Category: K-12

188. Student-Ready Courses

Posted in active learning, engagement, flipped class, higher education, K-12, learning, mastery learning, math ed, online learning, pedagogy, peer instruction, STEM, teaching
May 19, 2021

College faculty sometimes complain that many of the first-year students who enter their courses are not “college ready.” In this episode, Natalie Hurley joins us to examine strategies that can be used to ease this transition and help ensure that our courses are “student ready.” Natalie is a New York State Master Teacher and a 2018 NNSTOY STEM Fellow who teaches high school mathematics in the Indian River Central School District in Watertown, NY.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: College faculty sometimes complain that many of the first-year students who enter their courses are not “college ready.” In this episode, we examine strategies that can be used to ease this transition and help ensure that our courses are “student ready.”

[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 guest today is Natalie Hurley. Natalie is a New York State Master Teacher and a 2018 NNSTOY STEM Fellow who teaches high school mathematics in the Indian River Central School District in Watertown, NY. Natalie was also one of our students here at SUNY Oswego. Welcome, Natalie,

Natalie: T hank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are… Natalie, are you drinking any tea?

Natalie: I am, I’m drinking a peach tea because it’s warming up outside and I want to feel that warmth.

Rebecca: That sounds right up John’s alley,

John: …and I am drinking a ginger peach green tea.

Rebecca: I knew there’d be peach. It’s almost like you guys coordinated. I have Irish breakfast today.

John: No Scottish?

Rebecca: I am almost out of the Irish breakfast. And then we will move on to a different container.

John: Move down the Empire [LAUGHTER] and head back to your English breakfast and afternoon.

Rebecca: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

John: Okay, we’ve invited you here to talk about the transition between high school and college. Could you first tell us a little bit about the courses that you teach?

Natalie: I teach high school math. And I have a pretty nice spectrum. I teach algebra I, calculus, and precalculus. I’m in my fifth year of teaching precalculus and calculus, and I have taught algebra I, eight years.

John: Excellent. What were your majors in college?

Natalie: So, I was a math major from the get go. And then I had this fantastic professor who helped me find my love of economics. His name is Professor John Kane, and he’s here with us too. [LAUGHTER] And then, once I started to find my love of economics, I picked up a minor in it. Unfortunately, it was too late in the game to pick up a double major, but the minor was great too.

John: And we did talk a little bit about you going on to grad school in economics. And I was a little disappointed that you didn’t, but then I thought you could do a lot of good in the school system. So, one of the things we want to talk to you about is the differences between your experiences in college and the way you teach your classes now. Could you talk a little bit about some of the differences between what you observed as an undergraduate student and the way in which you teach now in secondary school?

Natalie: Yes. So there are definitely a lot of differences. Although I tried to definitely keep that idea of college and career readiness, being wholesome in my classroom. I remember in college it was a lot of lecture style, a combination between very, very large classes of hundreds. And my math classes were usually pretty small, less than 20, generally. In my classroom, in a non pandemic year, I have somewhere between 15 and 20 students usually. Of course, now we’re doing cohorts. So I have a class as small as two and another class as large as 13… is my largest class… on Thursdays and Fridays. So I just remember, in college, a lot of lecture style: the teacher talks, you write notes, you can ask questions, but it’s very much like you raise your hand, if a teacher calls on you, you can ask a question. In my classroom, it’s more a conversation about math, whereas I’m leading them to discover the math, hopefully on their own, with a little bit of questioning from me to lead them there. There’s a lot of… in a non-pandemic year, think-pair-shares, or working in groups, or talking it out with their partner, or somebody that they sit near… things like that, that’s a little bit harder to do these days, especially when I only have a class of two in there sitting six feet away from each other or more.

Rebecca: Everything’s a think-pair-share. [LAUGHTER]

Natalie: Right. So yeah, and as I grow, and I become more seasoned, it becomes more student centered and less about me than it had been before. So I want to put the students in the center, whereas when I was there, it was very much the teachers up there telling you how to do it. And then this is how you do the calculus. And then this is how you do calc 2, this is how you do calc 3, and they just show you and you find your study groups, and then you work with each other after class as opposed to in class. So that seems to be some of the differences. I remember in college is a lot of rote memorization: know these words, be able to regurgitate this proof, things like that, where just now, in my classroom, and really the focus of high school math, and really all math through the Common Core standards, is that deep understanding, getting to the core and understanding vertically, what number sense and number theory is throughout all the grade levels.

Rebecca: It sounds like you’ve incorporated a lot of evidence-based practices into your own practice, which we encourage all of our faculty, even at the college level, to do as well. We hear a lot of faculty complaining about students not being “college ready.” And maybe that’s because there’s still a lot of lecture and memorization, and we want to keep changing that. What are some ways that we can become more “student ready” and bring students in?

Natalie: I think it’s very important that colleges understand what it’s like in the high school, how teachers are teaching, what they’re teaching. I’m in my ninth year, and the next year, we’ll start to move into the next gen math standards. And then that’s going to be the third set of standards. And I think it’s really important for college professors at all levels to be able to understand what did these standards look like for these kids? And how do I need to change what I’m teaching to adapt to that? I recently had a very informal discussion with the master teacher program and SUNY professors at SUNY Delhi about their math and science curriculum. And there was just a lot of surprises on both ends about what’s being taught, what isn’t being taught any more… emphasis on the calculator… standards now are being written so that there’s a lot of calculator use and students are losing a lot of their number sense, because you don’t need to know how to add and subtract, multiply and divide fractions when you get into high school, because you have a calculator that’s going to do it all, which turns into a lot of button pushing. But that’s definitely going to have a trickle down effect into… or trickle up effect, I guess… in college, when these students get there and they’re so used to being fully dependent on calculator and technology use… which is great if you’re a college that also promotes that. But some colleges may also still say, “Hey, we want to limit technology.”

John: Since you were in college, I think much of our teaching has changed. I know in my own department, most of us were doing a lot of lecturing when you were a student. And there’s been a pretty steady transition away from that. And that’s been true in many departments, including our math department.

Natalie: That’s great to hear.

John: But we still see a lot of lecture. And one of the things we’re hoping is that perhaps the experience of the transition to remote instruction has encouraged more people to try some new approaches to teaching and learning.

Natalie: We have definitely seen that in the high school, a lot of teachers who were behind the ball, as far as utilizing technology in their classrooms, it’s been forced to become great at it… literally overnight. So I guess if there’s a silver lining to all of this, that is definitely key right there. I think something that’s extremely important in high school is making connections to real world, making everything very real life, how am I ever going to use this in real life and making sure that that is evident in the student learning. And I don’t teach in a college, I haven’t been in a college in 10-15 years. But I think that if you wanted to be more student ready is also connecting all of your curricula to career readiness. Students want to know why am I taking this class if I’m going to be a librarian, or if I’m going to be a social worker. So just being able to bring those connections to them, could also help colleges be more student ready.

Rebecca: Just that relevance alone is more motivating to get students excited about topics. So finding ways to connect to students, no matter the level, high school or college, is a really great way to bring them in and bring them along.

John: One of the challenges I know in economics we face, is with students saying, “I’m just not very good at math,” or “I have trouble with graphs.” And I suspect maybe you might have seen a little bit of that, too. How do you address that issue of a fixed mindset concerning student’s ability to engage in mathematics?

Natalie: In my calculus and precalculus classes, and you’ll be even surprised to hear it that I do hear that there. But it’s extremely prevalent in algebra I, that idea of “My mom wasn’t good at math, so I’m not going to be good at math.” “I’ve always had math support, AIS,” or “I’ve been able to get through because I’ve always stayed after with the teacher.” I definitely still hear that, but the idea is to kind of break that mold by saying, “Hey, listen, this is a new year. This is a new teacher, this is a new curriculum, maybe this is going to be the one for you.” I find a lot of students struggle through geometry. So as soon as I bring up geometry, it’s like, “Oh, no, I don’t want to.” And I say, “Listen, let’s connect it to algebra, then. Do you feel more comfortable making the connections to algebra?” …or I don’t even know. I don’t know how to tell them that you can be better. Maybe you had a bad teacher, maybe you had a teacher who didn’t make things relevant for you, or just some bad experiences, but every year’s a new year. I’ve seen all sorts of success stories of students who truly find their niche late in high school math. So in my class, I’ve definitely adopted the idea of a growth mindset. And I’ve been studying on best practices to help do this. And part of that has been through standards-based grading. I’m kind of a beginner, a novice, of standards-based grading… more of a cafeteria, I’m choosing which aspects of it that I’d like to implement versus which ones don’t work for me, yet, as I learn and grow, which is definitely not the high school or college that I went to, to implement things like re-quizzes and retests. And it was hard for me to even start with this idea. Nobody else in my department was doing anything like this. And to be honest, as I was starting my career, I started my career right as common core was being implemented. So there was a ton of work in developing all the new curricula. I started in an eighth grade and moved all the way up and I’m like, “Wait, you want me to make two tests? four tests? two quizzes? three quizzes? four? And you want me to give them to these kids and grade them and change their grades and all of the clerical work. But now that I’m nine years in, I’m ready for it. And I find that the students have such a better… I guess they feel better about themselves when they go in to take a quiz when they know that there’s going to be redemption. One thing that I do is, if their test grade beats their quiz grade, I let the test grade replace the quiz grade in the gradebook. If you can show growth, by the time you get to the test… and that idea actually comes from college. If your grade on the final is better than your grade in the class, some professors will do something like that. Or if your grade is high enough, you don’t even need to take the final or I don’t know if anybody’s still doing things like that. But that kind of way, it takes the stress of testing and quizzing, and it takes it off of the grade and puts it more onto the learning. And, however, I do understand that that practice might not be making my students “college ready” if their college professors are not following that, which probably they are not. However, it’s something that I feel I need to do in order to focus on the learning that needs to happen.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that we’ve been working really hard to do at the college level is to incorporate some of those practices as well, to encourage learning, and that it’s about test taking and the testing effect as a way of remembering and learning and practicing rather than some moment in time that somehow reflects all learning that has ever occurred, which is not really relevant or accurate.

John: And you would be happy to know that many people in our math department are doing mastery quizzing and mastery learning approaches where they allow students multiple attempts to demonstrate mastery.

Rebecca: One of the things that I think is somewhat problematic for the transition of students from high school to college is that we don’t have these kinds of conversations very often. They’re not in place unless we go out of our way to talk to local high school teachers about what’s going on in local schools and vice versa, where high school teachers are asking us what’s going on at the college level. Can you talk a little bit about how your Delhi experience evolved in ways that you could encourage others to have those same kinds of conversations?

