287. COIL Virtual Exchange

Studying abroad can help students develop intercultural competency skills to prepare them for a future in an increasingly globalized environment, but many students cannot afford international travel. In this episode, Jon Rubin joins us to discuss how collaborative online international learning programs can provide rich international experiences without the cost of travel. Jon is an Associate Professor Emeritus of Film at Purchase College. His media work has been displayed at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York City. Jon is the recipient of Guggenheim, National Endowment of the Arts, Ford Foundation, and Fulbright Fellowships. He is also the founder of the SUNY Collaborative Online International Learning (or COIL) program at SUNY. He is one of the editors and contributors to The Guide to COIL Virtual Exchange: Implementing, Growing, and Sustaining Collaborative Online International Learning, which was recently released by Stylus Publishing.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Studying abroad can help students develop intercultural competency skills to prepare them for a future in an increasingly globalized environment, but many students cannot afford international travel. In this episode, we discuss how collaborative online international learning programs can provide rich international experiences without the cost of travel.

[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&hellip

John: &hellipand Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer&hellip

Rebecca: &hellipand features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Jon Rubin. Jon is an Associate Professor Emeritus of Film at Purchase College. His media work has been displayed at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York City. Jon is the recipient of Guggenheim, National Endowment of the Arts, Ford Foundation, and Fulbright Fellowships. He is also the founder of the SUNY Collaborative Online International Learning (or COIL) program at SUNY. He is one of the editors and contributors to The Guide to COIL Virtual Exchange: Implementing, Growing, and Sustaining Collaborative Online International Learning, which was recently released by Stylus Publishing. Welcome, Jon.

Jon: Thank you.

John: It’s good to see you again. Today’s teas are:&hellip Jon, are you drinking tea?

Jon: I’m actually drinking coffee, which I just brewed just in time for this interview.

John: That’s one of the favorite teas among our guests.

Rebecca: Definitely. I have an English breakfast today.

John: And I have an oolong tea.

Rebecca: Oh, nice, John. So we’ve invited you here today to discuss the development of COIL virtual exchange programs and your new book on the topic. Could you provide a definition of a COIL course for our listeners?

Jon: Well, I’ll define it really loosely. It’s a course where two professors engage each other, two professors, usually from different countries and cultures, but occasionally, just from two different perspectives and together they create a conjoined class where there are two groups of students who will later on meet spend 4, 5, 6, 7 weeks collaborating and sharing ideas.

John: How did the COIL program get started?

Jon: Well, that’s kind of a long story. I’ll tell the short part of it. But even that short part is fairly long. Well, my background, as you referenced at the beginning, was as a media artist and a filmmaker. And in a strange way, this led to my work with COIL. I was on a Fulbright in the country of Belarus over 20 years ago. And my supposed topic as a Fulbrighter was American Studies. But what I did is bring some digital video cameras, and I had my students make short videos, much like my freshman would have at Purchase college where I was teaching. And I noted that the videos that they made were remarkably different. And I don’t mean in terms of what was in front of the camera, because a landscape looked different. They simply made very, very different choices. And when I came back to the States after the Fulbright and tried to explain to my students what might have been interesting on my trip, they were generally not at all interested. So eventually, I showed them some of these short videos that my Belarusian students had made and they became very captivated. And all of a sudden wanted to know everything they could about Belarus, and I realized that my students in Belarus had communicated with my students in the US sort of unbeknownst to me, because I hadn’t planned this, and that it occurred to me that it would be interesting to then develop a dialogue, using video between my students at SUNY and students elsewhere, for example, back in Belarus. So I created over a period of time, a course called cross-cultural video production, and the structure of it was exactly that. The students would meet, although back in 2002, when we first did this meeting online was a stretch, there was no Zoom, there was very little way to actually meet synchronously back then. But they were able to communicate primarily through email and a little bit through Blackboard and agreed on a theme that they would explore together. And then what happened was one of the student teams on one side or the other would make the first scene of a video on that theme, and post it, 10 days later, the team on the other side was supposed to make the next scene of the video. And this continued for four to six scenes, depending on the different iterations I had developed. So the students were doing a strange kind of serial collaboration, a sequential collaboration, with a small amount of back channel communication, but primarily they were communicating through these videos. And it was a pretty wonderful process. It was not always happy because sometimes the students were actually competitive. In other words, it was kind of like, well, you think that’s strange, I’m going to show you something even stranger, or whatever. [LAUGHTER] They were very varied. They were all over the map, in fact. And since the US students, for the most part, had never heard of Bellarus, while the Belarusian students, of course, had heard of the US and had their own, sometimes mistaken impressions about it. These videos were really remarkable. And the course was exciting. The students were excited by it. And I sort of said, “Geez, this is a model of international collaboration. None of these students are getting on a plane. The Belarusian students probably could never afford to. This is maybe a new modality of exchange.” And I sort of then tried to find ways to propagate this model.

John: How did it grow out of your course to the larger scale SUNY program?

Jon: Well, this is again a long story to be kept short here. And it’s not even necessarily easy to answer that question, what I would do is first step back and say, to create a new program or to innovate at the university, and here I’m speaking generally, I’m not saying SUNY, is difficult. It’s something that I’ve learned, others have learned, that universities are inherently fairly conservative structures. They’re about setting standards, as are grades, etc., and degrees. And they’re a little bit hesitant to open their doors to something really new for fear that somehow, I don’t know, it won’t set the proper standard. And here I was with a model that involves a classroom in the US, in this case, it’s SUNY, actually collaborating for like half the semester with a class in another country, and their teachers and students had never been vetted, accepted, never paid tuition, nothing, they were just sort of partners in the interactivity. That, for a lot of people, was very strange. So to really get down to the nitty gritty, I sort of mounted a campaign, I guess, to do this, and my immediate peers and colleagues at Purchase college in the film program, were very supportive. But the direction this was going would have meant that they would have lost me partially or entirely, if I were to take over this new COIL Center that I had proposed. So they even were sort of against it, because they didn’t want to have to deal with their local repercussions of losing me. In the university context, you lose somebody, you might not get them even replaced. So there’s a lot of that kind of thinking. And so it was a campaign that lasted a couple of years. Ultimately, the man who was back then managing the international office at SUNY system was very, very sympathetic. And he helped turn this around by providing some direct funding at the system level. So it meant that my campus, in fact, could adjunct me. And that got rid of some of the fears of my colleagues, at least I wouldn’t just be missing in action, there would be somebody else who would be paid to take over my spot. And over a period of these couple of years, eventually, also, with the strong voice of a new provost, who arrived in the middle of this kind of conflagration, a decision was made that the SUNY COIL Center would be launched, I would be its first director. But at the outset, it was just me on three-quarter leave, and a tiny amount of money to hire a part-time student to help. So that was the format in which it launched back in 2006.

John: I think it was pretty close to the time when I first met you, when you visited our campus… you visited a number of campuses to talk about this… and you also sponsored a number of COIL conferences at your campus.

Jon: Yes, I think it was one of the good things, good ideas, although it was very difficult to pull off in the early days, because there was no staff or anything and doing a conference is a lot of work. But we began right away, in 2007, was the first COIL conference. And yeah, that was great. The first conference was almost entirely SUNY people, which is, of course appropriate, but many not from Purchase College like yourself, people coming from across the state. And this conference continued for about 11 years, and growing larger and larger and inviting people from a wider and wider range of people. The last COIL conference that I participated in was in 2017, and we had 450 attending. Whereas the first one that you attended, we had about 80 attending. So it grew. And I’d even say to this day, without getting too far afield, soon after I left SUNY, it was decided that maybe this SUNY conference was a bit too much for SUNY. And it should, in fact, become shared with other players at other campuses. And so an entity called International Virtual Exchange Conference was created. And IVEC, as it’s known, began holding comparable conferences, and SUNY kind of went out of the COIL conference business.

John: But more international partner organizations became active in it, so the whole thing has spread quite a bit since then, right?

Jon: Yeah, it’s a pretty remarkable story. Since at the outset, it was a few SUNY campuses reaching out to a few partner campuses around the world. I mean, it was successful in a way, but it was a bit of a battle all the time. For one thing, international offices on campuses… and this is not a SUNY thing, either, it’s somewhat of a US thing… they need to support themselves. And usually their institutions only offer limited funds and they actually generate funds by the international programs that they sponsor, whether it be their students studying abroad and paying them a fee, or in recruiting international students who pay a higher tuition, etc., there’s an economic piece in international education. Nothing wrong with that, but at the outset, nobody could find any economic piece to COIL. And therefore, getting international offices that were primarily dedicated to moving people out of the country or into the country to have this lived experience, it was difficult to convince people beyond a very limited engagement to support COIL at a deep level. So what was happening in those earlier years, say from 2006, to two-thousand, let’s say, 15-ish, was the COIL grew a little bit, little bit each year, rarely was any one school offering any large number of COIL courses, maybe three, maybe four, maybe five. So the number of students who was involved with this new practice was small. The good thing was that there were gradually becoming practitioners in different countries who understood the dynamics of these classrooms, which are quite unusual, although they overlap with online learning, in terms of both the software used and their, let’s say, dynamics, they were quite different because they were co-taught classrooms, and the process of the teachers engaging each other, and developing a module that they could comfortably share with both groups of students, that was quite radical. And so this was a kind of gestation period, I guess, where during this time, although the growth was slow, it was steady, and the knowledge was spreading. And more researchers began to get involved. Because people always said things such as: “Really, do students get anything out of that? or more typically, and more problematically, “Is this as good as study abroad?” which was a false question, in a sense, because nobody ever said it was as good as or better than as or anything as. It was really its own experience, it was really a separate matter. But of course, those people managing study abroad programs, felt a tad threatened by it. And in some cases, I guess I would say, looked down their nose at it, because in those days, anything online was looked down upon by many people, not all, but many. It was seen as an inferior kind of education. And so it did have these growing pains and had to prove itself, and it gradually did.

John: So people in international offices were worried about this being a substitute for their programs, but from what I’ve seen, it’s expanded the number of students who participate in international activities, particularly those students who might not be able to afford international travel, either in terms of the time or the financial costs.

Jon: Yeah, I mean, for sure it does. I don’t see any negative at all of that kind. But the problem is to do COIL requires not just the two teachers, but it requires some level of management or facilitation. Particularly, if you get past the first couple of early adopter faculty who just jump in and do it ‘cause they love it. If you want to grow it, you need somebody, usually now call a COIL coordinator, as a minimum, who actually has a job, it might not be full time, but part of their commitment is actually bringing together teachers from different schools, finding new partners, helping train teachers, so they’re comfortable working in this new modality. And that piece, which was central, had a price tag. And so as soon as you’re saying, “Well, we need a new hire,” all of a sudden, then all of the concerns of the institution come up and people say “How the heck are we going to do that? We’re going to let go of somebody else?” And you get the zero-sum game being played. And that was often really a hard piece at the outset. And in fact, I think one of the things that my position created was actually the reality on the ground that here was one person, at least, this guy Jon Rubin, who was kind of getting paid to do this. And as there were so few who are being paid to do this, that was important, then it was something that I began to focus on. In other words, the center of COIL, of course, are the teachers developing the collaboration and the students engaging each other. That’s what it’s about. But if the management piece isn’t there, then it won’t grow, and then it really will not be successful. So as the Director of the SUNY COIL center, I think I was one of the first people to focus on that piece and say, “Okay, what does an institution need to do to create a COIL program?” Not just how do you successfully do a COIL course but how do you develop a program? And I would say that this was successfully growing, but slowly. I would also say, without getting into the details, that after doing this at SUNY for 10, 11 years, I was beginning to see that things are happening in other schools, other countries. And maybe it would be interesting to help promote COIL at other institutions to find another way to help carry this work forward. So, in 2017, I retired from SUNY and began, what I wasn’t very confident, would be a consulting career. That is, I wasn’t really confident that anybody would call me up and ask for my services. Fortunately, I had one client very early on, Florida International University, who was already very enthusiastic about this, and hadn’t quite taken the big leap. And so I was fortunate, because they’re such an interesting University. So they hired me on as a consultant, right at this juncture where I really wasn’t sure it was going to happen. And then various things happened over the next years. I’m not sure which sub story to jump into next.

Rebecca: I’m sure there’s plenty of options, but we’re hoping you can talk a little bit about how the Guide to COIL Virtual Exchange got started, how did your book come to be?

Jon: This is interesting, and it was indirectly also connected to Florida International University. My colleague there, Stephanie Doscher, had developed a global learning program at FIU. And around this time, she published a book on global learning, which was an academic book, but quite successful. And she was in a conversation with her publisher, Stylus Publishing, who had recently heard about COIL and said to her, “Well, Stephanie, I think maybe it’s time for there to be a COIL book, who might be the right person to write it?” And she suggested me. And the irony was that, at this moment, and I don’t want to get into a dour story, but I was actually in a hospital bed. I had gone through a period where I had become quite sick, and it was somewhat mysterious. In fact, the illness I had, it wasn’t really clear what was going on. And I literally read this email from Stylus in my hospital bed. And I thought, “Damn, do I want to commit to writing a book while I’m lying on my back, and I don’t know whether I’m gonna get out of here?” So long story short, I wrote back and I said, “Give me three or four months, see if I’ve got my strength back, and if I feel good about it, then sure I’ll take it on.” And so indeed, I had a wonderful recovery, I was in fine shape. And by encouraging my friend Sarah Guth, who I had written a couple of chapters with, I convinced her to work on the book with me, which made me feel okay, because I’d never written a book. I’d written a few chapters, I can write, but a whole book was like, “Oh my God.” It was not something that my career had prepared me for. So we agreed. And what’s really interesting about that story is that we started to do this in late 2018. And as soon as we started to think about the book, we realized that some of the subjects that we’d like to write about, which indeed were: “How are institutions adopting this, integrating it, supporting their faculty?” …the infrastructure piece that had always been my interest, we realized there was not much research on that. There had begun to be research on student learning in COIL classes and related areas, but in terms of its integration and development, no. So we said, well, we’ve got to do research. So we spent really the first year of the project doing as large a survey as we could manage. And it wasn’t that easy, because it wasn’t commonly known who were the practitioners. That is, we knew a lot of people, but beyond that, there was absolutely no organization that listed who does COIL or virtual exchange. So, it took research to even find the people to talk to. So we did this, I’d say, rather extensive survey, it was a bit new to me, I’m not a trained researcher. So that was even a learning process for me. And we started to develop some really interesting data. We found there were only six institutions around the world, as best as we could find, that were offering 30 or more COIL courses in a year. And so our initial jumping off point was, how did it happen? Why did these six institutions, why are they more successful than others in terms of at least scope and scale? And we then started to flush out the book, and guess what, then the pandemic occurred. And so all of a sudden, we’re about, I don’t know, a quarter of the way, an eighth of the way, into writing this book, and everything changes. So we got kind of set back on our heels at first, as the whole world did. We didn’t really know what to make of it. No one did. We were all at a loss, but two things occurred. One is that a lot of people who frowned on online learning were all of a sudden forced to do online learning, because that’s all that was available. So there was a huge transition, and a great number of people, some against their will almost, others happily turning this corner finally, that became at least aware of the tools and processes for teaching online. And that had been a blocking point to COIL development, because it was a small minority of teachers who had those skills and that experience. And over the period of a couple of years, it became most teachers had that experience. The second piece being that mobility was frozen. So all the students who were able to be mobile, mind you, that’s only 5 or 6% of American university students, but nevertheless, they were either locked in place somewhere they didn’t want to be for two years, they had trouble getting back, and mobility kind of stopped. So a lot of the same international offices, who before were sort of pretending they weren’t there when I knocked on their door, were all of a sudden calling me up and calling others up and saying, “You know what, we really better learn this thing, because it’s something we can do during the pandemic. And it’s a way to keep international exchange going,” …which was actually strange for me, because did I really want to be responsive to people who are doing this only because they were forced to, in a sense, or in some cases, were actually describing it as a temporary pivot, when in fact, to me, I knew that to really do COIL well, would take a couple year commitment to really develop a program and develop training and professional development and find your partners and all the pieces of the puzzle. But nevertheless, I mostly went along with it. And so what happened was, I became a full-time consultant, I was sometimes working with six or seven schools at once, and I stopped writing the book, because I couldn’t do everything at once. Everybody’s hiding, everybody’s masked, nobody dares go out and see each other. And here I am working more than full time after I retired. It was just completely unexpected. And so just to sort of finish telling this part of the story, because it is a story, I put the book aside, mostly for a year during this time, because I couldn’t do it all. And then I said, I better get back to this book, because everybody’s asking for it. Now I have all these potential buyers of this book, all these people who need a guide, and there’s not a single guidebook out there. No one had ever written it. So I got back to work on the guide, I started telling people “No,” when they asked me to do a consulting job, and then I realized, “Oh, my God, the field has changed.” The people I was writing about two years earlier, well, they’re mostly still doing it, thank God. But there are a whole lot of newbies who are coming in the door doing this, and with a different attitude and mind than the people who had started this kind of movement. And that was mostly a good thing. But it meant that some of the research we had done, maybe wasn’t completely accurate anymore. And so still another challenge was how to really complete the writing of this book, once the pandemic experience had sort of transformed the landscape.

Rebecca: It’s interesting how the pandemic has forced many virtual or digital initiatives to mature at a very quick pace. [LAUGHTER]

Jon: Yes, definitely, not just COIL, but I think COIL was particularly well placed in a sense because it had been developed as a format far enough. So it didn’t have to be like created then, it was really a matter of being developed and extended then. But it was an issue for me through that period, and I would say up to this day, if people are doing this because it’s a pivot and because it’s a way to do something they couldn’t do anymore. What will they do when mobility returns and the pandemic recedes? Is this something that they will continue? Is this something that will change? How will this evolve over time? So at any rate, we managed to finish the book with that question totally, of course unanswered. The writing of the book was finished about a year ago, in 2022. It then took three or four months to go through the editorial process of turning it into an actual book, which came out in September of last year. And really that was, you could say the beginning of the first academic year that one might consider, although I don’t know if this is accurate, post pandemic, since that’s very arguable. Are we even post pandemic today? I don’t think so. But anyway, where people are at least trying to get their footing back on the ground, people were willing to get on an airplane, etc. And we’re beginning to move on. And so there’s some hypothesizing in the book [LAUGHTER] about the future. But I think the future that I was just talking about is only just arriving right now. And we’re just starting to see that future, which is soon to become our present. And it’s quite interesting.

Rebecca: I think it will be interesting to see how many people adopted the practice, maybe because they saw it as a pivot or a necessity, who may have been converted, [LAUGHTER] and want to continue that work moving forward. I think it’s an interesting space to be in. And we’ve seen it in some other digital spaces as well, that the adoption that was done out of necessity, has just really changed people’s perspectives on what it means to teach you what it means to collaborate and what it means to have certain kinds of experiences for students.

Jon: It’s actually been incredibly interesting, because what was also trying to happen at the same time, I don’t think it had quite the momentum earlier, was the idea of curricular internationalization, or internationalization at home. There are a number of terms, which are all speaking to a related problem, which is: very few students can study abroad. And should we only have that experience be what we call internationalization? And many people, and it wasn’t just people doing COIL or virtual exchange, were questioning that and saying, “No, no, we have to develop other practices and policies at our universities that will support that.” So what happened was a broader context than understanding, far from universal, but nevertheless, was growing. And so it provides context for COIL. COIL was often, when people started to think this way, it was sometimes a little difficult to say, “Okay, we want to internationalize our campus and the curriculum. But how do we do that? What does that mean? What’s a practice that will allow us to do it,” and COIL was so specific, that people could say, “Well, we can do COIL.” And so it kind of became the tip of the spear, a slightly aggressive [LAUGHTER] expression. But nevertheless, it was something people could grasp, they could see, they could act upon. And it could be part of, in some cases, a larger global learning program, let’s say. And that’s certainly the path that my colleague Stephanie Doscher took, she was doing global learning and then was doing COIL. And now she’s director of a COIL Center at FIU, very much like the COIL Center at SUNY, because these things are so linked. And what was really interesting is how it also expanded, and transmogrified, culturally. So let me give one example that’s really amazing to me. So in the earlier days of the SUNYi COIL center, for a number of reasons, we did a number of projects in Mexico and Latin America. And the projects we did partly came because we were able to get funding. At one point, the US Embassy in Mexico City had some funds to do something International and wasn’t sure what to do. So we kind of talked them into doing COIL, and some other opportunities came our way at a time when there was no actual funding for this, there was nobody providing funds under this name. So we did a number of projects, particularly in Mexico and Brazil, and to some extent in Colombia. But in those early days, even though we said this doesn’t all have to be in English, in fact, to do it with a US university in general, did need to at least be largely in English. So we had this, I would say asymmetrical relationship with partners in Latin America, where the students and, in many cases, the teachers were primarily Spanish speakers, working with us, some of whom spoke Spanish, but the majority didn’t. And so it was a really an unequal relationship. And it was something we talked about, we struggled with, we spoke of that it doesn’t have to be in English. And guess what happened during the pandemic, a lot of Latin American universities found each other and began doing Spanish and Portuguese language COIL, and it’s exploded in Latin America. In Latin America, I would say, best estimate, there is more COIL than anywhere else in the world. And it’s because they’ve owned it. And they do it in their own terms. The number of students in Latin America who are physically mobile, able to study abroad, is even less than in the US. And they have very much adopted ideas like internationalization at home. And by working between Chile and Mexico, or Bolivia and Uruguay or Spain, they’re doing really interesting work. And it’s become a real center for this work. Indeed, the IVEC conference that I mentioned a while ago, this year, is going to take place in Sao Paulo, Brazil. And one of the reasons is because there’s so much activity in Latin America. So I don’t know that anybody predicted this one, thinking about the future, but definitely, the movement has shifted, it has its own life. And so Latin America has become one of the centers of this work.

John: We do live in a global economy. I sat in on a class quite a few years ago with Susan Coultrap-McQuin, our former provost here, when she was teaching a COIL course. And the students were discussing their response to it and what they took away from it. And one of the things they mentioned is that they expected that, in the future, they’d be working with international partners in whatever sort of job or career they were going to have. And they saw it just as a natural part of their future lives. And one of the things that’s happened is the technology has changed to make these types of exchanges and collaborative projects so much easier than it was when you first started.

Jon: Yes, this is interesting… technology. Because I think it’s mostly, of course, to the present time, been all for the best. And you’re right. I mean, when we were first doing that video exchange with Belarus, the Belarusian students, the only way they could send their videos to us was when their university shut down in the evening at 8pm. The students would traipse into their IT office, give them, on some kind of disk, probably a CD at that point, their video. They would put it on send, and leave for the night. And by the morning, their videos would reach the US because it would take hours for each video to get sent bit by bit. So that’s an extreme case. Now we’re used to YouTube and streaming video. So it’s mostly for the best on almost every level. But I think there are a couple things that are issues. So one is, and I’m not the first to bring this one up, Zoom fatigue. That there is the issue of people having spent a lot of time in this modality and to some extent wishing to be where they could hug the person they’re talking to, having their physical closeness be available to them. So I think this is an issue. I don’t think it’s in any way in the way of virtual exchange and COIL. By the way, you asked me at the very beginning, what is COIL, let me just do a slight definition here, rather late in this podcast, because these are the two terms that people are primarily using now: virtual exchange and COIL. And so I’ll just say for myself, and I think many are taking this up, virtual exchange is the broader term, it means kind of any educational sharing primarily between youth, that takes place using this kind of online format. Whereas COIL is a more specific model that has particularly to do usually with universities, and with these conjoined classrooms where the students’ work is actually been done for credit, and where this central collaborative project is part of the deal. That’s why in the book, I call it COIL virtual exchange, because it’s to me, like basketball is a sport, so virtual exchange is like the word sport, COIL is like the word basketball. That’s the relationship they kind of have. And you can train and study for basketball, you can become better fit, maybe, for sports, but you can’t quite train for sports. So I think that’s a difference that holds. So at any rate, one of the issues going forward, one of the many questions, is this issue of spending too much time online going to negatively affect the future of this work? I don’t think it will, by itself. I think there’s enough dynamics to working in these collaborative groups, it’s exciting. That’s not going to go away, it’s different than talking to your sister on Zoom, because you haven’t seen her for a year, because of the COVID thing. It’s a different project than a lot of our use of it. But, in fact, real mobility is returning. And so I think there is a bit of tension, the tension that I described, that existed prior to the pandemic. And there’s some of that back. But many are also seeing, as you mentioned, John, earlier, that COIL also can be very motivating. So people do COIL, and then they say, “Damn, I’d like to study abroad.” Whereas before, it never even occurred to them that this was an option, either for one reason or another. So I think for a lot of people, they’re now connecting the dots. And they’re seeing these as two things that support each other. But in terms of technology, I just want to bring up a point, this has really been on my mind lately. So this is sort of getting to my current thoughts.These are kind of concerns, I would sa,y about the future, which otherwise I think is bright for this work. One of the issues with doing COIL or any intensive online engagement is the risk of what I call disembodiment, that is that we’re functioning intellectually and visually, but our physical bodies are sort of left out. And that’s okay. I mean, a lot of things we do are like that. But I think there is a risk, a general risk, that we don’t sense each other’s presence the same way online. And that’s why it’s so important in COIL courses for students to explore where they live, how they live, to look at things in their lived environment, food, etc. They really need to bring the lived life into the course even if the course is not about cooking. It’s very important to get this physical presence and sense of each other. It’s something to work for, but what’s happening now, and this is an audio only exchange. So there’s no way we can verify this on this podcast, but that very many people use digital backgrounds. And the reason is that where they’re sitting in their Zoom is a mess. And they’d rather not display their mess. So they create a digital background. Well, that’s fairly innocuous, but it does mean that that person is talking to you from something that isn’t a room any longer. It’s a creation, which could be anywhere. There’s nothing terrible about this, but I feel this begins to add to the disembodiment. You’re then seeing a kind of head or head and shoulders that isn’t in a real room, but is in a virtual space that doesn’t really have much character. And now I want to make the leap into the future, the paranoid future, maybe. And it’s a topic that we’re all talking about too much, but I just going to try to connect it to COIL. So it’s AI, this is the topic of the month, whatever, everybody’s talking about AI and they’re talking about from many different angles. But what is beginning to happen through AI, and it’s not, I think, the main venue of our conversation, generally, is that AI added to other tools, graphic tools, visual tools, can actually change the way we look. And I have a concern, I was in a Tik Tok exchange with somebody and they demonstrated to me something called teenage look, which is not available on Zoom, it’s still being played within Tik Tok land, and it’s very scary. Teenage look literally scans you and makes you look approximately 20 years old. And it does it so well that it’s stuck to you. So you talk, you stand up, you turn around, you’re 20 years old at all moments. It’s not like an avatar, where there’s some kind of goofy little figure that represents you in some bad 3D world. This looks like you, except young. And I don’t know what it does if you’re already very young, I haven’t explored it that far. So my concern is, and I realized this is going down a very small rabbit hole, but I think it’s not irrelevant. What if we’re in a world in a couple years, where the people we talk to in Zoom are in a completely illusionary background, and the face we’re looking at is not them either. And yet, we cannot tell. We cannot tell that this is a facsimile. If we reach that kind of point, I do have concerns that this model of COIL virtual exchange could be undermined, just as a lot of our reality and truth is being undermined by lies and fictions that are being proposed as reality. And I think it’s an interesting moment at any rate.

John: But instructors could still address some of those concerns by bringing in aspects of culture that would not be faked into the assignments or the interactions that students are doing. So in a world in which we do have that fake reality for any synchronous interactions, I think there still could be a lot of benefits from the cultural exchange, as long as that remains a substantial focus of the courses.

Jon: Yes, there are a lot of creative ways that this could be utilized. So I’m not trying to blanket speak from the negative. There have been tools before, what was that tool? Second Life? …where people were existing, in a much cruder, three dimensional space. And some people took great advantage of it and did some really interesting things. So I think if you have enough of a grasp, and you’re doing it very consciously, it could be very interesting. Sometimes I’m beginning to feel that unless I can go up and touch somebody, I don’t know if they’re real. And I’m just saying, in the future, that I think some of the great advances we’re making with technology may be setting traps for us at the same time. And so we’ll have to be that much more ingenious, to keep the real and the unreal. And I think there are other issues around virtual exchange, some of which are more promising. One I’ll just throw out, which is beginning to be taken up in a small way. When I first started doing COIL, I actually had a conversation with the same man up at SUNY, who helped get this thing going. And I said, it’s interesting, because I think what we’re doing is partially about diversity, and being with and meeting with people who are different than us. Shouldn’t we talk to people who are beginning to start diversity programs, back then this was a, let’s say, much less advanced element of the university than it has become. And my colleague said, “Oh, no, we can’t do that, because then we’ll be competing with them and maybe horning in on their territory.” And so it was like international and diversity were, because of funding, partially, seen as competitors for cash to run their offices, which is, again, the problematics of university life. But that always stayed with me. And I think I’ve seen a few examples, and I’ve tried to promote when I do a consultation, that you don’t have to do a COIL with somebody in another country. You can do a COIL with somebody in another state. You can do a COIL with somebody in another town. You can do COIL with somebody three miles away, that’s living a really different life than you are because rural and urban are so different in our country. The idea of bringing difference together through this channel, I think, has a lot of potential beyond the international. And I hope that gets developed, it’s a little bit of a question of international has defined itself as an element of higher education. And to some extent, I don’t know if it will want to back up and say, “Well, what we’re doing applies locally too.” I think some see that and some don’t. So, I don’t know, this is to me the sort of new world of COIL, which is edging into some plus some minus, but it’s generally growing. And just one other thing I have to put a plug in for, because it’s important, I think, to the field, and certainly where my energy has been lately. As I was doing this consulting work I was speaking about earlier, the first thing that would come up if I was, let’s say, engaged by an institution that was very new to this was “Well, with whom can we do this?” Now, of course, there we are just talking international again, so I’m backpedaling a little bit. And I realized that there was no place really where you could find who else was doing this. Now, certainly, the SUNY COIL Center had a global, and has still, a global partner network. And so there was a way through, if you’re at SUNY, where you could reach out to partners. There was a structure in place, but there wasn’t anything like this for a small community college in British Columbia to know where to go. They had no place. So I got this idea and worked with some colleagues and a programmer. And we started to build this website, which at the initial stages, it’s called COIL Connect for virtual exchange, it’s just coilconnect.org, if you want to find it. The purpose was to just create a directory of COILing institutions, so that you could go to this website and look around and say, “Oh, here’s somebody in Turkey that’s doing this. Here’s somebody in New York that’s doing this.” It was just to be a directory, but the website has grown, and we’ve added partnering tools to the website, and a number of other features. So it’s become a pretty interesting hub. There are now 260 universities that are members from something like 40 countries. There are something like 1500 individual members, I think it’s grown so fast, partly because it’s free. So it makes it easy, which also might make the longevity of the site a little questionable. We’re trying to figure that one out right now. We grew so quickly, with so little funding that we need to find some way to bring in some funding to keep it growing. But anyway, at the moment, I think it’s an interesting place to visit. If you happen to be hearing this podcast, and curious who the heck is doing this stuff this guy’s talking about, you can go there, and you’ll see a lot of data. The site is primarily user created. That is, the site opens the doors to individuals to indicate what they’re doing and to share it with the world. And so there’s a lot of data, a lot of courses, a lot of institutions, a lot of individuals sharing what they’re doing in this field. So I invite you all to come visit the site when you have a chance.

John: And we’ll include a link to that in the show notes for this episode, so that people can just click on the link and go there. Would you recommend that institutions that are thinking of building a COIL program or creating a COIL program should perhaps pick up a copy of your book? And maybe take a look at the site?

Jon: Yes, of course. Yeah, it is still the only real guide. There are now some other books coming out, I think. But I think both of those would be helpful to doing this, and engage with other people who are doing this, especially who are doing it successfully. There’s a lot to learn about how to develop and manage a COIL initiative or project. And it takes a little learning, a little training, and there are now a lot of people out there doing that. Indeed, on the COIL Connect site, there’s a small area that we’re growing called organizations that support COIL. And if you go to that particular menu item, you can find about a dozen organizations that will provide professional development and other support for new initiatives, which is, I think, a key piece when you’re trying to get something rolling. And yeah, buy the book, for sure.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking what’s next?

Jon: Well, I think I kind of jumped ahead of you here, because I was sort of doing a bit of “what next” already. I think. So I am not sure beyond the things that I’ve said. For me, what’s next is actually trying to be a little more retired. I mean, I supposedly retired almost six years ago now. And yet, I’ve been probably just about as busy as I was when I was at SUNY, and trying to find that balance is not easy. I’m a slightly compulsive person. I’m still involved, obviously, with this COIL thing. I’m trying to step back very, very slowly, but it’s hard. And I love kayaking and bicycling, and so I’m trying to do more kayaking and bicycling, but right now in March in Brooklyn, neither of those [LAUGHTER] are ideal endeavors. So sometimes I try to escape to places that are warmer, so where I can do that. So I don’t know. That’s not really what you’re asking, but that’s gonna have to be my answer for now.

Rebecca: I think it’s a good answer. I hope that you’re able to really embrace the authentic retired experience soon. [LAUGHTER]

Jon: Whatever that is… it’s definitely trying to find a balance and people talk about this. I’m finally enmeshed in this point in life where I don’t want to give up the work I’m doing entirely. I’m not going to. But yeah, once I put my toe in pretty soon I’m swimming and that’s the problem.

John: You’re benefiting a lot of people and as long as you enjoy doing it, we’re awfully grateful that you are.

Rebecca: Yeah, we’re glad that that’s part of your retirement plan.

Jon: And thank you for inviting me to this podcast.

[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.

[MUSIC]

242. Student Podcasts

Student research papers have been ubiquitous in higher education, but there are many ways in which students can demonstrate the skills that they have acquired. In this episode, Megan Remmel joins us to discuss the use of student podcasts as a more engaging alternative to traditional research papers. Megan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bradley University.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Student research papers have been ubiquitous in higher education, but there are many ways in which students can demonstrate the skills that they have acquired. In this episode, we discuss the use of student podcasts
as a more engaging alternative to traditional research papers.

[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: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners. [MUSIC]

Rebecca: I guess today is Megan Remmel, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bradley University. Welcome, Megan.

Megan: Hi, thanks for having me.

John: Our teas today are… Megan, are you drinking tea?

Megan: I am not drinking tea. I have rooibos this morning. But I am now currently drinking my coke zero sugar.

John: It’s not that much different than many teas.

Megan: Yes.

Rebecca: Many other rebels join us as well. [LAUGHTER] I have English afternoon today, John.

John: And I have ginger peach black tea, a return to an old favorite as we move towards the end of our semester here.

Rebecca: We’re both getting to things that are comforting.

Megan: Ginger is calming. So, [LAUGHTER] you might need that at the end of the semester.

John: Oh, very much so.

Rebecca: So we invited you here today to discuss a podcast project that you’ve been using in your state and local politics class. Can you tell us a little bit about your project.

Megan: So I was trying to think of a way to make students try to approach things in a more neutral way. Because obviously, in poli sci, there’s a lot of soapbox standing. And I’d previously been using just plain old policy analysis papers. And students don’t love them. And so I was trying to think of a way to get them to do the assignment that I wanted them to do, and having some guidance, because they’ve listened to podcasts before, so they kind of know what some of these are structured like. And so I was hoping that that would help tone down some of the opinionation that can come out of these things. And so I YouTubed, and I found John’s YouTube page, [LAUGHTER] and found his podcast project and contacted him just out of the blue asking him if he had any materials he was willing to share with me. And he did. And those came in very handy in terms of being able to guide students in the project. But it was just me trying to give them a different way to do something. Some of them still opted to do a paper this semester, but I wanted to give them the opportunity to try something different, to maybe be able to say to someone in an interview that they’ve done something in this more kind of digitalformat. So it was trying to open up the possibilities for them in class.

John: And was this a face-to-face class? Or was this an online class or a hybrid class?

Megan: So the first time I tried to do it was last spring, and that was a hybrid class and was admittedly a disaster. But that class was a disaster for numerous reasons, I think hybrid being the prime driver of that. So this class was entirely in person. I did allow them to work in groups if they wanted to, and some of them did, and some of them didn’t. And I had them do two rounds of podcasts. The others who wanted to, wrote a paper and the percentages were equal. And so a number of them who worked in groups the first time around did not work in groups the second time around.[LAUGHTER] So they got to choose their own topics. I gave them a list of I think 10 topics from that section of the course. And so there were restraints, but I let them propose if they wanted to do a topic that was of interest to them. Somehow I managed to have a Sports Communication major in the class, and when we talked about special purpose districts, I mentioned to him that there are stadium districts where cities are basically using taxpayer dollars to do massive overhauls of stadiums. And so that’s where he went. So it was still in political science. It was still state and local politics, but it was something of much greater interest to him personally than say, term limits and state legislatures.

Rebecca: Imagine that.

Megan: I know, shocking, right?

John: So, the students worked in groups, how large were the groups that they work in for these podcasts.

Megan: So, I proposed having them work in twos. This class is a 300-level political science class, but it has historically been required for the history secondary education students and criminal justice students. and poli sci students have gotten more interested in state and local politics, but I don’t think they think it’s as sexy as national level or international politics, so I think that they realize that’s where the jobs are, they’re getting more interested. So the audience is not kind of a typical political science class. Because of that, I have these history secondary education majors, who because of how tight their curriculum is, are in classes all the time and know each other really well and work together and collaborate pretty frequently. And so I did allow one group of three to work together. So I basically increased the requirements. So if they worked in a group of one, they had to have eight peer reviewed sources that they could point to in the script. If they were a group of two, they had to have 12 sources, and then this threesome had to have 16 sources. And then it went from a 10-minute requirement to 15 and a requirement to 20 minutes for that three-person group and the three-person group was actually probably the best podcast I got. And I obviously can’t attribute it to whether it was just the number of them or they’ve also been some of the best students in the class this semester, just generally, so I wasn’t surprised that they did a good job anyway.

