on hearing a student’s participation throughout the semester.

John: As we’ve noted in a reading group—I think it was something that Michelle Miller talked about in Minds Online—everyone is much more likely to misinterpret meanings in text or to read negative connotations into things even when they’re not meant. What are some of the other episodes that influenced you?

Rebecca: I go back to Writing Better Writing Assignments, episode 31 with Allison Rank and Heather Pool as a reminder when I start writing new assignments. They are so intentional about making sure that you’re phrasing questions effectively and efficiently and you’re really asking students what you actually want them to deliver and I think that serves as a good reminder and I feel like every time I start making a new assignment I go back to some of those ideas. I don’t always necessarily listen to the episode again but I certainly skim through that transcript again.

John: I do the same thing sometimes. Either the transcript or sometimes the resources when there’s something I need to look up.

Rebecca: Their paper is really great too, so I’ve referred back to that a number of times as well. One of the other episodes that I found myself going back to a lot in the throes of this particular semester was episode 46, Creative Risk-Taking with Wendy Watson. In my department, historically we’ve had a lot of creative play between our classes and sometimes creative competitions and things and for some reason we have a lot going on with new renovations and stuff on our campus that have been keeping us extra busy and I think we had to cut something and we had started to cut the play and we’re all just feeling really dragged down and tired and what-have-you. So we brought some play back. So this semester my students invented a food truck for the campus and we created a website around it, created a menu so it was really creative and fun, and then some other classes created commercials and other resources and things to extend the brand and so the students all had a great time and it was really kind of funny because when we handed stuff off to the class that did little mini commercials they didn’t realize it wasn’t real. [LAUGHTER] They were like, “this will be really awesome.” They were really looking forward to it, but…

John: We were hoping for taco trucks on every corner and it didn’t turn out that way.

Rebecca: Yeah, actually it’s Space Buds; it’s a potato truck coming soon. [LAUGHTER]

John: Like the ice cream of the future, yes. [LAUGHTER] Which is now here; that’s no longer the ice cream of the future.

Rebecca: Yeah, but I think that’s a good reminder that learning can be fun and sometimes when you bring in these fun, creative opportunities for students to explore the class material everybody has more fun, including the faculty member and I think it just lightens the mood and makes everyone move forward faster.

John: That’s a nice reminder for all of us.

Rebecca: Yeah.

John: And also her discussion of just the importance of being willing to take risks in the classroom and not just go through routines and go through the motions the same way every semester was really refreshing.

Rebecca: Yeah, it can be really scary to take on a new project. When I decided that I’m just gonna change my project and it’s gonna be this after having engaged in that particular episode it’s like, “I don’t know how this is gonna go, fingers crossed…” but it worked out great.

John: One other thing that’s been affecting my class this semester was the podcast with Marela Fiacco, episode 34 on Flex Courses. In most of my classes I’ve been recording the sessions and posting them for students and if I knew a student was going to be out of town I would also livestream the class, but based on what she was doing with her class I just told my students that I’m live streaming each of my large classes and I’ve been amazed at the number of people who have been just joining in from wherever they happen to be. I’ve had up to 10 to 12 percent of the class and sometimes it’s because they’re not feeling well—we had a number of people out sick for a while—and while they’re lying in bed half dead or whatever they can still join in with the class… they can pose questions that pop up on the screen for a very few seconds… and they can also participate in all the clicker questions if they have the remote app… and that’s been working pretty well; it’s provided access for students who are away… who are out of town visiting family and traveling… and it’s just become routine where some people just enjoy it—they’d rather be by themselves. Some of the students who were sitting in the back have found that they can find a much quieter environment than some of the environments in the classroom— while we try to keep the noise level in the class down at times, some people are intimidated by having 300 to 400 students around them actively discussing things during some of the peer-to-peer things and they feel more comfortable in a quieter environment and they can do it that way.

Rebecca: That’s great. I think sometimes we expect that when we provide that kind of access that all of a sudden students aren’t going to get what they need or they’re gonna slack off or not take advantage but you can see that they’re there… they’re present… they’re participating, so that’s exciting.