Natalie: I believe it was somebody from SUNY Delhi reached out to the Executive Director of the New York State Master Teacher program, if you haven’t heard about it, it’s a STEM initiative to retain teachers in math and science. And it’s a four-year fellowship that you have to apply and interview and be selected to join. But, it ends up creating a very strong network of teachers statewide that are actually affiliated with SUNY, every region has a SUNY campus that they are affiliated with, Up here in the North Country, mine is Plattsburgh. And since our program has moved more to an online format, we were able to all participate with SUNY Delhi through this conversation. And I think that just leads to more ideas for the future or to somebody who has an in with some SUNY people. I think we all do professional development. I do it as a high school teacher, and you guys do it as professors. But then, where can we find the middle ground that can maybe mesh some professional development and share some best practices between our two groups?

Rebecca: Sounds like an excellent idea.

John: That is a practice that I think we should do more of. One of the issues that we have is that in general, high schools provide a lot of support for students. And often some of that support comes from parents who help encourage students to be successful in school, and then all of a sudden, people go away to college. And sometimes that doesn’t work quite as well, and we lose a lot of people. Do you have any suggestions on what perhaps colleges could do better to help retain more students?

Natalie: That’s a great question. And I think as we grow through the years, you’re noticing a lot more of, shall I say, helicopter parents or parents who are very, very involved in their children’s lives, and so much to the fact that they actually can become bulldozer parents and literally take roadblocks out of their children’s way so that they never experienced any kind of struggle. And that, of course, is not anything that me as a high school teacher, or you guys as college faculty can do, other than just encouraging parents to step back. Students should be very autonomous. I think that, if anything, we’re going to see out of this pandemic. Another I guess silver lining is the students are becoming more autonomous. They have to when their parents are working and they’re only going to school two days a week and they’re responsible for their own learning the other three days a week. They’re also learning skills, like do I care for online learning? So when I get to college, should I steer towards classes that are online or steer away from classes that are online. So these are definitely going to be skills. So you guys might want to look out for when you’re screening students or as advisors, “Hey, how did you do when you were fully remote? Were you able to get all of your work done? Did your mom have to come home and sit down with you and work with you? Or were you able to get up in the morning, eat your breakfast, and then get right started on your schoolwork?” I make a joke to my seniors about this time of year that if they are still being woken up by their parents, they are not ready for college. You will be home by Christmas if your mother is still waking you up to get you in the shower and get to school on time. Students are going to have a lot of free time when they get to college. Their lives are managed for 40 hours a week, an hour bus ride in and back, somebody tells them when it’s time to eat lunch, then they go right to sports practice and come back. They’re so busy when they’re in high school. And then when they get to college, and they have class that are for 15 hours a week, that’s a lot of extra time for these kids to have to manage. And then when they start to find out, “Oh, nobody’s gonna call my mom, if I don’t go to school?” That’s the kind of mentality that these kids are going to. And I ask my students often, “What do you think is going to be one of your biggest struggles?” or “What do you think is going to be a biggest struggle of your peers? …and it is time management. The students are used to doing a lot of their work in school, either in the class or given class time to start assignments, to do assignments, or they have a study hall where somebody says, “Okay, get your books out, get to work.” And now they’re just going to go to class, they’re going to learn for an hour, hour and a half, and then go back to their dorm and have to start studying on their own. And even that, just the idea of needing to study, a lot of students can very easily get through high school without studying, without ever learning how to study. They just are good students, they know how to sit and behave, they learn well, they do their assignments, and that’s enough. I was a victim of that. I was always above average just by doing exactly what is expected of me. And then when you get to the bigger pond and you become the smaller fish, that can cause a lot of struggle for students, that idea of time that’s not managed, that they need to learn how to manage on their own.

Rebecca: I think you’re highlighting a lot of great themes here. And we certainly experience as college faculty, but your students are right: time management is the number one struggle of our college students. [LAUGHTER] They already know that it’s a problem. We know that it’s a problem. High school teachers know it’s a problem. But we don’t actively necessarily all collaborate on finding solutions to that problem. We just expect overnight students are somehow magically going to have autonomy and know what to do with it. [LAUGHTER]

John: And that’s especially true for first-gen students who haven’t had family members talk to them about those challenges and those issues, and who don’t have that sort of support. And suddenly, they have all this free time. And they don’t have any tests until weeks away or months away. And they just had these big assignments due so they don’t have anything they have to do right away. But one of the things that we know makes that worse is online instruction. Because there’s a lot of research. I did some about 17 or 18 years ago that found that freshmen and sophomores just did dramatically worse with online courses. And we had a guest on our podcast several months ago now, who found the same thing in a much larger study… that juniors and seniors and older individuals, if they’ve been successful in making it to that stage of college, they tend to be relatively successful at managing their time effectively. So online instruction is much more challenging for freshmen. And one of the things that I know many faculty are concerned about is the fact that all of our students coming in next year will have spent at least a year in some sort of remote or online instruction. And the quality of that varies quite a bit across school districts. And I think that is going to be a challenge we’re going to need to address. Do you have any thoughts on how we can help students be better at this?

Natalie: You are definitely correct, there are going to be a lot of gaps to fill, based on how students have received instruction, in how much instruction, we were given guidance that perhaps we’d only get through 80% of our material. And as you know, at the end of the 2020 school year, some of the learning immediately stopped in mid March with the “do no harm” idea of you can’t do harm to any of their grades, whatever their grade is when they left is what their grade needs to be. So we saw students who had very high averages that said, “You know what, it’s good enough. So I know you can’t give me anything less than a 98. So I’m not doing anything for the rest of the year.” And that was a very real situation that’s not going to be reflected in a transcript that you receive as a college advisor or as a college applicant when these kids are applying to school. I’m hopeful that students could self assess where they’re at, that if a college is going to have a lot of remote opportunities, and they are good at online learning, absolutely, go there, that’s for you. And if not, then that might not be for you.

John: I think we can also refer back to an earlier podcast we did with Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan, who talked about the importance of structure in all of our classes, that providing students with clear directions, with giving them more expectations, and a couple of other podcasts that we had with Betsy Barre, she discusses the importance of sharing information about the time that’s required for various tasks. So giving students more detailed instructions and giving them more guidance on how much time they should be expected to work on things, perhaps, may help.

Natalie: I completely agree, I remember the rule of thumb was a three-credit level class would have about nine hours, the total amount of work, including class time for that class. And I try to drill this into my students heads as a pre-calc and calc teacher that you’re going to be doing a lot of work outside of this class, which is not what they’re used to. They’re used to, “I’m going to go home, I’m going to do 15 minutes worth of homework, and it’s going to be graded based on effort. So I get a free 100 in the gradebook if I did it, and nobody’s gonna care if I did it correctly, I could do the whole thing wrong, I could copy from my friend, and there we go, I get the credit.” And that’s just not college readiness, or career readiness, for hopefully most careers. But I would love to see some kind of, even in high schools and then have it trickle right up to college, some kind of bridging from each course… ninth grade, these are our expectations, 10th grade, you get a little bit more strict restrictions, and then all of that being an idea of we’re bridging the gap from 12th grade to college. And as well as college professors and faculty looking back and saying, “Okay, this is where they’re at when they’re coming to us. And so we can pick it up from here.”

Rebecca: Yeah, that ramping is so important. And just acknowledging where students are at, and meeting them where they’re at, and not having some false expectation of where we wish they were, which is very different. And I think what John was talking about, like providing some time allotments and things, but just even providing students with a sample of what their outside of class time should just generally be looking like, maybe you are spending three hours outside of class studying or six hours outside of class studying. But what are those six hours look like? What does studying look like for this class? What are the kinds of exercises that would be really helpful. And faculty have a vision of what that should be, we just often don’t communicate it.

John: And often when faculty do, though, they communicate what worked for them, which is what had worked for their professors before them, which is not always what would work for a typical student.

Rebecca: What do you mean? Highlighting, John?

John: …and repeated rereading, and focusing on learning styles, but there’s a lot of things out there that faculty may encourage students to do that is not really always consistent with evidence. And going back to your point earlier, Natalie, about providing the relevance of things, one of the problems I think that faculty have is we got into these things, because we’re just really interested in the questions of the discipline. And the things that interest us now are based on having studied the discipline for a long time. And it’s a little harder, often, to connect with the types of things that would interest a student who’s just coming out of high school or is in a sophomore or junior position in college, because they don’t have that same network of concepts to make the topics that we find interesting as interesting to them. That’s something I think we definitely need to work on.

Rebecca: I know one thing that I always struggle with in the design classes that I teach is I’m constantly trying to get students to think about audiences other than themselves. But then when you start to put things in perspective, you realize they don’t really know much beyond themselves. They know maybe what an audience younger than them might experience or have expectations of, but they have a really hard time envisioning what a professional world might be like, because you just don’t have any experience in it. So we often come to the table with so many assumptions that we think that they have, and they just don’t have the life experience to match it.

John: We’ve talked a little bit about how instruction was affected during the pandemic, how did your classes transition?

Natalie: I saw this, the pandemic, as a way to be able to spread my wings and try and implement some different teaching strategies that I had thought about, but I wasn’t totally sure if I wanted to dive right in in one given year. And one of those ideas was the idea of a flipped classroom. I had never felt confident to be able to create a flipped classroom that I felt students would be responsible for. That being, watching the videos at home and then us just working on problems together in class. And to be honest, that’s pretty much what has happened. I have students who will have to watch videos on the two days, three days that they’re not here, and they have to, and I’ve figured out now how to assess that they’ve watched the videos, and to make sure that they are responsible for that learning. It’s not totally flipped. But I do have to provide instruction to these students three days of the week that they’re not around. And I did that in a couple of different ways for each one of my preps, because I didn’t want to get so solid in just one way was “the way,” and I wanted to try some things out. So for calculus, I teach calculus fully synchronous. My students who are at home Google meet live with the students that I have in class in front of me. We’re able to talk about problems as a bigger class instead of just the five who are in front of me. And that’s worked out quite well for us. Granted, class is at 10 o’clock, so it’s not too super early for these students. So, precalculus, I do kind of more HyFlex. They have the opportunity to come to the live session if they want to, or I do make videos for them to watch on their own. One thing that we had to keep in mind this year was that some of these students are responsible for younger siblings while parents are at work. So we needed to be a little bit more flexible in how we set up our classes. And when I had the conversation with my calculus students, they said, “Nope, we could totally do synchronous.” And if they needed me to make a video, I can make them a video. And then algebraI, I do completely asynchronous, the videos are already set up. There’s no live session. When they come in the next day, or whatever day follows watching the videos, I check and make sure that they watch their videos, give them a little bit of credit, just for doing what they were supposed to do. And, to be honest, I have become very, very graceful compared to how I ever was in the first seven and a half, eight years of teaching. My department very rarely ever accepts late work. Math is a sequential subject, you need to do the work today so that you know what’s going on tomorrow in class. This year, I’m just happy it’s getting done and getting done with integrity. So I’ve become so extremely graceful with students who are getting work done after due dates, right before the quarter ends. It’s not great, but they are also learning a very important lesson in “it’s a lot easier if I just do a little bit every day instead of trying to cram it all in at the end of the semester, or at the end of the quarter.” So, hopefully, that idea can trickle up to college as well. It’s not very easy to dig yourself out of a hole, especially in college.