John: So you mentioned a script. Did you have students submit a script before they recorded or was that done after the fact?

Megan: So kind of both. I had them pick a topic and then I had them submit either an outline or a script and kind of gave the pros and cons, where an outline is obviously a little more freewheeling and allows for a little more conversational style in the recording, whereas a script would be much more definitive, they wouldn’t be scrambling for words necessarily. So they’d probably have fewer filler words and they could be sure that they weren’t fading off and losing track of what they were saying. So I gave them the option of either, I think the students who wrote scripts just generally did better. So I don’t know if in the future when I do this again, if I’m going to get the option of an outline, or if I’m just going to make them write a script, because those seem to just perform better, but with the script I made them include work cited, and they had to tell me where in the script or where in the outline which source connected to that material. So I was trying to make sure that they were still using peer reviewed sources, they could obviously use stuff from outside of that. But I wanted to make sure they were still using peer reviewed sources, the way that my policy analysis paper kids were. But letting them do it in this less structured style, in comparison to like an eight to 10 page policy analysis paper.

Rebecca: How did students respond to having these options?

Megan: I was a little surprised at how few students wanted to do the paper. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know if they’re just burned out from… I assume the last two years has just been a lot of online writing assignments, for instance, and so they were just scrambling at anything that didn’t involve them having to write in such a structured way. So I have relatively few students select the paper option. So I’d say it was probably three quarters picked the podcast and a quarter picked the paper. And the ones that picked the paper… my pattern deducing… seem to be the seniors in the class. And I think they just wanted to get their paper done and be done and not necessarily have to coordinate with other people. And maybe they have prior experience with less successful group work, for instance, and they were just: “I’m going to trust myself.” But that was kind of the pattern, where the underclassmen were more likely to do the podcast and the ones that seem to be picking the paper were the seniors.

John: Was there any apprehension about recording a podcast? Because when I’ve tried doing this, I know students are often a little bit anxious about things like, “I don’t know if I have the technical skills or have theequipment to do that.”

Megan: Yeah, well, what was great was in the material you sent me, you sent me a lot of options that students could use. So for instance, regardless of what they submitted to me, in terms of the outline, I have them use, I think it was Otter’s transcription. And so they were using some of the sources that you sent to me. And so I think they felt more comfortable. And as they went, I think, obviously, from the first round to the second round, the quality of the recordings went up. And some of them realized that there’s ways on their smartphones to record and that it will partly transcribe for them. So I think they got better as they went, I didn’t try to ding them too much for production value in the rubric. So there is stuff in there just about like, “Please don’t have insane amounts of background noise [LAUGHTER] in your podcast. Maybe don’t record it in your car…” or something like that. So I tried to have a kind of minimum standard, but I wasn’t going to hold it against them if it was kind of fuzzy audio, for instance. But they actually didn’t seem all that apprehensive about the idea. They were better at it than I would have felt.

Rebecca: So the burning question is: “Did they move away from so much opinion and they’re more neutral? Or did they stay pretty opinionated? [LAUGHTER]

Megan: So actually, it went better than I thought it was going to, because spring 2021, when I tried this the first time around, I could not get them out of being on their soapboxes. And when I created the instructions for the policy analysis paper, I frame it as though you were working for a state legislator who knows nothing about the policy topic you’re writing about. And they want a policy brief from you and then recommendations at the end. So, the recommendations part is the “opinion” part. But it’s got to be based in all of the research that you’ve talked about earlier. So if it were about legislative term limits, political science agrees on very little, but this is one thing there’s kind of universal agreement on is that they are bad, and they backfire and do the exact opposite of what we want. So if that’s what the research is finally saying, then the idea is that you would recommend to the state legislator to vote against instituting term limits in the state. So I found that they were generally able to do that… it took the scripts, that initial round, to be like, “some of this language is getting a little feisty,” and “some of this, I’m not seeing any citations behind it, so, as far as I’m concerned, it’s reading like your personal opinion.” So I think that stuff was pretty necessary to get them to tone it down. I also had them submit draft recordings before the final recording. So I could ensure that the script was improved upon for the recording and so I could direct them if they were starting to go a little too far into the opinion editorial page of the newspaper. And so they were generally pretty good at it. If anything, I think they might have been overly cautious by the end of it, in that they had all this evidence about something leading to something and it was kind of repetitive so… confident that that’s actually what’s happening and still feeling like they have to do a both sides-ism. So I think I’m gonna have to try to work on that to instill in them that “No, you can take a position at the end, it’s just got to be based on the evidence you presented earlier, instead of just constantly pontificating,”

John: …and once you have your students do that, could you have them work with some journalists out there? [LAUGHTER]

Megan: Yeah, as somebody who gets interviewed pretty frequently with local media, I get a little frustrated with the both sides-ism. And yesterday, I got interviewed a lot about the Roe draft. And the reporters kept wanting to talk about the leak. And I was like, “No, the leak is not the important part, guys.” So yes, I understand some frustration there.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how students either shared or heard each other’s podcasts or whether or not the podcasts were shared more broadly.

Megan: So, inside Canvas, which is the learning management software, Bradley uses, for the ones who gave me permission to share, I posted the files inside of Canvas. And then, strangely, and I don’t know if it was because they were maybe afraid of the quality of it, some of them let me share one podcast, but not the other podcasts. And it wasn’t necessarily like, they wouldn’t let me share the first and they would the second, I just think they thought I like this one better, and so you can let people share this one. And I didn’t like this one, and you can’t share this one. So I just put them on the Canvas website. A couple of them told me, the ones who got maybe low Bs, for instance, on the first one, because everyone did pretty well… the ones who got maybe high Cs, low Bs, on the first one, they told me, they went and listened to some of the other podcasts just to kind of see what the universe looked like. And one of them went, “Yeah, I realized I need to step up my game.” [LAUGHTER] And so I think it was useful from that perspective, I don’t necessarily think they were listening to it to learn about the topic that their classmates have done. But I do think it made some of them realize the quality of their work could have been improved If this is the comparison point.

John: I think that’s a useful benefit of any type of peer review of other people’s work, that when they get to see what other people are doing, they might feel better about their own work. But more typically, they realize that there were things they could have done better. And that’s, I think, a useful experience for everyone, including faculty.

Megan: Well, I think students don’t even realize that for all intents and purposes, we have to use them as guinea pigs from semester to semester to make a class better and to improve. So I realized that maybe the pure hybrid format of spring 2021 was not a good time to maybe experiment with assignments. And so it made more sense to try something now. And it’s unfortunate that those kids maybe didn’t get the best experience, but they are our little guinea pigs, and we also need to learn from their work to see how we can make their work better by improving our assignments.

John: One of the issues I’ve had when I’ve done this, I’ve only used it in online classes so far, mostly because my face-to-face classes are relatively large and I couldn’t listen to two or three hundred of these. But one of the issues I had was that for many students in the online classes, during the depths of the pandemic, it was the only time they really got to talk to other students at the same time and I ended up with these incredibly long draft recordings, sometimes, like 30 or 40 minutes for a podcast that was supposed to be quite a bit shorter. And it did add to the amount of time it took to provide feedback. And included in the rubric was a great penalty if it was too short or too long. So I had to remind them of that. It was a tiny penalty, I think the length was only like five or 10% or so of the rubric score, but I felt bad docking them for that, because when I listened to it, it was clear that they were just enjoying getting to know each other and they were having these great conversations and getting to know their classmates. On the other hand, the focus could have been a little bit tighter. And that is one of the trade offs about having a script versus something which is a little more freeform. But it was really encouraging to hear the connections that students were forming. Although, after many hours of this, I would have appreciated them being a little more concise in some of that discussion.

Megan: Well, to your point. I’m curious, I’m not teaching the summer, but I am teaching an online Intro to American Government class this fall. And when I’ve taught it online before I just used forum postings. And it’s a lot of “I agree with this person,” even though you have directions that tell them not to do this, “I agree with what this person said.” And I’m kind of wondering, and thinking about tweaking this for the fall of kind of doing these voice responses, in hopes that it might limit some of that just repetitive nature and get maybe something a little bit more substantive. Plus, it’s more interesting for me than just reading the same post over and over and over again. And because it’s in an online environment, and it’s asynchronous, though I do have weekly benchmarks so they can access everything all at once, I think it would allow them to have a little bit more of the interaction than they get into the standard asynchronous typical shell. So it’s nice to hear that. I think I would also then have to say it was only supposed to be a 300 word post. So that’s only like maybe two paragraphs so we really don’t need to give a War and Peace sort of opinion. But maybe that would give them some of that more conversational style and make them feel like they’re at least possibly getting to know some classmates, ideally with the idea that maybe they can talk to each other and go over course material instead of being in their own little silos.

Rebecca: There’s something about hearing a voice, or seeing a face that can make all the difference. Of course, from your end, if you just make sure they have to post things in accessible format, you can either listen or read, whichever might be faster. [LAUGHTER]

Megan: What are you implying Rebecca? [LAUGHTER] It was more fun to grade these for sure, it was way more fun to grade these than a standard paper, without a doubt, because I could listen and giggle. [LAUGHTER] Because some of them would throw in a little snarky bit. And you don’t get to have that in these really structured formal papers. So, for me, grading wise, it was definitely more enjoyable.

John: For me as well, it was much more fun. And my impression was students had a lot more fun with it than they would have had doing a written assignment.

Megan: Yeah, I still feel like I’m going to continue to allow them to do a written paper. I know, if I had been in their shoes, I probably would have still pursued a written paper. And I had a couple students in there who were just quiet as church mice. And were probably never going to have the self confidence to even attempt a recording. So I think I still need to provide the option, which I did not do last spring. And I think that’s another reason why it might not have been successful is just given the… I mean, you guys know… class personalities vary wildly. And so that class was just very quiet and reserved and not super engaged. And so podcasts probably not the best approach in that class, in hindsight, but I didn’t know that before they got into the class, and I had built the syllabus.

Rebecca: Yeah, those surprises do happen.

Megan: They do, they do. And it’s a little difficult to overhaul your syllabus quite that radically in the middle of the semester.

John: There is something to be said, though, for pushing students a little out of their comfort zone. And in fact, this podcast, in part, got started because of a similar experience that I had, where I was teaching in the Duke Talent Identification Program…

Megan: I remember that.

John: …and they asked me to be on a podcast they had just started. And I said, “Well, I’m really busy, I don’t really have time for this, and I don’t think I’d really be the best person.” So I gave them a list of people’s names who they should contact to be on this. And they said, “Okay, we’ll contact them, too. But we’d like to interview you.” And after trying to get out of it for a while I agreed to do it, [LAUGHTER] and then realized it wasn’t all that bad. And then I came back from Duke that summer and Rebecca and I were talking and I said, “You know I did this podcast and maybe this is something we might want to consider.” And it’s one of the factors that led into this. I wouldn’t have probably had been doing the podcast had I not been pressured a little bit.

Megan: [LAUGHTER] I feel something similar. 18 year old me would not have done the podcast option. 35 year old me who’s done probably 80 media interviews over the last few years…much more competent doing it now.[LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I think one of the things that I really responded to that you were saying, Megan, is that you were offering options. And that there were two that you did two podcasts or two papers and that if students chose a paper the first time but then heard podcasts, there’s a second thing. So they could do perhaps one of each, right?

Megan: Yeah, so there was more flexibility. I did not have any of them do that. But at least it was a possibility for them. I feel like I don’t know if they misread the syllabus, but it was once I picked a path that is my path, I am locked in for that path. But there was the possibility of it. So maybe some of them in the future will get maybe a little more courageous and go from a paper to a podcast.

Rebecca: Or maybe they go from a podcast to a paper

Megan: …to a paper.

Rebecca: whatever works for them. [LAUGHTER]

Megan: Also true, whatever is most appealing to their preferences.

Rebecca: I really like what you were both saying too, about personalities of students coming out. And that when they might be writing a more traditional paper, it’s just like entire personhood just disappears. And that having that kind of positionality a little bit come out and their personality come out helps us to get to know our students better and to help them get to know each other better when they’re reviewing each other’s work.

Megan: Yeah, there were some students in the class who in class itself were really quiet and then I would hear these little snarky asides in their podcasts and be like, where’s that in class, I want that in class, please give it to me in class.

John: And they would often make connections to their own lives. They were trying to connect their own experiences to what they were learning in class, at least in the podcasts they were doing for me, and those are exactly the type of connections we try to encourage students to make so that they recognize the salience of what they’re studying. I think that was really helpful.

Megan: Yeah, with my history, secondary education students. In the first half of the class, we talked about state-level interest groups. And so I gave them the option to talk about the NEA and the AFT. And most of them picked it because I think they all know that they’re probably future members of one, if not both of those organizations. And I don’t think any of them realized how different those two organizations are, I don’t think they realized not only currently how different they are, but the histories and the motivations behind them are entirely different. And so I think some of them may not join both of those organizations now, [LAUGHTER] when they become teachers, because I don’t think they like the motivations of one group necessarily versus another group. So I do like that maybe this is actually going to impact their workplace environments, and actually how they choose to behave. Same thing with the second half of the course, we talk about tax policy, which I love… shockingly, not of super interest to them… and obviously, property taxes are one of the major sources of education funding for K through 12. And so a lot of them picked that. And they knew maybe that it was bad, I don’t think they realized how bad it was. And at least in theory, some of them seem to have a little fire lit under them. How quickly that the real world maybe extinguishes that is a different story. But at least for now, I think there’s a lot of desire, at least within these particular students, to try to change school funding formulas, for instance. So I actually looked at the roster in advance of the class starting and looked at the majors of the students to try to find topics that were relevant to state and local politics as a political science class, but that students of those majors would actually gravitate toward.

Rebecca: To me that seems like one of the most meaningful choices that you made in your assignment design, because that really hooks a student and keeps them engaged.

Megan: Yeah, forcing them to talk about a topic they do not care about is hugely problematic. I teach our research methods class, and basically, if it’s a quantitative social science paper, it counts. I don’t care what topic it is. And they’re just mind boggled. So one of them, he’s a political science major, but he’s writing his paper on how video games affect stress levels in people. And so they just get to poke around in stuff that they don’t feel like they have permission to poke around in otherwise.

Rebecca: The other thing that I found interesting as a design faculty who does similar things, maybe not a podcast, but we do things that are out in the public, and we might share them, is that I often give models for students to look at that are professional, we might even analyze those together. But it’s not until they see each other’s that all the light bulbs go on. [LAUGHTER] It’s something about seeing a peer get it that all of a sudden helps bring the rest of the students along. And so they’re always clamoring for getting to see each other’s work. And it does improve the overall quality of the work, in my experience overall….

Megan: Yeah.

Rebecca: …despite the fact that they might have these professional models to look at.

Megan: Yeah, I did, because of, again, John’s instructions, I found state and local related podcasts, and linked to some of them. So they could see how they’re talking about policies, but not being super opinionated about them. And I’m looking forward to now that I have permission to share some of these, I teach this class every spring next spring, being able to give them these models of colleagues basically having done this work. So that, yeah, it doesn’t have the same production quality, and there’s no intro music and ad breaks, but they can see that their classmates have managed to do well on this. And they too, can do well on this. I mean, I always provide sample papers, I get permission from students and remove all their identifying information and post those so that students can see like “You can write a research design in my research methods class, it is possible. This was an A, this is what it takes to get an A.” So I’m glad that a few of them gave me permission to share their podcasts. And I think I’m going to share some of the better ones and some of the less better ones so that they can see for themselves, the spectrum of possibility. And if they’re cool with just putting in somewhat minimal effort, then that’s what this podcast sounds like. And if you want to put in the effort that’s gonna get you an A, that’s what this podcast sounded like.

John: One of the things that my students have commented on at the end of the class was that some of them have decided that they really enjoy podcasting, and they started their own or they plan to do one in the future…

Megan: Wow.

John: …and a few of them have also said, “I never listened to podcasts before, but now I’m listening to these podcasts.” So I was really impressed. But it did have these other side effects that I didn’t really anticipate it having.

Megan: I can’t say any of them have told me that but I’d love for at least for them to listen to some more podcasts because clearly, that’s all I listen to in the car. [LAUGHTER] So many podcasts.

Rebecca: I’ve had similar experiences. John, although I haven’t taught a podcast class. I’ve introduced students to podcasts as part of learning materials.

Megan: Yeah.

Rebecca: …and having assignments… and many of them say that they really enjoy that format more than others, but they may have never really experienced it previously.

Megan: Yeah, I can assign them a 10-page article or I can assign them a 30-minute podcast. They definitely like the 30-minute podcast better. They seem to actually listen to it in a way that they don’t with the reading. So yeah, I have been more and more frequently been trying to find either like 5-minute local NPR stories or outright organized podcasts for them to listen to,

John: I’ve been doing more of the same. And I try to find podcasts that have both the audio and a transcript, so that people can choose a modality depending on where they’re working and reading. In some cases, it may be hard to find the time to listen to audio, or they may be constrained in some way and they prefer reading the text. And in other cases, students would much prefer listening to a podcast while they’re walking or exercising, or doing something else. So they have appreciated the choice when it’s used as a basis for discussions or some other assignment.

Megan: I hadn’t even thought of that. But I’m gonna have to think about that for the syllabi for the fall.

Rebecca: The transcripts are really helpful too, because if you are listening, and then you hear the name of something, or you’re not really quite sure how to spell it, or whatever, the transcripts can be really helpful… if those transcripts have been edited, of course.

John: One thing I’ve always been amazed by are the number of people who say they only read the transcript, they never listen to the podcast. Because what I enjoy about it is the narrative and the ability to focus on a conversation while I’m driving or walking or something similar. And reading the transcript would be very much like all the other reading I do, and it just wouldn’t seem as interesting.

Megan: I agree, but to each his own.

Rebecca: There’s a few podcasts that I listen to regularly that I might go back and revisit in transcripts to pull out some notes of things that I wanted to remember. And so I really get very frustrated when podcasts don’t have transcripts for me to do that.

Megan: [LAUGHTER] Fair.

Rebecca: To support my needs.

Megan: This is about me. Thank you very much.

John: It’s important for accessibility purposes as well.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely. So Megan, you shared a couple of things that you might want to do differently in the future related to this assignment, do you have any other thoughts about how you might frame or structure the assignment a bit differently to continue producing excellent podcasts and your classes?

Megan: I’m curious about the idea of… It’s a 300-level class, and I feel like providing them the topics was a little hand holdy. And so I’m trying to figure out if I should let them pick the topics, because then they have to work a little harder to figure out what might constitute state and local politics. Because I think you can see that in pretty broad ways. But I worry that if I do that, then they’re just going to take some really black and white literal approaches. So I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do on the topics front of things. And it might just, again, depend on who’s in the class. I think if it were more of a straight up political science class, I’d let them maybe wander a bit more. But since that’s not the audience of this class, typically, I might try to give them a little more structure, since they’re probably of all people gonna go, “I don’t know what you want for me in a class that’s not directly my major.” So that’s thing number one. I am also trying to figure out for the groups, for when they recorded together, given that some of the groups fell apart in the second round, I’ve never had great success with peer review, because they don’t seem to want to be telling the truth about each other. And so I’m trying to figure out how to get around that because it was pretty obvious with one group in particular that someone was doing all of the heavy lifting, but that person wouldn’t fess up to it. And so I’m trying to figure out if I should allow them to work in groups, and if so, how to try to ensure that the workload is being done somewhat more equitably. Because when I’ve had them work on group projects that have involved writing, for instance, I can follow the Google Doc, because I’ve required them to give me access to something like that and I can see who’s adding what. I’m less able to do that in this scenario. So I’m trying to figure out how to… maybe in the script writing process, still have them share it as a Google doc so I can follow the trajectory of who’s adding what, when, in an effort to try to get a better handle on making sure that one person is not being carried through the assignment. And that’s just, I think, a general struggle with trying to grade group work assignments. But that’s the only thing that I can think of right now and I’d love advice. But the only thing that I can think of right now to try to address that a little bit. And I knew it was gonna be a problem, I just didn’t know quite what to do with it. [LAUGHTER]

John: While you can follow the editing history, that can be a bit of a tedious path through that. What I’ve generally asked students to do is just to use a color code where they pick a dark color, so there’s still good visual contrast to meet accessibility issues. But they each have their own color that they write their text in. So when they write a section of a document, just have them block it and choose their color. And then when you read through it, all the dark blue will be from one person, the dark green will be from another person, and the purple will be from a third and it makes it a whole lot easier to evaluate the individual contributions. And that’s worked really well.

Megan: That is beautifully simple. I appreciate that. Thank you.

Rebecca: I do a couple of things, also, because I do a lot of group work, and group work that’s not always visible. I often have shared documents where it makes sense and ways of documenting it. But I’ve also done things like having students keep timesheets, just recording what they’re doing and when and how long it takes with the frame that it might be helpful for them to better understand where they use their time. And so that sometimes is helpful. We also tend to do things in design more like a process document. So it documents the process and milestones and summaries of what they’ve contributed at various points. And so I find those kinds of documents really helpful to understand what people are doing. And I always request them to provide a little bit of information about why they made certain decisions. And as soon as you do that, then you know who did it, it becomes very clear. And the other thing that I do is a Google form as review of the other collaborators. But I do things like ask questions about how willing they were to accept feedback, what was their greatest contribution? So it’s framed in a little bit different way than maybe a traditional rating system? Like, did they do all the things?

Megan: Yeah, it sounds more, what did you do versus what did your partners do?

Rebecca: Yeah. It’s more aligned with how you might do evaluations in a workplace or something rather than maybe traditional peer-to-peer evaluation.

Megan: Those are awesome. Thank you.

Rebecca: Megan, was there anything else that you wanted to make sure we talked about?

Megan: No, I just want to thank John for being so willing to share his materials with me because I would have been floundering about how to start.

John: I was really happy that someone requested it.

Megan: It was great. Thank you so much.

Rebecca: Well, we always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”

Megan: I think I’ve got a lot of material to work with with state and local politics. Given the recent political landscape, maybe too much material to work with and state local politics. I think one of the things in the future and I’m nowhere near this yet, I’m interested in letting them explore alternate methods of this podcasting style. So maybe actually interviewing local candidates, working with political parties, the League of Women Voters is actually very, very active in Peoria, and they still subscribe to being non-partisan, so it would be nice to try to team up with them and see if they’ve got some sort of outreach campaign they’d like to do. So I’m thinking of trying to really expand, but next year is busy. So that might be the year after.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us.

Megan: Thank you for having me.

John: Thank you very much. And I’m really thrilled that someone actually found that material useful. [LAUGHTER]

Megan: It was, it was great. [LAUGHTER]

John: It’s an activity I’ve been doing with my class for three years now, and it’s been working really well, and I’ve really enjoyed it. And many of the students really have to.

Megan: Yeah, time two was the charm for me.

Rebecca: Yeah, you have to have a practice round.

Megan: Yeah, unfortunately, those students were guinea pigs, but I learned from them.

Megan: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

[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 Anna Croyle.

[MUSIC]

193. Making Team Projects Work

The ability to work effectively in teams is a skill that is highly valued by the employers of college graduates. Group projects in college classes, though, are not always designed to develop teamwork skills. In this episode, Lauren Vicker and Tim Franz join us to discuss strategies that we can use to create group activities that help students develop their teamwork skills while addressing complex problems. Lauren is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Media and Communication at St. John Fisher College. Tim is a Professor and Interim Chair in the Psychology Department, also at St. John Fisher College. They are the authors of Making Team Projects Work: A Resource for High School and College Educators, which was released earlier this year.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: The ability to work effectively in teams is a skill that is highly valued by the employers of college graduates. Group projects in college classes, though, are not always designed to develop teamwork skills. In this episode, we explore strategies that we can use to create group activities that help students develop their teamwork skills while addressing complex problems.

[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: Our guests today are Lauren Vicker and Tim Franz. Lauren is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Media and Communication at St. John Fisher College. Tim is a Professor and Interim Chair in the Psychology Department, also at St. John Fisher College. They are the authors of Making Team Projects Work: A Resource for High School and College Educators, which was just released earlier this year. Welcome Lauren and Tim.

Lauren: Thank you.

Tim: Thanks for having us.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are…. Lauren, Are you drinking tea?

Lauren: I am drinking tea. I am drinking Trader Joe’s Moroccan mint green tea, one of my favorites.

Rebecca: That sounds like something John would rock. [LAUGHTER]

John: I actually have a backup tea here which is Moroccan mint, but it’s a different brand.

Tim: …and Wegmans decaf green for me.

Rebecca: It’s a good one. Wegotta have the Wegmans on…

John: Wegmans has a wonderful collection of teas, especially in the larger stores. And I have ginger peach green tea.

Rebecca: …and I am back to my good old English afternoon, John.

John: It’s been a year. I think you only had that once on the podcast in the last year or so.

Rebecca: Yeah, yeah, I know. I was thinking like, I haven’t been drinking it very often. I need to get back to it.

John: Well, we have six boxes of it still in the office for when we return.

Rebecca: I have six boxes in this office too. [LAUGHTER]

John: So, you should be set for the week.

Rebecca: I’m good. I’m good.

Tim: I took all my tea home last August, because I knew it would be a while. I did finish all the office tea.

Rebecca: It’d be hard for us to do that.

John: We have hundreds of teas in the office, so yes. We’ve invited you here to discuss Making Team Projects Work. Could you tell us a little bit about how this project got started?

Tim: Yeah, this was an interesting project, because it’s really been something that Lauren and I have been talking about for years. When I first started here back in 2000, at St. John Fisher, we realized pretty quickly that we offer two similar courses, one in small group communication that Lauren was offering and one in small group dynamics that we were offering in psychology. And so what we did was merge the courses. And then we started team teaching it and have been team teaching for about 20 years together. Over the time of our team teaching, we realized that we were going way beyond with our team projects than most of our peers, most of our colleagues at St. John Fisher. And we realized that a lot of people don’t know all the details about running a team project. So, we wrote the book.

Rebecca: Sometimes students complain about group projects. There’s a lot of strengths and benefits, but also some reasons to maybe not do group projects. So can you talk a little bit about both some of the benefits and some of the weaknesses of doing group projects.

Lauren: So one of the best reasons came out last week in Inside Higher Ed a story about a survey that was done by a AAC&U (American Association of Colleges and Universities) where they surveyed 500 employers, CEOs, and hiring managers, and asked them about the top skills that they were looking for in their new hires. And number one, a top skill turned out to be ability to work in teams. So we really need to be preparing our students for the workplace. And that’s one of the best reasons to use a group project. It’s also a much better way to engage students while they are in the classroom. Get them involved, have them work with other people, give them some of those professional skills that they need, and also keeps them more engaged than say, listening to a passive lecture. So there are a lot of reasons why people don’t use group projects. And it is a lot of work to set up a group project, and to do it well. A lot of faculty think about group projects as a way that they can minimize their workload. So what they’ll do is they’ll take an individual project that they might give to students, and just turn it over to a group and say, “Here, do this.” Give it out. And then you don’t hear anything until the end of the semester or close to the time when the project is due. And that is definitely not the way to do it. And so what we’re proposing is that people follow a very systematic process. And we actually have a model that shows how you can walk through each of the steps and be able to turn what might be an individual project into a really good team project.

Tim: Rebecca, there are other reasons why faculty think you shouldn’t run group projects… for example, student complaints, sometimes you get some pretty serious student complaints about a project, or the problem with so many projects and so many team projects, especially, is social loafing, where one person just sits back and lets the other do it, or conflict, or all these other problems that teams can run into. But the reality is that the well designed team project can help to minimize a lot of those problems, especially if the faculty member uses a structured process, such as we suggest in our book, where there’s lots of steps involved, and the faculty members are checking in regularly with the team. Now, the other problem is that does take a little more work. But with good planning and practice, team projects can be really effective.

Rebecca: I’m certainly an advocate for collaborative work. I do a lot of team projects in my own classes and know there are a lot of planning things to do at the beginning. Can you outline some of the key things to think about before introducing a collaborative project to your students,

Lauren: We talk about an input-output model. So let’s start maybe with the inputs to the group. A lot of people think that they can, as we said before, just take an individual project and make it a team project. So attention to the task is really important. And we can talk about that more if you want to talk about what makes a good team task. But also, the people are a huge input. And one of the biggest mistakes that faculty make is allowing students to choose their own teams and just to say, “Okay, everybody break up in groups of four, or five, or six,” and go ahead and do it. And that is the worst way to do it. Because you are not going to get any heterogeneity, you’re not going to get people with diverse viewpoints and experiences, people are just going to be working with their friends. And the final input is actually the context. A lot of people overlook that, but it depends on what kinds of experiences do students have with working in teams. And there are some colleges and universities that have a lot of teamwork going on, and others that are still using a lot of lecture-based sage-on the-stage type of teaching. And so if the culture of the school isn’t used to doing teams, or if you don’t even have a physical setup for teams, where people are in kind of an amphitheater classroom, and it’s hard to move around into groups, all of those things can actually thwart it. And you have to also consider what else is going on at the time. So those of us who were using teams when the pandemic hit know exactly the challenges that that entails. So what we find is that you have to start at that very beginning in the planning… on planning your task and planning the people who are going to be there and then looking at the context that you’re going to be considering.

Tim: If I can follow up on one thing, Lauren, this idea of picking your own teams that so many people, and in our presentations, we’ve gotten some pushback on this, that “Oh, the students love picking their own teams.” But number one, and we’ve seen this in our class, and we both seen it separately. Sometimes friendships break apart in those teams, because the friends realize they have very different working styles and get very frustrated with one another. And then the other problem with letting people pick their own teams is the elementary school kickball on the playground problem where somebody is the last to get picked. And honestly, I had somebody in tears in my class a couple of years ago, when I did a very short project and decided I don’t have time to do all that. And the person didn’t get picked until very last. And that was awful. And this is not the way we want people in college to be picking their teams. When they get out in the workplace, they’re not picking their own teams there either.

John: I’ve had a similar experience when I’ve used group projects in my classes, and students will always say, “Can we make our own groups?” And what I’ve done the last several times I’ve done it, and it’s worked really effectively, is to ask them how they knew each other. These are upper-level classes, primarily, where I’m doing this. And they’ll say, “Well, we’ve taken a lot of classes together.” I said, “So we’d like to have teams where everyone has a good mix of experience on all the teams. But if you know these people because you’ve taken a lot of classes with them, that means you’ve probably taken more courses in the discipline than other people have. So if we put everyone together who has the most background in the material, we won’t get as much diversity in the group, but we’ll also end up with some teams having some really rich backgrounds in the discipline, and others having a somewhat weaker background. And that may not be the most equitable way of creating teams.” And once you say that to students, you get much more buy in and they’ll generally accept it. And then I’ll often ask them, “What might we use as a criteria to balance the teams?” …and they’ve come up with some good suggestions. And that’s worked pretty well.

Lauren: You’re absolutely right, John. We’re a really big fan of the team-based learning approach to forming teams, which is: make the criteria very transparent. So if you say “I don’t want you with people that you’ve had two or three classes with,” or “I don’t want you with people who are in the same major or at the same level,” that’s great. We’ve done a number of different things. Sometimes faculty can pick the criteria as you have done, John, other times I know Tim has used a questionnaire that he’s had students fill out like a self assessment of their skills, and then he’ll put the teams together that way and tell the students this is how you were put together. I actually had one class where I did let them pick the criteria, or suggest the criteria, and I said “That sounds like a good idea. Let’s give it a try.” And when we put the teams together, we realized that they were perfectly balanced. And it was one of the best TBL classes that I had. And when we went online during the pandemic, it was almost seamless, because the teams had already really been formed, and they had an identity, and they’d had successes together. And so it was a really great way to do it. So we’re a huge advocate of not letting students pick their own teams,.

Tim: …and letting it be that transparent process. That transparent process is so important.

John: I’ve used a Google form in the classroom, where, when it’s in the classroom, where it’s displayed on the screen, they submit their responses, I’ll sort them from highest to lowest according to that criteria, and just go down the list assigning the teams 1-2-3-4, etc., and it’s worked really well. And another nice thing about it is when the teams are formed with this sort of criteria, instead of by social network, the team has been created for a specific purpose and they tend, when they’re working together, to focus on their purpose, rather than talking about what they’re going to do that weekend and other things. I found that the students tend to be much more on task when the teams were created to be balanced, separate from any friendship relationships. They tend to separate it from the social networks that otherwise might tend to dominate some of the discussions when they’re in a physical classroom. The groups have been really productive that way.

Tim: That’s a fabulous point.

Rebecca: Yeah, I’ve had very similar experiences in my classes as well. I tend to have a lot of different majors that come together and so I often use that as one way of dividing up the differences of experience for these collaborative projects, and it tends to work out well, and they tend not to know each other, as a result. [LAUGHTER]

Tim: Well, and then on certain teams, Lauren, I don’t think you even know this, but two of the students in our last class, our last group dynamics class, are now the closest of friends. And they didn’t know each other before a class, so that division can actually open up the doors to new friendships as well.

Rebecca: One of the things that you talk about in your book, and this seems like a good moment to bring it up, is that teams need to form and get to know each other, understand the project, understand what each member’s expertise might be, what the tasks are at hand, and also a need for someone to kind of step into a facilitator role. We might call it a leader, we might call it a facilitator, whatever that might be, can you talk about how to make that process go smoothly? …because if that process doesn’t happen, as you indicate in your book, the team doesn’t work, because nothing ever gets done. [LAUGHTER]

Tim: Right. And the team can take so much longer to get to a level of performance. When we talk about team performance, the key theory of development is Tuckman, where most people have heard this… that forming, storming, norming, and performing… and we want to get our class projects right into that performing stage as quickly as possible, and a team charter can do that. And in that team charter, it’s allowing the team to create some guidelines. In those guidelines should be things like attendance and deadlines, how to deal with conflict, the levels of participation that they expect from one another, their communication standards and rotating responsibilities, as you said, Rebecca, who’s going to be taking notes at the meeting, who’s going to be facilitating the meeting, when is each person going to be taking the lead on each thing, meeting times and places and then even things like decision rules and ways to solve problems when they occur. Those are all things that we encourage our teams to develop upfront ahead of time so those discussions are productive, rather than during a time of conflict.

Lauren: And if some people think that a team charter is too formal, we’ve actually had the class as a whole agree on: What are the norms for the class? How are we going to run this class? …kind of giving them ownership. And we have all the teams get together and generate different rules for the class and then we post them up on our course management system. And so when there’s an issue, we say, “Hey, look, we said that people were going to answer any texts or email within 24 hours, or within 12 hours, or everybody was going to show up prepared to meetings.” So we can actually point to those. But I want to back up before we actually start the team charter, we are huge fans of icebreaker exercises. And I know one of the things that we had the luxury of doing in group dynamics was we were teaching about groups, so we could spend a lot of time talking about these issues. However, most faculty have content that they need to cover. I also teach a course in the Wegmans School of Pharmacy and I know how much content people in the sciences and the humanities… they have so much to cover. They don’t really have a lot of time to talk about the group dynamics. And so they might assume that just because you’re working on a team project, you’re learning to work in a team, but we really want the teams to be able to do some icebreaker exercises in the beginning, even if it’s just fun stuff, you know, like what do you binge watching? What kind of pets do you have? Where are you from? …just getting to know each other. We think that that is hugely important. Just to get to know each other on a personal level, and then they get a little bit more ownership of the team. So while John’s right that not knowing people may be good and make you a little more task oriented, you still have to be concerned about all the people. And we know that, like this past year, a lot of students have really suffered from some anxiety and mental health issues. So we want them to feel comfortable talking to the group when they need to, we think that that is an important piece. So starting with that, and then they can constructively work together on that team charter.

Rebecca: To take one of those icebreaker activities that I’ve done in my classes that’s been really fun is to design an emoji. Of course, I teach a design class, so it’s related, but the students have had a lot of fun doing that activity, but it immediately gets them figuring out a way to work together and just talk a little more socially. So it’s kind of a task to do, it doesn’t really matter what the outcome is.

Tim: Some of the best icebreakers are actually relevant to the course or relevant to the team project. If you can make them relevant, they’re even better. And so I think that’s a perfect one.

Lauren: Yeah, emojis or I have them design a logo for their team… come up with a team name, and then a logo, and in the olden days, I would print up the logo and put it on their team folder. Now we have to do that virtually. [LAUGHTER]

John: One of the issues that, as you mentioned before, often shows up for students in terms of past experience with groups, are those people who may be sharking. In your book several times you mentioned the student named Fred. Could you tell us a little bit about Fred and how to deal with students like Fred.

Tim: Fred is actually a real student. This was not a hypothetical story. I think we embellish a little, but you saw us both laugh when you mentioned, Fred.

Rebecca: I think I’ve met Fred. [LAUGHTER]

John: I think we’ve all met Fred. [LAUGHTER]

Lauren: So again, we go back to what’s happening with this project? What is Fred doing or not doing? What has the team decided on their norms, or their roles for the team? And what are the sanctions for someone who is social loafing and not pulling their weight in the team? And one of the things that we talk about extensively, and this is also a big part of team-based learning, is peer evaluations. People who are not doing what they’re supposed to be doing on the team should be getting feedback from each other, and not just at the end of the project. Very often, we wait to the end, and we say, “team evaluations.” And all of a sudden it says, “Wait, Rebecca didn’t show up for any of the meetings. John wasn’t prepared for the presentation.” We need to know that along the way, and we recommend check-ins frequently with the groups. So we spend time informally checking in with the teams, meaning just wandering around the class or, if they’re in breakout rooms, popping into the breakout rooms to see what they’re doing, or actually having formal check-in times. We’ve sometimes given surveys to the class to find out how things are going, sometimes we make them anonymous. So we find out where are you on the project? How is everybody doing? And other times we ask them to specifically evaluate the contributions of each member. Another thing that we’ve done in the past is actually set up Google folders for all of the teams with instructor access. And that way we tell them, “Okay, everything that you do is going to go into that Google folder.” So the instructor has a way of looking in and saying, “Fred, it’s been three weeks, and you have put nothing into the Google folder, what’s going on?” So we can talk to the teams individually, but also talk to Fred individually, as well.