John: Another thing that really influenced me quite a bit last spring was episode 12 with Doug McKee where he was talking about active learning. Two of the things he was doing I implemented right away, particularly the two-stage exam. I implemented it that semester—I talked about it first with the students to see if they were interested; they were and it just worked beautifully. We talked about that in an earlier episode too, and another thing I introduced was the student poster session that he discussed using in place of the end-of-term student presentations where students get up with their PowerPoint displays and those who are not presenting are sitting there anxiously worried about their presentation and most students were just not that actively engaged. When they got to create posters and post them around the room and have some of their friends and some other faculty from the department, and actually even the Dean came in and viewed them, they were so much more excited and instead of presenting for 8 to 10 minutes for each student they got to stand up there for the whole class period and explain it to all their colleagues and because I broke it up a little bit so that half of the students could go and visit the posters created by the other students for a period of time and then the other half could visit the others, they weren’t just standing by their posters and we had other people come in and talk about it and visit with him and they found it much more interesting and they were much more actively engaged in the presentations and much more enthused about it than they were otherwise, and several of them said that they wish all their presentations were done in that way.

Rebecca: I think that was a theme that came up in a number of episodes this idea of presenting your material out to a bigger audience than just the class. I wonder if some of the success is not just because it was this particular format with their students but because you were also inviting others in and it raised the stakes a little bit which might have just professionalized the whole experience. You mentioned the two stage exams—so I know we talked extensively about that on another episode, but it’s still really interesting to me too. I haven’t quite figured out how to implement it in the kinds of things that I teach but it’s still tumbling around in my mind; I like that idea and I do some things that are like that where I have students solve a problem on their own and then they come together and try to solve it together and in general that methodology seems to work just really well.

John: Peer instruction in general…

Rebecca: Yeah.

John: …works really well, which is when we talked about that more extensively.. What are some of the themes from our past podcasts that have influence your practice as a teacher the most?

Rebecca: I think this year seems to be my focus on diversity and inclusion and it’s for a few reasons: one is all of our accessibility initiatives that I’m highly involved with on campus, but also our reading group this year is on Race Talk by Derald Wing Sue… so I’m completely immersed in that particular subject… so I seem to be latching on to anything that’s about that and trying to digest that… and I also teach accessibility and things in my classes so I’m constantly thinking through how to teach empathy, how to get students to think about different experiences that are very different from their own and how to communicate that and how to get students to engage in that practice, so the episodes that really focused on diversity and inclusion include episode 41. Instructional Communication with Jennifer Knapp, one of our colleagues here on campus; episode 50. Diversity and Inclusion with Rodman King, who is our Diversity and Inclusion Officer on our campus; episode 49. Closing the Gap with Angela Bauer; and episode 58. Role Play with Jill Peterfeso, and the combination of those episodes runs the gamut of thinking through your interpersonal communications with students and in between students to how to present information to students to thinking about how to include students who traditionally may have been excluded from the discipline or from the community and then also thinking about historical context with the roleplay and how there’s a lot of ways that you can use roleplay to explore a wide variety of ideas in a safer space because it’s in a performative space rather than “reality” and that allows for some discussions and things to unfold in a way that it wouldn’t otherwise.

John: Jen Knapp’s discussion of the importance of creating a comfortable learning environment, which came through in the other episodes as well, really struck me in reducing the barriers between instructor and students and that’s particularly important in a large class because it’s really easy for there to be this big divide where it’s you and them and being more informal and more relaxed in the classroom can break down some of those barriers that are even more common or more difficult to break down when you’re in a large class setting than in a smaller group, I think.

Rebecca: Quantity alone can be intimidating.

John: It can be, but if you can break that down a little bit it helps, and just walking around, which I’ve always been doing, but I’m doing even more now… and that’s been helpful in getting to know some of the students a little bit more and making them more comfortable so they’re more likely to come by outside of class as well.

Rebecca: I’ve been a lot more aware of the way that I phrase things… the way that I address particular issues… being more positive in how we might address bigger patterns of struggle in the class… framing it in a way that’s much more positive promotes a growth mindset; these are things that I’ve been focusing on more and I know that I plan over winter break to revisit these particular episodes to pull out more of those details and to refresh my memory on some of those things so that when I go into the spring I can be a lot more on point on some of those things that I really care deeply about.

John: For many years now I’ve been interested in trying to build a growth mindset in students since reading Carol Dweck’s work, but Angela Bauer’s results with that in terms of how weekly growth mindset messaging in their introductory classes made a significant difference in narrowing the performance gap. I’ve been trying to do more growth mindset messaging in my own classes—more consciously doing it; I had been doing it a little bit but I’m trying to do it much more regularly whenever I send emails out to students, or whenever we’re talking about some of the more challenging things, I remind them that most students find this material challenging and that they get better at it by doing it. In economics I face a lot of students, and I know you do too, who claim they just are not math people and they just can’t understand graphs and it’s tough getting past that but reminding them that that’s a struggle for very many students and that it won’t be a struggle if they just continue to work and become more comfortable with it.