John: You mentioned with your recordings that you were verifying that they actually watched the videos. How do you do that?

Natalie: With my algebra I, the videos obviously match their note packet, they have guided notes that matches very nicely. So the next day I just come in, check, they’re going to show me a front and back with all of the notes filled in. For precalculus, I feel like I shouldn’t have to check their notes, that they should be responsible enough for that level to actually watch the videos, I did get a sense that they weren’t watching the videos, mostly because I was bringing things up when they came to class, and I had a lot of blank stares looking at me. So I started using a program called Edpuzzle. They have to sign into it with their Google account. Lots of teachers in my school use this. And I was able to see who was actually watching. And it was funny, I had a student come to me and he goes, “I’m going to make a guess that 1/3 of the kids are actually watching the videos.” And as soon as I started counting up the number of students who actually watched the videos, it was about 1/3. So that gave a very stern talking to about what my expectations were in that they’re not going to have the best understanding and knowledge if they’re just practicing the homework assignments, that it needs to be the full package, coming to class in whatever shape or form that looks like, be it coming to the live session or watching the videos. But all of it needs to be done in order to be successful in precalculus.

John: Do you embed questions in the videos?

Natalie: I am just getting my feet wet with it. I just started using it. So no, I haven’t gotten that far. But I did hear that you can and you can do a little checkup and it will not let you get through unless you do the question. So is that something you guys have used?

John: I haven’t used EdPuzzle. But I have been using PlayPosit this year. And I embed questions in it and it is required as part of the grade in my econometrics class and in my introductory microeconomics class, and I’m probably incorporating it in more classes as I go forward. But students actually have responded really positively. They discovered that when they watch the videos, it’s really helpful, because when there was no grading involved or no questions, the level of use of the videos was dramatically lower. So this provides just a small incentive, it’s a trivial part of their grade, but it’s enough to induce them to watch them, though. I’ve been really pleased with it. One advantage of Edpuzzle though, is that It’s free, as far as I understand, whilel, I do have to pay for PlayPosit.

Natalie: Yep, it’s free. And we’re a Google school. So they are able to sign right in. And it was easy for me to use, I could see all the students, I could see how much of it they watched. So that was pretty cool.

Rebecca: That’s great. As I’m hearing you talk about how your teaching has transitioned, it largely matches how faculty at the college level have also had to transition. So in some ways, we may have been brought together unexpectedly. [LAUGHTER] So there’s a lot more college faculty also using a flipped classroom model, and using more class time to solve problems and work on the more complicated things. Because often the video lectures or that kind of part of the material is foundational. Some of it might be memorization things, it might be terms and things like this, and then you put it into action in the class, and you can have guidance and coaching. So what’s really interesting is that the pandemic may have brought these two experiences together, and that bridge might be more present than it has ever been before.

Natalie: Exactly, I used to think that there was no way for my students to learn, if I wasn’t the one who was telling them and showing them. If I wasn’t up at the front of the board, doing it with them, doing it for them, then they weren’t going to learn… there was no way they can learn this on their own, and boy, was I ever wrong. Even though I could do 10 problems with them up at the board, whereas they could do three working together in a small group or in a pair, it’s so much more valuable to listen to them have those conversations, and to hear them explain these things, in their own words, or what’s very powerful too, is when I hear my words come out of their mouth, as they’re explaining it to another student. So that’s totally cool to hear that. And I think that’s the direction of education. The prep work is more important than what the teacher role is in the classroom. So the role of the teacher plays planning and prepping for a lesson is so much more powerful than what the teacher is doing in the classroom at that time as far as leading instruction.

Rebecca: That design of experience is so powerful, just generally. I think one of the things that I know I have always struggled with using a flipped classroom model, but I’m definitely getting better, the more and more I do it, is really scaling back on how much can actually be done in class, when students are working through problems and they’re not having quite as much coaching. You’re really letting them struggle and fail and try again. That takes time. It’s not like something that can happen automatically. So we might be used to going through more examples, but less examples, but more depth can be really powerful. And your right, students explaining to other students is an amazing thing to see. But it also helps them articulate or realize where they don’t understand, which is something that you don’t necessarily recognize when someone’s explaining something to you. Because when someone explains it to you, of course it seems obvious, until you have to do it yourself.

Natalie: Absolutely.

John: One of the things I was thinking about is I have to create a video on log transformations in econometrics tonight, and that reminded me of all that.

Natalie: Do you want one of mine? I can grab it right off Edpuzzle. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Can you imagine that, though, like sharing back and forth between high school and college and sharing resources? We should do more of this.

Natalie: Oh, absolutely. Why are we always reinventing the wheel for ourselves, when there’s so much already out there?

John: When you first create a flipped classroom model, it’s a lot of work, creating those videos, maybe embedding some questions in them. And doing that is a tremendous amount of work upfront. But it’s taking this stuff that’s relatively easy for students to learn and shifting it outside of the classroom. So that when students are in class, they’re able to focus on the things they have the most trouble with. Because, as Rebecca said, you can provide a really good lecture on how to do something, but if students haven’t wrestled with it, they’re not going to learn it as well. I know for many years, I was doing an awful lot of lecturing, and I’ve cut back to very, very little now other than when I’m recording lectures, and I’m seeing students struggle with materials, but then when they are assessed on it, there’s much more balance in their performance. Because before there were always some students who would pick up on everything you did… people like you, Natalie, and people like those who are faculty. We were able to learn the stuff by listening to people tell us how to do it and figure it out on our own. But that doesn’t work well for a lot of students. And when they’re there explaining it to each other, they learn it much more deeply than they ever would by trying to do the more difficult parts on their own. Because in the traditional model, we’d give them the basics and show them how to do things. But the only time when they really got to apply that was either when they were working alone, doing homework, trying to struggle to solve some problems. or on a high-stakes exam. And those are times when perhaps they need the most support and the flipped classroom model can really address that really nicely.

Natalie: Yep, I absolutely agree.

John: We always end with the question: “What’s next?” …which is a question I think everyone in education is wondering.

Natalie: I think what’s next is filling in the gaps. There is going to be a lot of gaps for a lot of years. And we keep saying I can’t wait till next year, I can’t wait till it’s back to normal. But pandemic aside, I don’t think it’s going to be normal for a long time, we’re going to have a lot of students who need a lot of support for a lot of years, and it’s going to affect me. And then it’s going to affect college faculty, as the students get up there, addressing where the gaps are, how can we fill them? How can we give these students the support that they need, even under just budgets that were being given that were cut in this past year or could be getting cut? We’re going to need a lot of support from each other, from our colleagues, from our administrators from the community… and I think a lot of understanding… these students are going to need understanding, we’re going to need understanding.

Rebecca: I really like the underscoring of this empathy towards one another, both between faculty and teachers, as well as between students and teachers. I think that’s a really nice note to end on. Thanks so much for sharing your insights, Natalie. I think many faculty will want to take the time and effort to reach out to some high school teachers and make some connections and start to figure out ways to bridge those gaps.

Natalie: Thank you so much for having me, this has been such a valuable experience. And I’m always grateful when anybody wants to listen to my opinion and share conversation with me.

John: Well, it’s great talking to you again, I very much enjoyed working with you when you were a student here, and it’s nice to see just how successful you’ve been. And I suppose I should mention that this came about because one of my current students had listened to the podcast, had shared it with people on Facebook, and then she said, “And you know, you really should invite one of my former teachers,” and so we invited you.

Natalie: That is so awesome. I feel very honored that that student thought that I had something great to share. And it’s been so great to be back in SUNY Oswego, among other Lakers, and of course, a professor who was a great mentor and led me down a path of success.

John: Thank you.

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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.

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151. Video Conferencing

Posted in classroom community, edtech, engagement, higher education, hybrid, K-12, learning, online learning, pedagogy, teaching, video
September 2, 2020

Although video conferencing tools are not new, the global pandemic has resulted in a dramatic expansion in faculty use of this technology in their learning environments. In this episode, Rick McDonald joins us to discuss ways in which we can use these tools to create productive and engaging learning experiences for our students. Rick is an instructional designer at Northern Arizona University who has extensive consulting experience in higher education and in K-12.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Although video conferencing tools are not new, the global pandemic has resulted in a dramatic expansion in faculty use of this technology in their learning environments. In this episode, we focus on ways in which we can use these tools to create productive and engaging learning experiences for our students.

[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:
Our guest today is Rick McDonald, an instructional designer at Northern Arizona University, who has extensive consulting experience in higher education and in K-12. Welcome, Rick.

Rick: Hello, how are you today?

Rebecca: Great, thanks!

John: Today’s teas are:

Rick: I am a coffee drinker myself, but at least this early in the morning tea is more later in the day for me. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I have Irish breakfast tea today,

John: And I’m drinking ginger peach green tea. We came through a really challenging spring semester, where people suddenly had to move online, and we’ve gone through a really difficult summer. We want to talk a little bit about video conferencing. In general, I think everyone’s become familiar with some form of video conferencing software. Zoom has suddenly become known by pretty much all faculty, one way or another, but there’s Collaborate and other tools as well. How can faculty become more effective in using video conference tools?

Rick: Well, I think, to start, we can all just relax a little bit but teaching with the video conferencing doesn’t have to be tremendously different. There are a few things that are absolutely different, and a few things to just consider that aren’t really such huge problems. First of all, when we’re teaching on video conferencing, we really need to know the software. Some schools are using multiple kinds of software. And I would choose the one that you know best. I would, again, relax and keep a nice and slow pace when we’re teaching over video conferencing, sort of frenetic pace can be very difficult for the remote student to stay engaged with, and at the same time making the class engaging, just like you would in your regular classroom. So, when we’re teaching, we try and engage the students in the classroom. When we’re teaching with video conferencing, we need to find ways to engage those remote students as well.

John: In terms of getting comfortable, one thing I’ve recommended to a lot of people is that, if they’re new to using video conferencing, they should work with other people in their department who may also be new with that, and take turns hosting meetings, so they get to play with all the tools. And if people do that a little bit, there’ll be a whole lot more comfortable, I think, once they arrive at their classroom. Is that something you’d recommend, too?