Tim: Yeah, and just as instructors, it’s our job to give students those skills for teamwork, because that’s what their employers and grad schools want. It’s also our job as instructors to develop our students. And that process of multiple check-ins, though, that’s one of the areas where it does take more work, we need those multiple check-ins to see how things are going. And Lauren, I think you emphasized and I can’t stress enough, the importance of these formal and informal peer and instructor evaluations that are going on throughout the process of this team project to keep them on track and develop their skills so that they can improve and be better team members when they leave our campus.

Rebecca: You have a couple other scenarios of student or learning situations around leadership that I think are maybe important to address as well, the idea that the team seems it’s going great, but come to find out it’s the one person doing all the work and no one else is allowed to do anything. And then there’s also the opposite where just nobody’s doing anything because nobody knows who’s in charge. Can you talk a little bit about how to make sure that there’s maybe a leader who’s not a dictator? …someone who’s really acting more as a facilitator within a team.

Tim: Well, I think this is another area where it does take a little extra time. And if we want to develop these teamwork skills in our students, we need to teach to the teamwork skills and teach to the leadership skills, at least a little time …and I’m not talking taking whole weeks of class but 15 to 20 minutes to put our expectations down and have them help get those expectations out there so that they know what it means to rotate through leadership. They know what the five or 10 top leadership characteristics are that their team expects of them when they’re leading. And we do emphasize the importance of rotating in the leadership role. That is important because we want everybody to lead team meetings and everybody to take notes at team meetings, not leave all that to one person.

Lauren: And students are really reluctant to take on the leadership role. They don’t want to seem like it’s a power grab sort of thing. And so it’s important for them to understand the nature of leadership, that it isn’t one autocratic person telling everybody what to do, that they understand the different perspectives on leadership. And again, we have the luxury of being able to talk about that, about different types of leadership, and we have our students do leadership assessments. And it’s helpful for them to be able to talk about when they go to a job interview. They’ve got something where they can discuss how they see themselves as leading the team.

Tim: Right, those demonstrable activities that they can actually show on paper in a portfolio, I say on paper, but it certainly could be electronic in these days.

Rebecca: I think one thing that comes up frequently when we talk about groups and group dynamics is setting on and establishing roles. And I’m hearing you both emphasize the idea of rotating some of those roles. And I think this is a place where faculty struggle to set up good structure. Can you talk a little bit about some of the rotating roles that should be there and how do we encourage students to rotate over the course of a semester?

Tim: Some of those roles I think we’ve already mentioned, certainly leadership should rotate at meetings. A lot of those roles occur in meetings. So, at a meeting, you want somebody who’s leading or facilitating, we often prefer the term facilitating, because that is somebody who’s just leading that meeting, then you need a note taker, then you need on top of that a timekeeper, somebody who’s keeping that team on task. But even beyond just the simple meeting strategies, where everybody should be getting some practice and learning opportunities throughout all those, when you’re thinking about roles, there’s also those informal roles, like somebody who could be the cheerleader for the team and trying to get people to feel better. And somebody who could be the one who’s asking the questions or giving the task-based answers, keeping them on track during their problem solving or decision making. These are all roles that each person should be practicing. We all tend to fall into our own roles that we are used to. And by forcing them out of their comfort zone and into some of these other roles, they can get better at being a team member, and bring more inputs, as Lauren introduced at the beginning, into the team project.

Lauren: But having said that, it is a lot more challenging to do when you’ve got an online class or online team projects, because, especially if it’s an asynchronous class, so it really depends on your circumstances. And another thing we found is that as the project progresses and students are getting closer to the deadlines, they definitely have to start solidifying their roles, they need one person who’s going to collect all the data and one person who’s going to do the data analysis and one person who’s going to organize, whether it’s a portfolio or slides or whatever that they’re going to do. So that part becomes important as well. And so one of the things we’re teaching them is to be flexible in their roles and realize that maybe you were a leader on the last project, but you’re not the expert to be the leader of this particular project. Or maybe you’re a really good graphic designer. And so you should do our slides for our presentation or design the portfolio. So trying to make sure that everybody gets a chance to show their strengths, as well.

John: I know when Rebecca and I have presented together jointly, she was always very quick to volunteer to do it, [LAUGHTER] because she wanted to make sure I wasn’t doing it. [LAUGHTER]

Tim: Well, Lauren and I have the same exact relationship, because I’m going to give Lauren some credit here, [LAUGHTER] she is way better at doing slides. And now when I’m doing the slides, I do my outline and hand it over to Lauren electronically to clean it up and make it look nice. [LAUGHTER] And it looks a lot better when we get it to the point where we’re going to use it.

John: So that does suggest though, that using the expertise of some of the group members can be helpful. But you do also want to provide some rotation in tasks. And that could be a bit of a challenge. Would you recommend instructors giving students are a rotating list of at least some of those positions? Or would you encourage the teams to do that on their own, such as the leadership role and other roles?

Tim: Well, I think the areas where you have expertise, you should certainly…. that’s the advantage of teams… you can spread the work out but you can also at least get closer to that idea of team synergy because you’re pulling together all those diverse views, all those diverse backgrounds, all that diversity in expertise. And oftentimes when we use the term diversity, we use it to mean race, but diversity is much, much broader than that. And so you can pull together that diversity in expertise and come up with a much better outcome, a much better product that the students are proud to share, and show off in the future. So yes, you certainly want to leverage the expertise of your students. But there are certain areas where you want the students to get some practice with those roles, as you pointed out, John.

Lauren: And I think if we don’t set them up, they probably won’t happen naturally. And so we need to be talking to them about it, giving them some experience doing it. A lot of it is putting the responsibility on the team and the students to say, “Okay, here’s something that we want to see you doing,” and have them explain to us how that happened. So one of the things that we’ve done when we have students give team projects is not just talk about what they found out when they did the project, but what was their process like? …and describing that, because you can learn a lot from hearing how other teams managed it. And you can actually see, during presentation time or reading portfolios, how they approached it, and which processes were most successful.

Rebecca: One of the things that we do in our design classes is something called a process video for just that. So if they’re working collaboratively, they describe and show their process for the project in a short video, like a three- to five-minute video. And it’s really interesting sometimes to see the way that different team members describe the same process.

Lauren: I love it. I love it.

Tim: That’s fabulous. The importance of reflection on their group work, it can’t be understated, because a lot of times is, Professors, we focus on the task outcome, but what we want for our students is also all the other stuff that comes along with teamwork, where they learned what it means to be a team member. And it’s those reflective activities at the end: “How did you get to this? Where did you help? Where could the team do better?” Those are the things that can really help our students develop those teamwork skills in the future.

Rebecca: Sometimes those things are so invisible too, unless we directly ask them to explain or narrate. I’ve been surprised often, in watching the process videos like”Oh, is that how you did that? I didn’t realize.” [LAUGHTER] It’s really interesting sometimes to see how they did something technically or how they arrived at a particular idea which hadn’t been explained to me in a one-on-one meeting or something or with a group meeting.

Lauren: And one of the things that we have done at the end of a big project is we have asked the teams to self assess, and actually tell us verbally, in front of the whole class, what they think they did well, what they’d like to do if they were going to do that project again, or going forward, how they will use that. And then we have other teams give peer feedback too, so it’s a good discussion. And it’s after they have finished the project, so there’s a sense of relief. But also, it’s important to say “Just because you turn the project in, that’s not the end of the process, you’ve got to look back and take those lessons with you to the next group experience.” And we should point out that there are some programs, especially in graduate programs, where people are in the same teams for a year or even two years. And so if you’re going to be doing more projects with the same team, it’s just invaluable to be able to learn from each of those experiences and take it forward.

John: One of the issues along those lines that came up with a podcast we did earlier with Olga Stoddard was an examination of long-term group projects and leadership roles in terms of gender. This was in an MBA program, which was disproportionately male dominated. And one of the things that happened in groups where women were in the minority, their leadership tended to be undervalued, or their rating of their leadership skills tended to be rated relatively low, while in groups where they were the majority or represented the whole group, their leadership evaluation was quite a bit higher. So one of the things, in terms of roles, that could be an issue is gender bias, and so forth in constructing the group. There’s also lots of research that shows that women are more likely to be asked to take minutes in meetings or to be the recorder in groups. Might it be worthwhile to address some of these issues with the groups before the groups create their charter or before they start their processing?

Lauren: Absolutely. And we do talk about implicit bias, not just gender, but on other factors as well, that it is important for students to have that call to their attention. Fisher has more females than males. So we haven’t had that much of an issue in classes. But I have seen that happen. I taught at the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester for a while and you see that sort of thing happening, but students may not even realize what they’re doing. And so calling it to their attention is really important. I recently hosted a DEI panel at the TBLC conference. And one of the things that came out was, if you only have a few people of color in the class, don’t spread them out. So each group has one person of color who has to represent their entire race. And it’s that sort of thing students don’t really understand. And I think sometimes faculty don’t even understand what the implications are. But how valuable that lesson can be for the students going forward.

Rebecca: We spent a lot of time talking about interpersonal relationships in groups in our discussion today, but maybe we can also talk a little bit about the kinds of activities that might be appropriate to do as a group, as opposed to what might be more appropriate for individuals.

Tim: Well, there are definitely tasks that are not appropriate for teamwork. For example, writing a paper, if you want people to write a paper together, that’s a task that really isn’t a typical team task. A team task, one that’s designed for a team, should be complex, it should be challenging, it should require lots of ways to solve it, and it should force some level of cooperation. And I wish we could give some examples. But the problem is that the task is very discipline dependent. And what task works for one discipline is different for another. But if you’re trying out a team task, then you can use it, you can see what works and see what you need to change or have some of your colleagues and peers review it and see what they think is relevant and what they think works and what they think might not work about it. Because we’re all trying to improve. We’re all lifelong learners. And so we can improve ourselves, too.

Lauren: And that’s another reason why you don’t want to take an individual project and turn it over to a group. Because those cooperation requirements are so important. They’re valuable for the students learning the content for the course, but also learning how teams work and how they can develop in those.

Tim: And back to those multiple check-ins. Once you start to force people to cooperate in a complex and challenging task, then it’s really difficult for certain students to let go their control and let others do it. But if you’re doing the multiple check-ins, you’re getting the information about which members are doing their work, and which members are not in time so that they can change and improve and develop.

Rebecca: Although cooperative tasks are different in different disciplines. Can you give an example from the classes that you’ve taught together, of where cooperation becomes an important key or important element to a project that you’ve assigned?

Tim: Oh, yeah, we’ve got quite a few of them, because we use team projects, not just together in our group dynamics class, but in many other classes. And so I ‘m going to pick my industrial and organizational psychology class. And in that class, they do a client project where they go out and they do a survey within an organization. And when they do that survey in an organization, I have them divided up to one person who’s the main client contact, and one person who does the data analysis, and one person who’s the lead for the first half of the project. And the project takes a lot of steps, I give them a stepwise document for what they should do, but there’s a lot of steps involved. And it’s something they’ve never done, writing a client type report instead of…. I’m in psychology… that dreaded APA-style paper that is [LAUGHTER] so frustrating for so many students. And in this case, they haven’t done this, so they’re trying to figure this out, dividing it up, and then coming back together and building on each other’s work to do this client survey.

Lauren: Now another project that we did in our group dynamics class was we had students actually do an observational report on a real-life group on campus. And so they had to choose a group, they had to get permission to observe the group, they had to observe the group at least three times, they had to give a certain number of instruments, whether they were things that measured interpersonal skills, leadership skills, roles, conflict resolution, that sort of thing. And then they had to go and observe the group and do a post-meeting analysis and ask people to say, “How did you think the meeting went?” So it required a lot of coordination, because they had to find a group that would give them permission to observe. And then they had to come back and figure out how were you going to collect this data, who was going to be responsible for doing that. When a meeting’s over, most of the time the students all get up and they want to leave the meeting, get to class or whatever. So they had to figure out how they were going to get that information from people. And when it was all done, they had to put it together and display their data. They had to show the results of all of the surveys they had done, the observations, they had to look at the task, the people, the contexts, and analyze those things. And then they were asked to analyze all those things that happened when the group got together. How was their communication style? What kind of norms did you notice? And it became really interesting to watch the students recognize things that they had done, and maybe not even realized, that they were either supportive of the group goals or not so supportive of the group goals, depending on what was happening. And then they had to come and give recommendations. And the groups that they observed were told that, if they wanted the recommendations, they would give them the executive summary from their report. So that was a task that required everybody being involved because they couldn’t all do all of the things. And it was pretty complex, and a long semester project.

Rebecca: So it sounds like scope is an important piece of the puzzle with collaborative assignments.

Tim:: Absolutely.

John: Do you have any other advice for our listeners?

Lauren: One of the things that we haven’t talked about was making sure that everybody is involved in the group. And it’s easy for people in groups to get lost if they don’t know the people well, if they may be shy and not comfortable speaking up… maybe it’s their first class in a particular subject matter. And so we’ve talked about this idea of checking in and making sure that everybody’s involved and that’s one thing that you can do is to encourage that sort of feedback, and making sure that everybody understands that everyone has to be involved, that that’s part of the requirements for the group tasks. Starting off with those icebreakers is just great, because it gets you to know everyone, and so people start to feel more comfortable. And especially again, I’ll say with online classes, it’s an issue because people don’t put their cameras on, they mute their microphones, they don’t show up for team meetings because of a scheduling conflict, and that sort of thing. So it makes it difficult, but you’ve got to make sure that with formal and informal check ins that everybody is involved and know what their role is and what their deliverable is going to be for the project.

Tim: And if I can follow up on a different thing, but it’s related to what Lauren finished on, in the online environment. We are all teaching in this different environment now, getting used to teaching online. And that’s difficult. And it’s difficult for us, it’s difficult for our students. What we found is our students often don’t know all the tools available to them, nor do they know how to use all those tools that are available to them. And so helping, especially on a team project, helping them realize all the different ways they can communicate, because if left to their own devices, it’ll be primarily by text, [LAUGHTER] and if other students are like ours. And so helping them to see that they have all these other things available that are both things they can do at the same time (synchronous tools), and asynchronous tools (things that they can use that drop information where other team members can get to it later).

Rebecca: I think that’s a really important point, Tim, not just in the online environment, just generally when students are collaborating, because they may not always be able to be in person together at the same time in any context. So having strategies to deal with communication or deal with sharing materials can be really helpful. And sometimes that means, in my experience at least, doing some little activities to introduce them to those tools so they can kind of level up in the technical skill sets that might be necessary before expecting them to be using it in their teams.

Tim: Absolutely. What’s interesting is, I’m going to date myself here, and sorry, Lauren, you’re coming along on the ride with me on this one, [LAUGHTER] but when Lauren and I first started teaching group dynamics together, we used to talk about teams that were either virtual or not virtual, because that’s the way it was at the time, your team was one or the other. And now in today’s environment, no team is all face to face, and no team is all virtual. I have a colleague next to me that I’ve texted, emailed and called and her office is right next to mine. And so we have a lot of computer-mediated communication, even in face-to-face teams now. So it’s the level of virtuality, everybody is using these tools. How can we use them to match the task and to match the skill set that the people on the team have?

Lauren: So at the beginning of this conversation, we talked about our book being based on a model that was an input-output model. And so we talked a little bit about the inputs, the things that happen in the middle are the communication and the conflict and the norms and roles, but to really be aware of what the outputs are. And faculty need to be aware of those before they assign the project. As much as we hate having to put together rubrics, it’s something that students need to have, they need to know how are they going to be evaluated. So we tend to focus, though, a lot on the task rubric. And that’s important. Obviously, we want students to get the content that relates to the course material, but we also need to have a rubric for those self and peer evaluations. And so the output is not only the task output, how did they do on the task? …but what did they take as a result from working on that task together? What kind of feedback did they get? How are they seeing themselves? …and actually having structured rubrics not just saying, “Well, what do you think? How did you do?” actually giving them a form to fill out and we’ve got some examples in the book and on our website too, that show what people can do. We’ve even got some from high school that were not as detailed as the ones that we gave our college students, but it’s important that they see the output of it is not just what the grade was on the project. But there’s more detail for that.

Rebecca: Students have a tendency to think that the output is the thing that the most weight or value was placed on. And I know, in my classes, it’s really the process. [LAUGHTER] So when I show them those rubrics and show them the weighting between the task versus the actual process of making the thing that you’re outputting, they’re often surprised. And I have to remind them constantly throughout the process, or through the project, that this process piece is important, you need to stop shortcutting this, this is the thing that actually matters the most, this is where the learning is happening.

Lauren: This is so true, I teach public speaking, and students think that the person with the best delivery is going to get the best grade. And I said, but look at the rubric, delivery is only 15% of the grade, you’ve got to do research, you’ve got to do organizing, you’ve got to have your citations in there, and you’ve got to have visuals, and how you handle Q&A, and all of those sorts of things. So it is a good example, Rebecca, of how there’s a lot more to it. And we need to lay it out so students know what it is.

John: And sharing those rubrics in advance with students in the learning management system or in person if it’s face to face, but preferably in the learning management system, so they have access to them anytime, and referring back to them regularly, will help remind them and help you be more transparent and how you’re assessing student work.

Tim: We remind our students: we want to start with the end in sight, what is it that you need at the end and build the project based on that end goal. So if we can provide those rubrics and those processes through which we’re going to be evaluating them, we get better work from our students. And that’s what we all want is better work for our students.

Lauren: And from time to time, we actually pull the rubric up during class and say, “Does this look familiar? Did anybody notice that this is the way you’re going to be evaluated?” …because they get involved in their project and then they lose sight of some of those details that are going to be important. For example, we had a project where students had to use two synchronous tools and two asynchronous tools when they were working on their project. And we went around and started asking them well, like, “What’s one of your synchronous tools?” They were saying: “Well, we’re using Google Docs.” We’re like, “Well, wait a minute, just because you’re both on the Google Doc at the same time, doesn’t make it a synchronous tool,” [LAUGHTER] and so it gave us a chance to really give them some clarification about what they needed to do. And so that’s why the rubric at the beginning is so important.

Rebecca: I think this is a good moment to wrap up in some ways, because it’s like we’ve got our end in sight, we’ve got a process in place. And so we always wrap up by asking: what’s next?” (that nice reflection kind of question) [LAUGHTER]

Lauren: Great.

Tim: That’s a great question, because we do have the “what’s next.” Number one is we post blog posts on our LinkedIn sites every Tuesday. So we’re constantly developing content. For example, on May 18, we talked about giving feedback and peer evaluations, we have something about how to teach peer evaluation, so your students do a better job at it. That’s on our blog posts. And we also have a student version of our handbook coming out in September. It’s going to be matched to the professor version, the handbook for the instructor, except it’s going to be more student friendly, a lot less writing a lot less “how to” in the text and a lot more based on checklists and exercises and guidelines, rather than simply explaining the things.

John: That sounds like a great project.

Tim: Thank you.

Lauren: Thank you. And we’re looking forward to being able to get more feedback from educators. We have a lot of professionals who follow us on LinkedIn as well, and so respond to some of those topics. And we’ve done a number of professional development seminars for different colleges and universities that have been pretty well received. So we’re looking forward to it. But we’ve got a lot of resources on our website, which we can put in the show notes and people can find a lot of information there and just get an idea of some tools they can use as well as contact us if they want more information.

Rebecca: Excellent. Thanks so much.

John: Thank you.

Lauren: Thank you so much for having us. It’s been a lot of fun.

[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.

[MUSIC]

105. Globalizing Classes

Improvements in communication and information technology have resulted in an increasingly interconnected global economy. In this episode, Dr. Blase Scarnati joins us to discuss ways in which our classes can be modified to help prepare our students to productively participate in this global environment. Blase is a Professor of Musicology and the Director of Global Learning in the Center for International Education at Northern Arizona University.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Improvements in communication and information technology have resulted in an increasingly interconnected global economy. In this episode, we discuss ways in which our classes can be modified to help prepare our students to productively participate in this global environment.

[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]

Rebecca: Today our guest is Dr. Blase Scarnati. Blase is a Professor of Musicology and the Director of Global Learning in the Center for International Education at Northern Arizona University. Welcome back, Blase.

Blase: Thank you. Really glad to be back with you both.

John: We’re glad to have you here again.

Our teas today are:

Blase: I’m drinking my everyday green tea. Chinesegreen tea Dragonwell Long Jing.

John: Very nice.

Rebecca: I have English Breakfast tea.

John: I have a pure peppermint tea. So, something plain.

We’ve invited you back to talk about your work with global learning. Could you tell us first a little bit about your role as a Director of Global Learning at the Center for International Education at NAU.

Blase: Primarily I work with faculty and departments, especially through our Global Learning Initiative, and the Global Learning Initiative (or GLI) is an across-the-curriculum global education initiative sited in all undergraduate programs and our liberal education program…also explicitly uses co-curricular experiences such as residence hall programming, department activities, community engagement, and so forth. And GLI established three interconnected and interdependent ideas that were all based and drawn upon long-standing campus values that were articulated as university-level thematic student learning outcomes around diversity education, global engagement, and sustainability. And so we kind of approached what global education can be in a very innovative way rather than just, like many institutions, privileging study-abroad-based experiences. We really broadened it out, and really defined it as diversity education, global engagement, and sustainability. And through that, when we were working to implement them at the department level, we really were asking departments not just to kind of hook up, to reach up, to those University outcomes, but rather recast them through the discourse in the discipline, so that departments truly would own those outcomes rather than just attend to them. We went about this after a lot of campus conversation for several years and it was adopted in 2010 by our faculty senate. Then we began to work with departments to implement and develop ways for them to think through…to create department- and program-level outcomes around those three thematic university level ones. And we used a backward design process: developing the outcomes, developing assessment strategies, and then determining sort of scaffolded learning experiences across the major curriculum. And especially with emphasis on reimagining courses; not just tossing courses out or adding courses, specifically. So how can you really get to the nub of modifying and internationalizing your particular courses. In 2012, GLI contributed significantly towards NAU earning the prestigious Senator Paul Simon Award for Campus Internationalization awarded by NAFSA. And more recently, we’ve been shifting away from working with departments and program curricula and focusing on individual faculty and their courses. And we do everything from individual consultations and dialogues about individual courses. But, most excitingly, we’ve organized a lot of large-scale frameworks that we’re calling collaboratives that bring together faculty, undergraduate, graduate students, particular programs, community members, all to kind of begin to think through how different courses different programs can really more deeply internationalize their efforts. Jean Paul Lederach, the great peace organizer and theorist has talked about large, flat, flexible, democratic platforms. And that’s what we’re really trying to pursue because, if you have a chance to listen to my other podcast with you all, we’re really focused on a lot of strategies that are based in community organizing theory and practice and that’s been my driving approach.

Rebecca: I have a question, Blase, based on some of the things that you’ve already mentioned. Can you talk a little bit about the kinds of learning outcomes that you were using for backwards design related to individual faculty. I think sometimes we have an image of what that might mean, but might have difficulty applying it to different kinds of disciplines.

Blase: Sure, the university level outcomes are really quite broad based. And they were rather intersectional in the sense that sustainability was also leaning into diverse spaces. We’re talking about sustainable communities and so forth and cultures with an idea that it can accommodate…if we built these really large boxes that lean almost into one another like Venn diagrams, then that would offer kind of the maximal amount of space for programs and departments to dialogue and think through them. And really, the individual departments…It was quite quite diverse. Some were very, very specific and targeted about really hard skills that they might need that would help them establish careers…be hired out in post baccalaureate efforts…and others were a lot broader. In the humanities, for example, they were much more expansive, and it was really quite diverse. So all ultimately address skills and competencies, but they were framed very, very differently. And the key point for us was that they were really rooted in disciplinary discourse. So, they were truly real and meaningful for faculty in the department so they could use them as tools to help their program move and prepare their students to succeed in the world that their discipline works with students to place them successfully in.

Rebecca: You do Musicology, right? So are you in the music department at your school?

Blase: Yeah, I’m a professor of musicology…music history. I do work with critical improvisation studies, popular traditions. I teach courses in reggae and country music, and jazz…and yeah, and in music. we’ve approached them in sort of interesting ways: sustainability comes about through…for example, my wife is an oboist and between global learning and lots of pressures with urban expansion in Africa, the wood that they source for that particular instrument has become quite scarce and rare. And there’s also lots of issues about appropriating other cultures’ resources and so forth. So, that’s really driven a lot of internal dialogue about what are we doing, how can we do it and what other alternatives might be available? Initially, of course, they went to oil-based solutions, you know, looking at polymers, but then they’ve been exploring other kind of sustainable woods and just ways to go about and reimagining and still achieving really high levels of performance and expressiveness, using an instrument that will allow them to do that. But again, with alternatives and there’s been real efflorescence in the oboe world around having lots of different woods being used and explored. And our theater colleagues were looking also at green ways to save energy: reusing, using non-toxic paints in their flats and their staging. So there’s been a lot of different ways. And some of its quite strategic and often overlaps with other ways in terms of economic efficiency, given tight budgets and so forth. But at the end of the day, that’s the reality. For example, we make and create and help to enable students to be effective performers and music educators, they’re dealing with audiences and the world and they have to come to terms with that. Within that is what I can contribute about uncovering lots of issues about how does music function in and as culture? And what are the resonance around whose music is being played? How’s that identified? How is it commodified? Who owns that music? Who can speak for it? And it’s a quite fraught history in the US and and European traditions vis a vis world music. But this can help unpack a lot of social justice focused issues within disciplines. Many pursue them overtly. Some that’s kind of bubbling a bit more in the background. So in music it’s been, in spite of popular culture’s music, quite forward art traditions and so forth. It’s more akin to museum systems in the visual plastic arts. So it’s a little bit quite contested in some ways, a bit behind some other areas. So it’s been useful to help disciplines turn over the field a bit and help to move themselves in productive directions.

John: What other types of experiences have been used on other departments to try to reach this goal?

Blase: Well, when the department itself has embraced the institutional imperatives of the wind filling the sail as one where one has to complete it, it’s baked into the program reviews that occur every six years internally, and so forth. And, at the same time, what’s also driven a lot of it is student demand. Just one example… our Department of Philosophy went through this process…and all dear friends, but it was a bit pro forma. And, you know, it wasn’t necessarily the deepest engagement compared to some other departments. But a couple years later, they came back in and wanted to re-examine and reestablish new outcomes for their program to really deepen their practice and their thinking. The discipline had changed, and there was a huge student demand. Once they started opening opportunities in courses and uncovering these issues, like linking it more close to the bone of what’s gone on in philosophy courses, then students were really driving that change. So, really, to kind of get to the nub of the matter when you start talking with a colleague, and they’re saying, “Well, how can I do this in my class?” And that’s always a very, very interesting conversation because in some ways, it can be challenging because they may be frustrated, they see where things are…the state of the world. They’re driven by their own passions and values, their disciplines also, and sometimes bringing that to bear within a curriculum that they may have inherited from someone else in the department over the years, or a particular course, then how do they go about working their way through that? And that can be a very, very rich conversation.

Rebecca: It sounds like that’s the conversation we should have. So, Blase, how can I globalize my classes? [LAUGHTER]

Blase: From my perspective, there are two ways to go about globalizing your course. First off, there’s no need to scrap it, throw it away and start over. No one’s talking about doing that. There are two approaches. One is to work within the existing outcomes for the course. And the second is designing additional outcomes for your course that specifically address why your students should be globalizing their work. That might be a formal outcome that you place if you have the latitude to add that to your course or an informal one that can help you frame your thinking. So in the first one…working within the existing outcomes. We would have a conversation and frequently would just…first off, get off campus…go someplace and have coffee. You kind of break down the routine of this is me in my role, you as a faculty member in your role…I mean, I’m a faculty member too, but I come to them within this other frame…and get someplace where you can begin to think and imagine and begin to talk about what have they always really wanted to do in the course around some of these issues. So, how can you take those outcomes and find ways of moving the learning and moving and modifying learning experiences…projects…what you do…what you read…what you think about…what you discuss in the class… so that it has a more global dimension. And some of that can be shifting readings, shifting the locus of activity or thinking through a problem and where it’s sited, and then helping your students that may not have a lot of experience in that discipline, thinking about those things. So, helping them understand how you really think and work within that discipline with these issues. So the first one is the easy one: where can you substitute? Where can you supplement? Where can you modify? What can you change? The second one, it kind of gets at things at a deeper level and probably something that’s more impactful. So, if you design your own courses’ outcomes, you’re really going to have to think through: Why are you doing this? What will it enable your students to do? To what purpose? …and, given the restrictions you might have, that might be just lurking in the background, helping you make decisions about what you want to alter. What new sorts of ways of doing and knowing that you want to explore with your students, up to you just add it as another outcome and discuss it with your students as you walk through the learning outcomes in the first day when you go through the syllabus quickly and begin to consider what are we going to be doing in this class and why?

John: When faculty have bought into this, how have they responded?

Blase: Most are really, really enthusiastic and people tend to seek this out if they are aligned to the overall goals of the project. In the early days, sometimes we had reluctant departments or departments that there wasn’t a working consensus to move forward in any particular direction. And those were more difficult conversations. These days generally working with individuals or departments that they’re highly aligned with this. So it’s a matter of what more can we do? How can we do that? And the restrictions aren’t about globalizing the course or trying to internationalize different activities or projects. But, often it’s how can we do this with little to no additional economic support? So we can’t buy resources…we can’t send our students necessarily independently out. And then how can we expand where our curriculum is, and I can introduce them to colleagues in the Center for International Education and we operate not by using a service where our students pay and go abroad using a services infrastructure. Like many places anymore, we have individual departments…have reciprocal agreements with other universities that our students would go and take a range of courses in the study abroad experience and they would come back. They would transfer right in. Students are not going to be missing any time in their progression towards a degree. They pay our own internal tuition. So their scholarships and financial aid cover those expenses. We also have a very generous level of support for travel for those students in need, especially in economically challenged groups. So, there’s a lot of infrastructure that the department or the individual faculty member may not have. But we can begin to put people together in a broader network to help them as an individual faculty member achieve aspirations or collectively as a program, or our whole department. Oftentimes, it’s frequently very, very exciting because, if you kind of are talking at that level of what have you all wanted to do, then let’s figure out a way to make that happen. That’s a very catalytic encounter and a catalytic discussion because it’s full of possibilities. I always try to shift the conversation to what else is possible? What have you never had a chance to do? Don’t worry about the 1001 reasons not to do it, they’re always there. But let’s figure out what that is, then we’ll go and figure out ways to remove the barriers or to provide the resources if we can. So, it’s usually a very satisfying work. And it’s usually a very uplifting conversation, because people take that energy inside and really begin to spin it. So, they’re lit up, and how excited they are infects others in their networks and groups and it can kind of feed off of one another. And much like we were talking about earlier conversation, if you get enough activity going, and you begin to saturate the airspace as much as you have the latitude to do, you can create a locus of gravity that starts to pull others in. And that’s just based upon your active network of folks that are collaborating together.

Rebecca: Can you talk about some specific examples that you think are really powerful implementations of globalization of a class or a curriculum?

Blase: Sure. One early example that I use to open up conversation with departments because I usually would go in into a department meeting and here’s what this project GLI is all about. And then “How do you do it?” That’s the next question. One really great example was out of our civil engineering department, we have a big school of engineering of civil, electrical, and so forth. And they often have core courses that all of the different threads within civil engineering would take together and one of those courses had a bridge building project. So, it had two major components. One was you need to design the bridge. So, you need to do the mathematics…the engineering of a bridge that will span a particular distance…that will carry a particular load…and then the materials and construction management side of that. So, then how do you actually actually create that bridge. So, it was actually a semester-long project, and it was quite complex. On the surface, that sounds fairly easy, but it is very real world, because that’s what these students would do when they leave. And they would join a construction corporation and they would be building bridges and other types of projects. So, engineering wanted to globalize that project. They thought this was one place where they could really make an impact. The faculty sited the bridge building project in Kenya. And that’s a country where we have a lot of reciprocal programs and our engineering students are working and taking courses and working in programs there. So, it still addressed the very technical side of what was needed in the course. So they still design and engineer a bridge that carries load…that spans a particular distance. But now that it moved the construction and the materials management into an international frame, and in a particular country, where there are infrastructure issues. How do you ship and transport or source locally materials. And again, that actually aligns absolutely with what their students need because their graduates are getting hired by major international corporations that build projects all over the world. So, that actually gave them a richer set of tools that came out of that learning experience. So, they accomplished everything they needed. Plus, they were able to internationalize it in a way that helps students develop tools that were even more necessary, and actually more salient to their success in the future. I think that’s a very, very quick, powerful little story that gets a “How can you take something and make some changes to it, that actually brings more to it?” So it doesn’t just globalize, but it actually opens up a set of possibilities and experiences that are multiplied. So, it’s not just here’s one way that we can do this to globalize this learning experience. But then, how can we, at the level of outcomes truly, how can we develop a richer set of tools that our students can use to succeed as they go out and seek to build a richer life?

Oftentimes inertia and perhaps a department, for example, or group of faculty, they may think it’s a good idea, but they don’t see a ready quick access point. Civil Engineering, they saw it almost immediately. And they said, “Well, we can do this.” And then it led to “Well, what if we do more of this? How about if we went here, as opposed to there…just so they move down the road pretty rapidly. For example, with Physics and Astronomy, we had a chair that was actually part of our planning group that helped design the whole Global Learning Initiative. And she was very, very interested in wanting to help move the department in this direction. And they were quite split. And it wasn’t just the astronomers versus the physicists, but it was actually a more generational split and that was just peculiar to their department at the time. So, there were a lot of very senior gray lions that really didn’t want to go in this direction. They thought it was counterproductive. They thought it was beside the point. And so that opened a lot in a very long conversation. And over five years or so, there was some change, retirements and so forth. And younger faculty and then the rising senior faculty began to have conversations about what it can be within their context between physics and astronomy. And we’re lucky we’re adjacent to a number of indigenous nations, the Navajo Nation, which is as large as all of New England for goodness sake. Within that’s the Hopi reservation downstate, various Apache groups, and it’s a very rich international space that way. So colleagues in Physics and Astronomy started working with colleagues in the community college system on the Navajo reservation. And so they started bringing in traditional knowledge holders. So, within astronomy, they started offering courses around indigenous cosmologies. So, they were actually helping their students to think in very different international ways using different frames for how do you conceive the founding of the cosmos, and the workings of all that is out there. Even the most rigorous, focused astronomer that is working in radio astronomy, or some other variation of across their wide range of disciplinary practices, then they’re beginning to open up what’s possible, how and what does it mean to be talking about these things? And when I know that I’m talking about it through my contemporary U.S. international sort of frame, that’s one frame. And there are other ways that might be useful to think about the facts, the activities that we do, and what the information we receive. And then what does it mean to put it together in an argument and an explanation. And by thinking through other cultural dimensions that expands their abilities to do that imaginatively, creatively. I come out of the arts, so I’m kind of hard wired to want to do things very improvisatory creative ways. And from my perspective, the more we can all think about, how can we be catalytic and creative in our own disciplinary work? I think that’s the exciting place because it shifts you, not from the core to the periphery, but oftentimes to willfully and intentionally walk to that edge, where your discipline is interacting with all these other disciplines. And that’s a very fruitful and very exciting place to be, because that’s where new knowledge can come about really quickly, as you begin to fuse and think differently and expanding what’s assumed. For me, that’s personally and intellectually this very, very exciting work. And believe me, I can’t follow the details of my colleagues in physics and astronomy when they start unpacking things, but I can get and be really lit up by the direction that they’re going, and their excitement and what they’re seeing as possibilities. Because once colleagues find that this is a fruitful path, then that leads much like we found with physics and astronomy, and certainly the example from engineering, that leads to “what else is possible?” So, you just keep opening and opening and opening. And that’s where we all want to be, especially in a time when most or institutions are getting squeezed in terms of economics. That’s a very empowering place to be.

Rebecca: You’ve mentioned this is a fruitful place for new knowledge. That seems like a good transition to thinking through the lens of students and seeing the world in a different way.

Blase: Yeah.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about some of the student impact that you’ve seen, or maybe even a specific student or a specific story that might help us envision how this plays out?

Blase: I work with faculty who work with the students, but I just get that energy and how they’re able to create new things. And then especially as I see colleagues being able to morph and continually transform what their course is, so that it’s not just, we take something static, we’re going to do some window dressing, and job done, and that’s good for another 20 years. But, once you start moving the pieces, that energy, that motion, that kinetic sense just keeps going and flowing, and students are really excited about it. And what I hear are those more collective pressures to do more. And we have some assessment too: that we had over 80% of our undergraduate programs in just three years out of 91 of the programs at the time, complete the program level GLI process that comes with outcomes assessments and a curricular map of learning experiences. Study abroad, because what we did was we talked to study abroad and asked the departments to position a semester in the program in their sequence of courses where students could go abroad, take courses at institutions that they have confidence in courses that they’re taking, and come back so they’re not losing any time towards the degree. And we saw 136% increase in the number of students going abroad over eight years between 2011 and 2018. And also those students that went abroad, I owe this all from my colleague, Angelina Palumbo, the Director of Education Abroad here in the center. But students that go abroad also have a 87% graduation rate, which is about more than 10% higher than our average graduation rate, which is not bad, but still, that’s quite impactful. Everything from the example when I was talking about colleagues in philosophy, where once they started opening up some of these issues and giving voice to them, their students were asking for more. That’s sort of the level that I encounter.

John: Was the expansion in study abroad programs due to the global initiative.