Rebecca: That raises a lot of the issues and things that came out in Marcia Burrell’s episode as well when we’re thinking about math people and this gatekeeping that happens. So it’s interesting that that particular episode ties really nicely with Angela Bauer’s work in really breaking down these barriers and helping people have access, which I think is really powerful and important work to be doing. I know that I’m catching myself saying things in a way that’s like, “Oh, why did I just do that” and undoing some things that I’m so used to doing that’s so embedded in how we work—come to find out I’m a much more of a negative person than I thought I was. [LAUGHTER] …and really.. It’s really a struggle. How about some of the themes that you’ve pulled out?

John: Some of the things that I think I’ve been most interested in and have been trying to work on the most is those episodes dealing with evidence-based teaching methods, especially because of the scale of the classes I teach; I’d like to do that as efficiently and as effectively as possible. Bill Goffe was one of the first people to discuss that very extensively and since he was coming from a background in economics it was very directly relevant to what I do and Bill and I have worked together for quite a few years here and it was nice to talk to him about some of the things he’s been doing and how he’s been evolving as a teacher. I’ve learned a lot from Bill over the years and it’s been… it’s been very productive and that episode was really useful. Episode 37 with Michelle Miller was very interesting in terms of where she sees the future of education going and where she sees some interesting possibilities for growth. Michelle Miller has been a major influence on me for quite a while from the first time I saw her present on low-stakes testing a number of years ago.

Rebecca: …and on our community in general because she’s been here as a guest speaker and we’ve done book clubs and things around her work.

John: …and she ran workshops here on two occasions and it’s been very, very productive. One of the things that influenced me this year was Dom Casadonte’s episode 42 on the flipped classroom… and I had been doing a mostly flipped classroom for quite a few years now, but I was still including a little bit more short lectures in it—five, ten minute lectures and he suggested that if you’re going to do it you should do it all the way because one of the problems is students in a flipped classroom environment will claim that you’re not teaching them and if you do a little bit of teaching them they come to expect that and then they feel cheated out of the rest so I’ve been much more explicit. I’ve always tried to prep students and to frame it in terms of the use of evidence-based practices but I’ve restructured my class a little bit to make it more obvious what we’re doing and I remind students more regularly that the basic stuff they need to learn on their own and it’s set up where they do some reading, they take some quizzes on it and then they reflect back on it and they give me a report on what things that they’re still struggling with and then we focus our class time on that. So the lecturing has been cut out except for the times when they’re stuck on something and then I’ll give short lectures to go over the things that they’re really puzzled by, but it’s much more focused and much more of the time is spent working on problem solving in the classroom.

Rebecca: It’s amazing how reminding students can be such a powerful tool for any of these evidence-based practices because if we’ve talked extensively about how it doesn’t always feel good to learn… it’s tricky… you feel challenged and so it doesn’t always feel good to learn—but reminding students why we’re doing things I certainly have also found helps a lot; it helps immensely; students buy in much more quickly when they realize why you’re doing something and when they can see that you’re customizing the content for them, even though you probably can guess often what you might need to spend time on, they feel like it’s customized and I think that means a lot to them too, probably.

John: In fact, most of the material I have I do prepare in advance, but I ask them to submit their list of concerns every day at noon and then I leave for class at 2:00 so I don’t have much time to customize it, but as you said, they feel that it’s very personalized because I refer back to the comments that they’ve been making and saying 60 percent of you said you’re struggling with this, let’s focus on some problems with this, which I’ve always known students struggle with and I’ve always been focusing on that but making it more obvious that I’m responding to their needs, I think, gives them a bit more buy-in, generally.

Rebecca: Definitely. I think some of the other themes that really have bubbled up for me is the revisiting of Open; we had a big series more recently about Open Pedagogy, Open resources; we started a long time ago in episode 8 with Kris Munger on Creating an Open textbook, but then episode 52, 55, 56 and 57 all focused on concepts of “Open.” So, I’m really excited about Open again. I forgot and it was actually Robin DeRosa that reminded me that I had been doing Open for so long and that it’s the culture of the field that I’m in to be open, so open-source software and things is something that I’ve been heavily engaged with since I’ve been a professional in the field but I kind of forgot that that’s what it was all about; I just needed that like little reminder and that little kick to get back into that mindset. So I’m really excited about focusing on that and making that more explicit in what I do and the reasons why I do it.