Rick: Absolutely. And really, I would recommend that those partnerships go on past the preparation stage, if it’s possible to find a faculty member who you can either team teach with, or you can assist when they teach their class and they can assist you when you teach your class. That can be really useful because, let’s say we have a very large classroom, we’re probably going to mute the mics of the remote students so that we don’t hear every dog barking and train going by 100 times. So, as we have been muted, somebody, if they have a problem during the class, we have to have some way of knowing about it. And generally that’s going to be through the chat. So, most of these applications have a chat that can go on simultaneously. And again, in larger classes, it’s not going to be very effective to be monitoring the audio and video of all of the remote students. So, if we use the chat and say, let the students know, “Hey, if you’re simply confused, put a bunch of question marks into the chat. If you have a question, ask it in the chat.” But if you have a partner who’s working with you, and monitoring that chat, that keeps you engaged, and you focused on your teaching, but the person monitoring the chat can say, “Excuse me, Rick, you know, I really didn’t understand that last point you made, could you please go back over it?” or “I didn’t hear it,” or as a partner can say, “Somebody online didn’t hear it” or “There’s a lot of confusion online right now. Could you please go back over that point?” I think that’s really useful. And if you can’t do that with a partner, it’s useful to try thinking about rotating it as a student role. I know there’s some negative issues with that; there’s some problems in that you’re adding something to a student that may have some difficulty keeping up with the content and monitoring the chat at the same time. But, I think it is really important to have a way to monitor and check for understanding and check for technical problems while you’re teaching, and it’s difficult to do that yourself.

John: If faculty want to keep tabs on how things are going with their students, what else can they do besides monitoring the chat?

Rick: In smaller classes, you can keep an eye on the videos as well, just like you would in your regular classroom. If you have a seminar or discussion-based class that’s smaller, then you’re probably going to have enough room to see the students and keep an eye on them and scrolling through them and just visually checking for understanding. Then there are other things that we can do. We can do live polls, we can do quizzes in our LMS and other activities that will help make sure that students are getting the materials that we want.

Rebecca: I’m newer to video conferencing and have been experimenting with recording so if I needed to share something with a student that was sick, one thing that I realized, for example, in using Zoom is that the polling doesn’t show up in a recording automatically. So, there’s things that, if you don’t test it ahead of time, you might not know how to do it or how to set it up. So, I really found being able to practice with colleagues in advance really helpful, because I’ve discovered some of those stumbling blocks that I didn’t realize were going to be stumbling blocks.

Rick: Right? Well, and that’s key. The technology and where we’re going to be teaching, it might not be our own technology. It’s easier for us to practice on our own computers and our own systems in our own homes in locations where we plan on teaching. But in this case, we are probably going to be teaching in a classroom, and that classroom is going to be designed and laid out by, depending upon the school, somebody in IT or in a teaching and learning center, something like that. And we don’t know how it’s set up. We need to go in there and test it. We need to know how to change the camera if we’re going to use a document camera, for example, we need to be able to switch back and forth. We need to know how to do all those things. And that practice is beyond us becoming familiar with it. Like you were saying there, where you did a recording, I really recommend that people go to every room that they’re going to be using and record a session. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a full lecture, but test what it’s like when you’re speaking at the podium and how you need to speak to be clear, make sure that the levels are right on the microphone for your particular voice. My voice is deep and loud, and it carries very well. So, generally, people can hear me, even if I’m a bit aways from the microphone, but that’s not true of everybody. You really need to know where the mic picks up and how well it picks up. You need to know where the frame is in your video. So, if you like to move around a little bit and walk back and forth from one side of the room to the other, that is probably not going to work in this environment. So, if you want to do it, you need to know where you are in the frame, so that you stay in view for those remote students. If you tend to walk around… and this is something that we’ve been taught to do as teachers, or have learned to do… that we want to walk around and engage the class. We want to make sure that people are paying attention. And we can really do that by moving around. Unfortunately, if we’re teaching to a group of remote students, when we move around, they might not be able to hear us as well. But they’re also then staring at a blank wall or the chalkboard or the whiteboard. And that makes it a lot harder to pay attention for those remote students, and even more so for anyone watching a recorded session.

John: And all that’s good advice, not just during a time of pandemic, but before any semester because one of the worst things you can do is go into class for the first day and set the example of fumbling with the controls and not being able to get this class started well, and that negative impression can have a pretty significant impact on how students see you and your class. So, you want to have a really good strong start, however you’re starting, and working with either the classroom or your computer controls, I think is really helpful, as you said,

Rick: I think we can expect some healthy skepticism from the students too. So we want to try and alay those by being prepared. It’s difficult for people who have never done this before, didn’t plan on doing it, would never have agreed to teach using this modality in any other circumstances. I think, fortunately, most people recognize that this is a big issue today and understand why schools are doing this. We may not all agree with every step that our administrations have taken, but I think we all do agree we’d like students to be able to learn this fall. My daughter’s starting college this fall in California in an art center, and he didn’t want to wait another year to start college. Personally, I would have been super happy to take another year. I would have just taken a year off. I’d be in, like Costa Rica or somewhere far away from here, if I was eighteen, [LAUGHTER] but there’s all kinds of life circumstances. People want to keep their careers moving on and it’s also a very different world today than it was when I was in school.

John: I think it’s a very different world than any of us were in school. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Indeed. For faculty that are having to teach from home or from their offices, and they haven’t done that before, can you talk us through some ways we might want to think about setting up our workspaces to be more effective and efficient.

Rick: I think, first off, we want to try and find a room that is relatively quiet and well insulated, sound wise, or isolated. That can be difficult. When we’re teaching at home, our children are at home too. Ideally, if you’re in a lucky situation, there are other people to help keep the chaos away from the room while we’re teaching, as much as we can. Secondly, I think finding a room that is well lit is a good thing. And then go ahead and start your camera, set up the room, turn on the lights the way you think they’re going to be, and then see how it looks. In the room I’m in right now, there’s an overhead light, and if I turn that light on, it’s not actually going to light my face better, because the way the lights going to come down, it’s actually going to hit the top of my head, and then put most of my face in the shadow. So, in that case, it’s actually better for me to have the natural light coming in from the window. But, we need to sort of think those things through in a way that we haven’t before. So, it’s good to bring up any video app really, and look at it on your computer and then adjust the lighting. So, the computer itself is going to provide some lighting, but then you might need to bring in an extra lamp to put on one side or the other to sort of balance the light. The other thing you can do is, if you have a light that directional and adjustable that you might normally use for reading or something like that, if it’s bright enough, you can actually turn it away from you and face it towards the wall or towards a lightly colored object if your wall is dark, and what that’ll do is that’ll bounce the light off of the wall and onto your face, and a light like that can otherwise be too harsh, but that way it can light it and sort of balance your light, keep your face well lit. Things like that can be really useful. And then again, just making sure that your mic is going to pick you up. Generally, the mics aren’t a big problem when we’re teaching at home in our rooms. Sometimes a headset can be useful. Testing and finding what works best for you, I think, is key in just making sure that the video appears in a way that everybody can see well and clearly.

John: And this was implied in your discussion, but having a natural light is really good, but you don’t want that natural light behind you because then you get more of that shadow effect. If you have a bright sunlit window behind you, which I’ve seen in so many faculty at webinars, you just see a dark blur surrounded by this bright light and you want to arrange it so, if possible, that light is facing you. I had that problem in my office and I had to put up a blackout curtain over the window so I didn’t get washed out that way.

Rick: Right, if you can’t change where your desk is facing and the light is behind you, that’s not gonna work. Even if it’s in front of you, if the way the sun shines at certain times of the day is straight in, it’s gonna make you squint, you’re gonna end up washed out, so the details on your face will get washed out. So, then you might want to think about curtains in that case. We want to work on the lighting so that we’re clear, that people can see our faces and our mouths. That helps people understand what we’re saying, but it also helps them convey all the nonverbal communication that’s part of the way we speak, that nobody can see in this podcast. But when we’re doing our video conferencing, they can absolutely pick up all kinds of clues on whether we’re smiling, on how serious we are when we’re speaking, based upon our facial expression. And you can’t really see that if, like you said, you’re backlit, whether it’s from the window or whether it’s from where the lights are in your room. So, we really just want to straighten out the lighting as best we can right from the beginning.

Rebecca: Also thinking about time of day is key and remembering that in the fall, we’re gonna head into shorter days. So, you might have really good sunlight at the end of the day right now, that lighting is great, but it might actually be much darker. [LAUGHTER]

Rick: That’s absolutely true, especially for those of you up in New York. [LAUGHTER] It’s a little less of an issue for my friends south in Tucson or Phoenix or Corpus Christi. [LAUGHTER]

John: I noticed behind you there’s a painting and some artwork on the wall, but there’s nothing that’s really distracting, that’s taking the attention away from you. Is that something perhaps that faculty should also do? Not have something really distracting in the background?

Rick: Absolutely. Anybody doing any video conferencing, whether it’s for anything that besides your friends, it’s not only going to matter because it’s distracting, but you might have things that… I’m looking around this room and right now I think everything… over the past four months, we have made sure that everything behind us is non-controversial as well. Because you may have artwork in your home that’s beautiful and wonderful, but we don’t necessarily want to begin religious discussion at the beginning of our computer science class, or something like that, right? So, we want to just keep everything nice and clean and neat.

Rebecca: Like my bland gray walls behind me. [LAUGHTER]

Rick: Yeah, exactly. The bland gray wall works really well. [LAUGHTER] So does a nice piece of artwork, I think is perfectly fine… and really any artwork is fine. I don’t mean to be too prudish on these things, but especially if we’re teaching 18 to 22 year olds, sometimes they can be a little bit more easily distracted by things like that. Well, actually, really anybody… You see something that’s gonna upset you, it’s gonna upset you. So let’s think about that and just make sure that the room is welcoming, and, and ready for you to focus on your coursework and not on the room.

John: In a lot of ways, the easiest environment to teach in that sort of framework is when you’re in a room where you get to control all that, to control the sound and so forth. Many colleges are going to be using a system in which there is some type of a hyflex structure, without much flexibility in terms of how students choose to engage, where some students will be present in the classroom in reduced numbers and spread out across the room, while other people will be participating online synchronously. And some other people might only be available asynchronously because of other issues, maybe because of healthcare issues, maybe because they’re back at home taking care of relatives, or they themselves are perhaps in quarantine somewhere, and may not be able to always participate at the same time. in that environment. What are some of the challenges that faculty might face in trying to engage in say, active learning type activities, which require some interaction among the students in person, among the students online, and perhaps even between the online and the face-to-face students?