Blase: Well, I mean, you know, it’s kind of a chicken and the egg thing. We had a new senior international officer (using the jargon, SIOs), Harvey Charles, who was a really, really innovative colleague. He was our SIO. I was working with him. We brought a whole bunch of people together. Basically, he established a presidential task force to help to internationalize the campus. The President was behind that. And working with Harvey, we brought from two or three of us that were focused on curriculum. Out of that task force, we invited 40 colleagues to come together to draft this Global Learning Initiative. And part of that was a concerted effort to expand study abroad. But what had been holding it back was the very things that we were able to address through the curricular side of GLI, that there was many programs didn’t have a targeted semester where their students could study abroad without falling behind. They didn’t have any particular countries or institutions that they had reciprocal relationships and confidence in their curricula. So, it was all at the same time, everything coming together. But the details of how many positions were added it actually tripled the number of positions working in education abroad. But again, that was in response to the huge increase of number of students that were going from our campus. And then also they were busy recruiting international students. We have a couple of thousand international students on campus. And that’s other parts of the infrastructure within the center that GLI wasn’t directly related to or focused upon.

Rebecca: You talked a little bit about economic barriers being a barrier for faculty and making change. Did you come across any other barriers other than maybe you talked about generational differences too?

Blase: Yeah.

Rebecca: Were those main barriers or did you see faculty coming up against some other barriers that they had overcome?

Blase: Some disciplines are just really deep…their disciplinary ways of thinking and knowing they’re highly aligned, right? They’re there…sociology, politics, and international affairs. There really wasn’t much of a discussion in terms of, they’re already doing a great deal of it, then let’s maybe see what else is possible. For a lot of other individual faculty, when we talk to them, or programs that are thinking about picking it back up…it’s kind of a reluctance either, like we’ve talked about before, I’m not sure how to go about moving and making further change, and/or this is a time when everybody is really stressed. On our campus, we’ve lost 60% of state funding in a decade, which is a radical truncation of our support. We’ve shifted to pretty much tuition-based funding, and that’s created enormous pressures…that level of tenure density has plummeted. So, there are a lot of lecturers and a plurality that’s a one-year non-tenured position here on our campus. It’s created a lot of internal pressures and schisms and issues and many faculty don’t have the additional emotional capacity to want to willfully step forward and say I want to create more change and uncertainty and chaos in what I do. When I was referring a little bit earlier to inertia, it’s not just intellectual laziness, it’s often just exhaustion. What’s happening nationally, I think has been exhausting many in the academy, and our politics, the level of incivility that’s increasing and rising on campus. Arizona… you just have to have one person agree in a public forum so that you can videotape and that could be the person behind the iPhone, if they’re agreeing to do it. And that’s all this needed. And of course, these courses and classrooms are public spaces. So, we’ve had lots of faculties classes being put up and being pilloried by different websites, various political perspectives, and some of its been in the Chronicle over the last couple of years. So, it’s been a challenging environment. There are many things going on that are tapping people out. But, for me, what has been the thing that always allows us to continue to succeed? If you’re talking about very mechanical things, or this is an obligation…we need to achieve these program outcomes, that doesn’t stir many people’s souls. But, if you actually have, in advance, thought about how can you position your initiative so that it’s focused and grounded in the values of your community, your literal community or your institution, then people can connect in ways that aren’t just focused on disciplinary interest or compliance. You know, you’re tapping into their heart and what they care about as a person and what motivates them. Again, sustainability in my own discipline of music, there’s a discourse there, and there are ways that one can think through it. But those colleagues (and I count myself) that are very passionate about the future of the planet, we’re motivated to do much, much more, and we’ll seek that out. So amid all the turmoil and depletion of energy and the exhaustion, if you can find ways to shift that conversation into this catalytic space that talks about possibilities, that taps into what people believe and what they value and what they care about deeply, then you’re feeding that conversation from a place that will enrich and nourish rather than just take away, exhaust, and grind you down into submission.

John: We always end with the question, what are you doing next?

Blase: Well, what I’m doing next is continuing on and more and more explicitly going back to the well of community organizing methods, strategies, and theory to help us come together collaboratively. For me, faculty on our campus, and I know a lot of places, feel increasingly radically disempowered either by state legislatures, distant boards, priorities that may be economically driven or politically motivated that are not aligned with where many faculty are themselves. And we tend to wait until we grow quite gray for change to come from the top. So, I’m a firm believer of coming together with colleagues to focus on what’s possible, what can we do together, and actively doing that. And good administrators will be happy to jump in front of that train and take all the credit they want. God bless them. But, just what can we do together to make this a better place, a richer educational space for our communities and for our students? That’s largely pretty much everything I’m doing. Of course…presenting, publishing, writing and more writing, but like everybody else, that’s the thing that really kind of keeps me lit up.

Rebecca: Thanks for joining us.

John: Yes, thank you for joining us. That was a very good discussion.

Blase: Very much appreciate it. Thanks so much.

[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 Brittany Jones and Kiara Montero.

102. Team-Based Learning

A large body of research finds that active learning approaches result in larger learning gains than traditional lecture approaches. In this episode, Dr. Kristin Croyle joins us to discuss how she transitioned from  explore using interactive lecture to collaborative learning, and then to team-based learning. Kristin is a Psychologist and our new Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY Oswego.

Show Notes

  • Johnson, R. T., & Johnson, D. W. (2008). Active learning: Cooperation in the classroom. The annual report of educational psychology in Japan, 47, 29-30.
  • A discussion by Dan Ariely explaining why asking for shorter lists of positive features in a relationship can engender positive feelings appears in this March 24, 2014 video clip.
  • Michaelsen, L. K., Knight, A. B., & Fink, L. D. (2004). Team-based learning: A transformative use of small groups in college teaching.
  • Team-Based Learning Cooperative
  • Epstein Educational Enterprises, What is the IF-AT?
  • Sweet, M., & Michaelsen, L. K. (2012). Team-based learning in the social sciences and humanities: Group work that works to generate critical thinking and engagement. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
  • Croyle, K. L., & Alfaro, E. (2012). Applying team-based learning with Mexican American students in the social science classroom. Team-based learning in the social sciences and humanities: Group work that works to generate critical thinking and engagement, 203-220.
  • Deslauriers, L., McCarty, L. S., Miller, K., Callaghan, K., & Kestin, G. (2019). Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(39), 19251-19257.
  • 74. Uncoverage – David Voelker – Tea for Teaching podcast episode discussing the uncoverage movement in history, March 27, 2019

Transcript

John: A large body of research finds that active learning approaches result in larger learning gains than traditional lecture approaches. In this episode, we explore one faculty member’s transition from using interactive lecture to collaborative learning, and then to team-based 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.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Today our guest is Dr. Kristin Croyle. Kristin is a Psychologist and our new Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY Oswego. Welcome, Kristin.

Kristin: Thank you.

John: Our teas today are:

Kristin: Earl Grey

Rebecca: I am having Mama’s work tea, because Ada made it this morning and she calls it work tea, which means she pulls the tea bag tag out and puts it in the big cup. Also, it’s just my normal English Afternoon. But, that was a better story.

John: And I’m drinking Spring Cherry green tea.

Rebecca: We invited you here today to talk about collaborative and team-based learning in your classes. But before you do that, you’ve noted that you had a strong preparation in teaching before you got started. Can you talk a little bit about that. We’ve talked a little bit about that on the show before and how a lot of faculty aren’t prepared…

Kristin: Um hmm.

Rebecca: So, could you talk about how your preparation may be informed what you’ve done.

Kristin: My graduate program, I went to the doctoral program in clinical psychology at the University of Montana in beautiful Missoula. And that program takes the preparation of their grad students very seriously, but across several areas not just in clinical work and research, but also knowing that some of them are going to end up in positions in which there will be teaching. So, while I was there, that very first semester I was brought in, they had a structure for teaching their introductory psychology classes where graduate students were assigned our own classes where we were the instructor in the classroom, but we had a supportive network around us. So, the syllabus was already there, the textbook was already there. We collaborated in writing tests. We had a structure of TAs that supported us and they would have recitation sections in which the TAs also received development. And we joined in that so we could see how more hands-on kind of things could be done with students in smaller groups. We even assigned our final grades together. And some of those pieces are pieces that are areas of skill that people don’t often think about developing. So, that first semester, all I had to do was think about working within the structure: How am I going to handle the day-to-day teaching and learning in the classroom? I didn’t have to worry about course design because the course was already designed in front of me. And I also didn’t have to, at the end, think: “When you assign grades, is that rigid? Do you really have to follow the exact, you know, 90/80 that it is in the syllabus? Or what if there are natural breaks around 88 or 89? Is it okay to flex that? What kind of power does an instructor have that is fair to students and evaluation?” I got to do all of that in a collaborative setting with a very experienced faculty member as a guide. There was also a credit-bearing course for teaching psychology that we were encouraged to take… which I really enjoyed. And then I was given opportunities to function more independently. When they needed a stats teacher over the summer, and they knew I was living there over the summer, I got to teach on an adjunct basis, but still with the support of faculty around me. So kind of putting students in the deep end, but with a high level of support around them, I felt very prepared when I was done with the graduate program to enter into an assistant professor position. And I still appreciate the preparation that they gave me.

Rebecca: I think with the preparation like that you’re probably far more willing to experiment and do new things as a faculty member too and to maybe even break away from what faculty around you are doing. Do you find that to be the case? Or were there other faculty doing some of this collaborative work in the department that you were in?

Kristin: Yes, and no. One of the experiences I had at my previous institution, which was the University of Texas – Pan American that then transitioned through a merger to be the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. I was talking with a colleague in another department about the kinds of things we were doing in the classroom. And I still remember him saying “Oh, I didn’t know you could do that in the classroom and that was like teaching.” He had a very restricted idea of what teaching was, and what would be acceptable to colleagues, which he had never had the opportunity to test with other people around him. And that was something that I arrived from day one… that you talked about your teaching… that you can do many different things in the classroom. And it’s all teaching, as long as you are trying to work with students to create a learning environment and they are learning, then it counts as teaching. So I did come in with a much more flexible idea, then certainly some of my colleagues who hadn’t had an opportunity to ever have those discussions. And of course, some people are hired into departments in which those discussions don’t ever happen, so they may persist with those misconceptions for many years.

John: Or throughout their entire careers at times. [LAUGHTER] The scaffolding that was provided is really nice, because we’ve talked to a few people who’ve been in teaching training program or had some training in graduate programs. But usually, it’s not quite as structured as that and that’s a nice feature.

Rebecca: Yeah, I came from a program like that, but it was like very front loaded. It wasn’t that ongoing…. So I felt a lot more prepared, because I did have a lot of those experiences, but I didn’t have that same kind of supportive network throughout. Which is incredibly valuable.

Rebecca: So, you want to take us through what some of your collaborative experiences have been in the classroom and the ways that you set up some of the team-based learning exercises, maybe starting with what are those?

Kristin: Sure. So kind of the way that I journey through my teaching, particularly when I was an assistant professor, I felt comfortable in the classroom, but I didn’t feel expert. I felt like I was still trying to figure out what was going on, which is a perfectly fine way to be and a good state for learning to occur. So I felt like I was a talented lecturer, like I can engage students. I teach in psychology, I also think psychology is naturally very engaging, but part of that is because I really love the field. So, I felt like I could engage students and that they would listen and that they would be interested. But I started to become dissatisfied that there was always a core of engaged students and I had no idea what was happening with the other students in the class. And then sometimes I would be disappointed when we have tests or homework. Everyone said they had no questions. Clearly that was wrong. I was wondering how do you engage the majority or all of the students in their learning so that they aren’t coasting through class believing that they understand until they really don’t. And then I also felt like I was kind of fooling myself into thinking that students were with me when they were not with me. So I had an opportunity at that time to do some intensive cooperative learning training along the model of Johnson and Johnson collaborative learning. And that model from the University of Minnesota, it focuses on the importance of cooperation in the classroom, and that in cooperative settings, students learn more, develop a stronger sense of self efficacy around their learning; that they together are able to achieve more than they would individually. And it also has impacts on retention… that if students are feeling like they are individually known and valued in the classroom by their peers, they’re more likely to continue showing up to class and to develop relationships outside of the classroom that supports them along the way. So through that training, it was intensive, it was like eight hours a week, one day set for several weeks. The very first day, I could see what a difference I was going to make in my classroom. So, for example, I was using group assignments in class and they had all the same disadvantages that group assignments and most classes have, because I had no idea how to structure the group work so that it would be successful. I was doing group work to save me grading time, honestly.

Rebecca: That’s why a lot of people go to group work.

Kristin: Yes! Without understanding that all I had to do was some structural changes, and then it would actually be effective for learning as well, instead of just saving me grading time. In that cooperative learning training, I learned how to structure intensive group work that could be the length of an entire semester, or it could be the length of a single class day. I learned how to structure less intensive moments of team time. So how do you do a think-pair-share that works versus how do you do a think-pair-share that doesn’t work very well. So, that within the course of that training… actually just within a few days… I suddenly had, instead of 10% of the students in the class engaged on a daily basis, I had 100% of the students engaged on a daily basis. So, that was a huge breakthrough and I continued that way for several years.

John: What were some of the structural changes that you made that did lead to increased engagement?

Kristin: So, the cooperative learning approach of Johnson and Johnson, is kind of theoretically heavy, in the sense that they outline the pieces that are necessary for strong collaboration to occur. And then they turn it over to you as the instructor to say, “How do I build those pieces in?” So, for example, they emphasize positive interdependence as one of the essential components of cooperative learning… that when you create a group and a group activity for them to do, the activity has to be structured in such a way that each person is necessary to contribute. You can’t structure it in such a way that you can have three people talking when one person is only needed, and there are specific recommendations on how do you structure it so that everyone is needed. At the same time you have to build an individual accountability as another required component, so that, even if each person is needed, people can still slack off, say, “Yes, you all can’t do as well without me because you need me, but I don’t really care about what is happening here.” There has to be a level of individual accountability that’s also built in. Along with that, some of the skills that I thought were most important, they build an emphasis on group processing and social skills, so that if you have people consistently working together in class, they may not have developed the social skills to do that effectively, especially over time. You can work with someone for two minutes on a think-pair-share and really be bad at social skills. But, if you have to work with them over an extended period of time on a project and things are going south in terms of group conflict, it’s the instructor’s responsibility to help them to develop the social skills to work together. For example, on the first day of class, when I first start having students talk to each other so that they know that’s going to be a pattern in the class, I give them something quick to talk about. And I say introduce yourself to the person next to you… spend two minutes talking about this. And then I’m going to ask you about what you talked about. And then I run around the class real quick… pair up people who aren’t participating, introduce them to each other so that they understand this is a part of the class. So, then I follow back. So, what pieces are important there? …that I explicitly instruct them, you turn with your body… you actually make eye contact. And I will point out as people first start doing this, look at these two people, they are looking at each other, because many times students won’t do that, and it’s very hard to have a cooperative interaction if you don’t make eye contact… and I will say, “Who was the person you talked to? Tell me their name.” So they understand that I was serious when I said, introduce yourself, tell me something about them and that there’s individual accountability through just random calling on… that they need to participate in the cooperative portion. And then there’s also the self-reinforcing aspect of it that five minutes later, when I say to talk about something else, they realize they already know somebody in class, they have a connection. The next day, when I come in, they’re not quiet, they’re already talking to each other, they’ve created those connections.

John: A nice thing about that, too, is for people who are uncomfortable talking about themselves in class, having one person tell you something about the other person, it’s a little bit less pressure, it’s a little less revelation to the whole group. There’s some evidence that that type of thing is more effective in providing a more comfortable environment.

Rebecca: Kristin, can you also talk a little bit about a specific example of a cooperative activity where all of the members are held accountable, and all have a role? …just to provide an example for people who have less experience.

Kristin: So cooperative learning can be divided into informal and formal cooperative learning. Informal cooperative learning tends to be much shorter activities that can be done kind of on the fly if you already have an idea in your mind of how you might want to do that. Formal cooperative learning tends to be more intensively structured… longer-term activities. So that could be a single class session. If you’re going to do an activity that takes an hour, that would be more formal… or if you’re going to do something that takes an entire semester. The pair-and-share that I just talked about is an example of informal cooperative learning. Something like a jigsaw classroom activity can be structured as a formal cooperative learning activity. And it already shares almost all of the components: there’s individual accountability, because each student is given a specific role. There’s also positive interdependence, because the success of everyone depends on each person doing their role. So there are ones that are already structured with a built in component. The pieces that aren’t built into something like a jigsaw classroom activity, would be the group skills and group processing, and the ways that you can build that in. You can, for example, ask groups to reflect on what went well. I typically emphasize that more than asking them to reflect on things that went poorly, because asking to reflect on what went well tends to maintain a positive atmosphere, but also helps them to cover both bases at the same time anyway.

Rebecca: …or realize that my list for what went well is not very long… [LAUGHTER]

Kristin: Right. So, a common group processing thing I would have students do after their first more lengthy or more formal cooperative learning activity would be: list three things that your team did well together and one thing that you could improve on. And another thing I might ask them to do is to provide positive feedback to each member of the group at the end of the activity. And the kind of feedback that they provide is usually pretty specific, and helps to shape their behavior throughout the rest of the semester. So when they say things like, “I like it when you disagreed, and you said that this other thing would be a better way to go” that provides important feedback, and it helps to encourage better processing going forward. But I will go around and give individual social skill feedback too. But it’s usually things like, “Oh, I see you’re sitting so far away from your group, I’m not sure they can hear you, let’s scoot your chair in so that they can hear you.” Or I might ask, “Oh, do you know this person’s name next to you? What’s her name?” …and we’ll make sure that people maintain the social and cooperative connections that enable to do that kind of good group.

John: Just as an aside, it’s useful if you’re asking about things that went well, to keep the list fairly short. I’m reminded of a study that Dan Ariely talked about where they did a controlled experiment where in one case, they asked people to reflect on three things they liked about their partner and another case to list 10 things I liked about the partner, and then they surveyed them on the quality of the relationship. And those who were asked about three things generally rated their relationship with a partner fairly high. But when they were asked to come up with 10 things, they struggled with that and they rated that relationship lower. So keeping the list short…

Kristin: Right.

John: …is really good so you don’t…

Kristin: There’s kind of analogous thought about keeping things like gratitude lists. If you list too much stuff, it can have a negative effect, because you start to identify things that you really don’t think are that important, and it makes you think the whole thing is less important.

John: And if you want to get the opposite effect, ask people to list 10 things that were bad, and then they’ll struggle beyond the first few. You talked about having continuous relationships or persistent relationships with collaborative learning. Did you try to keep the group relationships consistent for the same groups throughout the term? Or did you vary that?

Kristin: I varied it. There are some good data to suggest that in collaborative learning… they refer to them as base teams… that base teams have a persistent positive effect, particularly on things like student engagement and retention throughout the semester and throughout the year…. that you have a team that is expecting you every day. But when I was doing cooperative learning, I didn’t restructure my courses. I restructured the day. Does that make sense?

Rebecca: Um hmm.

Kristin: So I didn’t have a reason for base groups. And I felt strange imposing them on the students without a reason. Besides, they would maybe be socially a good idea. I had to completely rebuild my courses from the ground up before I started using base teams. And that’s when I transitioned to team-based learning.

John: …and in team-based learning, persistent teams are recommended as part of the process.

Kristin: Absolutely.

John: Could you tell us a little bit about this transition to team-based learning. What prompted you to introduce that? …and how it worked?

Kristin: So I was happy with how courses were going. People were interested and engaged. I had students telling me, “I know every single person in this classroom.” and when you’re teaching a class of 30, or 40, or 50, that’s unusual. “I know everyone in here, I feel really supported.” I feel like things were going well. But I was unsatisfied with what I was teaching. I wasn’t clear, in my own mind, about what persistent learning outcomes I wanted for my students. I had not sat down and really thought through if I were to follow up with a student in a year or five years, what would I want them to recall from this class? What would I want them to be putting into use in their lives or in their careers? I had never thought that through. And I was fortunate enough to run into team-based learning at that time, right as I was primed to start thinking about this questions. Team-based learning originated by Larry Michaelsen. He was coming from the perspective of enrollment increases. He had been assigning some pretty challenging work. He was a faculty member in business. And as his course enrollments increased, he started to wonder how can you maintain the same kind of interesting, really challenging in class… by case work, for example… with a large enrollment. So he developed team-based learning to address that piece, but it also requires you to completely rethink the design of the course. And to start from the course outcomes: “What do you want the persistent outcomes to be?” …and then structure the course forward in that way. So in team-based learning, after you make a decision about your course outcomes, and what you really want students to be able to do, then you structure the course in a modular fashion. And each module has certain steps. So the beginning is student preparation, then when they come into class, you test. You say, “okay” …and it’s called the readiness assurance process. So you want to know what students are ready to do after they’ve individually prepared, and what they’re not ready to do. So they prepare, they test. And then, since it’s a team focus, they also test as a team. After that you have a good idea as an instructor, what are they ready to do? What are still the fuzzy areas? What do they really not get at all? What are their competencies as a team already, even if every individual student doesn’t have it, and then you can do some corrective lecturing, basically, so many lectures that fill in some of the gaps. And that’s all part of the readiness process, because you’re getting them ready to do some interesting application work in class. And the rationale for that is… and actually what I had been doing prior to that, was giving interesting application material to work on at home individually, while doing lecture and cooperative learning in class. But the interesting application material was actually the heart of the course, and the much more challenging piece. So it was better to bring the hard piece where they needed support into the classroom. And the piece they were ready to do, which was to do their own self study back into their own lives. So you do this readiness assurance process to make sure they are ready for interesting application, and then the majority at the time for the module you spent on application. Doing that after I had already worked with cooperative learning was really helpful, because all of that application work is done in a team setting. So when you already have some experience with how to build teams, how to maintain and develop their social skills, that’s really, really, really helpful. That’s a short version.

John: One of my colleagues, Bill Goffe, who was on one of our very early podcasts, noted that when he gave the group test, the performance always went up significantly, so that they could see the benefits of the peer discussion that was part of that. And he was really impressed with it. And he noted that, oftentimes, if a student didn’t show up for class one day, they get a hard time from their classmates from the group because they let the group down. And he said his attendance had never been better than when he was using a team-based learning approach.

Kristin: Absolutely. And a lot of people who do team-based learning, use the same methodology for doing the team testing, which is honestly really cute. It’s a scratch-off form. And the scratch-off form is used so that the team gets immediate feedback on each option. So on any particular item in a multiple choice test, if they want to select “B” they scratch off “B.” If it’s not there, then they continue to scratch until they get the right answer. For one thing, they love it. But also they are getting immediate team feedback. If this person is not speaking up, if they say I think it’s “B” and then they stop advocating and then it turns out to be “B” later than the team immediately knows, by the time they get to the next question. “Okay, we need to incorporate more feedback from all of our team members, wait a minute, this person who’s not speaking up actually has a lot to say.” In the course of just a few multiple choice questions, it brings their team development forward leaps and bounds. And they kind of have fun with a scratch off, which is also a bonus.

John: And it also gives them incentives to come prepared and to listen to other people in ways that they might not otherwise.

Kristin: Yeah, and their team will give them grief, if they say “Oh, I don’t know, because I didn’t read,” their team members will be like, “But we are depending on you, you need to read, we all read.”

John: And it also gives them a little bit, perhaps, of improvement in metacognition because they’re getting that immediate feedback, and it’s being coupled with the reactions of the peers. So if someone was insistent on a wrong answer, and they dominated that discussion, they might be a little more careful in the future and more willing to listen to the other people and reflect.

Kristin: Exactly, and it doesn’t have to wait till next week, it can happen right away. Right on the next question. The team application activities are also structured in a particular way. In team-based learning, they talk about the four S’s for the application activity, the first one is that you have to select a significant problem. So what they’re working on is something that will be important to them, something that they will identify with, or that they recognize is worth their time in thinking about and trying to think through. The second one is that they need to be working on this same problem. You can’t say teams one and two are working on this, three and four are working on this, five and six are working on this. Third one is that they structure in so that they make a specific choice as the outcome. Because it’s easier to solicit team feedback if everyone is making a specific choice rather than having kind of an open-ended narrative response. And it helps to stimulate whole group discussion as you’re moving. Now it can sound like it’s limiting to say that you have to make a specific choice, but you can do in a very broad way. And the fourth one is simultaneous reporting. So all the teams are asked to report at the same time on what the choice was that they made, so that they can’t piggyback off another team who’s putting in effort. So, as an example, one of the courses that I taught in the psychology major in Texas was the tests and measurements course in psychology, and test and measurements starts with a stats review. They’ve all had statistics, it usually comes prior to tests and measurement. But it’s the first time that they have an opportunity to work with statistics in kind of a decision-making way. So you start with a stats review. So one of the activities that I would do, I gave them two hypothetical first-grade teachers with how many questions 10 of there students got right on a spelling test. And the two distributions had the same mean, but one was fairly normal, and one was highly skewed. So they had to do their quick statistics review… Do the mean, median, mode and standard deviation describe the shape of the distribution. But the question I was asking them was, “If you were the principal, which teacher would you offer an after-school tutoring program to for extra pay? And which teacher would you potentially nominate for a teaching award?” They found that question to be a really interesting question. For one thing, students think a lot about what good teaching is, and what constitutes a good teacher. So they already come in with very strong opinions. And they also understand the complexity of, you know, if everybody’s passing but people aren’t excelling, is that good teaching? Whereas if most people are failing, but a few people are getting an “A” is that good teaching? …and how the data contributes to good decision making, but can also be kind of manipulated to contribute to decision making in not such a good way. So instead of just saying, “Let’s review the stats, here they are,” it was a question with a specific choice that they simultaneously reported on. And then we could discuss together. And of course, their answers are different. There’s different rationales in both ways. So then we could discuss together what their rationale was, if they want to debate they can debate a little. It generates a lot of student enthusiasm, and everybody’s doing it instead of just 10% of the class.

John: And once they’ve committed to an answer, they have a stake in and they really want to know, that’s something we’ve seen a lot of things we’ve talked about in the past, too.

Kristin: Absolutely.

Rebecca: When you were doing the team-based learning, were you sticking specifically to problems that were on a class-by-class basis still, like you were discussing in the co-operative setting, or were you doing some longer term activities that went across multiple class periods?

Kristin: I had the… what I consider gift… to often be teaching in a three-hour time slot, which is my very favorite time slot. So I would have activities that would extend two or three hours, but typically not between classes, I found that to be more of a sweet spot, at least for me. At my previous institution we had a very high commuter population. And I promised, in both models, that I would never ask them to do something out of class with their teams, that was one of my rules… that it was just simply too burdensome for students who have multiple outside of school commitments… family and work, or living potentially 150 miles apart, which was not unheard of. I promised them no out of class stuff. I structured that intentionally so that the individual preparation that they were doing, they could do anywhere on their own time schedule, but they were expected to be there. And their team expected them to be there to be able to engage in class. And it was also one of the ways that you talk people into it, when they say “I worked with other groups who were all slackers and we would always set times and they wouldn’t show up.” And I said “That’s not going to happen in here. We already have a time we’re all going to show up together.”

John: And the philosophy that’s very similar to the flipped classroom approach where you let students do the easy stuff outside and then give them assistance with or have them work in a framework where they’re getting more assistance with the more challenging issues.

Kristin: Absolutely. I think TBL [team-based learning] is definitely a flipped classroom approach.

Rebecca: I think the other thing that helps too with that model… of making sure you’re not working outside of class… really helps students with really different backgrounds start working together, because you might have students who are more traditional who are on campus. And so for them to meet outside of class is often not such a big deal. But then if you have students who are working or have families, and there’s a disconnect in the class, even, between those two populations, that helps make that more obvious and work a little bit better,

Kristin: Right. Absolutely. Yeah. And I didn’t want to set up anything where people were made to feel like unvalued team members, because they couldn’t do what was asked of them because of other commitments. Since that was in my control, I wanted to make sure that people felt welcome.

Rebecca: I’ve tried to even do that with long-term projects. In the field that I’m in, we tend to do things that go across class periods, but there’s always the “Are we going to do this outside of class or are we going to do this inside of class, and I try to have them do anything that needs to be collaborative, and decision making, in class, and then things that can be done on their own, even if that means doing some creative work, or whatever, outside of class. But those are independent things that can be done for the same reasons. And I find that students will try to manipulate that system, so that they’re gonna: “Oh, we’ll just do it outside of class, because we don’t want her to know whether or not we’re on top of something,” or whatever. But I call them out on it, because it’s really devaluing some of that exact thing. People have other commitments and things.

John: You mentioned, you started to use a backwards design approach where you started with the things you want them to remember five years later. Did you have to cut back on the breadth of the coverage in the class, to some extent, by doing that?

Kristin: Yes, I did. When I was going with the straight up cooperative learning approach, I did not have to cut back on the content at all. Without the full redesign, I found I could cover the same amount of material in straight lecture versus in a cooperative setting. But it was all coverage. It was just a different kind of coverage. When I approached it from a backward design perspective, and I really was able to focus on the objectives that I thought were important, I did have to reduce the amount of things that we were covering. I have no regrets about that, of course, because I completely recognize that covering material isn’t just covering it. What are students going to do with something I covered in class? They didn’t cover it, I was the one who was learning it and talking about it. So I’m much happier with an approach in which I am consistently hitting on the objectives that I really want them to recall, and that they are working hard to apply those throughout the semester.

John: If they’re not going to remember it passed the final exam, covering more material isn’t terribly useful.

Kristin: No.

John: We talked about that in a previous podcast with David Voelker, who talking about the coverage approach in History…

Kristin: Right.

John: …which is the same logic.

Kristin: Exactly. And I actually now consider that to be a complete waste of time. So why am I spending class time on something that I actually don’t really care if they remember, it’s not the most important thing to me, and they really don’t care if they remember.

Rebecca: You have some compelling arguments for why team-based learning and collaborative learning are good options. If one wanted to start moving in that direction, what would you suggest their first steps be?

Kristin: For team-based learning, there are a couple of great books that are very easy to approach. There are several great resources for team-based learning. Larry Michaelsen published a book in 2008, for example, that covers that from front to back. It gives examples of applications in different disciplines. There’s also a book published a few years later on team-based learning in the social sciences and humanities. That also covers the basics, but has applications that are more specific to social sciences and humanities. Team-based learning has really caught on in medical education and in business education. So in the original book, there are more application examples that are in MD preparation or in business schools. So if you’re looking for other examples, the second book might be a good choice as well. And that one is edited by Michael Sweet and Larry Michaelsen.

John: And in fact, I read your article, or

Kristin: Oh, did you?

John: …your chapter in there as background.

Kristin: I’m glad someone read it.

John: Now I have to read all the others. But, I, at least, did read that. It was very good. So for faculty who are moving to this, what are some pitfalls that they might run into? Or what sort of problems might they encounter?

Kristin: Team-based learning as being a much more structured approach… Michaelsen does a really nice job of laying out the pieces that he thinks are critical. And I agree they are critical. So, for example, he talks about explaining, and testing the model with students on the first class day, and you cannot skip it. So the very first class day, I give students an example individual application test, like they would get for their readiness assurance. It includes basic psychology knowledge that may or may not be present in the culture. So they have some chance of getting some of them right and some not. And then I have them do it as a team. And the team scores, of course, are always dramatically higher than the individual scores. And the team testing process is so much better. [LAIGHTER] It’s more pleasant and interesting and collaborative than they expect it to be. That simply going through that, it allays many of their fears about what a team is going to be like to work with. Plus, when they see that the team has tripled their individual score, they’re like, “Hey, maybe I could depend on other people to help me learn, and maybe this will pay off for me.” So going through an explanation of what the rationale is, having them experience it a little is really, really critical in helping them stay open minded while they experience it. And then regularly throughout the semester, I will keep reinforcing them with those messages. I’ll say, look at this amazing thing you guys did. You used all the intellectual resources around you, and you analyzed this difficult problem and came up with some great solutions. I’ll remind them how much they’re learning and what kinds of challenging tasks they’re able to do as a team when they have the preparation to do it, which helps as they’re starting to think “Well, wouldn’t it just be easier if I could do this by myself?” It helps them to kind of remember, ”Well, yes, but you wouldn’t be doing this, you would be doing something not as challenging, not as integrative.”

John: and probably not learning quite as much either&hellp;

Kristin: Yes. He also emphasizes an aspect that is also emphasized in cooperative learning… of helping the teams develop and giving them feedback, helping them give each other feedback. That’s also really critical, especially very early in the semester, as they’re starting to develop group norms and bond together to make sure that you don’t short the time in class for them to have some group processing time and to build their team skills. So, for example, when I taught last spring, I had a student who came to me after I think it was the second week. So it’s very early in the semester, and she said, “I really need to reassigned teams. My team hates me, they won’t make eye contact with me.” She was really upset. And I’m reluctant to reassign people teams, because often what they’re experiencing, they take with them. It’s not always a function of that team process. So we talked some, and I tried to get a handle on what she was experiencing. I knew where she sat, I had an idea of the team composition. And I asked her to try one more day, just one more day. And then we would talk about reassigning her teams. And that day, I was sure to build in plenty of time for group processing, where they talked about what they were doing well as a team and something to improve. Their team turned around immediately. She was a relatively assertive person, which I already knew. I knew that she could handle this. So she went back to the team. She was able to talk with her team about not feeling heard. They immediately turned around in the way that they were with her. And by the very next class day, they were a relatively high functioning team. They did well all semester. They brought doughnuts for each other. I mean, it was a really nice supportive group. What they needed was the time in class to do some processing. And if I, as the instructor, had been moving too fast, and not giving them time to do that, and not giving them a prompt to do that, it would have been a really negative experience for her. So, also building in time for the team to develop and prompts for them to do that.

Rebecca: So you mentioned liking to have a three-hour teaching slot.

Kristin: That’s my favorite. It’s not required.

Rebecca: So, in that amount of time, how much time would you designate towards this group processing, for example, to give people an idea of what that proportion or the amount of time to dedicate so that you don’t shortcut it and you don’t rush through it?

Kristin: If I were to do an activity that might take an hour, I might spend 10 minutes for group process, it doesn’t have to be very long, or even five. And you don’t have to do it every time, you could do 10 minutes after the first one or two more intensive activities, and then not do it for another few times… and another five minutes just every so often to help them resolve their underlying dissatisfactions and to recognize that what they’re doing is not just application activity, it’s also group interaction. So please take time to do both. Another really important required component that I didn’t mention is peer evaluation, I always incorporate peer evaluation as part of the grade.

John: How did you form the teams in these classes?

Kristin: They’re heterogeneous, first, with a very open process so students can see it happening and know there are no shenanigans… that this is all very open… talking about the rationale that people of different backgrounds bring different strengths. So you want a group that has people of different backgrounds, so you can have a larger kind of learning base between you. So usually, I’ll pick a few characteristics that might be important in that kind of background. And I will line them up around the room based on those characteristics. And if it’s 200 people, it’s a really long line. And then we count off. So when I teach introductory psychology, students who have had a high school psychology class usually are starting a big leg up on the other students. So I’ll include that as a characteristic. Sometimes I’ll include the distance that people are coming from, because then they have different experiences, depending on what class I might also include if their student athletes, just because if you put too many together in a team, then they’re all gone on the same day. They have interesting backgrounds, but they also have patterns of attendance and of absence that need to be adjusted around. And we’ll count off all the way around so people can see how the teams are made. But heterogeneous teams are really, really critical. Having students with pre-existing relationships will throw off the team process in a way that automatically excludes people that don’t have pre-existing relationships… plus they tend to be lower performing teams. And I don’t want to set that up on purpose.

John: One of my colleagues once did this in a class of, I think it was about 350 students, but he just sorted them alphabetically. So he had them organize himself that way, and it was a fairly long process. But, it was kind of amusing for those of us wandering by and just seeing…

Kristin: …this huge line… Yeah.

John: He didn’t do it that way In the future, he used other criteria.

Kristin: I’ve had colleagues that I’ve talked with that think that this is a long process. It’s not. You can sort 200 people in 10 minutes, and then you’re done for the whole semester,

John: Doing it alphabetically…

Kristin: takes a lot longer.

John: …can be more challenging, because they were self forming that… it didn’t convert rapidly.

Kristin: The other thing I never do is I don’t put the students who didn’t come the first day into a team, because there are characteristics about why they didn’t come the first day. If you put them all together in one team, they share some of those characteristics… It tends not to be a very high performing team. So I make sure they’re sorted out among the other teams. But that was one of the things that I learned in cooperative learning. That, before I did cooperative learning training, and I was assigning group work, I would assign people based on if you didn’t come the day we did the assignments, you were in another group. And that group typically did not do very well. And as an instructor, it’s my responsibility to create a learning environment in which students can excel, it’s on them whether they do their part. But if I’m setting up a team in ignorance, with predictable characteristics, so that they’re going to have a failure experience, that’s on me to correct. And it’s not on them. So afterwards, I felt guilty when I had come to a new realization. But, yeah, it’s my responsibility to set up an environment in which those students can be successful in their teams.

John: In your chapter in that book, you mentioned that when you switched over, it did affect your course evaluations a little bit. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Kristin: Just a little bit. But yes, it did. So when I was doing straight lecture, I was shooting for engaged lecture. And in psychology, you can build in little experiences, especially in introductory psychology, where the topics are changing frequently, you can always build things in that are kind of interesting. You can do a little optical illusion here and a little bit of memory trick there. And there’s these ways to build it in, but it is still basically straight lecture. And I got high evaluations for that. I was careful about trying to build those in every day, you know, every few minutes. And when I went to cooperative learning, where it was essentially the same approach, but in in a much more engaged and cooperative fashion, those evaluations stayed very high. Students knew each other, they were happy in class. When I went to team-based learning and I was actually asking every student to participate all the time, and be prepared in class in a way that their contributions were much more obvious than mine. My evaluations did drop just a little bit, not a lot, but a little. And I am grateful that I was teaching in a context where I knew that my department wouldn’t care. They were more interested that I was doing good teaching. And they understood the many factors that influence student evaluations. But I also recognize that it’s incumbent on me to help students understand how they are learning, what kinds of things encourage learning and retention, and then you kind of let the student evaluations fall where they may.

John: When I read that, it reminded me of that study that came out a few weeks ago from Harvard in their physics program, where they found that students in active learning classes did demonstrably better on tests, but they perceived their learning as being lower. So there was a pretty strong inverse relationship between their perception of learning and actual learning. That seems to be fairly common, there have been a number of other studies where what students think to be most effective, is often not what most enhances their learning.