John: Robin DeRosa’s visit was very inspiring to many of us here when she both talked on campus and joined us in episode 55 and I’m planning to finally release my textbook as an open textbook for this spring, which is more OER than Open Pedagogy, but she also convinced me to try having students work on an open pedagogy project in the capstone course that I’ve been doing and so I’m working on putting together plans for that for the spring. I do hope that that works out, but I’m really excited about it.

Rebecca: Yeah, I’m excited about Open not just in the classroom but also as a scholar and having more open scholarship and publishing and open access journals and things like that as well. I also have to say that episode 57 with Fiona Coll was really exciting about Scalar. I haven’t had a chance to really experiment but my mind was blown by the possibility and I was really excited about the power of that particular platform—I’m not sure how it might be integrated into what I do quite yet but it’s something that I’m excited to experiment with. Are there any other themes that bubbled up for you?

John: The scholarship of teaching and learning was a theme that came up in quite a few of them where we were talking about research, but in particular two of the episodes: episode 26 with David Eubanks and episode 54 on the scholarship of teaching and learning with Regan Gurung were both really inspiring as well in terms of ways that perhaps we could do a little bit more research in our classrooms about what works.

Rebecca: I’m also really excited to do more scholarship in this area and build it into and integrate it more closely into my teaching in general so that it becomes just an overlapped area and everything’s more integrated. I’ve been slowly working in my personal research, my creative work, the service that I do on campus and my teaching have all been thematically related but I’m working really hard to integrate them more closely so that I can do more publishing on some of the ways that this influences my teaching and learning. Related to the scholarship of teaching and learning and actually Open is the idea of engaged scholarship where the work that you’re doing is really integrated into the community; you’re really working with the community, so I was really excited by episode 51 with Khuram Hussain and the ideas of having conversations with community… community really having a mutual relationship with the campus, and working on projects together…maybe outside of a semester framework. I’ve been doing a lot of community projects historically and I found some of the same struggles and some of the concerns he raised were things that I had certainly experienced in the work that I had done previously, so I think he offered some new ideas and some old ideas that I was familiar with as well that I needed some reminders of ways to approach some problems and do some creative projects. So I’m excited to start building on that work as well.

John: I thought that was a fascinating discussion and a so much more productive way of doing community based learning.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think he raised the issue of charitable work versus engaged work and I totally buy into that model already, but I like that he provided some really clear ways of being more engaged as a scholar in the communities that we work in.

John: It seems like a much better experience for the students, for the community, and for college community relations.

Rebecca: Definitely.

John: One other episode that really influenced me was episode 30 with Charles Dziuban on adaptive learning; it influenced me so much that I proposed a SUNY wide task group on adaptive learning and we have now people from quite a few campuses are exploring this and looking at a variety of adaptive learning platforms and we’re also going to be preparing a report for all of SUNY, at least in a preliminary form by the end of the spring 2019 semester.

Rebecca: That’s a pretty exciting endeavor and a big one, too. Interesting how some of these episodes have sparked really big changes, big work that we’re doing—not just ourselves but collaborating with our colleagues on some interesting projects.

John: One of the challenges I faced is that virtually every episode has suggested some things that I’d like to try and it’s a challenge to try to keep from trying to do them all at once.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think we struggled at coming up with a list of some of the things that inspired us the most but that’s because everything inspired us and so… [LAUGHTER] It was a challenge to come up with that particular list, but I think that we have some themes that we’re working on as a campus and individually and we’re in a really interesting and enjoyable position to get to talk to all these wonderful colleagues about the work that they’re doing and to learn from our colleagues. So at the end of the year it’s always good to be thankful for things and I’m certainly thankful for that opportunity to talk to all of the great guests that we’ve had and to learn so much in this past year.

John: And we’d like to thank all of our listeners for joining with us, and if you have any suggestions for topics that you’d like to hear discussed on a future episode, please let us know, and we’re happy to try to add them.

Rebecca: Happy New Year, everyone.

John: Happy New Years. [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.

John: Editing assistance provided by Kim Fischer, Brittany Jones, Gabriella Perez, Joseph Santarelli-Hansen and Dante Perez.