Rick: Let’s take that last example first. From a teaching standpoint, that’s ideal. We’re mixing our in-class students with the remote students. It’s helping us build community. And it’s great. And that can work really well. But, we need to think about the environment. So, if we do one person locally with one or a few students remotely, then the local student needs to have a computer, or perhaps they could do it through their telephone. And we probably want them to have a headset on because, if everybody in the classroom has a computer open, and is communicating with people from off site, we’re going to just sort of have a bit of chaos in all the sound coming from the speakers. But, if we can find a way to do that, if the room is suitable, or if there’s easy ways to break students out, that’s sort of the ideal. Otherwise, I think we’re looking at building breakout sessions within the remote students so that the remote students and… you mentioned Collaborate earlier… students can make their own Collaborates and then work together there and then come back to the central Collaborate that the class is in and we can do sessions like that and then have them present the results of their group breakout. They can communicate that back. That’s another way of doing it. And then the local students can obviously just meet in groups within the room.

In the LMS, we may find that the group tool is something we need to use for these video classes, though, because some schools are not actually doing the work of dividing the section up. So, if I’m going to have a third of the class come on Monday, a third of the class come on Wednesday, and a third of the class come on Friday, I’m going to need some way to decide that. And since most of the LMS tools do have groups, I can either randomly assign students or I could put signup sheets for the days. And then I could also use that group rule to do breakouts, whether they’re asynchronous or synchronous, it will help to have them set up. And so I can, again, either do it randomly or through sign up. And then there’s all kinds of group activities that people can do once we get into that asynchronous realm. In the synchronous realm, they’re meeting, they’re speaking, they’re coming up with a plan and then they’re reporting it back to the group and the asynchronous it might be different. They might meet, come up with something, and then post their work to the LMS. for everyone to review.

Asynchronous environments can still be very interactive and active through discussions, through group work online. There’s lots of different tools that you can use for that. And we can also engage the students with polling. There’s Kahoots!, I’m not sure everybody’s familiar with those. But in, Kahoots!, there are ways of doing polls and you don’t necessarily have to have your institution on board. So, if your institution doesn’t have a polling system, or it’s not built in… like Collaborate has a built-in polling system… I believe Zoom does as well. But, if you can do some kind of polling that can help the students stay engaged. You can also do little quizzes in a similar way with the polling… and just sort of checking for understanding, I think those are great ways of helping students stay engaged.

John: And in terms of Kahoot!s, you can do it synchronously for the people who are in the room and remote, and then you can have some discussion of their questions after you go through them. But, you can then set it up so that you can share the quiz online so that students, at least, would have the option of participating at asynchronously as well. They wouldn’t have the same real-time discussion capabilities of the students who were there synchronously, but at least they would have the same type of retrieval practice as an exercise with Kahoot!.

Rick: When you talk about the recorded version of your video conference or your streamed lecture. That is not an ideal way to learn or to teach, to watch a recorded session of a bunch of other people. People are going to tend to zone out and not be able to follow everything that happens. They’re going to be distracted by the other things going on and there isn’t going to be anything pulling them back in. Because when you say, “Okay, everybody do this poll…” well, on the recorded version, and they’re gonna do it whenever later, they may not pause it, they may not even notice that you told them to do something right away. Which doesn’t mean that I don’t think people should record their classes. I absolutely think we should. But, I think if we have a substantial number of students who are not able to attend live, then we are much better off with a very strong online learning component. At least in my opinion. A lot of these ideas that sort of flex idea came because people read work by Brian Beatty from San Francisco State where he coined the term HyFlex. When I was researching this when I started at NAU, I found that there is HyFlex, but there’s also been other people who’ve done very similar types of teaching, calling it different types of things, but it hasn’t been widely used. But, when you look at what they did, if you read the articles and research around this, which is relatively scant. But, what there is pretty much shows that all of the previous experiments with this involve having somebody there to assist the faculty member, whether it was a partner or a learning assistant or an educational technologist, somebody was there helping. And then the other thing that they really all did is build extremely good and strong online components. And in the San Francisco State one, they didn’t necessarily have to show up in person at all, they could do it entirely through the learning management system. And in my ideal world, schools would give faculty options so we would be able to teach one day a week live, and we would stream that for anybody who wanted it and everybody would have, say, one live session. And then in my ideal world, there would be an online component for the other half of the course for that week. And that would, I think, give students more actual flexibility in learning, but it would also, because the strong online component is so important, it would give them real incentive to create that strong online component.

John: And that would also have advantage if schools have to shut down at some point because if they do shut down, the face-to-face component will go away. And having that ready would make the transition a lot smoother, I think.

Rick: Absolutely. And if you are counting on everybody showing up every week, in the middle of a giant pandemic, you’re probably going to be disappointed. So, if you’re hoping to pass out papers, the one day a week that the students come to class, I think you’re going to find yourself with a lot of headaches. So, I think having your materials online… that’s the whole thing with an online learning course or a video conferencing course. And we didn’t really get into my background with that. I ran, for 13 years, a video conferencing system at a community college here. We’re the second largest county in the country and more rural than the largest county. And so at one point, we were teaching students over video conferencing who were living at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. So, those students, they’d have to hike out 12 miles or take a helicopter and then drive for four hours to get to our main campus. So, that was why it made so much sense for us and why we had a video conferencing program that went on to 2015. And that’s why it was like that. It was because there was this real reason to do it. But, when I was managing it, I would tell faculty, we have to build online components. And the reason is, the plan that had been made by the academic leadership was… well, we had this complicated system of faxing papers and collecting things through fax, we were already building online components. We started with WebCT and I said if we use WebCT for this we can do low-stakes testing through WebCT. We can distribute papers. When the students lose those papers, we don’t have to worry about finding a secretary or an administrative assistant, or another professor who’s at the other campus to run and print it out. And in the cases where we were working in even more remote areas, we didn’t have those types of resources. So, we really needed to use the online component. And that’s even more true if your students are going to end up staying at home or if somebody gets exposed and has to self isolate for a few weeks, they’re not going to be in person. So, having that online component really is going to make your life easier. And as you said, right now, when all these plans were being made, our state looked fine. But our state now is one of the highest rates of infection in the world. So, I don’t know what it’ll be like in a month. Nobody does.

Rebecca: I didn’t want to follow up a little bit on this conversation. We’ve talked a lot about what it’s like for faculty in planning, but not really entirely about the student side of remote learning, like what their systems might need to be like or what kinds of rules we might have in place? Or what kinds of expectations we have about participation in terms of a synchronous video component. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Rick: I think one advantage we have that this is happening in 2020 is that, if we’re looking at engaging in something that’s primarily video and audio, our telephones really today can do a lot of that, and even answering short polls we can do on our phones. So, the students do have that possibility. But, ultimately, a computer is a little bit more effective. And one of the things I am worried about, actually, is access to that technology for some students who may normally rely on computer labs at our schools. And when we’re thinking about it as faculty members, it’s tricky for those of us in instructional design and educational technology, who have been doing this our entire careers to remember that not everybody has all the tools that we do. And so I’m really hoping that schools are either making socially distanced labs available, or ideally having equipment that is available for checkout for their lower-income students who may not have all the equipment. And I think the other problem that we’re going to have for students is going to be quiet learning environments. A lot of students live with multiple people living in the same room. A lot of students live in environments that are a little bit noisier, and we’re gonna have to adjust to that and figure out, based upon the size of our class, like I mentioned earlier, do we need to mute them? How are we going to check for their understanding if they’re muted? Are we going to have all the video available? You mentioned what the students have at home. What is their internet connection? Do they have a strong enough internet connection? It probably needs to be at least in the megabit realm for this to work at all. And I think the other problem is that sometimes students are going to be on shared connections. And what I found in the spring, that we had switched from the telephone company, because I was able to get a much higher bandwidth to the cable company, which generally has been great. I’m working at home, my partner works at home and that really hasn’t been a problem. But I tell you what, when my two daughters were both participating in Zoom conferences, my spouse was on a Zoom conference, and I was on a Zoom conference, we were not all doing video, it just didn’t work. And so we had to mute some of those sections. And really, some students may not even want their video on. And so I think we’re gonna have to be open and accomodating for those types of questions that students might have. Because they may be a privacy issue. It may be a technology issue, and if they don’t have their video on, I don’t think we need to spend a whole bunch of time talking to them about their video and why isn’t it on, whether it should be on. I really feel like there’s so many different reasons that are valid for the camera to be off, that we should probably let some students participate without video feeds.

John: And the same argument can be made for audio because if they’re in a noisy environment, they may not be able to even speak without a lot of background noise. It’s one thing to invite students to turn on their video and audio if they can, but we probably shouldn’t require it.

Rick: I think you’re right. I think it’s also one of the real key differences between that built video conferencing environment that was pretty popular a good 10 to 20 years ago. Those rooms were purpose built. Every single room was purpose built, whether it was built for somebody teaching or whether it was built for the student receiving the mat. rials. Everybody went into a room that was, ideally sound isolated, that had a good mic setup. And that’s just not going to be the case when everybody’s at home.

John: We always end with the question: “What’s next?”

Rick: I think what’s next, globally… what a lot of us in instructional technology and instructional design really hope is that this fall is gonna go better than last spring. Because I can’t tell you how many, what I personally think are bogus, articles came out saying, “Look, it proves that distance learning doesn’t work.” No, it proves that distance learning needs preparation, and you can’t do it with a day’s notice. So, hopefully this fall, people will have much better experiences. I really hope people contact all the resources that are available at their schools. If they have instructional designers, those people can really help you build that online component. There are people who have been working in video at your school. I know there’s a number of people at Northern Arizona University with extensive experience. Reach out to those people, they can really help you. They can make sure that the room is the way you need it to be. I would say really reach out. But, as far as what’s next, I hope that what’s next is that people say, Wow, building an online component really made my life easier. And that they’ll start building online components all the time every year. And I’ve been pushing that to the point of obnoxiousness…. sorry, folks who worked with me… for decades now, that it’s more work that first semester you set it up, but every subsequent semester, using your learning management system, even for your in-person classes, is going to help. And now we’ve seen that it helps if there’s a global pandemic, but we can also see that it could help if there was a massive forest fire that went through your town, and everybody had to evacuate and you didn’t want to call this semester a loss. And there have been some, more in K-12, but some experiences where that really did happen. People were able to do it, and it’s also really critical. I don’t know how much you guys talk about K-12. But, that’s an environment, too, where preparing for emergencies is easier to see now. But, also where college students may sometimes forget things, 12-year olds and 13-year olds forget things a lot. And so having the work online for them can really help them. So, I’m really hopeful. That’s what I think is next. What I hope is next is that we have a much better experience this fall under such trying circumstances.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for your insights and some thoughts about preparing for the land of video moving forward.

Rick: Thank you so much.

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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.

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123. New Trends in Science Instruction

Posted in active learning, authentic learning, collaborative learning, K-12, learning, math ed, pedagogy, STEM, teaching
March 4, 2020

Science instruction in K-12 education has long been provided as if science consisted of a body of facts to be memorized. The Next Generation Science Standards, however, rely on an inquiry-based approach in which students learn about science by engaging in scientific exploration. In this episode, Dr. Kristina Mitchell joins us to discuss this approach and its implications for college instruction.