Kristin: Right.

John: Do you have any other advice for our listeners, who might think about using either collaborative or team-based learning in their classes,

Kristin: The one thing I would say is that teaching a cooperative learning or a team-based learning structure class is a lot more fun. You have to be willing to give up control, because when you’re lecturing, you have absolute control… meaning even that students can’t ask you weird things, because you haven’t opened the door for that to happen. But when you structure the learning experience, and then you give up the control to the students, it is an exciting environment to be in. I wasn’t as tired when I was coming out of class. I was energized, you could feel the difference in the room just walking into class… they were excited and talking with each other. When I would circulate around before class started, they’re talking about the class instead of talking about other stuff. It completely changes the environment in the classroom in a way that I think really matches what I expect out of a university education for students, it creates a environment of intellectual enthusiasm around the topic that you’re teaching.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking what’s next?

Kristin: That’s a great question. So right now I’m 100% administrative. And since I’m in a new position, in a new institution, I’m gonna spend some time figuring out all the newness pieces. But I’d like to go back to the classroom, at least for a course here and there when I can. There’s nothing different about students than there is about people. So I also think often about how what we do in the classroom, what we understand works and what we understand doesn’t work, how that applies in administrative settings as well. We know for example, that people tend to try and find the shortest path. So if they’re trying to learn something, they want to put in the least effort to learn it. If you ask a faculty member to do a task for the department, they are obviously going to choose the easiest path to do that… not necessarily the best path. So how do I take the experiences of learning and teaching, that in some ways are better understood to an environment of administration that in some ways is not as well understood? What kinds of lessons can I apply there as well?

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much. It’s been a really interesting conversation. I’m sure it gives a lot of people things to think about as they move forward in this semester and future semesters.

Kristin: Thank you.

[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.

101. Change in the Academy

Change in higher ed often occurs slowly. In this episode, Dr. Blase Scarnati joins us to discuss how community organizing strategies can be used to formulate changes that can be supported, or at least not resisted, by all stakeholders.

Blase is a Professor of Musicology and Director of Global Learning and the Center for International Education at Northern Arizona University.

Show Notes

Transcript

Rebecca: Change in higher ed often occurs slowly. In this episode, we examine how community organizing strategies can be used to formulate changes that can be supported, or at least not resisted, by all stakeholders.

[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]

Rebecca: Today our guest is Dr. Blase Scarnati. Blase is a Professor of Musicology and Director of Global Learning and the Center for International Education at Northern Arizona University. Welcome Blase.

John:Welcome.

Blase: Yeah, thanks so much, John and Rebecca. I’m so very happy to be here with you.

John: Very pleased to have you. Our teas today are:

Blase: I’m drinking my daily Chinese green tea Dragonwell Long Jing

Rebecca: Yum, Jasmine green tea,

John: I have Tea Forte black currant tea, again.

Rebecca: So we wanted to talk a little bit with you today about using organizing strategies to make institutional change. Change in colleges and universities, as we all know, can be a very slow process. [LAUGHTER] And you’ve worked on some ways to overcome this. Can you talk a little bit about your approach?

Blase: Yeah, we found that using community organizing theory and practice can be really a very powerful way to build a collaborative consensus for change. And especially around working to bring together folks around curricular change across campus, and especially across diverse units and disciplines. We adapt the work of political theorist Harry Boyte, who’s in Minnesota and I’m lucky to work with Harry quite a bit. He’s one of the founders of the field of civic studies, and his concept of Public Work, which is really a route that the citizens are co-creators of the polity. So that’s a very, very powerful idea. So everything that we have done here to bring about change is grounded in flat democratic practices, so that everyone is an equal collaborator, and co-creator in any sort of initiative. And again, at no surprise to anyone, that often runs counter to the hierarchical organizations of the Academy. So it can create a little dissonance, but it keeps the blood flowing. So we’ve used key community organizing theories and practices, such as power mapping, to understand the formal and informal power centers in your institution. And these are the people and committees and units that you’re going to need to work with to bring about change. So, one-on-one meetings, to build public relationships and coalitions and alliances towards common goals, especially with people that you don’t know, and cultivating practices of mutual accountability, learning to strategize action, and especially working with the well known cycle of organizing which mirrors our academic practice of research: where you do research, planning, action, and critical evaluation. And they ceaselessly follow and inform one another. A really good primer for all this kind of work, if you’re interested is Ed Chambers, the longtime head of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), a really powerful community organization that’s been around since the 40s, and the work of Saul Alinsky. His books, especially Roots for radicals: Organizing for power, action, and justice a continuum of books from 2004 and their multiple editions, is really particularly good.

Rebecca: I have a question. How does a faculty member of musicology come to this work?

Blase: I’ve wandered quite far afield and while I still publish and present in musicology, especially critical improvisation studies, jazz and reggae, and even country music… became involved in our liberal education program…. and in our faculty senate, been faculty senate president… was hired to be our founding director of our first-year seminar program, which I established, and started collaborating with newly hired, endowed chair, Rom Cole’s who came over from Duke University, he’d been there for 20 years. And we started collaborating around this community engagement methodology. And we kind of situated it in with working with our first-year students and community members and ultimately it proved to be quite successful.

John: Many systems have a whole lot of bureaucracies that are designed to thwart any type of change. Could you give us an example of perhaps how you work through that first- year program? What was the issue that you wanted to address? And how were you able to build that coalition and work towards that goal?

Blase: We’ve used community organizing strategies actually here on campus, I’ve worked with a number of folks around a couple of different initiatives: one’s the first-year seminar program, another with my colleague, Michelle Miller, who you’ve had on as a guest a number of times, and in our first-year Learning Initiative. And that’s more focused around kind of key gateway large-enrollment classes and changing the pedagogy to create much more interactivity. And the first-year seminar program as well, they were both really founded to help us really increase student retention. And also, I’ve done a lot of work around global learning. And we have our Global Learning Initiative, which I helped to co-create in 2010. And that’s an across-the-curriculum initiative where we established three themed student learning outcomes for all undergraduate programming in our liberal education program around diversity, sustainability, and global engagement. And they’re grounded in long standing campus values. And that also proved to be pretty successful. Just back to your question, though, around the first-year of seminar program, we were able to pull together some initial seed funding to establish a series of action research teams, which is kind of a framework we pulled up from K-12. But they were flat sort of umbrella organizations where we had students from multiple course sections coming together, and with graduate student mentor who had some background in training that we provided to them. So, work with community partners. So, we were trying to shift the boundaries of where the university was to embrace those deep centers of learning and knowledge in the community. And to create these sort of flat reciprocal learning spaces where faculty can learn from community members and students can teach. And everyone works around issues that fundamentally the community itself has identified. So back to Harry Boyte, who I mentioned, there’s kind of a spectrum of civic engagement. And a lot of what happens in the university and in the academy is labeled service, where they’re good projects that individuals, especially in the university identify and they go out in the community, and they do good, well enough, but this is kind of the other end of the spectrum, that public work corner of things where the work is at root, political… in the sense that has real impact on real people’s lives. And the only way that you can kind of move into that collaborative space is to have the community itself really determine what those issues are, that really are of concern. And so we were dealing with immigration… we’re here in Arizona… weatherization… water issues… food issues… a range of very powerful, impactful issues, and also working with elementary schools in town too, where the students would identify issues in their communities. Sunnyside neighborhood, for example, has a large undocumented population… there’s diabetes as a big issue… and also a large off-res native population as well. So it’s very, very invigorating work, it takes a lot of time, but the results can be quite, quite powerful. And it actually starts to attract and generate a lot of interest with colleagues and others.

Rebecca: You mentioned the gateway courses as well, at this first-year level and I heard something about changing the way faculty are going to teach? Sometimes that can be a challenge to get faculty to change. Can you talk a little bit about how you got the community on board… like the faculty…

Blase: Sure.

Rebecca: …to buy into the idea of changing their practices to be more effective, and how that was able to go through a systematic change throughout the institution?

Blase: Yeah, there was a lot of kind of the root method that we used in the first-year Learning Initiative with my colleague, Michelle Miller was that we had a target list of key gateway classes, I think, as I mentioned before,like Bio 101… traditionally, very, very large enrollment… they’re just the foundation courses that you need to get through… they have huge impact on a range of different majors. And traditionally, they’re taught in large lecture halls… you know, PowerPoint slides, and so forth. And the DFW rates were really quite, quite high. And also then, consequently having a really negative impact on progression to graduation and retention of students. So we started to work very, very collaboratively with those faculties. We talked to departments, we had a lot of one-on-one meetings with important colleagues, we kind of did some power mapping… and again, tried to figure out who are the people that we really need to be talking to, to ensure that when they start speaking about this issue, then their colleagues will pay attention to… or those that actually make decisions, in perhaps the hierarchy itself. And we spent a lot of coffee-shop time, so we would get off campus intentionally… you know, meet in their office or your office, you just kind of break the whole sort of standard thing, and you move yourself into a different space. And a lot of times working with these faculty, they’re kind of straitjacketed… I mean, they just have to get from point A to point B, the end of the semester… punch the ticket, and they have active research agendas. So how to really re-engage them deeply… and one of the most powerful ways that we found were to kind of work with groups of faculty around a single course, and especially with the idea of really kind of developing a syllabus of practice. So there’s kind of a common broader agreement about what this course might mean… what Bio 101 might mean over 11-16 sections, with maybe eight to 12 different faculty members. One of the key questions that we always ask when we meet people individually, or even in small groups, is “What have you always wanted to do?” There are a 1000 reasons never to do that, right. There are financial reasons, time reasons, resources, and manpower to help you do grading and so forth, and we were able to come in with some funding for peer teaching assistance, and just help to open that space up. They may be stuck in a large lecture hall. But yes, you can have students turn to the folks to the right and to the left and start to engage in a conversation. There are just thousands of different sort of pedagogies that can be really quite impactful, to kind of break down that “Just let me talk to you continually.” And the literature is really just filled with them. But I think from my perspective it all kind of grew from “What have you always wanted to do?” So you can really break through all the reasons not to, to touch the passion that is in most of us in the academy, and to really help folks connect to that and have that passion, drive that change. So they own it. It’s not my passion, it’s not my program, it’s not my funding… to try to achieve something that people will dutifully participate in. But now they own that process. And kind of another subtext to all of this… in Arizona, for example, in our institution, in about eight years, we lost 60% of state funding. So there were some radical realignments of what we are as an institution. We have 38,000 students, so we’re not a small institution, we’re one program short of Research 1, so it’s a very active community and campus. But at the same time, people felt the walls closing in. And they really felt a strong loss of agency. And they really couldn’t affect events. So one of the things again, in my vantage and perspectives gained working in the Faculty Senate helped them inform this as well. But we really decided that we’re going to focus on curriculum from the faculty side of things, there was great alignment with administration at the time, which was great. So from a faculty perspective, we own curriculum, that is our province, and our institution as part of our faculty constitution. So curriculum can be that space to really re-empower, reinvigorate and get people excited again, because fundamentally, they own it. And often, we’ve kind of deeded and passed things over either to administrators, or just let inertia take hold and carry things forward. Again, there was a confluence of interest in sort of a Venn diagram, if you will, between administrative interest around retention, the DFW rates, and a couple of these different initiatives that I was positioned in and the desire to reinvigorate faculty agency. So that also became a very powerful driver on campus.

John: If someone wanted to do this type of approach to make some type of change on their campus, how would you go about starting to develop that power mapping?

Blase: That’s really key and fundamental, because you have to really understand who and what you’re going to be confronted with, once you start to talk to colleagues about things that are of mutual interest. And there are a lot of different ways to power map and the Industrial Areas Foundation way, that I mentioned in Chambers’ book earlier, it’s really particularly useful. So, power mapping can help you determine where are the centers of power on campus and within that where is our support for any particular issue? And where’s the the opposition? And who do we need to engage in critical conversations, to move an agenda forward? So within all that, who are the key decision makers? And the formal decision makers, they’re easy to find… they’re on the org chart… they are in the committee structure. But the informal decision makers are much more difficult to determine. And that takes a lot more time and it’s actually a bit more nuanced. And a lot of conversations, especially outside of your usual circles are going to have to be pursued to help get a sense of who are those folks that when we’ve mentioned before, when they say something, or when they offer an opinion or offer their support will bring others along? How will the decision to adopt a particular issue be made? And again, the formal and informal decision making processes… and to build a coalition you need to determine who are potential allies? What motivates our allies and friends? And what risks are they willing to take? So, where are the lines? So that you can really always be positioned in the most powerful way to help move the agenda forward? Another part of that coalition is really who owns this issue on your campus? The Global Learning Initiative, like I mentioned, tapped into very long standing campus and are actually community and regional values around diversity and sustainability, and global engagement. Diversity on campus have Ethnic Studies Program, or Women and Gender Studies program, we have a set of commissions on campus that are very interested in promoting these… Commission on Ethnic Diversity, the Commission on the Status of Women, the Commission on Diversity, Access and Design and so forth. They’re all interest groups that have a strong say, and rightly so, have deep, deep expertise around these issues and want to be involved in any conversations. So, who do you need to talk to before you start? What kind of support do you need to bring this all about? Who will our action upset and at what costs? And then finally, the opposition… who will oppose us and why? And it’s really important to understand why because at some point, you need to try to get the opposition to a point where they’re not actively opposing you. They may they never be a supporter, they may never be leading the parade, but getting to a point where they’re just not going to just block and lock things up completely. So, what are their interests? What motivates them? What’s their relative strength? And who are their supporters? And once you have this map of supporters, potential members of the coalition, those an opposition in your institution, then you start reaching out, and building those public relationships. You go out and have coffee, you spend a lot of one-on-one time with folks, not to become their friend, but to establish those common interests that you have around these issues, even those in opposition. Where’s the common ground that you can build upon? Ultimately, at the end, end of the day, that’ll help lay out the pathway forward. But I want to talk about one-on-ones just briefly… Classic community organizing is that you just don’t meet with every possible person, especially with time being short, and you’re wanting to move an issue forward. The critical people are the ones in your power map, those that have actual decision-making powers and have influence. So, classical community organizing methodology is you’ll only usually meet with leaders of groups, because those leaders can bring the group along. Always keep that in mind. Sure, you meet with anybody that wants to meet with you. But, strategically, really make sure your time has maximum impact on things by always talking with people that can bring others along and can persuade, and ideally, they embrace… they own the set of issues. And they’ll be the champions. From my experience, that’s where a lot of the power comes from.

Rebecca: Blase, can you talk a little bit about how you identify those informal decision makers or those informal influencers?

Blase: Yeah, that can be rather difficult. At the same time, if you’re not already out, and a member of your broader faculty polity, if you will, where you’ve been able to come to know a lot of different people from across various colleges and units and programs, then you need to start talking with those people that have done that. So that can be part of your power mapping too. They can help say, “Well, you know, you really need to talk to this person, because when they speak people up and down the hallway will listen; when they get up in the faculty meeting, everybody will give them the benefit of the doubt.” Those are the kind of folks that you want to start talking with, and try to see Is there a resonance between your issue and the group that you’re working with and their priorities, and ideally, move that conversation as quickly as possible, up to 30,000 feet. Talk about common values that you have collectively, as faculty, as an institution, as community, because once you start getting into disciplinary ways of doing, then you can easily get mired in a turf battle. But if we talk about what’s common among all of us, it’s a lot easier to help pull and to submerge a lot of that trench warfare that we often discover miring us in the academy when we try to do anything.

John: At the start of our discussion, one of the things you mentioned was reaching out to students and to the broader community. That’s not something that always happens in curricular change.

Blase: Yeah.

John: How have you gone about doing that? And how has that added to the effectiveness of the change?

Blase: These days, I mostly work around global learning and with colleagues around those diversity, sustainable and global engagement values and issues, especially through the curricular frame. When this all started our Global Learning Initiative in 2010, it was based in programs and departments. So, it was a very formalized process where there were department teams that came together and worked on outcomes, and we used backward design and doing curricular maps to achieve the outcomes, and so forth, and assessment. But these days, as we continue to turn the wheel, we’ve begun to organize broad collaboratives around diversity, sustainability, and global engagement. Within them, we invite community members and invite graduate students, undergraduates, to come and begin to dialogue across departments, across disciplines. Just fundamentally, the strongest way to have something change in a hurry is have students and moms and dads begin to push that issue. That’s what ultimately will really move things and, to a lesser degree, the broader community. But just from my perspective, community members and students bring all sorts of pools in knowledge and abilities. For many of us, it’s a difficult issue. faculty were often caught in our frame of being credential. So we need to allow and basically cede control to this larger flat, democratic space where consensus can be built and really wonderful ideas can bubble up, it seems for administrators that can even be more of a challenge, to let go and trust your colleagues, that they’ll really do the right thing, without trying to put your hand in the back of the mannequin, and help to steer where things are going without being seen to do so. So from my perspective, the broader the group coming together to dialogue around curriculum, I mean, community members will really be talking about real world impacts and real lives, students will be talking about their aspirations: what do they need to really, from their vantage to be successful in life. And then faculty, we have our strong and deep disciplinary ways of knowing and doing, that we can help to shape and bring that together into a curriculum that can begin to capture really all of that.

Rebecca: So you talked a lot about bringing people together to form a coalition around some common ideas and values. Once you have that group of folks together, what do you do next, actually make the change happen. So you got people on board…

John: …to move it down from that 30,000 foot level to the nuts and bolts of actually moving forward.

Rebecca: Yeah… and be practical.

Blase: From my perspective, it isn’t you establish a group, then you go about working. It’s actually a continuum of work and practice. So you’re always recruiting new people, you’re always bringing more folks into the coalition. And that’s the big open set of doors, right? That’s the value. That’s the excitement. That’s the energy for change… the new thinking… and then concurrently, you keep working through how are we going to bring this to pass? At a certain point, you can tip everything, and you’ve recruited the key decision makers in the formal power structure, you’ve co-opted the curricular system, if you will, in a positive way. Because it’s our curricula system. But you build enough consensus that things begin to happen easily. So in my experience, it’s a dynamic continuum. Oftentimes, in the academy, many faculty like to put together maybe one course, or we do one initiative, and we work on it, and we do it really well. In my experience, what’s really succeeded, working with colleagues, is establishing almost a vortex of initiatives. A colleague of mine, who I’ve done a lot of collaborating with, Romand Coles, who came from Duke, he’s now most recently from the Social Justice Institute at Australian Catholic University in Sydney, we’ve written a lot about how to do a lot of this sort of stuff. And that’s all based on kind of civic engagement and agency programming for first-year students and others. And if anyone’s interested, they go on my academia.edu site. And you can find all of those articles. But he’s really fascinated by, coming out of biological sciences, the concept of eco tones were two sort of different biological systems, where they cross and where they meet. And that’s a very fructiferous and rich zone full of potentiality. And it’s a very exciting place to be… much like in the academy, oftentimes, the cracks between disciplines… exciting work and happen there. We tried to always sit and find that kind of eco tonal spaces, if you will, and really push and, instead of doing one project, for example, in our first-year seminar Action Team project, we set up 16 different umbrella organizations. Within each, they had multiple different working groups. Some of them lasted multiple years. Students took ownership, they developed their own leadership structure, working with community around very powerful issues I was discussing earlier: immigration, water issues, the undocumented and so forth, and others would last the semester. From my perspective, you want to saturate the airspace with activity. So back to what we’re talking about, as you’re organizing around an issue, you want to generate as much activity as you can… you kind of get a swirl of activity going, it becomes a locus… a center of gravity, that starts to pull others in, because “Hey, something’s happening, this is exciting.” What’s going on? There’s change, my gosh.” In the academy change is the rare animal, right? We don’t engage in it very much, and especially change that can touch people’s passion, beyond just disciplinary work and practice. So that can be a special pocket to try to position yourself in.

John: You talked a little bit about the first-year seminar program. Could you talk about one of the other things you’ve mentioned in terms of local issues, such as immigration, or the undocumented? What types of programs were put in, and how have they been working?

Blase: Yeah, I’m not working with our first-year seminar program any longer. It’s deeply political work. And as we changed presidents and wind s shifted, and the legislature became much more activist, sadly, our funding was cut. I mean, at the high point, we had 600 students working with more than 40 community partners each year, and we were showcased at the Obama White House in 2012. So it can be very strong, very, very powerful. There are a lot of really powerful pedagogies that you can help students… usually you never do this with first-year students, this is usually a senior project. Because first-year students are thought to be undirected, not to have that many skills, but they really can develop these skills quickly and develop voice, which is often what we were trying for. So developing agency… sets of tools to how to bring people together, and a voice in a sense of where as their particular passion, just key pedagogies or just democratic decision making in the classroom. While you may come in and have a framework around a set of issues, you might have the relationships with community members, and you might have a sense of the types of activities you want to do. There’s enormous latitude for having the class make decisions in common and the literature is replete with all sorts of ways to go about this. But just establishing that kind of democratic decision making on day one is really, really critical. We also use public narrative, which is created by Marshall Ganz at Kennedy Center in Harvard. And it really helps students begin to find their voice and agency through a couple of different steps where they start out with their individual story of themselves. They connect with others and what motivates us together as a group, the “us” collectively in the class and the community and provides an opportunity to strategize common action and going forward in the now. So there are a lot of different ways to go about this. But there’s some really good frameworks that help you do this. We’ve talked a lot about that collective way of bringing faculty and others together. But again, it’s the same set of democratic flat principles at work, even in the classroom. But you’re talking about specifics, and maybe just to kind of do a little quick validation. So the Global Learning Initiative that we mentioned, in three years, we were able to get 80% of undergraduate programs out of 91 programs in total at that time completed in our process of developing outcomes assessments and curricular map of learning experiences in study abroad because one of the parts of the Global Learning Initiative was to provide an optional semester that students could study abroad and not have them fall behind. So they would work with our Center for International Education and the center would develop reciprocal exchange relationships, and especially placing students in courses that our faculty had confidence of the experience, and data from Angelina Palumbo, or Director of Education Abroad here at NAU, we saw 136% increase in the number of students going abroad in over eight years from the beginning of that initiative until almost a decade later. Basically, those students that were involved in study abroad had an 87% graduation rate, which was 30 points higher, I think, than our average. The first-year Learning Initiative, my colleague, Michelle Miller, and I have written about FILI and how to do it and some of the impacts and you can find an article that she and I published on my academia.edu site.

John: Could you give us an example or two of how one of these programs was structured in practice?

Blase: Well, for example, in our first-year seminar program, we established an arts through all mediums action research team. Again, I’m Professor of musicology, so this was all very performative. We have a number of different courses, talking about public art, political art, visual sound art, poetry, then so the early days of slam poetry. so we had students organizing slam poetry events, and had hundreds of students attending it. We had the curriculum created for the first-year seminars, they were all topics courses, so we could easily populate a range of different topics. We were able to pull in allied faculty to teach them. The faculty often had community partners they are working with, or we had others who were working with and have established relationships with community… and others were able to kind of join in and piggyback on them. And key to all of this was embedding assignments that deeply foregrounded working with community as part of a class. That this kind of work, doing research with public and through publics was equal to any lab type research activity, or archival research activity that are done more traditionally. So, at least there’s a parallel sort of relationship. So faculty, were doing research with students. Students were doing research with community members and knowledge holders, creating multi generational experiences. So everything from K-6th graders all the way up through Navajo elders, and so forth. So it was a very, very rich learning environment within any one of our particular arts. And it was designed that way. So, that it was a very broad range of people, activities, positions, and knowledges, focused around trying to bring about change on a particular set of issues. One of our weatherization and sustainability groups was able to work with the community and basically with Arizona’s Electrical Corporation, to fund a $1.5 million dollar revolving loan grant program where people in our poorest parts of the city could apply to do weatherization upgrades, because we’re actually, even though we’re in Arizona, we’re at 7000 feet. So we have a full four seasons, and it gets quite cold and a lot of snow in the winter and quite warm in the summers. And not as much as down in the valley, but still helping the people put in more insulation to help tighten up windows and replace things and working on the same sort of weatherization projects on community centers and buildings. It was really quite exciting. So a number of our students then kind of spun off and some that were focused more on businesses. There was a Composting Action Team, where using bicycles to go around and collect compost from businesses and places on campus. And ultimately, the movers and shakers, the students behind that as they graduated, they started their own business, which was quite successful in town. So one of the important things that we were able to do with all this, because we’re in Arizona, and we’re talking about immigration issues, right? There’s no more lightning set of issues in our state than that perhaps. And the way that we have been successful is trying to build a very large table so that you can get very progressive, very left, folks sitting down with very right leaning. They’re Mormon farmers talking about water issues, having strong alliances with progressive urban gardeners in the city, and just finding those common spaces. So when we’re talking about immigration, we’re really trying to get away from people cartooning one another’s positions, and get to the point. So, what are the impacts of immigration, there’s huge impacts on policing and crime. And if undocumented residents don’t feel safe to talk to the police, then you lose all of the community members that can help break crime cycles, and help bring those that are creating havoc in our community at bay. So it proved quite successful. We adapted and pulled the methodology and the underlying sets of issues and a broad range of directions over about 15 years here to fairly good effect. There’s just a couple of things too that I do want to say that developed writing with my colleague Rom Coles. If you want to pursue some of this business, with your colleagues, with students, with community members, you need to be really pretty capacious with respect to human differences, to be able to work really with any and all who come. Some folks you may disagree with violently. Yet, if you can create common cause around an issue that’s greater than all of us, that’s the place to be. So we’re not just talking with people who think and act like we do. And sadly, that’s becoming increasingly the norm as we’re caught in our own bubbles. You need to exhibit radical receptivity. That’s my colleague’s phrase where we stretch ourselves to listen, attentively, really to open up and be altered in the relationship you develop with others who are different from us. And we also need to develop a musicality, really emphasizing the improvisational and the experimental. So that specifically we sought to really decentralize initiative and decision making in any of these projects, as much as possible. Make the space for those engaged in pursuing distinctive projects, processes and partnerships. Give them space, just to empower people to try to fail to succeed, to spin off on other topics and projects… to proliferate. Again, if we’re in that eco tonal space, it’s always so fructiferous and just overflowing with possibilities. So the proliferation, acceleration, increasing momentum that I talked about a little bit earlier, that does create this momentum that actually maintains itself through activity that’s constantly bringing others in, constantly feeding and generating additional interest to bring others along… Patience, accountability, commitment, those sorts of things, standard community organizing values, and a strong strategic sense that you’re able to look at a situation and realize you can’t generally go from here to there, you often will have to go through multiple steps to achieve those ends. And part of that is also something that collectively we’re losing… a sense of compromise, that just inherent and community organizing is you often will need to settle for half a loaf. And in a sense that can be viewed as a failure because you didn’t achieve what you wanted, but you achieved half of what you wanted, which is fine, because then tomorrow, you start in on the other half. So nothing is static, nothing is fixed. But you do have to be able to build and achieve to keep people together and to help move things forward. It could be evolutionary, and the leaps can be quite dramatic and fast and cover a lot of ground or perhaps not. Every community’s culture is different. And the issues will be resolved variously.

John: In the academy, one of the things we started with is that change often moves slowly. And partly, that’s because individuals have this bias toward doing things the same way.

Blase: Right.

John: It reduces a cognitive load and so forth. But one of the things that seems to be common with a lot of the things you’re talking about, is the sense of purpose that people gain from this. A few episodes back, we talked to Sarah Rose Cavanagh, who talked about how we can increase students’ motivation, using control value theory… that when there’s something that they value, and when they have a sense of control, they become much more engaged in their learning, and they tend to be much more effective. And their performance improves in classes. It seems like all these projects have that in common. Both when you have students working together, or working with the community, they have a sense of purpose, and they see the value of what they’re doing. And the faculty working in these initiatives see that they do have some autonomy in a way that they may not always feel that way in other environments or in other programs. I think there’s a lot of value in what you’ve been discussing.

Blase: Yeah, I agree 100%. And oftentimes, just how do you get people out of that inertia? And we kind of opened the conversation, that question that I found powerful was “What have you always wanted to do?” and allied to that is, if you are talking about those values that people care about… whether they’re faculty, community, members, students… that just pulls you right out of your day-to-day circumstance. I’m a musicologist, an historical musicologist by training, but I care deeply about sustainability issues and the planet. And that has little formal role in my research, as a musicologist. But that’s something that I care about as a person, as someone who is part of this country in the world. And so again, that just pulls me out of where I am. If I’m taking one step and then the next step, that’s the inertia. So how do you move people beyond that, to start thinking and imagining those new spaces… uniting the head, the hand, and the heart? How do you start to move people into different places, different experiences, and assembling things in different ways so that, that energy and excitement peeks through and informs everything you do, and others can catch that excitement. And hopefully, they can feed off of that, too.

Rebecca: We often talked about student motivation, and how faculty can motivate students. But we don’t always think about how we can motivate each other, and how we can work together. Those same strategies that work on students work on your colleagues too. [LAUGHTER]

Blase: Yeah, it’s so simple. You’re talking about community organizing, and a university, by definition, is a big community… there are sub-communities… you can use power mapping, in your department all the way up through working with folks across your state. It’s just they’re very supple, and as long as you are sound and what you’re trying to achieve, then you have a lot of tools to start to build a coalition to bring them about.

Rebecca: I like what you just said, because I think some folks might have thought initially, like, “Wow, you’re at a big school, does this scale, does this scope to a smaller institution or a smaller scale problem?” But I think you just defined exactly how to do that. You can try something really small, that’s more concrete, maybe in your department, and then move up to something much bigger.

Blase: Sure. I mean, you can start at wherever you are. And especially Honestly, I think the institution that I’m in now a big state research institution, that’s a harder nut than if you’re in a smaller space, or a smaller institution where you actually physically may know more people and have a better sense of the currency and where people, orientations, and motivations are. So yeah, I think it’s scales just variously. And you’re right, it can be applied in whatever frame that you decide to begin to tackle.

Rebecca: So Blase, we usually wrap up by talking about what’s next, even though you’ve already indicated, like a million things that you’re working on. [LAUGHTER]

Blase: Yeah, well, I’m really increasingly working with colleagues from other institutions to help them kind of acquire these skills and to understand community organizing theory and methods and how they might apply them on their campus in their situation to work with faculty, students, community… and especially around global education, but I’ve done a lot of work around civic engagement and agency, and in the past, first-year programs. And that lights me up… working with people that work with people, because that can be just helping to energize and get things going. I also have a couple of articles underway, one with JY Zhou of Stockton University, a colleague of mine that we’re writing about the community organizing theory and another framework that has a lot of resonance with that. And so hopefully, that’ll be coming out… and continuing our collaboratives here on campus faculty, student, community, collaboratives, and disciplinary articles. I’ve got a book chapter coming on Willie Nelson, and lots of presentations at conferences… the standard fare. But fundamentally this kind of work. It’s just so, so exciting. Thank you for the chance to talk about it with you.

Rebecca: Thank you so much, Blase

[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.

94. Open Reflection

Students can provide useful feedback on instructional practices and class design when they are asked, In this episode, three students from John’s spring economics capstone class join us to provide their reflections on the class’s experiment in developing an open pedagogy project. Our guests in today’s episode are Maria Aldrich, Victoria Heist and Charlie Tararzona.

Show Notes

Transcript

Rebecca: Students can provide useful feedback on instructional practices and class design when they are asked. In this episode, students join us to provide an open reflection on one class’s experiment in developing an open pedagogy project.

[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: Our guests today are Maria Aldrich, Victoria Heist and Charlie Tarazona, three students who participated in the creation of an open pedagogy project in one of my economics classes this spring semester. Welcome.

Victoria: Thanks for having us.

Maria: Thank you.

Charlie: Yep, excited to be here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are…

John: None of you are drinking tea, are you?

Maria: No.

Victoria: No tea.

Charlie: No tea today.

Rebecca: How regretful. [LAUGHTER]

John: It happens with many of our guests. I’m having ginger peach black tea.

Rebecca: And I’m drinking Lady Grey. The issue is our tea selection is no longer close to our recording studio. It’s a problem. It’s an epidemic now with our tea choices.

John: …now that we’re recording in this little closet in a building next door, where at least we don’t have toilets flushing every 30 seconds or so that we have to edit out.

Rebecca: So John, can you start first by explaining what open pedagogy is, to kind of frame our discussion?

John: Going back a step further. Last year, I saw a presentation by Robin DeRosa who presented on this at the SUNY Conference on Instruction and Technology and she made a really compelling case for some of the advantages that open pedagogy projects have. And open pedagogy just involves having students create content that is open and shared publicly with the world.

Rebecca: So what class did you do an open pedagogy project in?

John: This class is a capstone course in the economics department here. It’s taken mostly by seniors and a few juniors. And it’s a seminar course in economic theory and policy. It’s one of our smaller classes. And we had only 27 students in this capstone, this semester.

Rebecca: So why this class?

John: Because the students were ready for it. The course builds on all the courses that they’ve had up to this point and it allows them to pull together material they’ve learned in all of their prior courses, as well as the cognate classes in statistics and math and so on.

Rebecca: So what kind of project exactly did you propose to these students?

John: I originally proposed two options. One was to do something on behavioral economics, because past classes have found that to be a lot of fun, and another one I suggested was they could just pick current topics and work in small groups and create papers on that. Turned out that they really didn’t like any of those ideas and given the nature of open pedagogy, I left it up to the class to decide what their topics would be. And I think it was actually Charlie, who came up with the idea. And would you like to tell us what that was?

Charlie: I know you had mentioned in the beginning of the class the idea of open pedagogy. And I found that pretty interesting because it seemed like a good opportunity for us as seniors and juniors to really put what we had learned out there. And also, in terms of topic selection, you gave us the opportunity to really choose which topics we wanted to talk about. We ended up choosing the topic of intergenerational mobility and economic inequality. We focused more on the economic inequality aspect of it in the end. But yeah, like I said, it was just a good opportunity for everybody to really finish their college careers with something that they can show.

Rebecca: Dr. Kane is going to close his ears now and you guys are going to tell us exactly what you thought when he said, “Hey, you’re going to write a book.”

Victoria: I was hesitant at first, just because group projects are kind of daunting, especially in economics. However, a collaborative group project was exciting to do… to see all of our work put together. As economic students it isn’t something you really see, it’s usually individual work.

Maria: Oh, yeah, I would agree with Victoria. I was kind of hesitant at first, especially because it was something new for our class so I figured there are probably a lot of kinks that needed to be fixed. So I was a little worried about not having everything fully figured out at first. I thought it was something interesting. It appealed to me because I like the thought that other people could read what we had written and we could have control of what we would want to talk about.

Charlie: And the topic and the idea of a book project really intrigued me… that it just let us put out there what we had learned over these past few years and gave us something that we can show in the end of it.

Rebecca: Were any of you scared?

Victoria: Not scared. I wouldn’t use that word.

John: Were you concerned?

Victoria: A bit concerned, just because I like doing my individual work. I feel stronger in that.

Maria: Yeah, I would agree. I think group work can sometimes be difficult to have for every class because everyone has a different writing style and everyone works on their projects at different times. So I think at first, you’re a little bit worried that not everyone will be able to work well together. But I found that in my group, we were able to work very well and we’re able to meet once a week to go over what we needed to work on for the week.

Charlie: Yeah, I found something similar to that experience. Whereas my group, after the first few weeks, figured out what we wanted to do, and when we could meet, and what was the most effective way for us to put the book project together? And I think it turned out really well.

Rebecca: So you’ve all mentioned groups, can you talk a little bit about what the groups were, how they were determined, and how that worked?

Victoria: The groups were groups of three from the class, because there’s 27 people. And then we’re able to email Professor Kane and ask if we wanted to work with anyone specific, like if we had friends in the class, we could work with them. But if not, or if we didn’t want to work with someone we knew, we’re able to randomize it.

Maria: I was put into a group of two other random people that I didn’t know, but we were able to set up a group chat immediately and communicate very well through that.

Charlie: I actually emailed Professor Kane about being a group in Victoria and we also included another student in that. I think it worked out pretty well and I was happy with how it turned out.

John: Before the groups were formed, though, the class decided on what the topics would be. So we had kind of a free-form planning session where we narrowed it down to nine topics you wanted to address. And then at that point, we knew how big the groups were going to be. And it worked out nicely with three people per group.

Rebecca: How did each group get assigned a topic?

Charlie: So the way we assigned topics was, we had created a list of the nine topics, and then each individual group could choose their top three, and then we divided them that way based on everybody’s top choice. If they didn’t happen to get their top choice, they usually got their second or third, I think that only happened for maybe two groups, and they seem to be fine with what they ended up with.

John: And going back a little bit further, it was a weighted voting scheme that you didn’t just rank them… that you assigned points, if I remember was it 10 points I gave you? And so if you really wanted to chapter you could bid all 10 points on that. And if you were indifferent, you could have assigned weight to your top three preferences and so forth. And it did work out really nicely where I think most groups got their top choice, but two of them ended up with their second or third choice, but it seemed to work.

Rebecca: How did you find collaborating in the end?

Charlie: I found that it worked really well meeting every week. We also had presentations every week that we gave on specific topics that we’re talking about during that week. So that set the initial schedule for us to meet every week and talk about what we were doing and what was going on. Also with the book project at the time, in terms of organization, I found it very laid out and simple.

Rebecca: That sounds like you had a writing group that met that frequently, but it also would be more of like a study group as well?

Charlie: Yeah, I would definitely say it was a mix between a writing group… a study group. Your group members ended up being the way, if you wanted to succeed in the class, like that was the way to do it was to work cohesively with your group members.

John: And it should be noted that they had other tasks in the class as well, where they selected topics that were presented each week and each group was responsible for presenting an article or a research paper on a topic, some of which were related to the book and others were completely different. The groups were persistent across all the assignments and involved more than just writing the book.

Rebecca: How’d you get feedback to make sure whatever you’re putting out in the public was good enough?

Maria: Well, we mainly used Google Docs. At first, we tried to use hypothesis. But that wasn’t really working out well. So we ended up just going back to Google Docs. And each group would be given a couple of chapters to review each week. And they would write a couple comments in that chapter as well as some comments made by our professor and we used that and we also used each other’s feedback to make those edits.

John: How did that work? Where the comments helpful?

Victoria: No. [LAUGHTER] Just because I’m very protective over my work, which I know I should be open to criticisms. However, I got some comments sometimes I was just like questioning, like instead of “what about this article that you might want to look at” it would be “change this word,” where I know we emphasized that often in class many, many times, but still people would persistently do that.

John: I hope that wasn’t from me. Was it from me?

Victoria: Oh, no. Well, if you wanted to do that, you’re the professor. You can do that. But you also give us feedback that’s helpful. Whereas, students I feel like if they’re rushed or doing it, like 20 minutes before the class, they’re not going to look at me like, “Oh, what about this topic that might be interesting to consider.” Instead, they’re like, “Switch this word.” That just might be the students in the class too, just because we did have a lot of work in the class. And I found that because our group would meet to practice our presentation before the class, a lot of groups are doing their final work 15 minutes before the class.

John: Yes, the quality of the work did vary a little bit across the groups and across the individuals within the groups. Overall, there was some really high quality work, and all three of you did really well. But the quality of the feedback varied quite a bit.

Rebecca: So the feedback was generally done outside of class? Like not during class time?

John: Primarily, except for the presentations on the work where there was some feedback during the presentations.

Victoria: Yes, but I found that your feedback was most helpful, rather than the students.

Maria: Yeah, I would say I paid a lot more attention to Professor Kane’s feedback than some of my fellow students. Luckily, we didn’t have that experience. We had a lot of people give a sincere, really constructive feedback, but sometimes I’d be hesitant to take that feedback because I didn’t know that was the direction that I should be going in. But I definitely think our experience was a little better and our comments were more substantial, I would say.

Victoria: And I think next time maybe switching the groups that review the feedback might be helpful, because if you have one group that gives worse feedback, and you keep getting that, it’s not as helpful.

John: The way it was structured was each group reviewed and provided comments on three other groups, and we did that on three stages. And the class decided to maintain persistent groups there. I did give them the option, but I think it does make much more sense to vary it so you’re getting a wider range of feedback.

Charlie: I think the idea to keep persistent groups stem from the fact that we wanted to have somebody read the paper and then continue to read the paper throughout the weeks when we were supposed to be improving it or making it better. So then they could also see the changes we were making. And I agree with my classmates where I think we can say that it didn’t work out too well. There’s some groups just didn’t happen to give feedback that was too good.

Victoria: I also think part of it was the length of the papers because each of us had to review three full papers for the weeks that we did that, and three 20-page papers is a lot of reading to do on student written economics. And I think maybe in the beginning it was helpful to read all three, but maybe as time went on to scale that back a little bit, so we don’t get burnt out.

John: More detailed feedback on a smaller number of papers.

Victoria: Yeah because at first, I find myself doing it too. Like the first paper, I’ll take the time to read every single word and provide helpful feedback. But I can see myself not doing as much on the third.

John: I gave feedback in three different ways. The first time I gave video feedback, and while I’ve heard that that can be really efficient, I was taking about two hours or so per paper. And that was really slow and people really didn’t like the feedback that much because some of the feedback was fairly long in terms of the suggestions. So, I probably gave a little too much feedback. The second was with comments embedded in Adobe. And the third time I just basically went along with everyone else and provided the feedback directly in Google Docs. And the nice thing about that is I was able to see some other suggestions and sometimes I’d say, “Well, maybe that’s not such a good idea.” Because in many cases, the original draft actually made more sense than the feedback.

Rebecca: What way did you all like feedback better?

Charlie: I think the best feedback I received was actually in class feedback when I would go to Professor Kane and ask him, “Hey, you know, this is what’s going on with my paper. Is there something else I could look at? Is there another source I can find?” I found that to be the most effective in helping me write the paper. I was also a fan of the comments in Google Docs, they were pretty helpful.

Maria: Yeah, I think the most helpful feedback were the comments from Google Docs because, for that last draft, I was able to go through and resolve any comments that I had made the changes to and that just helped motivate me to make my draft a really good copy. And then I would say that I was really against the video feedback because I personally like to review feedback multiple times. I like to go through it and make changes to it. And I found myself just typing up his comments at the end of the doc so that other teammates could see it as well. So I was definitely against the video feedback and prefer the Google Doc comments.

Victoria: Yeah, I prefer Google Docs as well, just because I could see where exactly you wanted the changes done. It gave more specific feedback and then it also gave the students validity I guess, like this should be changed. Like I made a comment in one paper and said, “I think you mean a different word.” And they just resolved it and moved on. But then Professor Kane came through and said, “Yes, I agree.” And I think that you agreed, and they now are aware that yes, those changes need to be made.

Rebecca: I think sometimes when a faculty member responds to student comments in a way that it also helps students know how to make better comments. So it would be interesting to see how another round of that would have gone after Dr. Kane had responded to some of those right? To see if the comments were better the next time around.

John: Yeah, I think I should have done that from the beginning. And I’m sorry, I didn’t. But in the future, I’ll probably use Hypothesis. Now that we have Hypothesis in Blackboard it will be much easier. Among the problems we had is that people had some trouble making comments on Google Docs because they also had edit access to those and they couldn’t mark up specific text. And with PDFs, that was a bit of a problem given the way the browsers were set up that they had to change a program in order to make comments on PDF documents. So now that we have that in our learning management system, it’s going to be much easier to do that and the comments will be a little more persistent, because one of the issues was people were, as you mentioned, resolving comments sometimes before anyone else had a chance to see them. And the strategy was to have the draft documents with the comments copied over to another folder, and they were only supposed to make changes in their working document, not in the documents used for comments. But there were three or four people who through three drafts, just didn’t quite get that notion and I’d see the email saying that comments were resolved, and I would go back in and unresolve them. But in any case, there were some problems with those. That’s an issue that I think has to be worked out a little bit more efficiently.

Rebecca: Beside some of the technical issues that we mentioned, what were some of the biggest challenges of working on a project like this?

Charlie: I think one of the bigger challenges was keeping the cohesive idea behind the whole book where the topic we had chose was income inequality and we also had talked about intergenerational mobility. But as the book progressed, we kind of saw that portion of the book fall off a little bit where chapters were really focusing on the income and economic inequality topic.

Rebecca: So is that something you discussed in class to keep everybody on track?

Charlie: I think we mentioned it at one point towards the end, we’re just like, “Okay, are we going to keep this? Are we going to not keep this?” And I think we agreed, we could talk about it but we won’t make it a major portion of the book.

John: There was also some scaffolding on the project… that it didn’t just start with people starting to write, groups were first asked to put together a bibliography, and then an annotated bibliography, and then an outline of the chapter, and then the actual writing started after they had feedback on each of those steps.

Maria: I would agree with Charlie, I was definitely worried about the cohesiveness of the entire book. But for my group, specifically, we did a very broad topic, the global trends of economic inequality, and for myself, it was really hard to find relevant subjects to talk about because it was just such a broad topic. It was really hard for each of us to find something that we could spend a large amount of time writing about. So I’m not sure how the other groups felt. But for us, it was definitely hard narrowing down what we specifically wanted to talk about, and then to find resources that were recent enough to include.

Victoria: Yeah, I agree with you on that. I think one change I would make after we figure out the specific topics, you can go deeper in that because it’s hard as a group to form a thesis statement or very cohesive argument because we ended up doing more of a timeline than like an argumentative paper because you have to split it up.

John: Your topic specifically was on what?

Victoria: Tax-structure and income inequality. So basically, we looked at early 20th century, later 20th century, and the 21st century, and how the changing tax structures led to increasing income inequality over time. So that’s kind of how we split it up. But I think if I was to do it again, I would take a different approach to it, because I did the first section and finding information on World War One income inequality is much harder than it seems. So I struggled a lot with that too.

Charlie: Yeah, in terms of how we wrote our chapter of the book, I’m usually a fan of writing papers that follow a timeline as an explanation but that’s just a personal preference. It doesn’t work for everybody. So I can definitely see how making the cohesive argument along with following that timeline can be pretty difficult.

John: In your chapter, I think the timeline made a bit of sense. We were talking about the evolution of it and the transitions in your chapter were pretty smooth. I don’t think that worked as well in all the chapters, quite often it looked like they were three essays…

Victoria: Yes.

John: …chopped and pasted together.

Victoria: There was this one paper with a bunch of sub topics, but it wasn’t cohesive. And I was reading it and it just did not make any sense to me how it was organized. So that was one of the suggestions I made… maybe taking a step further in class and presenting maybe our papers a little earlier.

John: In more stages…

VICTORIA. I was just trying to read it and I just could not make sense of the organization of it, where maybe if we caught that earlier we maybe could have made better paper.

John: I was giving them feedback in several groups… that sort of feedback… that they need to smooth out the transitions and have a more logical structure. But some groups responded really well and did a nice job with that, other groups were a little more reluctant to do that.

Rebecca: Perhaps some groups will respond really well to some peer pressure. [LAUGHTER]

John: And having the presentations in class would have helped do that. When people in the class were saying, “This is just too disorganized.” And most of them got better by the end, but it was a stretch getting there.

Rebecca: So you’ve talked a little bit about some of the challenges, but what was really rewarding about working on this project?

Victoria: I found it really helpful to work with the group. I had Charlie and then another student, Junweii, in my group and we all read each other’s parts. I know I went through the document and made comments for my own group too. And we were all able to bring it together, make comments for each other, ask each other questions about like what sources to use especially too. And it was easier in that regard than an individual paper. Because if you make a mistake and you don’t realize it, no one’s there to help you, it’s just you. But here we have people to help each other.

Charlie: Yeah, I always find it beneficial to complete a task with other students also trying to complete the same task as you. It just makes the learning more interesting. And you’re more willing to go and spend the extra hour looking at the document to just make sure you understand what you’re writing, but also that it fits with whomever else you’re working with. I found it really beneficial or satisfying just the fact that we, like I said, could create something that any ordinary person could probably read and understand what was happening.

Maria: Yeah, I think the most rewarding part for me was just seeing that finished product and getting you know, positive feedback from Professor Kane and from my other group members. I think working in that group setting helps to motivate me to do the best of my ability. And I think it was just rewarding at the end to see everything come together well.

Victoria: I think it gave us all a deeper understanding of the material too because, instead of writing it yourself… because you can write something and not understand it. I’ve done it many times. [LAUGHTER] But when you’re sitting in a group, getting a presentation ready, you each need to understand the material. So you’re explaining what you learn to each other. And that’s something you don’t get by yourself. I found that really rewarding.

John: What about the public nature of the project? The fact that this will be out there, it will have your names on it, and it could be out there indefinitely.

Charlie: I found that portion of the project pretty intriguing and exciting. Just like I said, you can go out there, and obviously we’re college students, we’re looking for employment after this. So just showing an employer, “Hey, I’ve written something that’s been published. It’s out there, you can go read it for yourself and see what you think.” It gives something for the students to show.

Victoria: Yeah, it made it exciting because we knew what was at the end of the project. Rather than just a finished paper, we actually had something to like prove ourselves, like we did this.

Maria: I think for me, it was cool to know because at the end of the semester, I’m able to go to my family and say, “Oh, here you go. This is something that I worked on all semester long. Here’s something that you can read and you can better understand what I’ve studied for the past four years.” So I think it was helpful that I was able to show my family I’ve worked hard on this. This is something that is to show for that.

Charlie: I would definitely concur with that. Economics as a topic isn’t really discussed when you’re talking just with family members, so many of them don’t understand what you’re talking about. And you’ll try, but it’s hard sometimes. So to put something together that they’d be able to read and understand, I found that pretty satisfying.

John: And how did the class select the audience for this? What level was it written for?

Victoria: Students with a background in economics I think we decided on. But we came together as a class and decided on that. But you need economic background to understand some of the things we wrote.

John: But at an introductory level, so it wasn’t written at an advanced level. It was written for people who’ve had an economics course somewhere along the way.

Victoria: Or just no background. You don’t have to go to college to read the book.

Rebecca: How would you change this project in the future? We touched on a couple of things here and there, but do you have any other key things that, if the same exact project were presented to another group of students, how would you change the structure? Or the way it’s organized? Or the way that it’s presented the first day?

Victoria: Thinking about the class as a whole rather than just the book project, we did weekly presentations which was a lot of work in itself. So I would probably minimize those and focus on the book. Because we were sitting there reading 20+ page economic journals every week and making a presentation on it and doing the book project. So I think having more time dedicated to the book project and presenting on that material, rather than just economic journals that people have written, like it gives background, which is helpful, but maybe a little less, or maybe shorter ones, or ones that are just easier to understand. Because I know a lot of times you would say, like, “I know you guys don’t understand this, it’s challenging. But we still need to know it.” Like you would explain it in class, which would be helpful, but reading something you don’t understand is really difficult for students… in economics specifically. That’s challenging.

Maria: Yeah, I would agree. I think, at the beginning of the semester, it was a lot of work to have to juggle both the presentations and the book at the same time. So I kind of like the idea, I’m not sure if it was you Victoria, who mentioned it in class, of doing the presentation one week and then the next week working on the book and having class time devoted to the book in the week after. I think that would have been very helpful too because we did meet as groups, but if we were able to meet in a class setting than I think other classmates will be able to make comments on your chapter and offer advice. I think it would just help overall with the workload that we have.

Charlie: I also agree with that. I think the improvement can be made where we’d work on maybe a random topic every other week, and do a presentation on that, and then also incorporate the book project into that. I think it would help with the cohesiveness of the book along with just feedback and all the other problems that we had discussed.

John: One of the things I had suggested at the very beginning, you may recall, is I suggested one option is to spend the whole class focused on this. Another option is just to do it the way it was done in the past, or something else. And the class actually voted for the something else. Now having had the experience, the something else didn’t work quite as well, and that more class time should have been devoted, I think, to this and I saw that too.

Victoria: I think we’re just looking for something exciting. Like yeah, it’s a book project like we know what we’re going to do with that. But the presentations just added something else, but if I went back to a book project because then we could have taken the steps at a slower pace too, like the annotated bibliography, like the topics, we could have taken way more time with that than we did. Because once we did that very quickly, and then went into presentations, and then we just had due dates instead of meetings in class.

Maria: Yeah, I think for us, what appealed to us with this combination of the book and the presentations was that the presentations offered structure for us when we knew what we were getting with those presentations. We knew each week that we’d come in with the presentation. And I think with the book, we were excited because it was something new and different and I think we were a little too hesitant to go fully and choose the book, because we weren’t sure what we would be doing in class. We weren’t sure how we would be tested on that. So I think the combination of fields lost because we were able to have that structure, but we were also able to try something new.

Charlie: I know for some of the students in the class they had mentioned to me… they were hesitant to get rid of the presentations weekly because they were a fan of learning something new every week and learning a different topic, not just focusing on the book project. They really wanted to increase their knowledge base by just learning about multiple fields of economics. So I think that’s why we ended up going with what we went with in the end. But I think we all could all agree that if we had done that every other week, it would have been more efficient.

John: I agree. And I think some combination might be good for the reason you mentioned, but more class time devoted to it would be helpful.

Victoria: Maybe at first too, do a presentation. Like the first presentation, I don’t know what week that was, but maybe keep that one because when our group really met each other, we worked together, and then we planned a time every week where we would meet.

John: And if this is done again, and that will be if the class wants to do this in the future, perhaps that first topic for the readings could be related to whatever they choose to do so they’re actually doing some scaffolding with the presentations then.

Rebecca: I had something similar in my classes before where a team formed early on. We did something small, low stakes, to figure out how to work with each other and what doesn’t go well. So that when we did something a little more high stakes, you already knew what the wrinkles were going to be so that you could plan for that moving on. So it sounds like your presentations served that purpose, whether or not you intended that to happen or not.

John: But it became a lot of work when it was done every week, in addition to writing a book.

Victoria: That was difficult.

Maria: Yeah, I think it just helped to make us all more comfortable with each other and more comfortable speaking in front of the class.

Rebecca: So the big question is, of course, should other faculty do this?

Victoria: Yes, I’m working on my honors thesis right now, which is kind of what you would do in a traditional seminar. And it’s very difficult. So just having people there… write it with you… know what you’re talking about… You can ask them questions. In our group chat, we often ask, “What would you recommend for this part of the paper? Or what articles do you think are appropriate for this?” If you’re doing it by yourself, it’s very difficult. And the overarching topic… I feel like in a lot of seminars, they have that. It’s a topic for the seminar, but it doesn’t really filter through as well as the book project does, because we are all cohesive, all of us together working as a class of 27 people, which you never see. So, I found it really helpful and I liked it a lot. And it wasn’t like a crazy amount of work. You did the work, and you study, you did the presentations, and you wrote a paper, but it didn’t take you hours every day to work on. I feel like I learned more in this class than I have in other classes that I write individual papers for.

Maria: Well, I think I would partially agree and partially disagree with that. I think as a class, we all appreciated that Professor Kane was willing to change like the class structure and was willing to try something new. And I think that was definitely intriguing for us and provided something different as our last economic course. But I think if I had done my own topic paper, I think I probably would have learned a little bit more, I think just I would preferred that. But I think it was still important to get this experience and try something new.

Charlie: I think I would definitely suggest it to some other faculty members to maybe try this out. Like Victoria was saying, working with a group is pretty beneficial. And I feel like, from a personal standpoint, I learn more when I’m working with other people who I can ask questions to, get feedback from. Really, it helps your understanding of the class. In terms of incentive, I find that I wanted to work on the book project because you had that end goal of, “This is something that I can put out there and show to somebody.”

Victoria: Yeah, but at the same time, group work can sometimes be the worst thing that ever happens to you. Like we got really, really lucky because I know Charlie, we’re friends so we were like, “Okay, let’s work together. We’ll just get one random person.” Junwei was like such a blessing. We just work together so beautifully, but I feel like if we had someone that didn’t want to do the work… wasn’t willing to put in the work… didn’t show up to meetings… that would ruin the project for us. So I don’t know how you could fix that. But just if there’s a good group, it works. If there isn’t, I feel like it wouldn’t work as well.

Rebecca: So good to write one book during your time here, but maybe not many books. [LAUGHTER]

John: But there could be other things. For example, they could have been podcasts that were created. They could be collections of essays.They could be video projects that are put together by groups. So there’s a lot of different things that could be done.

VICTORIAL: Yeah, I would throw that out there. If you did this again with another book, like, yeah, you can write a book, but you can also do that… a different kind of form of the same kind of structure. That would be interesting.

Maria: I would be interested in doing some type of podcast because I know some of my friends in their classes have been required to do podcasts. And I feel like you have to prepare really well for that. So I think maybe that would have forced your teammates, if they weren’t doing the work, to do the work so that they wouldn’t get to the studio and not have anything to say. So I think that would have been another really cool option.

Charlie: I think it would be a good option for capstone classes, just because I know for a lot of majors, you hear what the capstone is about for the three years before you even get there. And I know personally for me, I’m also trying to get a political science degree, my capstone is next semester, like I’m already dreading the 25-page paper I’m gonna have to write. So to switch it up and have the students maybe not know exactly what they’re in for, I think it gives a little bit of an intrigue and like, “Okay, this isn’t just the I’m going to go and write a paper all year. It’s something else that I’m going to do.”

Victoria: Yeah, it’s more fun. I’m more willing to write a paper that my group members are in. Like we can all see each other too in the Google doc and talk to each other in the chat… be like, “What do you think about this part?” Or like Charlie can watch me while I’m writing my part of the paper and say, “This is good. Maybe change this. Or bring this sentence up.” You don’t do that in individual papers and even if you write an individual paper and have peer feedback, it’s not the same as having it right there, real time, or just people caring more because it’s theirs too.

John: We did have some issues with that early on though, in the first draft or two, because there were some people who really didn’t want to try using Google docs for writing. And were any of you involved in that?

Charlie: So, I’m not opposed to Google Docs. [LAUGHTER] I had just always used Word documents before. So it took a little bit of getting used to but once you commit to it, it’s a really nice thing to have in your repertoire. Google Docs, I feel like, is used by countless numbers of people, companies, places, businesses, the college. So honestly, as a student, you should just take the incentive to try to get to learn it. And once you learn it, it’s really beneficial to you.

John: One of the problems was that some people were writing in Word and then uploading it to the drive and that made it really hard for other people to edit. And eventually everyone switched over, but it did take a few iterations with some people.

Maria: So yeah, I think there were a couple of challenges with having different drafts because people made comments on separate drafts. So I think just sending out a reminder email would be helpful and letting people know because I know I think I made my changes on the wrong draft the first time and we had to send an email right away to have him fix that. So I think just having it set up all before the due dates like before you mention it in class would be really helpful too.

John: Yeah, there were some rough spots. This was new for me too.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up our podcast by asking what’s next for each of you?

Charlie: This December, I’m looking to graduate from Oswego, which is exciting for me. And after that, I’m not really sure what’s going to go on. We’ll see.

Maria: Well, I’m graduating this Saturday, and I’m going to be moving down to Florida for a little bit and doing an internship there.

Victoria: I’m also graduating Saturday and I’ll be working at HSBC this July in their graduate development program.

Rebecca: Sounds like exciting futures for each of you.

John: What are you doing in Florida? An internship where?

Maria: I’m doing the college program, the Disney College Program.

John: Oh, wonderful. Maybe I’ll see you there at the OLC conference. Well, thank you. It’s been a pleasure working with you all semester. And thank you for joining us.

Charlie: Thank you for having us.

Victoria: Thank you.

Maria: Thank you.

[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.

88. School Partnerships

What does it mean to have a collaborative learning community inclusive of faculty, professionals in the field, and current students? In this episode Dr. Christine Walsh and Kara Shore join us to explore one such partnership that is rich in mentorship, professional development, and mutual respect that could serve as a model for other schools and programs.

Christine is a visiting assistant professor and professional development liaison in the curriculum and instruction department at SUNY Oswego. Kara is a Principal at Leighton elementary school here in Oswego.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: What does it mean to have a collaborative learning community inclusive of faculty, professionals in the field, and current students? In this episode we explore one such partnership that is rich in mentorship, professional development, and mutual respect that could serve as a model for other schools and programs.

[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: Our guests today are Dr. Christine Walsh and Kara Shore. Christine is a visiting assistant professor and professional development liaison in the curriculum and instruction department at SUNY Oswego. Kara is a Principal at Leighton elementary school here in Oswego. Welcome.

Kara: Thank you.

Christine: Thank you. It’s good to be here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are…

Kara: Sweet tea…

Christine: …and Jasmine tea.

Rebecca: Those sound good.

John: Ginger Peach Black tea.

Rebecca: And I have Christmas tea in July.

John: So we’ve invited you here to discuss the partnership between the Curriculum and Instruction department at SUNY Oswego and Leighton Elementary School. Tell us a little bit about that program and how it got started.

Christine: Sure, I’ll start. SUNY Oswego’s School of Education has a long standing relationship with Oswego City School District. I came to the college in 1990 and we had already been working together in preparation of high quality teachers, both elementary teachers and secondary teachers…. teachers in the school district except our in-service students for practicum for student teaching placements. And so in the 90s, we began a PDS—Professional Development School—partnership across Oswego County, and Oswego City School District has really been at the forefront of that since the 90s. I’ve been the PDS liaison here for about 10 years and so it just makes sense to continue enriching that partnership in many different ways. And this is our third year now in the Leighton-Fitzhugh learning community and it really is reaching its richest quality at this point, and in part because of Kara coming in as principal there.

Kara: Thank you, Chris, for saying that—for me when I came in three years ago, really got off the ground running as far as starting this partnership. And we did some planning in the first summer that I came. And really what we talked about was, and these are kind of Chris’s words I’ll use—how can we make it clinically rich—was the term that she used and, kind of thinking about that as we go forward, how can we make it so that our student teachers, or rather the student teachers that come to us from SUNY Oswego, how can we make it so that they are really getting all the experiences that they would have once they’re hired as a teacher? And so we know that from being teachers ourselves that six to eight weeks of student teaching and maybe some practicum hours is certainly helpful in that goal, but it’s really not seeing the whole picture of really what happens in a school day to day and so that’s really kind of where we started from. And then it was all the details that we had to get situated so that we can make sure that it was clinically enriched for those students that were coming into the program.

Christine: The superintendent in the Oswego district now, Dean Goewey, actually approached people in our President’s office here at the college and he said, “What can we do to really cement this relationship to go beyond what other districts are doing with SUNY Oswego School of Ed, to honor a clinically rich experience for undergrads for pre-service teachers, and bring professional development in for in-service teachers?” And so he kind of has a vision of this very strong collaborative learning community. And he said, “I’m going to give a classroom in Leighton elementary school to SUNY Oswego. This is going to be a dedicated room. The technology belongs to SUNY, the equipment, the furniture belongs to SUNY, faculty from SUNY will teach their courses there.” And so our students now take courses right at Leighton—their three education courses in the fall are right at Leighton—so we bring their faculty in to meet Kara’s faculty and staff. They’re an integral part of the professional development we do with teachers, our pre-service candidates are a part of our professional development now which in other districts, pre-service teachers really don’t become a part of professional development—they’re just taking their coursework—but we like to see the two populations together, send the same messages to both groups, and it is a true learning community. We sit down every month, and all the planning is collaborative. And in those ways, it’s really become so much richer than we expected.

Kara: And really, by the students being part of that professional development, they are able to have that professional development and their classes right on our campus at Leighton and then they’re able to take that learning and go right into the classroom. So it’s not removed by a few days or a few weeks, it can happen right away. So, as we know with all learning, you can put it into practice right away, you have a better chance of solidifying what it is that you’ll be doing when you’re working with the children.

Rebecca: What do our students say about that experience of taking classes at Leighton and then being able to have that direct experience in the classroom?

Christine: I do want to start off by saying that we’ve morphed from the Leighton learning community into the Leighton-Fitzhugh learning community, because Leighton is a relatively small building now that the district office is housed there and we had so many pre-service candidates interested in being in the program, we now rely on the Fitzhugh elementary school right down the road, and the principal and teachers there are very much a part of this learning community too. And so our candidates take their classes and go right into the classrooms at Leighton or they jump in their car and they go right into classrooms at Fitzhugh and it’s seamless for them. I think they appreciate that they’re not just on campus. They know that they need to learn as much from people in schools as they’re learning from people at the college and without one of those partners, they’re not getting a really true learning experience and a realistic learning experience. We need the K-12 setting for teacher preparation, and we feel they need us in many ways as well. And so it’s not an either-or situation, I think we respect the whole package and our students now, we can see the light bulbs going off for the pre-service teachers. And they go right from class where they hear about this particular theory or method of instruction, and then they go right into their host teachers classroom and they work with children for so many more hours than what our state ed requires for teacher prep and they see it happening and they say “No, I really don’t like how that’s working,” and they question it and they really are more critical thinkers because they’re in the schools more. So they’ve got that theory-practice connection down pat.

Kara: And I would say that just my own experience as a student teacher way back when, I would have never thought to go into the principal’s office. I don’t think I remember who the principals were in the places that I was put into as a practicum student and/or student teacher. And really, I have connections with those students. So not only are they working with us day to day, they really become part of our staff in everything that they do. They’re eating lunch in the same places the teachers are eating their lunch, often. Sometimes they’re in their own classroom, so the college classroom rather so that they can have their privacy but a lot of times they’re right with our teachers even down to eating their lunch. I have parent meetings and when I have parent meetings with students, they are part of those meetings. We have CSE meetings which are special education meetings, we have open house, all those things that invite our parents in to speak with us about their children, and now these pre-service teachers, these student teachers from SUNY Oswego, they are all a part of that process. So I really get to know them as well as they get to know me so I think that’s a big distinction between what we would normally see if students are just doing those six weeks.

Rebecca: I can imagine that most students don’t think of going to the principal’s office because that would be a bad thing. [LAUGHTER]

Kara: That’s right. That’s right and we’ve got to change that, right? That paradigm shift on that. So it’s very true, it’s very true.

John: It seems like a much richer experience than they typically would receive in in-service teaching where they’re just there for a few days or portion of days each week with much more immersion in a much more realistic environment.

Christine: Absolutely. Right from the beginning, we know that the college culture and climate is so different from what we live in the schools. Our schedules are different, our calendars are different, the whole energy is different in these two settings. And so it’s so interesting to work with one foot in both places, and our candidates too, they need to be flexible because things don’t always go as planned when they’re out in the schools or when they’re at the college and they have to juggle more things on a regular basis than a typical practicum student or student teacher, but we think that’s a good thing because they have the support there. They have the support from more college people in that same location, they have support from the building principal, the host teachers in that building. It is a real learning community because there’s no hierarchy and that’s a model that I think is so important for new teachers to grasp… that it doesn’t have to be that we have to have a boss or a boss of a boss and that teachers are leaders and they need to be able to connect and communicate with administrators, teachers, it doesn’t matter what your title is. And I’m finding in our learning community, we really have that communication without the fear of hierarchical constraints, which happens in a lot of places.

Kara: Yeah, and I’m really glad you mentioned that Chris—to kind of backtrack a little bit what you said a few minutes ago—it’s that professionalism. It’s understanding what it is you need to do when you walk into a school building and how you need to carry yourself. And sometimes that’s not something we might learn in a college class. But it just becomes natural because they see everyone around them and they experience what everyone else is doing. And so because of that, it just sort of happens on its own, which is, I think that and of itself, if I’m going to interview some candidates in the summer, and I’m interviewing candidates that really had those experiences and they can talk about those experiences, that interview is going to look a lot different than just someone that’s kind of talking to me about maybe theory that they have learned in a classroom. Not that that’s a bad thing—that’s a really good thing and an important thing—but if they can actually talk about how they put that into practice, that learning that happened in the classroom, that’s going to be a real strong candidate that I know is ready to go and is ready to work with whatever students come in front of them.

Rebecca: I can imagine that in a lot of disciplines, not just education, that students have a mental model of whatever the discipline or whatever the job is going to be that’s very different from what it actually is and in part because their experience of it may be from a consumer point of view or as a student rather than as a faculty member. It’s the different side of the coin. Or maybe they have pictures of what that might be from media, which doesn’t include all of the nuance that we actually experience in our jobs. So I can really imagine how much being immersed in that way can really help them understand the interconnectedness and how all these pieces work together rather than thinking, “Here’s my little hole that I’m going to exist in.” rather than realizing that everything’s connected and that you do have to adjust based on other people, bigger picture things, strategies that are being used within the entire school rather than just in a particular classroom, et cetera.

Kara: Yeah, and I think you find out very quickly if this is what you want to do. There’s lots of articles out there, lots of data, that shows that there’s a lot of teacher burnout, and so in trying to be proactive around that, I think this is one of the ways that we do that because I think students come out and they really know, “Is this for me, is this what I have passion for? Is this what I want to be doing for the next 20 years?” So I think it really gives them that guidance as well.

Christine: It’s not an easy job, not at all. Sometimes when you’re sitting on campus in a college class and you’re studying, you’re reading out of a book, you’re reading articles, you’re reading current literature, you’re talking theories, you’re talking methods, without the practical context to connect it to, and not just a short time that you’re in this context, but you’re really—like you were saying—you’re immersed in this context over and over and over, that’s when connections are going to be made. And so those practices inform both what we do at the college, and then we reflect on what’s happening, and that informs hopefully what the public schools are doing and how they can change.

John: One of the things you mentioned was the professional development aspect of this for teachers in the school. Could you tell us more about that program and how that works?

Christine: This fall, for example, we start out with a cohort of practical students. It is the semester before they student teach. We bring them out. We start in August, the schools don’t start until September, so we have a little bit of time to meet them, work with them. We’ve already recruited host teachers that we’d like to match them with, and we have an orientation at the beginning of that semester because hearing expectations right from the beginning in the school, that they are expected to do this work in has been found to be super valuable. So host teachers hear what the expectations are for their work with our candidates. Candidates hear expectations, not only from our principal, but the PDS liaisons and their professors that semester so everyone’s on the same page for this whole semester. This is what we expect our experience to be like. This is what our requirements are. This is what professionalism looks like in a public school versus walking around a college campus in terms of behavior, dress, social media. I love this work because we take the elephant right out of the room right from day one. There are no questions about what is expected in a public school classroom with children. And in this day and age, you have to be extra, extra cautious, careful, explicit. And it’s different from hanging around a college campus for four years.

Kara: Right, and we’ve been fortunate the last couple of years—maybe even three—but I think it’s been the last couple of years, we’ve been able to invite those pre-service teachers when we have opening day for staff. They’ve been a part of that. So we’ve done some team building exercises and just really get to know each other and that’s what we kind of do when we come back as a staff just to say hi to everyone, and “Welcome back, and how was your summer? And how did things go? And what’s something you’d like to talk about that you’d like to celebrate? What are some goals for the beginning of the school year? What are you thinking?” And they’re all a part of that. So not only are they getting to know our staff,as far as pedagogy goes, but they’re also getting to know our staff as, “What are your interests? What are our interests? What do we have in common?” And I think that’s critically important. As we work with students—no matter what grade level you work with students—making connections with students, we know how important that is. We know that that’s always been important, but we know that in 2019, it’s extra important that we are making relationships with kids. And so the teachers themselves are learning how to do that with these pre-service teachers and they’re learning how to do it back with their host teachers so that when students come into the room when school starts, they’re ready to do that. They’re ready to make those relationships from day one because they’ve already practiced that in the summer.

Rebecca: What a great way to have everyone feel included. I think that sometimes the internships, pre-service teachers, kind of drop-in drop-out like they don’t ever feel fully integrated or included and it sounds really great that when your staff come back, they’re all a part of the same thing.

Kara: Yes. And a perfect example of that is that when our student teachers are out sometimes—because we all are out sometimes, we all get sick sometimes—the students are asking where they are. They asked me were those pre-service teachers are. That would have never happened in the past so I think that’s a great concrete example of how much the kids really start to depend on them being in the classroom.

Rebecca: Can you elaborate a little bit more on what your students get from our college students being present so frequently?

Kara: Sure, absolutely. So we sort of know as teachers and buildings that the more that we can differentiate what students are learning, meaning the more that we can give them experiences and they can actually work with and be concrete… let me give you an example. Let’s say we’re getting ready for our science fair. And so for our science fair, typically, we would have one classroom teacher, we might have a teaching assistant in a room, and we might have anywhere between 20 and 25 students. So you can imagine that the teacher kind of goes through, “This is what needs to be on your poster board.” But then the students have to work independently. They usually will have a rubric and they can go through that rubric and they can look at all the things that should be on the poster board. And then when they’re all done with the finished product, the teacher might rotate around the room, they’re finished with the product. The teacher sort of goes over with them what that looks like. That’s fine, except for you are an end product and you hope it all went well. Okay. But with other student teachers in the room from SUNY Oswego, they are working with kids, two and three kids at a time, and they’re really helping them through that process. So by the time they have a finished product—for example, a science fair project—those students are really able to talk about what it is that they went through when they were learning it. And the student teachers—pre-service teachers—are able to really talk about where students started, and where that growth came from and as they went along, what that looked like. And that’s very different than just saying, “I’m the teacher standing in front of the room, this is what you’re going to learn, and then I’m going to grade you on this product of what I think you should have learned,” versus actually doing it and being a part of the process. So certainly they are doing that every single day and that’s across all disciplines. That’s in social studies, that’s in math, that’s in science, that’s in ELA. Also, we’re able to really take our reading groups, we’re really able to look at data and say, “These are the two or three students that really need this extra support. Now we have that person to give them that extra support.” So great to look at data—very important—but if you don’t have the staffing to then support that, when those students need that extra help, that what happens is kids get into groups, and so you might have a group of six or seven students and they’re still this high and low. That all goes away because we have those extra students that are able to do that and able to teach that reading just like alongside with the supervision of the teacher, of course, but they’re able to really work independently with those students and give them what they really need.

Rebecca: So, much more personalized learning is happening.

Kara: Absolutely.

Christine: We hear stories all the time from the host teachers at Leighton and Fitzhugh, about how much more they can accomplish in a lesson or in a given day. Some of our students even before student teaching, our college students are there three full days a week and taking courses. And so they get to see the children from when they get off the bus until when they get back on the bus at the end of the day, up to three full days a week. And so we watch them go from full-time college student to semi-professional, and then through student teaching into a full professional life—and it’s a really beautiful transformation within a year, their last year of college. But without this setting and without the collaboration, those stories wouldn’t be coming out and the richness really wouldn’t be there. But the professional development is a big part of that. We have a list of PD offerings every semester for host teachers and candidates. It begins with the orientation that we talked about, the opening day for teachers that Kara talked about that our candidates are invited to every year, and then we do something called instructional rounds where our candidates and classroom teachers are invited to do a lesson study. Two of Kara’s teachers had volunteered to do demonstration lessons for their colleagues and our candidates. And so we structure a data collection tool where we’re looking for specific pieces of instruction and elements of classroom learning and teaching and we literally go in and observe the teacher and then we debrief with the teacher afterwards, and it’s a really great form of professional development. Our candidates learn a lot, the in-service teachers, the practicing teachers learn a lot about their own teaching, “What am I doing? What am I not doing? How could I do that better?” And then they can start using their colleagues as resources. Many say, “Gee, I didn’t know you knew how to do that. How did you learn how to do that? Can you teach me how to do that?” So the learning community really is just bolstered by all the PD that we offer to both schools.