After six years as a director of online education at Texas Tech University, Kristina now works for a science curriculum publishing company and teaches part time at San Jose State University.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Science instruction in K-12 education has long been provided as if science consisted of a body of facts to be memorized. The Next Generation Science Standards, however, rely on an inquiry-based approach in which students learn about science by engaging in scientific exploration. In this episode, we discuss this approach and its implications for college instruction.

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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.

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John: Our guest today is Dr. Kristina Mitchell. After six years as a director of online education at Texas Tech University, Kristina now works for a science curriculum publishing company and teaches part-time at San Jose State University. Welcome back, Kristina.

Kristina: Thank you. It’s good to be back.

Rebecca: Today our teas are…

Kristina: Diet Dr. Pepper.

John: The same as last time. [LAUGHTER] I have a green tea today.

Rebecca: And I have a nice pot of brewed English Breakfast tea.

John: We’ve invited you here today to talk about the Next Generation Science Standards. How did you get involved with the Next Generation Science Standards?

Kristina: During my work at Texas Tech University in online education, I was doing a lot of consulting for publishing companies on their online and curriculum offerings, which led to a full-time job offer from a curriculum company that works specifically in K-12 and some higher ed science curriculum, and I learned very quickly that one of the newest trends in science education at the K-12 level are these Next Generation Science Standards that were created by college-level science professors in order to change the way we teach science to K-12 students.

John: How did these standards come about?

Kristina: I have to admit that because I’m relatively new to the science curriculum world, I am not an expert on their creation. But I do know that there were several panels of scientists from various higher education institutions that got together to try and figure out from the perspectives of different disciplines, “What do we want our students who come to university to know about science once they get there?” When I was in middle school, I don’t know how much you remember your middle school science lessons, but I remember dissecting frogs and doing our Punnett squares about genetics, but what I remember most is that we would learn those principles of science like Newton’s laws throughout the week, and then Friday, we would do a lab to prove that they were true. And unfortunately, that’s not how any of us do science. Being a social scientist myself, that’s not how I did science at the college level, as a researcher. So, the panel of experts from various scientific disciplines sought to change the way students think about science to think about it more as a process of investigation, rather than something you sort of memorize and then confirm.

Rebecca: The Next Generation Science Standards have three dimensions. Can you talk about those a little bit?

Kristina: Sure. So, these sort of three dimensions, or the three pillars of the way students are learning in K-12 about science, the first is they’re learning disciplinary core ideas. So these disciplinary core ideas are the core features of disciplines like physics or chemistry and the things that they really have to know about that specific discipline in order to build on that knowledge. The second one is science and engineering practices, so these are the ways we study science. And the great thing about the ways that we study science is that it doesn’t change across disciplines. Whether you’re a physicist or a chemist or a sociologist, you’re going to use the same types of scientific practices to answer your research questions. And then the final dimension, the third dimension, are cross cutting concepts. So, these are things like observing patterns or observing cause and effect, concepts that also span across all disciplines, not necessarily limited only to science. So it’s concepts that students can use to understand the world around them, regardless of what questions they’re asking.

Rebecca: Can you give us an example of how these three dimensions play out in a particular grade level?

Kristina: Sure. So when we’re thinking about what students are doing in science classrooms these days that might be different from the way we learned science when we were in seventh grade, students are doing a lot more investigation centered science. So, you walked into your classroom, your college classroom, and somebody walks in and says to one of your students, “What are you guys doing?” And your student might say, “Oh, we’re reading this chapter on…” Rebecca, I think you’re an art person, right?

Rebecca: Yeah, design.

Kristina: “So we’re reading this chapter on Photoshop,” and you ask them, “Okay, well, why are you doing that?” And they’d say “Well, because Professor Mushtare told us to.” In trying to get them away from that instead, the way they’re trying to implement science in the classrooms now would be to get students, you know, if they came into your classroom to say, “Well what are you guys working on?” And they might say, “Well, we’re trying to make a flyer for this project.” And you’d say “Why?” And they’d say, “Well, because we’re trying to figure out how we can make people more excited in this project that we’re working on.” So, getting students to start from the point of “What are we trying to figure out and why do we have to do this activity in order to figure that out?” …rather than “What are we memorizing, what are we learning because the teacher told us to?”

John: So it’s more of a project-based learning or inquiry-based approach to the discipline.

Kristina: Absolutely. And we’ve seen that a lot emerging in higher ed. So, it’s really great to see it reflected in the K-12 space too.

John: But it’s important probably for faculty to be aware of this, because if students are starting to use this approach, as they move forward, they might expect to see more of that in higher ed, where they might see it as a step backwards if they have to move to something that involves more rote learning, for example.

Kristina: Exactly. We’re seeing a lot less “sage on the stage”-type activities, both in K-12 and in higher ed. So it’s really important, I think, that we all kind of know what both sides of education are doing so we can at least know where our students are coming from.

Rebecca: How do you see this new approach helping students be better prepared for college?

Kristina: Well I definitely think that the idea of empowering students to be in charge of their own knowledge is really important. Sometimes I find that a struggle that my students have is doing this sort of figuring things out on their own. If I don’t give explicit instructions with explicit rubrics, they sometimes feel very lost. And so empowering them to recognize themselves as people who can ask questions and figure out the answers to those questions, that goes far beyond just physics class. That goes into just being a responsible and productive member of society. So, I think hopefully we can see students taking a little bit more ownership in their learning because of these trends at K-12.

John: Does it also perhaps give students a little more motivation when they have a goal in mind, and they know why they’re doing things rather than just doing it because their instructors told them to?

Kristina: Yeah, I would definitely think so. I definitely remember my seventh grade year not being passionate about the science, other than “Wow, cool. It’s a dead frog.” So thinking about empowering students to ask these questions might get them more excited about what they’re learning about.

John: In one of our earlier podcasts, we talked to Josh Eyler, who emphasized the importance of curiosity and nurturing curiosity and this approach seems to be very nicely tied into that.

Kristina: Absolutely. And I think about my own political science classroom. One of the fun activities I’ve done and I swear the first time I went through it, it was one of those days where I thought, “Ah… I’m tired. I don’t have anything that I’m interested in lecturing about. We’re almost through this semester, what am I going to do today?” And so I decided, I’m just going to have the students write questions on index cards related to political science and hand them all in and I’ll answer all of the ones that I can. And that was one of the best days of class. I’ve recreated that many times in semesters. And so seeing that these Next Generation Science Standards where we’re trying to get students to think there are some things you learn about each discipline, but there are some practices and concepts that apply everywhere and you just learn how to ask the right questions and you use these concepts and practices to answer them. It’s something that I’m using in my political science class, even really, before I realized that I was specifically doing so.

Rebecca: Do you have any idea how students are responding to this curricula?

Kristina: So every individual curriculum and program is going to be a little bit different, but they are all going to tie into these main ideas. And one thing that we’ve seen in student performance and student preferences is that the students really like doing things in class, having activities and hands on specifically to science. Of course, that often means labs. But one thing that I often talk to teachers about and get a lot of really good feedback on is the idea that we kind of think of doing science looks like it’s in lab coats with safety goggles, but we all know as researchers ourselves that science looks like talking sometimes. And sometimes it looks like asking questions, and sometimes it looks like taking notes or revising models, and getting the teachers and students to realize that that’s all part of what doing science is. They get really excited at the idea of doing science themselves. Of course, they like to see things explode in class, but sometimes just getting them the opportunity to have discussions with each other. It’s amazing to me what the middle school students are capable of, and our elementary age students, what they’re capable of. I have kids myself and I didn’t know that they were learning such higher level concepts of science in class.

Rebecca: There’s big movements to move STEM to STEAM. Is the humanities represented in this new model?

Kristina: So, when we think about STEM, that’s kind of what everyone’s prioritizing these days: the science, the technology, engineering and mathematics… and the A to add it to STEAM would be the arts. So the idea that the arts are also important, but I think there are some key pieces missing here. When we focus exclusively on STEM and on creation and innovation, that’s really good. We need creation and innovation. But as I feel like sometimes we’re learning right now, without a good background knowledge of history, we might be creating and innovating things that either already exist, or have already been tried, or that don’t have a good basis in what we’ve experienced as a society. It’s like they said on Jurassic Park, you spend so much time wondering whether you can and you don’t stop to think about whether you should.

Rebecca: So you were just raising that question about ethics and things like this. So,how do you see this curriculum evolving so that the humanities are better represented or integrate more into our integrated learning in K through 12?

Kristina: Well, one thing that I think is really great about the NGSS is that it definitely starts to sort of de-silo the disciplines of science. So, when we think about physics and chemistry and earth science and life science, when I was in school, those were all completely separate years, both in middle school and in high school. And the NGSS standards definitely start to recognize that we can’t silo our disciplines like that because they have so much to speak to each other. Some questions you need many disciplines of science to answer. And so I’m hoping that slowly, more and more curriculum writers will apply that same standard to the humanities, to the social sciences, and to the arts, the idea that nothing can truly be siloed because social science speaks to even questions like “What scientific research do we do? What research questions do we ask?” That can’t be explained using natural sciences alone. Because yes, natural sciences might seem really unbiased, but we’re asking certain questions and we’re not asking others. So using social science and humanities to help answer those bigger questions. I’m hoping that we see less siloing across disciplines over time. And even at universities, we’re starting to see increases in things like cluster hires, where multiple people from different disciplines all come at a sort of similar question, kind of like what we’re doing here. We’re three people from very different disciplines. But we’re all interested in the question of, you know, what makes teaching good or bad.

Rebecca: One of the questions that’s risen a lot in higher ed, and I know as a popular conversation on our campus, is about fake news and debunking pseudoscience. Do you see that this curriculum helps with that,? …perpetuates that?

Kristina: I think that’s a really good question, and kind of a difficult one, because I think it’s really important to teach students how to interpret the world around them, and what science is and how it’s done, because that can help us determine the validity of the information that we get. But I also think, like we were just talking about, there is a move away from rote learning, from the idea that an expert in a field tells us what is true about that field and we learn it. The fact that we’re moving toward anyone can be an expert, anyone can do the research themselves, anyone can ask questions. Sometimes, I also worry that that pendulum might swing too far, because that’s sometimes where we get people who go online and find whatever Google can tell them about vaccines not being safe or about climate change not being real. And because they feel empowered to be their own expert, they’re treating themselves and their research as equivalent to people who have devoted their lives to getting advanced degrees and who know the answers to these questions. And so I worry that maybe we’ll see the pendulum swing a little too far in the other direction, but I’m not sure.

Rebecca: Based on knowing what you know about higher ed and what you know about this science curriculum, what do you think faculty should be thinking about in terms of what their students might know or might not know, or how they might know differently than they did before?

Kristina: I think that it’s important to teach students what expertise is to begin with, when we think about what it means to be an expert and know something. So, when we go back to those next generation science standards, and think about those three dimensions, the disciplinary core ideas, to me, those are the things that experts already know and that we can accept as the core ideas of each discipline. So, starting from that point and saying the question of vaccine safety has already been established, we know that the vaccines that are here are safe. That’s a disciplinary core idea. But now let’s use our science and engineering practices and our cross-cutting concepts to think about other types of preventative medicine that maybe don’t have the same consensus or new types of vaccines? How would we know that those are safe or how would we know that those are effective? So, I think it’s important not to forget about those disciplinary core ideas that are things that experts have already figured out questions that have already been settled, and then allowing people to start from that point and ask their own questions and do their own research using the scientific method.

John: Changing the topic just a little bit, we get a fair number of people who are interested in the STEM fields when they’re in middle school and even high school, but then they get to college, and all of a sudden, they have to start taking calculus classes, and Matrix Algebra, and Organic Chemistry. Is there any way that perhaps lessons learned from this approach could be used to make college classes more effective and not having so many people get lost along the way once they hit these courses that have been traditionally a bit of a barrier to progress in those areas?

Kristina: That’s a really great question, and we even see that in political science. I teach our research methods class in political science and it has just the tiniest bit of statistics in it. And students are like, “Why am I doing math in a political science class?” And then of course, in graduate school, we’re seeing increasing amounts of quantitative knowledge needed to finish graduate programs and then to compete on the job market. So, I definitely think that the rise of math as something important is a deterrent to some students who might otherwise be interested in entering STEM or social science fields, but I think that also comes down to the pendulum again. I think that it’s important to realize that quantitative methodology is a method of understanding scientific questions, and you don’t have to use quantitative methodology to answer every scientific question. Some of them can be answered using qualitative methods, and even discussing political theory or other types of theories in other sciences or in the humanities. I think it would be good if we could open up the doors a little bit to people who have really high level intelligence and interest and curiosity, but maybe don’t have an interest in math. I think both by making math more accessible and less required, we might be able to get some really interesting new perspectives in our college level courses. I don’t like the idea of using hard math classes as a way to weed students out. And I think that’s sometimes what they’re used for, because I took Matrix Algebra in grad school, and it was really hard. And I’ve never used it since that class… ever again. So it’s not as though it was a skill I needed to be a PhD in political science. It felt more like a class that was used to weed out students who weren’t as interested or weren’t as good at memorizing how to do Matrix Algebra.

John: The point I was trying to get to, I think, is that perhaps if more of these inquiry-based methods were used to motivate the material, it could help get past that. I actually had a similar experience with Matrix Algebra. And when I was learning, I was able to do the proofs and work through it, but I didn’t really understand it until I started using it in econometrics and other disciplines, when all of a sudden it just made so much sense and why all those theorems were there and useful. But we lost a lot of people along the way there. And perhaps that’s something we could build into all of our classes to help motivate students and not just hit them with a lot of theorems and not necessarily even just rote learning, but a lot of inquiry for which the motivation may not be obvious to people when they take it.

Kristina: Definitely. And I think that when I teach my Statistics and Research Methods class, it always is easier for the students, and they always do better, when I tie the math we’re doing to a real question. So even something as simple as “We’re trying to figure out whether the average American is conservative or liberal,” and this is our question that we’re trying to figure out. Now we need to do a difference of means test to figure it out. And so that would be, going back to what we were saying earlier, the idea of you walking into my class and asking my students what they’re doing. Well, they could answer “We’re memorizing how to do a difference of means test from chapter 12 because Dr. Mitchell told us to,” versus saying, “Well, we’re trying to figure out what the ideology is of Americans from different regions, so we have to use this mathematical test so we can answer that question.” So really about framing it in terms of “What are you doing and why are you doing it?” and making sure that we know that the students would answer in a way that gets them excited about the material.

Rebecca: I think context is everything. The real world problems that you’re talking about in the new science curriculum is not unlike the kinds of things that you’re talking about in your classes or even when you have to use math in design class. So, a lot of visual arts students think math is completely irrelevant to them, but when it’s put in context, when you need to do certain things, all of the sudden it makes more sense. I teach a creative code class and we do fairly complicated geometries there, actually. And if you can see the results, sometimes it makes a lot more sense to some of our students.

Kristina: Exactly. So the fact that they would know why they’re doing this and it’s to accomplish a specific goal, rather than just “We’re memorizing this because the professor told us we had to, it was going to be on the exam.”

Rebecca: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

Kristina: Lord, help us for how many times we hear “Is this going to be on the exam?” That seems like the motivation for trying to learn something. And it would be great if we could move it away from that being the motivation, toward the motivation being “Well, we’re trying to learn this because it helps us figure out this question or this design problem.”

Rebecca: Or the motivation, like, “Hey, I really need to understand this mathematical principle, because I really want to know the answer to this question.”

Kristina: Exactly.

Rebecca: And that leads to where they actually start asking for the things that we’ve prescribed previously. [LAUGHTER]

Kristina: Yeah, and it becomes just a tool to figure things out. And if they want to figure the answer out, then they’re going to need all the tools.

John: Could you tell us what this would look like if we were to stop by a seventh grade class, and this was being put in practice?

Kristina: Absolutely. So if we think about what a seventh grader might be doing, so if we start from that point of the goal is to figure something out, and maybe they’re learning about Space science. They’re learning about Earth and Space and trying to figure out “Why do some objects in Space orbit other objects?” …like “What does that mean? How does that happen?” So, one really fun activity that I’ve seen middle schoolers doing is they have these embroidery hoops and these marbles. And so what they do is they put the marble in the embroidery hoop, and they sort of spin it around on the table. And so the marble is swirling in circles and then they lift the hoop and marbles start shooting everywhere. So it’s very funny in a seventh grade classroom, because you got kids running everywhere trying to chase their marbles. And so at first, they’re just having fun, tracking which way the marble goes and trying to figure out when they lift the embroidery hoop which direction will the marble head, and then eventually they start realizing, “Oh, well, the marble kind of wants to go straight, but the embroidery hoop is keeping it going in a circle.” So, if we think about the sun, with the planets orbiting it, if the sun suddenly disappeared, Earth would kind of want to go straight out in whatever direction it was headed. But because the sun’s gravity’s in the middle, it’s keeping Earth going in a circle around the sun. And so they start putting these pieces together and eventually they come up with this idea of the relationship between inertia, which keeps the earth going, and gravity, which is what keeps it in that same orbit. When they think about what is the core idea they’re learning about, well, they’re learning about orbit, but the way they’re figuring it out is by looking at this small model of what is actually happening at the planetary level. And that’s really reflective of the kinds of things that scientists do in their labs. We’re running models that try to simulate what’s happening in space, or what’s happening in the political world, or whatever discipline we’re doing. We’re trying to create these models to help us understand it. And so that’s what the students are doing, too.

John: That reminds me of a talk that Eric Mazur has given in several places, including at Oswego, where he talked about the Force Concept Inventory, and how, while students were able to plug numbers into formulas and solve problems very well, when they were asked about questions like that, specifically, if I recall, “Suppose that you’re swinging a rock on a sling, and you release it, what would the motion look like?” And basically it ends up flying in essentially a straight line… well, other than the effect of gravity. But when people were asked that, they would bring up things that they had seen in cartoons where they expected it to loop through the air, perhaps as it’s moving. That’s actually one of those things where people in really good institutions who had taken a college class had some really poor intuition. And this type of practice can help prepare them with better intuition on which to build later.

Kristina: There was also a video at, I think it was Harvard’s graduation, where they asked a bunch of STEM majors who had just graduated if they thought they could make a little circuit that would light up a light bulb. And so they handed them everything they would need to do, and everyone’s like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, I got this no problem.” And they couldn’t, they couldn’t figure out how to light the light bulb up, because as much as they had done the math in class, they just had never really done the practical aspect. And so getting students hands-on to do the things with those science and engineering practices in whatever discipline we’re in. It’s really important to get our students in the driver’s seat to start practicing what they’re going to be doing when they leave the classroom.

Rebecca: It also seems like having multiple pathways to the same information is a good way to play with our memory, and make sure that it sticks and it stays there. So, something that’s embodied, something that you memorize, something that’s a couple different kinds of examples.

Kristina: Exactly. Maybe it can move it from our short-term back to the long-term memory to help us keep that knowledge.

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

Kristina: So I think I’d really like to start exploring what this does look like in a classroom setting for myself. So rather than just focusing on what it looks like for students in K-12, I’d like to see if I can use a similar style of teaching in my political science classroom, and just see what kinds of evaluations I get and how the students like it. I think the idea of getting rid of these silos and recognizing that we all use the same practices and concepts could help us with keeping our college experience for our students interesting and consistent. And we start realizing that they’re going to learn in each of our disciplinary core ideas, but there are a lot of things that we all have in common. So, I’m really going to try this semester, maybe my student evaluations will suffer greatly, but we all know from my past talks that they’re biased anyway. But I just kind of want to see what it looks like if I let my students take a little bit more of a driver’s seat in asking the question, “What are we going to figure out? What do we want to know about the world?”

Rebecca: Do you have a piece of this semester that you’re most excited about that you already have planned in this domain?

Kristina: Well, I’m doing the research methods class this semester, which of course, involves some math. And I think that I would like to use their ideas about what kind of data we should be looking at and what kind of questions we should be answering. Because I think that’ll make it a lot more meaningful for them, rather than if I say, “We’re going to look at the American national election study,” letting them figure out “What question do you want to answer?” And then I’ll teach them whatever method it is that they need to know in order to answer that question. So, we’re going to try it. We’ll see how it goes.

John: In a past podcast, Doug Mckee talked about a similar situation in his econometrics class where he was using a time-for-telling approach. Where basically you face students with problems and let them wrestle with it a bit before giving them some assistance and helping them resolve things, and there’s a lot of evidence that those techniques can be really effective.

Rebecca: So, it sounds like well wishes on your new adventures. [LAUGHTER]

Kristina: Thank you.

Rebecca: Thank you so much for joining us.

Kristina: Of course, this is great. It’s always great. I think eventually I’ll have to come visit y’all.

John: That would be great. Well, thank you.

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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. Editing assistance provided by Brittany Jones and Savannah Norton.

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115. Tangelo Park

Posted in equity, first-generation, higher education, K-12, learning, mentorship, persistence, teaching
January 8, 2020

Unequal access to educational opportunities in the United States has helped to create a poverty trap from which it is difficult to escape. In this episode, Dr. Chuck Dziuban and Harris Rosen join us to discuss a remarkable program that demonstrates how students and communities can flourish when educational barriers are eliminated.