Kara: YEAH, And I’m really glad you said that, Chris, because that’s something that I have found to be just really, really an important piece of all this is that often, once we become practitioners out there in the field, we kind of go with what we learn and go with what we think we do well and that’s how that works. And so having that growth mindset, that growth model, is something that we know we should be as teachers. We should be lifelong learners, but how do we actually do that? And so by having that PD, instead of being told, “This is going to be the flavor of the week that we’re going to do for this month,” or “This school year, this is what we’re going to do, and we’re all going to jump on board, and this is how we’re going to teach reading,” let’s say for example. And we do it and certainly we’re good about following through and being good soldiers, but we don’t really know why we do it. And we don’t really know if we’ve grown because we don’t have that time to really reflect. This really gives us that opportunity to do that. An example I have of that is one of the professors Dr. Duffy, who is a professor here at SUNY Oswego. She did some PD around spelling and she did it with the adults—including myself—and there were things that we didn’t know. So we know as adults that we know how to read, but we didn’t really know why we knew how to read or how to read, and so the students really almost knew more than we knew, because they had been learning it and for them, it wasn’t anything that had to be retaught or relearned. And so we actually were reaching out to them for them to help us so that we could be working with the students. And that’s magical. That dynamic is not going to happen in any other setting, that we as the practitioners would be reaching out to the pre-service teachers. So I think that’s a good example of something that really, what we learn is going right into the classroom and how it’s a partnership, not, “I’m the supervisor and you’re sort of the student.” It’s really that partnership. That’s just I think a good example of that.

Rebecca: It sounds like really powerful interdependence. That doesn’t always happen.

Kara: Absolutely.

Christine: It is now. I think it has grown to be that.

Rebecca: Yeah, I can imagine things don’t always start that way. You have to really get to know and trust.

Christine: Trust is a huge part. If we go back three years, I remember walking into Kara’s office and introducing myself. “I’m your PS liaison!” “Oh, okay. Nice to meet you.” It was her very first month on the Leighton campus and, “I have a classroom in your building,” and “Let’s go see my classroom,” and it’s very awkward. It is awkward because it’s brand new for both of us, we don’t know each other, we think that we understand the vision, but it hasn’t really been created yet. All the pieces haven’t been thought through and it’s up to us to create whatever it is. And so it’s exciting and a little scary and weird all at the same time.

Kara: I would agree. We all come from a different place and so we all prioritize differently and I think what we had to do is we had to get in sync with that and have an understanding of the other person’s role and perspective. And I think that’s where we’ve all shown growth so that we can really provide the best model possible for those students that are coming in to learn from us.

Rebecca: It already sounds a lot, like really rich and deep and full of trust so I can imagine that it will continue getting even more rich as your partnership grows over time.

John: And it’s really convenient how close Leighton is to the college. It’s less than two miles away, so students can even walk there and back.

Kara: Yes, absolutely. In fact, I have—this is aside—but we have two students from SUNY Oswego that are part of our AmeriCorps program, and one of the students actually walks from campus so that makes a big difference that students have that accessibility.

Rebecca: So you’ve talked a little bit about the professional development aspect and the relationship that the campus has with providing some professional development opportunities for existing teachers at Leighton and Fitzhugh. Can you talk a little bit more about how that works?

Christine: Sure. We have ongoing professional development based on what our planning committee has decided the teachers would like and what our candidates like and need, and so the planning is always collaborative and then we have a semester long—or year long plan even—but it’s always grounded in what the district has set as their strategic plan, their initiatives. And so because we’ve been a part of Oswego City School District for so many years, we have relationships with people in the district office, in the buildings, we know that they have had two initiatives going on really for the last several years: explicit direct instruction and trauma-based teaching. And then recently they brought in an early literacy initiative that’s across the county. But one great thing about the Leighton-Fitzhugh learning community is that we really zero in on those initiatives. We don’t want our candidates learning things that aren’t going to be useful once they come into their practicum and student teaching. So for example, we have right now, mindfulness classes being offered—not only at Leighton and Fitzhugh but we’ve extended beyond to other buildings in the district. Oswego High School and Oswego Middle School had been involved in those courses for a number of years. We have yoga being taught in three of the buildings in Oswego City School District at no cost to the teachers here, these are all college professional development opportunities that we would like to provide and continue providing to help the district meet their goals. We do PD usually once a semester on giving and receiving quality feedback. So we know one of the sticky points of being in a relationship with a pre-service teacher, for the classroom teacher, is they’ve been dealing with children for many, many years. They haven’t necessarily been communicating with adults in an evaluative or critical thinking kind of way, and so we know the host teachers really are in a position to help our candidates in constructive ways. We don’t want them to be overly critical, but they have to be able to say when they see something going on, “I’d like to sit down and talk about this,” and really hit the nail on the head with that. And at the same time, our candidates—as they mature and become professionals—they have to have the language and the courage to go to the principal or go to the host teacher and say, “I’m really struggling with such and such, can you help me with this?” So giving and receiving quality feedback is a topic for PD that we’ve done a number of times. Co-teaching is a PD that we offer that’s very successful too.

Kara: I think just to add to that, Chris, I think that when the students and the teachers are working together to problem solve through what’s going on when they’re in the classroom, they can always refer back to those experiences that they’ve had during those PD sessions. So it’s not only that it works well when they’re working with students, but it also helps them work together as a team because truly, once the student has been there—I would say after their first or second practicum experience and they’re really part of that pre-service teaching mode—they really are doing that planning with the teacher. And so to be able to have those skills of feedback like Chris had said, is really important because often there isn’t enough time in the day to do that once you’ve started teaching. Once you’re live, you’re live. So to be able to do that ahead of time and even know what questions to ask, or what feedback to give, or why that would even be important, I don’t think is something we would have done before, and now it’s just part of our routine.

Rebecca: That just sounds really great.

John: It does, and one of the things I really like about it.. you mentioned the growth mindset idea. But when our students are there working with teachers and seeing that they’re going through professional development with them, I would think that would help build a growth mindset and help encourage them to become lifelong learners and realize that this is an ongoing process. That’s a really nice aspect of the program.

Christine: Absolutely. For too long we’ve seen such a division between what we experience in a teacher ed program on campus and what the real job looks like, feels like, demands of us, and really we have broken down a lot of that. We’re not completely there yet—we have a lot of work still to do—but for public school people to respect the contributions of teacher educators and for us to respect the jobs, the intense super-demanding jobs of classroom teachers and principals and then to bring all of that together, I think that’s where the power is.

Kara: I think it really forces us to reflect as practitioners because you have these folks around that are really depending on you and looking up to you and watching and we are modeling for them. And so really being able to talk about that, it’s one thing to be doing the job, but after you’ve done it for a while, you don’t so much really talk about it with anyone anymore. But really, that conversation has to happen so that it is rich for those students when they come into our building. So, it helps us be better I think, too, because we want to make sure that we’re doing right by our students that come in.

Christine: It heightens the professionalism just by having us in the building. And it helps us question how and why we do what we do. And we are watching them in action—it forces them to do the same. What are they seeing right now? And what are they thinking about what they’re seeing? And then we come together and talk about what we’re all seeing.

Kara: You have to be willing to be vulnerable to grow and I think that’s a big piece. And I can’t say enough for my staff that really has taken students and really, that’s the word I would use would to be vulnerable, that they really kind of put themselves out there so that the students will be able to go and teach thousands of students for years to come, which is really the ultimate goal… to be able to do that and to be able to give back to their community. Often many of them stay right here in Oswego and that’s really another one of the initiatives that the superintendent is looking at is, “How do we keep our community vibrant? And how do we keep students going?” And I think that’s definitely a piece of that.

Christine: In one of our PDs we invite the HR, the personnel director from Oswego City Schools in for a few minutes so that she can show our candidates how to apply for substitute teaching positions in the district. And it is quite a process, to go through the online application to come in for the interview, to become Board of Education approved. And so our candidates have to want to substitute teach to go through that whole process. But there’s such a shortage right now of high-quality substitute teachers everywhere we look. And so we feel at the college that we want to help address that problem by encouraging our candidates to apply to sub, get board approved. They’re very happy that they can then make some money and then be present in the school more if they could substitute teach and be present in their classrooms more than what they’re required to be. That’s the best marriage of all. We’re really helping both institutions with it. And we do have several board approved candidates in both buildings right now getting great subbing experience.

Kara: I would agree and I think that it really gives them a sense of value. Often they come in and out of fairness to the student teachers—the pre-service teachers, I know I keep using those words interchangeably—but I think that it’s a big commitment for them, and Chris kind of alluded to that. They really have to set their own lives aside to make this commitment because they are spending so much time with us. And I think it validates all of their hard work that we would trust that they could sub and they could be with those students. I think that gives them a sense of confidence and a sense of competency that the work that they have been doing is certainly the same kind of work that they’ll be doing when they’re out in their profession,—hopefully—a few months down the road once they graduate and get a position. So it’s about can you do the job, but also we know in teaching that you psychologically you have to be present all the time and you have to give 100 percent to the kids all the time. They expect that, they need that, they deserve that. And I think for our pre-service teachers to be able to actually do that, and to develop their own style, that’s another piece that you don’t necessarily get with the six weeks. But with us, they have learned what their own style is and how they’re going to go about managing a classroom and teaching the students in front of them.

Rebecca: I can imagine, especially in teaching teachers, but also in other areas that you’re teaching professionals. I’m a graphic designer, I teach graphic designers, which is also a professional degree, that the more you interact and integrate with the profession and know what’s going on and know what the challenges are, the better you can instruct your students and adjust the curriculum in higher ed to better serve what students are actually going to need in the field. So I can imagine, Chris, that being so embedded in the district right now in the way that this program is working, that you’ve learned a ton about how we should be educating future teachers, and have you had any adjustments to the curriculum as a result?

Christine: Well, I think that I am in a unique position being at the college full time and part of my load being out in schools. And so I do bring a lot of information to both groups as I learn it. I bring observations to both groups. I think that’s the only way good change can happen is if we keep those lines open and keep watching and learning from each other. We do have a ways to go, I think. Ideas are kind of popping in my head right now about ways in the future that we could really start bringing college folks and public school people together. Years and years ago I wrote a grant so that half of my load at the college could be covered and I taught a half day every day in a sixth grade ELA classroom in Oswego County with an ELA teacher. We co-taught every day and then on Fridays, I brought my literacy students out to that building to watch us co-teach and then debrief our literacy lesson afterwards. And it was ages ago that that happened, but I still think “Wow, how could we really start learning from each other in very practical ways, and then bring that back to our respective roles? So has our curriculum changed? I think it is starting to. We have a strong link with state education (as do public schools), our standards are changing, state ed regs are changing, what they require of for certification for our in-service teachers it’s constantly changing, and so we have to be in communication with CiTi BOCES, with public schools, with state ed, we can’t be isolated. And we have to keep reaching out and seeing that the schools are continually reaching out to us to be partners in that. So, taking a look at a syllabus, for example, and let’s sit around the table and we’re all looking at a copy of the same syllabus for a methods of instruction course. And all the eyes looking at that document are coming at it with a different lens and wow, what a conversation that would be. “Well, I think the new teacher should have this and this and this in there,” and other people think, “Oh, no, we don’t need as much of this as we have. Let’s take it out,” and just getting into those deep, professional discussions about what’s the most important thing for new teachers to know. I hope that we can keep going in that direction.

Kara: And I think as students go back to their professors, and talk about their assignments and what it is that they’re doing and give their experiences, I think that plants some seeds, and I think that’s what we can hope for going forward.

Christine: One of our methods professors said to me recently, “After I taught this course the first time, I looked at it and said, ‘You know what, they don’t need two research projects. They’re out in the field, they’re out with children all the time. I’m going to cut one of those out. I’m just going to do one research project and get rid of the other one and let them do some action research in the classroom.” Teachers are collecting data all the time on many different things. They’re observing kids in so many different ways and so that’s the research that is valuable, that we can learn so much from. We need books, we need articles, we need current research studies on teaching and learning. But we need action research that’s going on every day with kids in classrooms, too.

John: I noticed in an article on your arrival here that you had done some work at NORAD, before moving into teaching. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Kara: Sure. Yes, I was in the Air Force and I actually was stationed in Colorado Springs, Colorado, it was about 1990, 1991, and I actually got to work in NORAD. And so that’s where we tracked Santa Claus. So, when I first came to Oswego and they asked the questions around what makes you unique and so we always kind of talk about, “Yeah, I worked inside of a mountain and we track Santa Claus.” And certainly, the United States Air Force does other things besides track Santa Claus there, but certainly it’s all about that problem solving. So when I was in the Air Force, very much there is always an end result. And we don’t give up and we have to figure out a way. There is no “Oh, it didn’t work out. We’ll try better next time.” It’s “We’ll keep working at it till it does work out.” And I think there’s some real same sort of ideas here when we talk about this partnership, that we keep growing and we keep learning, we keep problem solving, and that we don’t give up. Because think about how sad the children would be if Santa Claus didn’t come, right? and NORAD failed… So we want to do the same, think about how our children would fail if we weren’t doing our very best for them every day in a school setting. So, I think they definitely are the same in that way and I think the other thing is that when I was certainly working there, really it’s about how can we do things smarter, how can we do things differently, so that we can still get the same result but we’re not getting “stuck in the weeds” as they say, and I think that we did that at NORAD and I think we certainly are doing that with this program. What are those things that are critical and key to making it—like Chris has always said—that clinically rich environment for our students, for the students of the campus, for all the practitioners that are working with them? So, I would say those are the two things that are alike. No Santa Claus that Leighton though, but while I’m still working on it. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Sightings coming soon.

Kara: Yes, right, sightings coming soon. That’s right.

John: Although apparently there’s Christmas Tea in July.

Rebecca: Yeah, well, you know… hey…

Kara: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

Rebecca: We always wrap up by asking what’s next?

Christine: Oh my goodness, we have a wonderful cohort coming in in the Fall, I can’t wait to meet them. I’m just excited to keep going into classrooms and seeing the work that our candidates are able to do. We did not have as high enough expectations of them until we began rich partnerships in schools. These candidates are able to do so much more before they even come student teaching than we ever imagined that they could and so capturing that, capturing concrete ways that they are growing in ways that we’re affecting the children in the elementary school—Kara says we’re not going to stop until we figure this out—we need tangible evidence that this is powerful and that it’s working. We know that it is, it’s not just anecdotal, so we want to look at it through a research lens.

Kara: Right. And I think that the way that we do that is that trust that Chris talked about earlier. I think the more we and/or the way we continue to have that trust with each other, the more we’re going to be able to talk about what’s working well, what are some things that we might want to do differently, and what does that look like? And then let’s actually try it, let’s not just talk about it, but let’s really put it into practice and then see what happens. If we have to take a step back, then we do. But if we don’t, then we know that this is something going forward that we can kind of put in our toolbox.

Rebecca: Sounds really exciting. Thank you so much for spending some time with us and telling us about this partnership.

Christine: You’re welcome.

Kara: Thank you for having us.

[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 Fisher, Chris Wallace, Kelly Knight, Joseph Bandru, Jacob Alverson, Brittany Jones, and Gabriella Perez.

67. Iterative OER Development

Imagine course materials that are always up to date and evolve continually to become better at supporting student learning. In this, Dr. Steven Greenlaw joins us to discuss how some publishers of open educational resources are trying to set up sustainable practices to achieve these goals. Steve is a Professor of Economics at the University of Mary Washington and the author of the OpenStax Economics textbooks. He has also developed the materials for Lumen Learning’s Waymaker Introductory Economics texts.

Show Notes

Additional Resources

Transcript

John: Imagine course materials that are always up to date and evolve continually to become better at supporting student learning. In this episode, we discuss how some publishers of open educational resources are trying to set up sustainable practices to achieve these goals.

[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 guest is Steven Greenlaw, a Professor of Economics at the University of Mary Washington and the author of the OpenStax OER Economics textbooks. He has also developed the materials for Lumen Learning’s Waymaker Introductory Economics texts. Welcome, Steve.

Steve: Thank you.

Rebecca: Today teas are:

Steve: I’m drinking coffee. Thank you.

John: …and I have Enchanted Forest Fruits black tea from Epcot which I picked up while I was out there for the OLC conference where I last saw you, Steve.

Rebecca: You’ll never guess what I’m drinking.

John: English afternoon?

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s my favorite.

Steve: Well, honestly, I switched to tea in the afternoon.

Rebecca: See…

Steve: But in the mornings, I tend to drink coffee.

Rebecca: Yeah, you and many other people.

John: What prompted your interest in using and developing OER materials?

Steve: I have to say the developing came first. For a long time, I’ve experimented with textbooks going back into the 1980s, which at least John can remember. And I came to the conclusion that that it didn’t really seem to matter what principles book you used. Students needed a book, particularly for the analytical parts of the course: the models and things like that. But whichever book I used, they seem to learn just as well. And more recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that intro textbooks are commodities, that where companies are going to make their money is in the aftermarket products. But we’re not there yet. At least, the majority of the textbook industry is not there yet. So I had that and I didn’t really pay much attention in the 2000s about what textbook I was using, because I didn’t really think it mattered. But I did notice how high textbook prices were going and it was around that point that I became aware of and interested in OER. Again, this is dating myself, but when I was in college during the mid-1970s, I remember a teacher in my intermediate macro class—John, that’s for you—saying he would never assign texts for a course that collectively cost more than $10. [LAUGHTER] And so that’s sort of my base year. So, I sort of had this in the back of my head, I basically tried to choose around the least expensive textbook that I thought would work. And then out of the blue, OpenStax contacted me and said they had funding to create a principles of micro-macro text, and would I be interested in helping them out. I actually jumped at the opportunity, it sounded like a lot of fun. At that point I had already published one textbook commercially for an upper level course and I knew something about the commercial publishing process. I knew that I didn’t really want to go through that again, but I did want to get my ideas out there. One of the things about commercial publishing is they ask you, “What are all the innovative things you want to do?” and then once they have you on contract, they say, “Oh, but you have to do it like everybody else’s.” So that was the start. A year after the OpenStax book got published, I got contacted by Lumen Learning who said essentially the same thing. They said, “We’re building this digital platform, and we wondered if you would like to be the principals subject matter expert.” That’s the term of art that I become a SME.

John: So could you tell us a little bit about Lumen Learning’s project and the Waymaker version of this?

Steve: Sure.

John: What does it add?

Steve: It adds a lot. So, just to be clear, I wrote the OpenStax principles book. And we can talk about that process later if you want to, especially about peer review and things like that. And then I wrote the Lumen Learning Waymaker version, which was essentially an improved version. When we did the OpenStax principles book, we did it in an incredibly short period of time, I think it was nine months. So, when I did Waymaker for the first time, it allowed me to flesh out some of the things that weren’t ideal in the OpenStax book. And then OpenStax came back to me maybe three years ago and said, “We have funding for a new edition. Would you like to do that?” so I wrote a second formal edition for the OpenStax principles book. And then right after that, I did the same thing for Lumen. So, in my mind, I’ve gone through four versions of this now. And it’s not done and that’s part of the beauty of OER… at least the OER business. So to get back to your question, the OpenStax principles book is a textbook, it’s available in print and a variety of online options. My particular favorite is the phone app. So if I’m in class and a student asked me a question about something, I could literally look it up on my phone. Waymaker is a very different animal. It’s digital courseware so it’s a more immersive, interactive experience for students. And it’s not available in print. For example, how would you show a video or do a simulation in a print textbook? You can’t. The most you could do was provide a URL or something and have the student go out to that. In Waymaker, it’s all in one. So Waymaker, aside from text, it includes video, it includes animations, it includes simulations. Just to give you a specific example, instead of students looking at a graph of supply and demand, they actually get to climb in and take it for a test drive. Students really liked that. Many students seem to get it in a way that’s just looking at a two-dimensional graph, or reading text it is much harder for them.

John: I saw you present on this at the OLC conference…

Steve: Yep.

John: …And you demonstrate this. What software did you use to create those interactive graphs?

Steve: Those little interactives are H5C… maybe… it’s called? [It is H5P]

John: Okay.

Steve: It’s a European company, and it’s open source, and it’s really easy to do. I can say that even though I didn’t create the interactives. That’s the joy of working with a company… they actually have people to do the stuff that you don’t know how to do… unlike my earlier career, when I was the programmer, I was the graphic designer and all of those other things. Talking a little more about Waymaker, it’s more than a source of course content. It’s designed to teach students to study more deeply and more effectively. I don’t know about your students, but my students don’t seem to have learned how to study well. They’re very good at the game of school, but they’re not so good at learning. And I don’t mean that as a criticism. It’s just sort of a fact. They think study means read, highlight, read again, highlight again. When we know a lot from cognitive science now, that learning comes from working with the material. As I like to say, “the best way for students to learn economics is to do economics.” So Waymaker emphasizes mastery learning and personalized tutoring. The tutoring comes both from the software and also from the instructor. It’s designed to give students actionable feedback so that they can make their own decisions about how to allocate their study time. This is a really different way of learning, so I’m going to say it again a little bit differently. Assessment is integral to the learning process, it’s not just or even primarily about the grades. Rather, the assessment is designed to make students interact more deeply with the content and interact in a more intelligent meta-cognitive way. I can go into more detail about what it looks like from the students perspective, if you want.

John: Sure. Could you talk a little bit more about that? It’s a great approach. I tried to do that myself, but it’s always an add-on. Having it integrated is a nice feature, and one of the reasons why I’m planning to adopt your package in the fall.

Steve: This is really different for students, but also for the instructor. I’ve been working on this product for three years. When it finally came out in beta, I thought I knew what was going on, and I was really surprised at how little I knew about how it actually worked. Waymaker is organized into modules, which are analogous to chapters in the text. Students begin each module with the “show what you know,” which is basically a formative assessment. The purpose of that is to identify what content they already know. So, it gives them feedback on how they can efficiently use their study time. So, if there’s stuff that they absolutely already know, they don’t need to read about it again, they can just go into the stuff that they don’t know.

John: And even if they don’t, it activates prior knowledge. And it helps them make connections so that they can learn more effectively…

Steve: …Yes.

John: So there’s a lot of benefits, even for the areas they don’t know.

Steve: Yes. And I’m actually adding a little exercise for my first day of class next week, where I put my students in small groups. Some of whom who’ve had the first semester, and some of them who have not. And I’m going to give them a basically a problem to work with, knowing that some of them won’t really know what to do with it. But I want the groups to start working together. But anyway, I digress. So, as students progress through the content, there are a series of learning activities. The original one is called a “self-check.” It’s basically a short formative quiz. The purpose of the quizzes is not summative assessment. But as I said before, it’s to help students think more about their learning. Think about the idea of a Socratic tutor. The tutor doesn’t ask questions to assess the students’ knowledge, but rather to help them work through the content, help them really understand it. So what happens in Waymaker is: the student reads a page a text, or watches a video, or plays a simulation. And then they’re posed a very short quiz, like one or two questions. If they pass the quiz, the “gate” opens and they move to the next section. If they don’t pass the quiz—and on a one-question quiz, either you get it or you don’t—Waymaker suggests that they review the content before attempting the quiz again. They can take those quizzes as many times as they want to. So they can really build some expertise. There are other sorts of learning activities, but I want to focus on the quizzes today. At the end of the modules, students take a module quiz—essentially a chapter test—which is summative. Again, if they fail to achieve mastery—and the default mastery level is 80%, so it’s pretty high level. As an instructor, you can change that to whatever you want. But I like 80%. So if they don’t achieve 80%, they’re encouraged to study again and they’re given information about what areas to study. And then they can take the module quiz one more time. They’re only allowed to take the module quizzes twice. Now, here’s where it starts to get really interesting from the teacher’s point-of-view. The instructor receives reports from the module quizzes whenever a student fails. So for me, the first really good thing about Waymaker was that I don’t have to go to some website and look at some spreadsheet and see which students are struggling. Rather, anytime a student fails, I get pinged from the software. So it says, “so and so…” Well it’s a little boilerplate language… but basically it says they worked through the module, and they scored a 46 on the module quiz. You might want to reach out to them at that point. So the software is flexible. So you can get these things in real time, you can get them once a day, you can get them once a week, if you want to. I get them once a day. That seems reasonably quick for me. If the students taken the quiz at three in the morning, I’m not up anyway, so it hardly matters. It’s not like I’m going to give them that fast feedback. But what happens is I get that information, and then I get to decide, “What am I going to do about it?” If someone gets a 76 on their first attempt, I generally figure, “Okay, they’re gonna figure this out.” And so I don’t worry about it. If someone gets a 46, then I immediately want to reach out to them and say, “Hey, I see that you’re struggling with this. You know you can take it again. Go back and review the material. And if you’re not sure that you understand it, let me know and I will work with you on this. Because the goal here is mastery. It’s not anything else. Anyway, Waymaker helps me, the instructor, make better, more efficient use of my time. In any given week, Waymaker allows me to know two important things. It allows me to reach out only to those students that need my help. And it lets me know what topics the class is struggling with, so that I can tailor my in-class time to the material where the students need help and not spend it on material where they already know this stuff. Basically, it gives me a better feel for the effectiveness of my teaching and student learning. And that’s really, really important I think as a teacher. I’m embarrassed to think of my early years and teaching, when if I got all the way through the 50 minutes, I counted that as a successful day.

[LAUGHTER]

John: I think many of us started like that.

Rebecca: It ties really nicely to your blog post series that you’ve just recently published. The first one being the critical importance of instructional design…

Steve:Yup…

Rebecca: …where you talk a lot about the instructor’s role is designing the experiences, rather than delivering content. Can you talk a little bit more about how Waymaker helps you do that as an instructor?

Steve: There’s a “just-in-time teaching” element to this. I have a course outline, I know what I’m supposed to be doing on a week-to-week basis. But what happens on any given day depends on the stuff that came before it. I’m absolutely not wedded to the calendar. If the students haven’t figured out what we did on Monday, I’m going to start by spending a little more time on that. But also because of the feedback that I’m getting from Waymaker, there are times when I spend 90% of the class on 10% of the material. Because that’s what I know students are having trouble with. I know that if it’s something analytical, probably what I’m going to want to do is instead of talking to them about it—I mean, certainly I’m going to talk to them about it—I put together some group activities. I do a lot of group activities, small groups, generally two to three people. And then I essentially turn the classroom into a lab experience for that day. They seem to enjoy it more, they seem to get more out of it than me just lecturing over the content. After all the content is in the book. I don’t need to just repeat that stuff. So I guess that’s my short answer to your question.

Rebecca: Can you give an example of the kinds of activities that you’re doing with your students?

Steve: Oh, sure. Supply and demand is the first real model that the students work with. And so one of my learning goals is that they ought to be able to take a scenario… something happens… use supply and demand to analyze the effect on the market for x, gasoline or something like that. Typically what happens is, hopefully they will have read the material in Waymaker. Typically, I spend a day talking about “here’s how you would do it” and then generally what’s going to happen is, I spend a day where I have a couple of problems, like three is all that we’re going to have time to do. And I say, “Get in groups of two or three.” Basically, I count the number of students that showed up that day, because my classes are pretty small. And if it’s divisible by three, I put them in groups of three, if it’s divisible by two, I put them in groups of two. And then I say, “Okay, here’s a problem,” I show them the problem. And I say, “Take 10-minutes to work through this, draw the graphs.” And then they know that I’m going to call some of the groups up to present the results to everyone else. So there’s a little bit of competition. It’s not very stressful. It’s a little stressful for people that don’t like to speak in class, but you’re not there by yourself. You’re there with your group, so it works better that way. So I do a couple of those problems until I’m convinced that most people know what they’re doing. So that would be an example.

John: You also mentioned—when I saw you present at the Online Learning Consortium—how you use some of that feedback to improve the text in your current edition. Could you talk a little bit about that process of revision and creation of the text?

Steve: Sure. While I can’t take all the credit. From the beginning of Waymaker, at least from when I began to get involved… once I realized how integral the assessment process was to Waymaker, I pressed Lumen to make sure that the assessment questions were good. One of the things that I’ve noticed over the years is, test banks seem to be the lowest priority of textbook publishers. Because after all, they’re selling the text but they’re giving away the test bank. So what I want, I guess what we all want, is that the questions in the test bank that Waymaker uses, are discriminating correctly. And that’s harder than you might imagine. To their credit, Lumens put a tremendous amount of effort into this. And more generally, into the design the courseware. This has resulted in a process of continuous improvement. Now, continuous improvement is not a term that excites most faculty. I think that’s a fair statement John? [LAUGHTER]

John: Yes.

Steve: But what it really means is that, Lumen has an ongoing process for improving OER, making it more effective every single semester. And they’ve done this, and we’re now in your five and a half. So how does it work? I have a short answer and a long answer. The short answer is, after every semester Lumen downloads the data from every student who’s given them permission at every school using Waymaker across the country. And then they analyze the data. The analysis identifies where the students are having problems. At that point, we go in and either revise the content to make it clearer, or add some learning activities. Or else we revise the assessments to better capture student learning. We do this a little bit in a panicky way over the winter break, because we only have a month. But we do it intensely every summer. Here’s the longer answer. Over time, we’ve gotten better at doing this more efficiently. Lumen has developed something called “RISE Analysis.” RISE is an acronym. I don’t remember what the letters mean. [LAUGHTER] But basically it asked the question, “Which course materials would benefit the most from improvement?” Or to put it differently, “Which changes would have the greatest impact on learning?” So what we’ve done—and this is all programmed now. So Lumen has dozens of Waymaker courses, not just an economics. Though, I like to think that some of the most interesting stuff is started in the econ Waymaker platform. I’m not just making that up, it’s actually true. [LAUGHTER] So, instead of just doing the aggregate sweep on the data, we particularly look at student learning outcomes. And everything in Waymaker is driven by the student learning outcomes. This is out of order, but let me just throw this in for a minute. The way that Waymaker started is they brought together—I want to say 50 principles instructors from everything from community colleges up to R1s. And we spent four days together. And we asked the question, “What do you have to have in your principles courses?’ And so from that we created a list of primary learning outcomes. And then we drilled down and we now have secondary and tertiary outcomes. So the assessment questions in the test banks are coded down to the third level. So everything is really granular, if you want to think about it in those terms. What we look at is not just which student learning outcomes are students struggling with. But rather, which student learning outcomes where students are doing relatively poorly, are they putting a lot of time and effort into. Because that’s where we’re going to get the biggest bang for the buck in terms of fixing things. So what we do is we look at three things. We look at, “Are the questions badly worded?” We’re mostly done with that at this point. “Are the questions testing what they’re supposed to be testing?” There are some psychometric tests that allow you to do that. And then finally, what we do is—after we’ve exhausted all those—we look at the content and we create new content, or different types of learning activities, and we integrate those into the course. So, the interactives that you saw at OLC John, they were the big new innovation from last summer. So we do this, and then we teach the courses again, and then we start the cycle all over again. So, the process just goes on. It’s not continuous, as in every day, but it’s continuous, as in regular. I’ve used the courseware since the first year, and the courseware has gotten noticeably better. Fewer students are failing to achieve mastery on the module quizzes. And fewer of them are crashing and burning. More of them are in the 60 to 70% range when they fail. But what’s really cool is Lumen has shown no sign that they’re ready to quit, that they’re done with this. As long as they’re willing to do this, I think I’m willing to do this.

Rebecca: I like the iterative process.

Steve: Yeah.

Rebecca: That’s something that, as a designer, I’m very comfortable with… that I do all the time, especially designing online. But one of the things that’s really interesting about this model is that, as the author of the textbook, you don’t just have this finished thing. It’s an ongoing…

Steve: …It is.

Rebecca: … thing. So that’s a really different model of authorship.

Steve: Yes, it is. I think it’s fair to say that we make small changes all the time. And then every summer, we make larger changes. And that’s pretty interesting. Because as a user—as you pointed out—I can see that this is helping.

Rebecca: Yeah, that’s really exciting.

Steve: Right now, the hardest part is getting students to trust the process. Because it’s a very different model of learning. And so one of the things that I’m going to do this semester is, build in opportunities for me to remind them that this is a different process, and that they need to trust the process. One of the things that I did last year, which seemed to help with that was I started using exam wrappers after the midterm exams. And ask them to think about how they were studying, and what they would do differently, and what I could do to help them. It’s real easy to see in 30 seconds, I can tell if they’re taking it seriously or not. And if they’re taking it seriously, I learn a whole lot from what they say. So, anyway, just another little wrinkle.

Rebecca: So we’ve talked a lot about the students and the different learning process for students. You talked a little bit about the different processes being the expert, or the writer of the book. And you also mentioned earlier about the peer-review process for an OER being a bit different. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Steve: Sure, and that’s really important. First of all, people have a wrong idea about how OER is produced. The OER that I have experience with is working with OER publishers. It’s not the loan faculty member working in their spare time in their basement, or something like that. Both the OpenStax and the Lumen experience for me, have been very much a team effort. There have been a lot of people involved. So this is really important because one of the concerns about OER textbooks is their presumed lack of quality. There was an article in The Chronicle about that, today in fact. I have to tell you that the peer-review process that I went through with OpenStax was extensive. The way we did this is, OpenStax purchased a manuscript from Tim Taylor—a prominent economist—as the basis for the first edition. They sent copies of the manuscript out to about two-dozen reviewers all over the country, asking them to identify strengths and weaknesses. Based on those review comments, I rewrote each chapter. Each chapter was then sent out to half a dozen new reviewers. And again, the reviewers were from a range of schools, from community colleges through research universities. I took that feedback and I revised each chapter again before it went through the editorial review and production process. I have to say, this was much more detailed and extensive then when I worked with a commercial publisher. The review process for Lumen was similar, there was a lot of peer review involved. And as I said before, I’ve now written two formal editions of both texts. We’ve gotten lots of feedback from users. I’m pretty happy with that.

Rebecca: Do you find that the difference between OER and a commercial publisher is that you keep getting this feedback from users? And that you’re able to revise based on the use of other faculty, rather than working in a silo?

Steve: If I’d written the principles book for a commercial publisher, I would be better able to answer that. I got no formal feedback on my commercial book. I got a lot of comments from people at conferences and things like that. But we have gotten tons of feedback on the OER books, and that is interesting. You can’t satisfy everybody. Somebody says, “This chapter is too long.” Somebody says the same chapter is too short. But, in general, the feedback has been really, really helpful. And we’ve tried to incorporate it as soon as possible. And with these digital text, it’s really easy to do. I can literally go in and edit if I have five-minutes on the fly. And then it’s out there.

John: While with regular publishers, there’s usually a three-year cycle on intro textbooks.

Steve: Yes. And that’s the other thing that—now I’m not a typical user, but I know that if I want to make a change, it’s going to be done by the next semester. The same thing is generally true of other people who give us feedback. Though, they don’t necessarily know that. W e take that feedback very seriously. And there is no three-year review process. So that’s wonderful.

Rebecca: I love the user-centered design process, like that’s clearly what’s being used.

Steve: Yep, we try.

John: And that iterative process is what we should all be doing with our courses, all the time…

Steve: …Yes.

John: …But the fact that you’re doing it makes it easier for instructors who perhaps, don’t have to do as much of that.

Steve: Yeah. But again, let me just say one thing; Waymaker is not my course, Waymaker is my text. So there’s whole levels to my course that go beyond Waymaker. That’s just one element of it. Not that I’m disagreeing with what you said.

John: I’ve seen you present at conferences on teaching principles, for decades now. And I know you’re constantly changing how you’re teaching your courses and trying new things there. And you’ve been doing a lot of great work for quite a while.

Steve: Thank you.

John: Going back a little bit though, to the question of mastery quizzing. When students take the quizzes at the end of a block, you said there’s one or two questions. When they do it a second time, do they get the same question or different questions?

Steve: No. We are adding questions fairly regularly, and so the test banks are getting larger. From the beginning, I think we started with 2000 questions. But again, that’s across the whole book. The questions are randomly chosen, so the odds are that students would get different questions at the self-check level, at the section level. There’s a different test bank for the self checks than there is for the module quizzes. But there are similar questions. In fact, we wrote two at a time basically when we did that.

John: This is a question more generally about Waymaker. Does it do any type of interleaved practice, where later in the course, does it call back earlier sections? Or is it just based on the current module?

Steve: No, it’s just based on the current module. But my more nuanced response to that is, economics is sort of cumulative. But I have thought about that, we just haven’t thought of a way to build it in yet.

John: In my classes, I’ve been adding that the last couple years where I just randomly pull in questions and the module quizzes from earlier modules. Maybe 10 to 15%, building up to about 20% at the end, just to help do a little bit more spaced practice as well.

Steve: I think I know how you could do that pretty easily. Because instructors have access to the test bank that their students are using, so that you can edit your own questions. But what that also means is that you could move questions from earlier into the course to later in the course. So I think there’s a way to do that.

John: Excellent.

Steve: So John, we learned all this in our graduate training, right?

John: [LAUGHTER] You know, it’s getting a little bit better. Some people are learning these things. We have someone in my department who actually came out of Kentucky where he had a lot of training and teaching and learning. But it’s still pretty uncommon.

Steve: Yep.

John: You mentioned two ways in which, OER materials are developed. Some by primary developers, such as the OpenStax and Lumen. And others, with people working in their basements…

Steve: …Yes.

John: …or working in a dark room somewhere. Which is how I often do a lot of my work. Is that process sustainable? And what role do for-profit publishers such as Lumen play in providing these services, or in continuing the development of OER materials?

Steve: There are a couple questions here. One is, is the development process for published OER materials, or OER materials created by publishers. Is that sustainable? And then the second one is, is the individual scholar model sustainable? And those are very different questions. The individual scholar model, I don’t know if sustainable is the right word. I have a colleague who did this, she did it all on her own. I’m so impressed. She didn’t have any support from the school other than a small summer grant. And she did it without any sort of extrinsic motivators. I think that over time, at least at schools like yours and mine, faculty are going to get credit in tenure and promotion, for creating OER, especially open textbooks. I think that’s really important. I think that people will eventually be able to get sabbatical leaves to create these materials. And I think that’s really important to keep that side of the OER creation process going. As far as revision, I don’t know enough about that to really answer that. But I’m curious. I may have to go talk to my colleague Katie now. As far as the publishers go, and I don’t mean the traditional publishers, every publisher has a plan for how they’re going to do this. Some work better than others. I know something about OpenStax and I know a lot about Lumen, about what their sustainability plan is. OpenStax have develop partnerships with a variety of ancillary publishers like Sapling Learning or Knewton. These people provide aftermarket functionality for the OpenStax books, and in return, they get kickbacks from these ancillary publishers. And by kickbacks, I don’t mean anything pejorative about that. I just mean that they contribute financially. I don’t know any more about how sustainable that model is. I know that that’s what OpenStax has been using. Lumen from the beginning, has been a commercial publisher. It took me two years to figure out how a commercial publisher could make money giving their content away. Maybe others haven’t thought about that, but I sure did. So, the short answer is, Lumen gives the content away, but charges a very modest amount, $25, for the intelligent backend. All the feedback that goes both to the students, and the instructors. Today, you personally, either of you, could go and get a copy of the Lumen Principles and Micro book, or the Principles of Macro book, and it’s yours forever, you can do with it what you want. But if you want to take the full Waymaker course, they charge $25. The idea is, that amount of money is both affordable to students, but also enough to maintain revisions and corrections, and keep the servers running and all of those things. So that’s the answer to that question. And I will say that every semester, I try to be completely transparent, and say, “If you don’t want to pay the $25, you can get all the content for free. But here’s what you lose.” In five years, I’ve never had a student who didn’t pay the $25, because they thought it was like beer money for the weekend, or something. Compared to spending 300 bucks on a traditional text that was nothing to them.

John: What are some of the barriers that you see to faculty adopting OER? You mentioned that people may have this perception of lower quality…

Steve: …Yes .

John: …but there’s quite a bit of evidence that the quality is not weaker in any way. And I think you had done some studies on that a while back, didn’t you?

STEVE. Yes. The number one problem I think is misinformation. The majority of faculty today don’t know what’s available in their discipline. Many of my colleagues have told me, “Yeah, OER sounds like a great idea, but there’s nothing available in my field.” Now, that’s flat out wrong. For your listeners, there is OER available for nearly every Gen-Ed course taught today. So that’s number one, is lack of knowledge of what’s available. Number two is, as you mentioned before, the belief that OER is inferior, that there’s no peer review. And that’s just not true. There’s a couple things here. One is that OER publishers don’t have a sales force, and so it’s going to take longer to get the word out. There’s been a lot of progress over the last few years. But at my school, we’re only in the second-year of our formal OER initiative. So we’ll see how it goes. The other thing that I think gets in the way of adoption of OER is path dependence, and the unwillingness of many faculty to change their textbooks because of the fixed costs involved. “I’m going to have to go through my lecture notes and make sure that I’m using all the same terms as the textbook does,” and that sort of thing. I don’t know the answer to that question. I know that some schools have used financial incentives, fairly modest financial incentives, to get faculty to try to make the switch. As far as my own assessment goes, every summer, I do statistical analysis of the effectiveness of the texts that I’m using. I looked at both the OpenStax Principles book, and also most recently, the Waymaker package. What I’ve looked at is, textbook alone, textbook with ancillary website, digital courseware, and because I used to teach a writing intensive version of the principles courses, I also looked at writing intensive. And what I found is pretty predictable, at least from somebody who has done this for a while. What I found is that there is no significant difference between student learning using OER, with commercial textbooks. I found that using either courseware or an ancillary website improves student learning outcomes, regardless of what the text is that you’re using. And I’ve also found that writing intensive courses seem to work better than non-writing intensive courses, because the students are getting into it in more detail. Over the last two years, I’ve been doing a randomized control trial, where I can really drill down and see what’s going on. And what I found is that using the full Waymaker package seems to have a statistically significant positive impact on student learning. So I’m going to rerun the analysis using last semester data, which I haven’t had a chance to get yet, but I’m anxious to see how that goes too. I believe this stuff works. And so I think sooner or later, more and more publishers—the commercial publishers too—are going to move towards digital courseware type products.

John: I think most of them have started to at least.

Steve: Yes, but it’s like turning the Titanic. Their base is so large that it’s going to take a while before even all of those people get on-board with this.

John: One thing I was wondering is whether you see more collaboration or competition in OER textbooks?

Steve: Initially, there was more collaboration in the early years. And the reason why is because anybody who was doing OER, was increasing the interest in users for everybody’s OER. Now, I think we’re going to see more competition between the users. Especially as more publishers are going to adaptive and personalized learning type courseware. I think that’s a way that publishers are going to be able to say, “Well, yeah, we’re doing that. But we’re doing better in our own particular way.” So I think there’s going to be a fair amount of product differentiation. And it will be harder for faculty, it’s going to take more work to dig in and see exactly what’s going on. I would love to see more published assessment of efficacy on the part of the commercial publishers. They’re only now starting to do that, and the studies that they publish are heavily controlled by them. So it’s not clear that they’re telling us about all of their things, just the ones that work. But at least it’s a start.

John: One of the things I see in most of those studies is comment to the effect that, “Students who use our adaptive learning platform have letter grades on average, one letter grade higher or point eight points higher.”

Steve: Yes, that’s right.

John: And there’s no evidence that they’ve done any control for the students who chose to use it versus those who didn’t.

Steve: That’s right.

John: But it would be nice if we could see more research on that.

Steve: And I think we will. At least I’m hopeful.

John: Earlier you told us a little bit about how your course is structured with some “just-in-time teaching,” and some activities there where you have students work on problems. Could you tell us a little bit more about how you structure your course so that it’s not duplicating the textbook?

Steve: The first thing that I would say is that, my intro course looks like almost anyone else’s Principles of Micro or Macro course. If you look at the course outline, it has all the normal topics in it. A very slight difference is, instead of assigning students chapters to read and problem sets to do, students have modules with content and learning activities to complete. There is some difference between my face-to-face sections and my online sections, because I teach both. My face-to-face sections are pretty much the way I described them to you earlier. My general approach is to do Socratic lecturing with a lot of in-class activities, like the supply and demand problems that I mentioned. I also like to have formal in-class discussions on interesting questions that don’t have a right answer. In the macro class, I spend a day talking about what is money. And I spend the day talking about what is government. And those are things that aren’t done in the same way and the same degree with a textbook, whether it’s Waymaker or something else. My online course is roughly similar. But what I do is I add group and individual activities to the online course to mimic what I do in class. I also have a weekly Google Hangout, a synchronous Google Hangout, where I can give students guidance about what I think they should be doing. And I can give little mini lectures on things that I know students have trouble with. But it also gives them a chance to ask me individual questions in a real time basis, one on one. Not a lot of students come to those Hangouts. I usually have between five and ten, and my classes are about 35. But more than 90% of the students watch the recordings. Google Hangouts are automatically recorded and archived in YouTube. So the students seem to like that a lot.

John: You mentioned that a number of people at Mary Washington have switched over, what proportion, would you say, of the faculty at Mary Washington has moved to using OER?

Steve: Single digits, a handful, probably less than ten at this point. But this semester, I have two new people. So I’m excited about that. And we haven’t yet given them any money or anything to do this. I’ve just been talking to people. I was invited to the College of Business’s summer retreat, and I gave a little talk about OER. And I got two people who expressed an interest in following up. One of whom has already done it. So I think we’re getting there. We just have to be patient.

Rebecca: So we normally wrap up by asking, well, what’s next?

Steve: What’s next for me is I’m continuing to iterate to improve Waymaker. I’m going to continue doing my own statistical analysis. So I get access to the aggregate analysis that Lumen does, but I also have my own analysis. So I can tailor that to my particular students. I also want to do something this semester that I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but have never done it. And that is to write a new non-traditional chapter for the micro book, which is relatively easy to do. It’s just really a question of me sitting down and doing it. So I know it’s doable, but I do want to actually make my version of Waymaker different from the standard version. In part, because it’ll better match the way I teach. But also because I want to see that it’s relatively easy to do so that I can talk about that to faculty.

John: Very good.

Steve: I’m going to the CTREE conference this summer to talk about Waymaker. And this is the first time we’ve actually reached out to a disciplinary conference. So I think that’ll be fun.

John: You know, I always want to go to the CTREE conference, but I teach at Duke in the summer and it runs right into that. So I haven’t been able to go. And we should note that the CTREE conference is a Conference on Teaching and Research and Economic Education.

Steve: I love to talk about this stuff, because I believe it.

Rebecca: Yeah, it was really interesting.

John: Thank you.

Steve: Oh, you’re very welcome. Thanks for the opportunity.

[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 Kelly Knight, Kim Fischer, and Jacob Alverson.

[MUSIC]

59. Gatekeeping in Math Ed

Teachers at all levels often play an important role in influencing the educational and career paths of our students. In this episode, Dr. Marcia Burrell joins us to discuss how math teachers play a critical role as gatekeepers who may either welcome students to or provide a barrier to student success in all STEM fields. Marcia is the Chair of the Curriculum and Instruction Department at SUNY Oswego.

Show Notes

  • National Council of Teachers of Math (NCTM)
  • Budapest Semesters in Math Education
  • Polya, G. (1973). How to solve it: A new aspect of mathematical method. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • The Polya Approach Used at the University of Idaho
  • Bjork, R.A. (1994). “Institutional Impediments to Effective Training”. Learning, remembering, believing: Enhancing human performance.
  • Bain, K. (2011). What the best college teachers do. Harvard University Press.
  • Brown, P. C., Roediger III, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick. Harvard University Press.
  • Miller, M. D. (2014). Minds online: Teaching effectively with technology. Harvard University Press.
  • Miller, L. & Spiegel, A. (Hosts). (2015, January 23).Invisibilia: How to become Batman pt. 1 [Radio broadcast episode].
  • National Research Council, & Mathematics Learning Study Committee. (2001). Adding it up: Helping children learn mathematics. National Academies Press.
  • Brandsford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (1999). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. National Academy Press.

Other resources:

  • Larson, M. (2016). The Need to Make Homework Comprehensible. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
  • Stinson, D.W (2004). Mathematics as gate-keeper: Three theoretical perspectives that aim toward empowering all children with a Key to the Gate, The Mathematics Educator14 (1), 8–18.
  • Burrell, Marcia (2016) Gatekeeping in Mathematics TEDx talk at OCC. January 29, 2016.

Transcript

John: Teachers at all levels often play an important role in influencing the educational and career paths of our students. In this episode, we examine how math teachers play a critical role as gatekeepers who may either welcome students to or provide a barrier to student success in all STEM fields.

[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: Our guest today is Dr. Marcia Burrell, the Chair of the Curriculum and Instruction Department at SUNY Oswego. Welcome, Marcia.

Marcia: Thank you.

Rebecca: Welcome. Today our teas are…

Marcia: Earl Grey with caffeine.

Rebecca: Extra caffeine. [LAUGHTER]

John: Mine is just a pure peppermint tea today.

Rebecca: And I have a jasmine green tea.

John: We’ve invited you here to talk a little bit about the work you’ve done on math instructors as gatekeepers. What does it mean to be a gatekeeper?

Marcia: Well, I like to use the word gatekeeping because sometimes gatekeeping has to do with an open gate, where you can just slide right through, or someone gives you the key, or they’ve given you the secret password, or it’s a barrier, where if you don’t really know what the hidden curriculum is about passing through the gate then you could stay there and be turned away. And in mathematics a lot of times people are afraid of math or they’ve been socialized to think they cannot do math and it’s really a gate that’s been created either by themselves through socialization or it’s been created by a math person or by someone like a parent who said, “oh, don’t worry, I wasn’t good at math either.” So, when I think about gatekeeping and mathematics it’s really about barriers that are created by us or barriers that are created by others, or for people who are really successful in mathematics, they have an opportunity to open the gate; there are certain things that they can do that will make people pass through the gate more easily.

Rebecca: I think our students can empathize with the idea of gatekeeping when it comes to mathematics—you hear them talking about these stories of certain situations where the barriers have been in place for them, or sometimes that’s faculty. For example, I’ve heard many times in creative fields where the creative faculty might say, “yeah, we know you’re not great at math but you have to take math,” or I had a situation when I was a kid in middle school—I remember distinctly middle school teachers saying “the women in this class aren’t going to do as well” and then I remember the few of us banding together and then we got really good grades on this final exam that we were told that we wouldn’t do well in. I think that those narratives are certainly there and it’s interesting to think about it not only from the person coming to the gate but also from the gatekeeper perspective, which leads me to the question of, what are some things that gatekeepers do that keep people out?

Marcia: I’m gonna focus on math people mostly, where sometimes they say things like maybe in a beginning level math course, “Why didn’t you know that? You should’ve learned that before. I don’t understand why you can’t do fractions.” So, there’s vocabulary built into a lot of us where we send out messages which get people to realize, “Oh, there’s something wrong with me; I should know how to do this.” So, they start imposing those same messages on themselves. The other thing that I think is important is in mathematics there’s always been a stratification about who can do math or who should do math and who can be successful in math. Often, as you just said, women have stories about fighting to get into a advanced math class because they didn’t do very well on some class but they were willing to work hard. So, certain populations are harmed because they’re socialized that way that when women have trouble in mathematics we say, “Oh, we should make it easier; you should do a group of courses that are not gonna lead you to calculus in high school,” but sometimes when men struggle we go, “Oh, struggles perfectly fine.” In the U.S., teachers make it easier for students to learn; they give them answers, they work out all the details. When I say give answers, I mean they work out all of the problems so that it’s really just rote, as opposed to in other countries, struggle is actually honored—hard work and struggle is part of the mathematics learning process, where in the U.S. sometimes we don’t allow people to struggle. If you got a B in Algebra I, well, you don’t really need to take Algebra II because the minimum requirement in New York state is Algebra I, and the fact is struggle is a part of the learning process. Historically, we’ve always stratified who is successful in math or who can take math and the level of courses that people can take. Plato 2,300 years ago believed that everybody needed arithmetic, but the advanced math was relegated to philosopher guardians, and in the 1920s the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics argued to have mathematics part of the curriculum, and between 1890 and the 1940s there was a growth in public schools and the perception was that sometimes they weren’t sure that students had the intellectual capability of doing some of the mathematics that NCTM thought was important. But remember in the 1950s the business world and industry said, “What are you guys doing in schools? The people that you’re putting out there can’t do mathematics.” Well, that was mathematics for a purpose and then Sputnik happened and all of a sudden math became this subject that we wanted to make sure people had. But think about how many English classes do people take—one or two in high school, but in high school students often take four or five math courses. I’m not saying they’re not important, but it really forces us to think about mathematics as an elite subject when gatekeeping from my perspective is it’s not about an elite subject, it’s everyone can do math; people are born mathematical and everyone should have an opportunity to do the subject and not fail at it, but struggle and make movements towards whatever learning they need to do.

John: So a lot of this sounds like our society is creating or emphasizing or encouraging the development of fixed mindsets in math where many messages coming through (as you both have mentioned) in early childhood discourage people from thinking that they’re able to do math and only the elite can get through. Is that common in other cultures?

Marcia: I mentioned earlier that in other cultures hard work and struggle are honored and I witnessed in Budapest, when I was visiting there as part of my sabbatical, that students were asked to go up to the board and struggle through a problem, even if they had no idea. And we do a lot less of that because either you know the answer or you don’t; that doesn’t really work that way—it is an iterative process. I used to work on problems and maybe get a little frustrated, put it away and the next day I’d look at it and I go, “Oh, now I get it.” It’s really about process. The NCTM standards talk about process and product, and if you want people to learn mathematics then you really have to emphasize process, working in teams, giving people a chance to try things and fail but also collaborate with others to ensure that maybe there are multiple ways of approaching a problem, but if you’re not allowing students to talk with one another and work it through, then sometimes they think there’s only one way to do it and it really doesn’t improve their mathematical abilities. Mathematicians are about process—there are certain skills that mathematicians use. Good mathematicians persevere through problem-solving. They check their answers using different methods, they plan how to solve a problem versus jumping into a solution, and they justify the answers and communicate with others. Good mathematicians don’t just know the answer; it’s a process, and there’s even collaboration between mathematicians, but when we teach it on the K-12 level, we say, “This is what you need to learn and you need to learn it in a specified amount of time,” and so a lot of times students are turned off by the way we teach mathematics. Opening the gate is really about helping teachers rethink how they actually teach mathematics. We have a lot of data about how to successfully teach math, and it’s about problem-solving, reasoning, communication, connections and representations, but if you’re just gonna stand at the board and write the answer to a problem, that doesn’t help people really connect to how you came to that problem. So, gatekeeping is about getting teachers to rethink how they’re teaching mathematics and what they think is important. Process and products are important, but process is actually more important.

Rebecca: You mentioned mathematics as a collaborative process, but in my experience in K-12 I don’t think I ever worked with another person once.

Marcia: It’s funny you mention that. Again, the stratification stuff is huge. I attended a program called Budapest Semesters in Math Education and it’s geared for Americans, Canadians to come to this program. They’re interested in both juniors and seniors to come and learn about the problem-solving approach to mathematics. These are students who are mostly math majors, but they could be math ed majors, and they are sent to these schools where they’ve selected the top students in mathematics to use a problem-solving approach and what happens is they give them a problem with no background and they ask them to work out these problems. They can use their textbooks, they can use calculators, but the fact is our students—Americans and Canadians—get to witness students almost trying anything to work out these high-level mathematics problems—sometimes they’re theoretical, sometimes they’re applied. But what the students say who are in this particular program—and I got to be in these classes with them—was, “Why can’t we have all students use some of these processes?” And the processes are really just the things we already know that good mathematicians are supposed to do, sort of George Pólya, you know: analyze the problem, look at all the facts, try something, test your answer. But you actually get to witness that. So, when you asked me “None of the classes I ever went to that were collaborative and problem-based and working in teams,” well we seem to have an idea that only the gifted and talented or special programs will allow kids who already show aptitude to do mathematics in that particular way, and the fact is I visited a school in Budapest where this teacher who’s been working with the gifted and talented students got permission from the parents to try this problem-solving approach for a ninth grade through 12th grade. They had to get sign-offs by parents, because of course, in our system, if kids don’t know certain things by the end of certain grades then their opportunities—another gate—for getting into the university and going through the career path are cut off. So, these parents had to sign off that they were going to risk that what she was gonna to do over the next four years was gonna be helpful to their students and that they wouldn’t be harmed by doing this problem-solving approach. I witnessed several math classes where this teacher had been working as part of her dissertation to have students go through this problem-solving approach—it’s not just Pólya; there are other… Pósa there’s a Pósa method—I met this gentleman who, he was in his 80s and he invented the Pósa method and he’s one of the top mathematicians in his age… in his day, but he devoted his life to teaching problem-solving to kindergarten through grade 12. But the point that I’m making is, I witness students who had been through this process, and they were explaining problems to their peers on the board in ways that I haven’t seen good math teachers explain. But they built these kids up from start to finish to be confident about what they knew, to work in groups, not be afraid to make mistakes, and I think that we can do more of allowing students to learn not just at their own pace, but learn what mathematicians do—the process of engaging with one another if we weren’t so afraid of the whole accountability—what do kids know at the end of 12th grade? What do they know at the end of 11th grade? It’s recursive. Some things they learned in ninth grade in Algebra I will come back in Algebra II and when they’re college students they’re gonna pull the algebra and geometry together, if we allow it, as opposed to looking at these areas as completely separate things. One of the things about gatekeeping is that teachers have to think about students as already being competent; they’ve got to provide students with scaffolding so that students that are in different places have an opportunity to demonstrate what they know. I also think that we have to have high expectations, but we have to let students understand that they can extend the learning if they take some risks; that’s what good mathematicians do, and then we have to exhibit in depth knowledge as well as subject matter knowledge. So there are certain things that gatekeepers—math teachers—can do, but they’ve got to trust that students can learn, and we’ve got to keep the expectations high, but also scaffold for them so that they’re successful.

Rebecca: …a lot of evidence-based practices.

John: Yes, I was just going to say a lot of what you’re talking about, there’s a tremendous amount of research supporting that, not just in math instruction but across the board. In terms of providing students with challenging problems—you have the desirable difficulties of Bjork and Bjork, for example, and in terms of learning from mistakes, that shows up in all of the research on teaching and learning and it’s something that Ken Bain talked about when he summarized some of this research in What the Best College Teachers Do, and it’s also shown up in several of the books we’ve used in our reading groups, Make It Stick and Minds Online, for example: that retrieval practice, low stakes testing, where students can make mistakes and learn from mistakes, is effective in all types of instruction. So, these are really good practices that seem to be mostly neglected in math instruction.

Rebecca: I was expecting John to also mention something about growth mindset. [LAUGHTER]

John: I think I already did a while back, but treating math as something you’re either good at or not good at by teachers and by families and by our culture discourages the development of a growth mindset, and that’s really important. This year I’ve completely flipped my large microeconomics class and one of the things I had them do is before each class I asked them to do some readings and then I asked them to work through some problems in the readings; I have students submit a short Google form, where I ask them just two questions before each class. The first question is: “What have they learned from this reading assignment before that day’s class?” And also, “What are they still struggling with or what don’t they fully understand?” And half to two-thirds of them before each and every class list, “I have trouble interpreting graphs;” “I have trouble understanding graphs;” or that “I have trouble computing these things,” and that’s all basic math, and of course they have trouble doing it when it’s the first time they see it, but they see it as a barrier— “I’m just not good at it,” and every day in class I’ve been trying to encourage them to say, “Well, you may not do it now, but you can get better at this;” “You haven’t yet mastered this;” “You’re not yet good at this, but the more you do it the easier it gets,” and we’re not always seeing that happen, and we see that in lots of areas.

Marcia: Yeah, I think that students are more willing to say “I’m not good at math; I don’t have any experience with math,” but they would never say, “I can’t read; I’m not good at reading.” They might say it, but it’s socially acceptable to say “I’m not good at mathematics,” and the fact is when you look at a group of kindergarteners and they’re in a classroom, they’re all learning for the first time how to add and subtract and they slowly… I’m sorry, through some of their elementary school teachers who often are afraid of mathematics, and they say little things, “Oh, don’t worry about that, it’s okay to not be able to do that, we’ll work on that later on,” but they say it in a way that sometimes gives students permission to say, “Oh, I don’t have to learn that—I’m a girl, I’m a student of color, I don’t have to learn that because the teacher said she doesn’t know it either,” and so one of the concerns that I have for how we train childhood educators is we force them through, at least on our campus, these two math classes where they go kicking and screaming, but the fact is we almost need to reprogram them to think about the things that they can do mathematically and then build curriculum around them. It’s not always about the fact that the way you learn is the same way that all the kids that you’re teaching learn; it’s more about how do you change your perceptions about mathematics. There’s something on NPR, and I’ll have to find the reference a little bit later on, where this young man who was blind learned how to ride a bike, was sent to school, and people couldn’t even really understand why he was able to do all of these things as a blind person—well, his mother decided to treat him like he was a sighted person and it’s a Batman series, where the fact is, if you convince someone that they can do something and you believe it, then all of the things that you do to work on their perceptions about their capacity will come through. But first the teacher has to believe it and then they have to do all of these things to scaffold it. The fact is that, and again, I’ll have to find the researcher, but he did this study where he told all of his researchers that these mice were smart mice… these mice were everyday the same mice… what happened is the researchers came in and they treated those mice like they were smart—they handled them differently, they had them run through whatever people do in psychology with mice, and then he came back later on and said “All of these mice have exactly the same capabilities.” Well, that works in exactly the same way in the math classroom; students come, and if we believe that they’re capable and we come off and treat them with respect about what they have learned and how to build on that, then we’re gonna see better progress in their learning. I have to come back to the gate because the teacher has a lot of power to make the gate accessible or make the gate a barrier, and the barrier is really just the messages that the teacher says to the students and to herself about success in mathematics, and we lose entire generations of people when the gate is closed to them mainly because of perception.

Rebecca: So much discussion of gates it should be important to note that in front of Marcia is this picture of so many different kinds of gates in our conversation. Can you talk a little bit about the gates that you have in front of you?

Marcia: Yeah, I decided to Google different kinds of gates and when you think about the Brandenburg Gate or you think about gates like this one —remind me what this is called; this is in Cincinnati—the arch; this is really a gate, but this shows an opening to something, so when you think about gatekeeping in mathematics, I want us to think about people being gatekeepers for accessibility. So when you look at those pictures you think of when you’re going through the turnstile to pay with an EZ Pass. That is a barrier. If you don’t have money, you don’t have an EZ Pass, you’re not getting through, but if you look at the door to no return like in Benin it’s an opening to the next world just like certain pictures of gates just have you think differently about openings and closings.

Rebecca: There’s some like the dog pen where there is no way in or out; it looks like that one’s just closed forever.

Marcia: Yeah, which one is it? This one or this one? Right, I mean this has a gate, but often people are closed inside of thinking that they can’t do math and they can’t be successful. The job of a teacher would be to help them jump over that particular gate or find a different way to think about opening that particular gate. If you’re a dog and you’re inside of a pen, I think you’re just gonna need somebody to lift you up over that gate, and I think about that with teachers that what they have to do with each individual student is completely different, but their responsibility is to help them understand that they’re all mathematicians and they all have capacity for success in mathematics.

Rebecca: You’ve talked a little bit about how gatekeepers can open the gate or provide the leg up over the wall, or whatever it is, right, that’s there. Can you talk a little bit more about how to be inclusive and how faculty and teachers can really support this environment that would allow for problem-solving and allowing students to fail and try again and to iterate and eventually succeed?

Marcia: I’ve thought a lot about elementary school students and middle school students, where you’ve probably heard about the Montessori Method. The Montessori Method, you work with individuals to build from what their interests are and it turns out that students without a lot of direct instruction can complete whatever the curriculum is for that grade level by mapping to their interests, their strengths, and projects that they do where they’re learning the mathematics in ways that might be considered non-traditional. In the Montessori Method, they’re not just looking at memorizing times tables; they’re looking at multiplication as repeated addition, they’re looking at visualizations instead of just looking at a text. And the fact is that sometimes, I think, that if we allowed students to individualize their learning, especially in middle school and high school, that there’d be more progress than forcing students through the curriculum where each week they’re expected to learn something but they’re not learning it, they’re sort of just being dragged through the mud. And I have a lot of respect for my peers who are math teachers. I was a math teacher where I felt like I know what that kid needs, I need to take time to help that kid through what they need, but I didn’t have the courage to stop what I was doing and figure out how to individualize or make them work in small groups. I was a successful K-12 teacher, but I feel like I started to figure out what was needed when I made the decision to leave. So, part of my job as a math educator is to help our candidates who are gonna be teachers in schools to have the courage to do what they know is right: think about their love of mathematics and give kids problems that are theoretical and have them try it; give them applied problems, give them things where they have to use visualizations and not just know the procedures, but also understand the concept.

John: And also perhaps to use peer instruction, as you talked about, where students explaining things to each other reinforces learning for each student.

Marcia: Yeah, and sometimes the things that we expect of what we call the gifted and talented are exactly the things that other students can do but we’re afraid to take a risk, and I met earlier this afternoon with one of our adjuncts that’s teaching math methods to our graduate students and she said her job is to teach her candidates how to be good teachers, and sometimes that means forgoing what they think they wanted accomplished on that day and building something fun that’s gonna get students to see that math has many openings, not just following things through rote or through memorization. So, I had a really nice conversation with her because she does work in the school systems, but she’s teaching a course for us and she uses constructivist approaches. I have many peers that are still engaged in this math war that it has to be rote, it has to be step-by-step. In the constructivist approach, you care more about the process that students engage in and there’s a program that I listen to on Sunday morning it’s on NPR where it’s a puzzle and the puzzle is usually related to a vocabulary puzzle as opposed to a math puzzle, but the type of thinking that you have to engage to solve those puzzles really is mathematical thinking, so I love those puzzles, but they’re all couched in word puzzles… but it’s really mathematical thinking… and so I think the teachers need to use more of those word puzzles to bring people in so that they understand that they’re engaged in mathematical thinking—it’s just not called mathematical thinking. One of the other things that I wanted to mention before I run out of time is we are heavily tracking students into particular tracks. Sometimes you’re in the track where you’re just going to do Algebra I, and sometimes you’re in the track where you’re gonna get to do Algebra I and Algebra II, and maybe you’ll get to do Geometry, but some of the best learning occurs when there’s heterogeneous grouping and there’s less tracking. This gate stuff, these gatekeeping, really reinforces tracking, which when students come to SUNY Oswego and they’re in a remedial class and don’t know why they’re in the remedial class, because they may have been tracked in a particular way and cut off many, many job opportunities or majors because they were tracked in a particular way, and that is gatekeeping that occurs in fourth grade. And again our responsibility for our childhood educators is to get kids to think more broadly about what mathematics is; it’s not just arithmetic, it’s not just geometry, it’s not just theoretical problems; there are many types of problems that childhood people could engage students in that wouldn’t shut the door to possibilities 10 or 12 years later when students find out that they were tracked in a way that makes it so that they could never do graphic design or they could never do engineering or something else that they didn’t really understand was possible because somebody closed the gate early on.

John: …and that’s really important because most of the growth in income inequality is due to differences in educational attainment and the returns to education. And the returns to education in the STEM fields is far above the returns in other areas as well. So, keeping people out of those areas means that the people with those areas end up doing really well, but the people without those skills end up in jobs that are perhaps overcrowded with lower job prospects, lower prospects of growth and it helps reduce social mobility and economic mobility. It’s a serious problem in our society; it’s the worst we’ve ever seen it in the U.S.

Marcia: Yeah, I can’t connect it completely to perceptions, but a long time ago I taught a remedial math course at Clinton Community College and I had a student in that class and she was a smart person—I think everyone is smart—but I walked through how to study math, how to approach it: you are capable, work hard, keep asking questions, and about 10 years later I got a postcard from her—this flabbergasted me; she was in a remedial class and she had entered a PhD program in mathematics and she said it was just about the fact that somebody finally showed her how to study math—it was read the textbook, try the problems, come to class, listen maybe to the lecture, don’t be afraid to make mistakes; when you’re tired take a break. There are certain things We know that people can be successful in mathematics but we keep thinking that it’s this magic wand thing; it’s not a magic wand thing. We actually know —there’s research from Adding it Up —where we know exactly how people learn math well. The stuff research from Bransford, which how to study mathematics, how to learn mathematics, it’s written in black and white from large-scale studies, but then we return to the rote memorization, follow these steps and that’s not the beauty of mathematics at all.

Rebecca: One of the things that I think is really interesting about what you’re saying is that societally we might think, “Oh, fourth grade teacher… not really gonna have a big impact,” but you’re really talking about this fourth grade teacher is not a gatekeeper of the little gate around the garden; this is like the gate to the universe.

Marcia: Absolutely, and most of our math candidates who are not math concentrates—they’ve got to take these two four-credit math courses—will say, “I just need to get through this class; I hate math.” If you hate math it comes through loud and clear in your teaching; it’s really difficult to mask that. I taught a math for diverse learners course that the School of Education and Arts and Sciences Math Department and Curriculum and Instruction collaborated on and it was a math for diverse learner, so some of the things that I’ve been talking about here was in a full graduate course, and students would say, “Well, I never really thought about that; I thought everybody was gonna learn math the same way I learned math”—you’re a math person, I shouldn’t even say that. You’re a math person—you came through the system and you were successful in the current system, but if you want to build the next generation you’ve got to think about some of these other factors—you’re gonna be in a system, and as we’ve talked about systems, you are part of the system and you do have power to make changes to it, even if it’s perceptions, even if it’s just giving students the perception that you care about their learning and that they can succeed, and so this is really important to me. There are three principles: teachers must engage student misconceptions, understanding requires factual knowledge and conceptual understanding, and a metacognitive approach enables students self-monitoring. If I think about gatekeeping, if teachers kept those three principles in mind, they’re not mine—it’s in the research. This is sort of revolutionary because we don’t want to restrict people to thinking that only certain people can do mathematics, but if math teachers, whether they’re childhood or adolescence, or university teachers think about what good mathematicians do, they’ll follow these three principles and it might move us forward. I know it’s a big deal because the successful people want to keep what they have to themselves, but I think we miss out on the potential of entire generations if we don’t give them access to opening the gate through mathematics. When the Common Core came out teachers had the perception that they had to give these problems to students and parents would call and complain—“I can’t even do these problems; these aren’t the problems that I did when I was a kid”—well, the fact is we weren’t supposed to be sending these problems home; we were supposed to be doing those problems in class, and so a lot of the Common Core mathematics was supposed to be using manipulatives and getting kids to talk about how they think through the arithmetic problem. They were sending home problems and parents were complaining they were spending two or three hours to work through these problems, and there was an article put out—it was an NCTM—where they said what is your problem? No, don’t send these problems home for kids to fight with their parents, ‘cause that’s just gonna reinforce, “Oh, I couldn’t do math either;” it was supposed to be completely done in the classroom in collaborative groups, but we’re still not interested in teaching in that way. So, we sent home the homework—well, you could have been sending home memorize these timetables just as we did 20 years ago or 30 years ago, so finally NCTM put something out to help math teachers in the K-12 area not to send home these problems that would take parents two to three hours, but to rethink the organization of their classrooms where students could work on problems and have fun with mathematics, and the fact is that there are reforms that mathematicians fight about; there are a whole host of mathematicians that said Common Core was bad; Common Core is not bad, the way it was implemented was bad, so now we’ve done some backtracking to think about the fact that when you carry, when you’re subtracting or you’re adding, why do we do that? And the Common Core got students to make sense out of place value and make sense out of what it means when we carry this is about the tens place or the hundreds place and whenever you have new curriculum, Common Core or what was the curriculum in the ‘50s, I can’t remember… the new math… there’s always new math, it’s just an approach to make it more inclusive, but sometimes the way we roll things out makes it difficult, at least for the next generation of teachers, so I’m pro-reform movements, but we have to take the time and the energy to implement it in a way that’s actually gonna be useful—we just keep going back to the way we taught math a hundred years ago.

Rebecca: It sounds like what happened was faculty who knew how to do things a particular way get handed something that’s different but not a way of demonstrating or doing the different, right, like…

John: …without the professional development needed to allow them to implement it effectively.

Marcia: Correct. That’s correct.

Rebecca: The method doesn’t match the material.

Marcia: Exactly. At the same time they were putting out that students have to take a main assessment in fourth grade and eighth grade, but those assessments didn’t really align to this new Common Core curriculum, and so lots of things have changed over the last, I’d say seven to ten years, and we’re sort of coming out of that. When students come to the university level we still expect them to know mathematics. Do you remember twenty-five years ago they changed the math curriculum to be Math A and B, Course I, II, and III? New York state was the only state that was really thinking more globally about, “Wow, it doesn’t always have to be about algebra—it could be about statistics, it can be about more applied,” but the fact is universities didn’t change and we were still expecting students to know this narrow curriculum but it did broaden what people thought about mathematics, but it didn’t really help a lot of those students because then they were closed out of particular career areas because they might have been in a school that embraced applied math or embraced business math or something that might not connect to what they would do at the university level.

John: You’ve also been involved with Project Smart here at Oswego. Could you you tell us a little bit about that and how it relates to math instruction.

Marcia: Project Smart was a thirty-year project where teachers came to SUNY Oswego for summers to do professional development, math, science, technology. There are some teachers retiring over the last couple of years that came to Project Smart right from the beginning. We brought people in like Damian Schofield in the early days to learn about human-computer interaction. We brought people in from music and from art to help teachers integrate other things into their teaching, so they used to come for three weeks, then they came for two weeks, then they came for one week, then we built it into the department where faculty got released time to go into schools and work with teachers from the bottom up to think about how to improve teaching in their classroom. Project Smart really honored the work that teachers did because we would say, “What do you want to improve in your classroom? Are there particular things that you know students are struggling with?” This past year, funding for Project Smart ended, but the institution is still supporting individual faculty to go into schools and work with teachers to build classrooms that connect with the learners that they have in front of them. It’s more connected to what’s called a professional development school, where at the university we have the latest about how to teach, whether it’s math or English or social studies or modern language, and then we go into schools where they’re dealing with kids every single day and we try to help them figure out how to improve as a teacher; we meet them where they are; we build from there, so Project Smart is over—I’m not gonna say it’s dead, but we have a different system to work on professional development schools but just in a different way.

John: So you’re still doing the same thing even though it’s not under that official title?

Marcia: Correct. Correct.

Rebecca: We always wrap up our episodes by asking, what next?

Marcia: Oh my goodness, thank you for asking what next. After returning from my sabbatical, where I had the opportunity to be part of Budapest Semesters in Math Education where I got to see classrooms where students were using Pólya’s problem-solving approach in addition to something called the Pósa method, I worked with Josh McKeown, who’s from international education to reduce the cost of the Budapest program, so we’re working to recruit math students, both childhood and adolescence teacher candidates, as well as straight math candidates to consider going to Budapest over a winter course for one or two weeks over winter session or during spring break. What would they experience if they went to a short course? They would visit classrooms using the Pósa method, they would sit in on some of the math courses at BSME, where teachers are actually showing how to use a problem-solving approach in mathematics, where sometimes our students say “You talk about problem solving, you talk about the constructive approach, but no one is doing it so we don’t really know what it is.” The next step is to work with international ed to get a group of students to do the BSME program.

Rebecca: That’s really incredible.

Marcia: I’m excited about it too and I hope to also re-institute my math for diverse learners course because through that course I reinforce that I believe students should have access to high-quality, engaging math instruction. I believe all students should have mathematically rich curriculum. I believe all students should have high expectations and strong support, and we’re all gatekeepers— we are change agents and we control the gate. I think it’s ambitious because many people don’t agree with me saying that mathematics needs to be more inclusive, but that’s what I’ve been working for my entire career and I hope to continue that way.

Rebecca: Your work is incredible and we’re really excited that you’re doing that work.

Marcia: Thank you.

Rebecca: I know as someone who’s in a field that you don’t always associate with math—I believe in math and so I hope we can all help support your initiative.

John: It’s a major social justice issue.

Marcia: It’s a huge social justice issue because, again, what happens is often students of color, students that come from poor families may or may not have had the best math instruction. I mean, it’s a big cycle, and when they come here we should be able to help not just convince them, but this is a public institution. We should be able to provide access for them to reach whatever goals they hope to. We should be able to take students where they are and help them achieve whatever their focus is, whether it’s math related or not.

John: Well, thank you.

Rebecca: Thank you so much.
[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.