Chuck is the Director of the Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness at the University of Central Florida (UCF) where he has been a faculty member since 1970, teaching research design and statistics. He is also the founding director of the university’s Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning. Harris Rosen is the owner of several large hotels in Orlando and a philanthropist who has invested heavily in the Tangelo Park and Parramore school systems.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Unequal access to educational opportunities in the United States has helped to create a poverty trap from which it is difficult to escape. In this episode, we explore a remarkable program that demonstrates how students and communities can flourish when educational barriers are eliminated.

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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.

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John: Our guests today are Dr. Chuck Dziuban and Harris Rosen. Chuck is the Director of the Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness at the University of Central Florida (UCF) where he has been a faculty member since 1970, teaching research design and statistics. He is also the Founding Director of the university’s Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning. Harris Rosen is the owner of several large hotels in Orlando and a philanthropist who has invested heavily in the Tangelo Park and Parramore school systems.

Welcome.

Chuck: Thank you.

Harris: Yes, welcome. Thank you.

John: Are teas today are:

Harris: I have the blueberry and it’s caffeine free. That’s what I drink: blueberry tea, caffeine free.

Rebecca: Yum.

Chuck: and I have orange spice.

Harris: …and is it okay if I put a little honey in it? [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: You have our permission for sure.

Chuck: Thank you.

Harris: Thank you so much.

Rebecca: I’m drinking royal English breakfast today,

John: I’m drinking Tazo Refresh Mint tea today. The first program that you worked on was the Tangelo Park Community school program that began in 1993. And the more recent preschool program was instituted in the Parramore Community schools. Could you tell us about the origin first of the Tangelo Park program?

Harris: Yes, well, we go all the way back to 1993. And I remember, very vividly, sitting in my office and thinking about how incredibly fortunate I’d been… from New York City’s Lower East Side to college, in the army, and then ultimately working for Disney, and then after Disney purchasing a tiny little motel here in Central Florida. And at that point of time, in 1993, the owner of five hotels with my sixth under construction… and planning and dreaming about another property, a resort property they I always dreamed about having. And it occurred to me that I’ve been blessed beyond anything I ever imagined. And that a voice said to me, “Harris, it’s time for you to offer a helping hand to those in need and to say thank you, God.” And so I thought about that for a while, and I remember growing up in New York. My mom would be very, very strict with my brother and myself in terms of doing homework and getting good grades, indicating that if we did well, one day we wouldn’t live in the neighborhood we lived. And the neighborhood we lived in was between the East River, Little Italy, the Bowery, and Chinatown. Not exactly a gated community. And so my brother and I certainly dreamt one day that we wouldn’t be living there. And so, here I was sitting at my desk with all of the things that have occurred in my life being so incredibly blessed. So, I called a couple of friends of mine, because education was something that was always very important growing up, Bill Stone and Sarah Sprinkle. Sarah, an early childhood expert; Bill, a Principal of one of the top high schools here in Orlando. And we met several days later, and I said, “I want to do something that has to do with education. What do I do? I can give college scholarships. If you think that’s probably the answer.” But the answer was a little bit more complex. It was “Let’s put together a program that is a little bit different, Harris. Let’s create a preschool program for 2-, 3-, and 4-year olds and then let’s offer fellowships, complete scholarships, for those who are accepted to either college or community college, or perhaps a vocational school. And I said, “God, that sounds beautiful. That sounds really simple. Let’s think about doing it.” And so we thought about it. And we ultimately decided that all we really needed was a community. And so I called Orange County Commission. And I spoke to Commissioner Mabel Butler. And I said, “Mabel, this is where I am right now with a thought, all I need is a neighborhood, an underserved community.” She said “I’ll be right over.” I said “Really?” [LAUGHTER] She said “Yup, I’ve got something in mind.” And she did. She came right over, then drove me to a community not too far from my office. And she said, “Harris, welcome to Tangelo Park.” I said, “Well, wonderful.” And she said, “Well, not wonderful. This community is under siege. It is in terrible, terrible straits. Crime is out of control. Drug abuse is absolutely outrageous. Teachers that teach here at the Tangelo Park Elementary School have to leave with security. As soon as classes are over, they’re not permitted to stay.” I said, “Oh my God, that’s awful.” But she said “The neighborhood wants to change. And that’s a good thing.” So I was introduced to some of the neighborhood individuals, and I just introduced myself as who I was without going into any detail. And then I was introduced to the Principal of the elementary school, Bob Allen. And I shared with Bob what I had in mind. He said, “Harris, look, let’s have a neighborhood meeting, and you share with the neighborhood what it is that you have in mind.” And I said, “Fine.” So, several days later, I was asked to go back to Tangelo, which I did, and there were about maybe 100 people there at the meeting, and I indicated what it was that I had in mind, and the reception was not what I had anticipated. People, I think, just didn’t understand what the program was, but they were wondering “If I have a child that 16 or 17, I guess he or she won’t be able to take advantage of this scholarship, but if they’re 2, by the time they’re 17 they’ll be able to go to college for free.” And I thought that that might be something that was puzzling them. And I said, “Well wait… in June, those youngsters of yours who are in college, I will pay everything. Those of you who have youngsters in high school and are graduating and are contemplating college, community college, or vocational school, I’ll take care of everything.” Well, the place went crazy. [LAUGHTER] And that was the beginning of the Tangelo Park program. We’ve been doing Tangelo Park now for 26 years. And Chuck can give you all of the data in terms of how many kids we’ve sent to college, what the graduation rates are, what the return on investment is, all of that stuff, but that was it. It wasn’t complicated. In the army, we learned K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, stupid) and we kept the program simple at Tangelo. We had a challenge because we didn’t know where to put the preschool, because the Tangelo Park Elementary School certainly was not able to accommodate a preschool. So we drove around the neighborhood and spoke with individuals who owned homes (they were all single-family homes), and we asked them if they might mind if we converted a little part of their home into a tiny little preschool accommodating about six children. And we would pay for all of the refurbishing, provide all of the material, and they would be certified, we would certify them as certified caregivers. Well, within a very short period of time, we had 10 volunteers. So, we had 10 little preschools, and that was the beginning of the Tangelo Park program. Boy, that was a long babble, wasn’t it?

John: That’s wonderful.

Rebecca: No, it’s a great story.And I really love the idea that it bookends. We tend to think about interventions being K-12. But it’s interesting that the intervention is really a before school, and then after K-12. Can you talk a little bit about some of the results that you’ve seen by having the interventions at this early stage

Harris: Before Chuck will provide you with all of those details, you mentioned preschool two, three, and four. What we have discovered, and I think it’s fairly common knowledge now, the brain develops more in 2-, 3-, 4- and 5-year olds and then at anytime else in their lives. So, Isn’t it wonderful to begin education then to what a wonderful advantage these youngsters have in kindergarten, and elementary school, and middle school, and high school, and in college. And so that’s why we decided to do 2, 3, 4 programs, because it’s a perfect time to do it.

Rebecca: I have a two year old so I deeply understand what you mean. [LAUGHTER] She’s rich in learning everything. She’s in preschool and you can just see her brain exploding with new information and new ideas. She’s a sponge.

Harris: I had four for a while, a five-, a four-, a three-, and a one-year old. So, I know what you’re talking about. [LAUGHTER]

Chuck: Let me just review. I just love to hear Harris tell story. To be clear, in Tangelo, it starts at two years of age. quality education begins at two years of age, three years of age, four years of age, pre K, all the way through school that begins. But, all the way through the system, these children in Tangelo are supported. They get support all the way through the school. They start with a tremendous advantage coming into kindergarten. They come in and in many cases reading. It’s just a marvelous kind of experience. But, we also have a program in Tangelo for years where we work with the parents…. parent leadership… help them become advocates and help them learn how to become leaders in the school, help them how to negotiate with the school on their children’s behalf. Oftentimes these parents would go in and confront. That’s not the way to do it. The way is to learn how the school operates and then advocate for their children. Then, all the way through, we have a counselor at the high school who works with the children all the way through… prepares them for college… and the results are really amazing. So, they begin to prepare for college. We have an alumni association: students who have graduated from college and come back.. work in the community… and are activists. To be clear, not every student has to go to college. Harris pays for many other things. They can go to community college, they can choose to go to the military, God bless them. And if they want to go to vocational school and learn a productive trade, there is support for that as well, so they have lots of options. We understand that college is not for everyone. Given those kinds of things, given those bookends, as you said, Rebecca, the results are nothing short of amazing. Now I’ll say this about Harris, in the early years, he didn’t want to collect any data. And then what began to happen is people began to notice the program. And then they began asking for data. So, Harris said to me at one time, “Chuck, we need data.” So, we have data.

Let me give you some of the data. We know that the children both in Parramore and Tangelo are making tremendous cognitive gains from two to four years of age. They’re also learning things like executive function, how to control their anger, how to work in groups, all of the kinds of social skills that they need to function well in groups and work with college. They’re also learning social-emotional skills, how to communicate their feelings. So all of these wrap up around in this early childhood program. Now, 26 years ago in Tangelo, we reckon (as best we can tell) the graduation rate in high school from Tangelo was about 60%. Today, it’s 100%. Virtually every child within Tangelo graduates from high school. We’ll talk about the impact of that financially in just a minute. So, from 60% to 100% graduation. Now, if they choose to go to college, they can go either to community college and through our direct connect program move on to a State University of Florida college. And you have to listen very carefully to this. Mobility rates have gone down greatly in Tangelo. They used to move away, now they don’t. So, those children who are eligible, they just don’t move away. Those children who remain in Tangelo and are eligible for the college scholarship, graduate at a rate of 78% from college. Caveat, they remain in the community. Think about this. Because I’ll tell you right now, the national data show that if a student lives in the lowest economic quartile in this country, the chance of their graduating from college is 10%. The odds against them are 10 to 1. That’s unacceptable. And Harris will tell you, we are wasting millions of minds In this country, we raise that to 78%. Even if all the kids, even the kids who don’t graduate from college, they have college exposure, all the data shows they make more money in their lives than if they’ve never ended college at all. Crime rate in Tangelos is down 78%.

Harris: Correct.

Chuck: That is nothing short of amazing. Harris will talk to you about that as well. But preschool, college graduation, high school graduation, success in college has tremendous impact. So Tangela was fixed, in a way. My kids are older, they’d graduated, I’d move into Tangelo for the scholarship. Why not? Rebecca, move to Tangelo. [LAUGHTER] Your kids have a scholarship. So, that’s the general picture. John and Rebecca, have your listeners contact me. I will send anyone in the country all the data… the data, they are compelling. That’s what I have.

Rebecca: One of the things that you were mentioning is related to a lot of our previous episodes about first-generation college students and the lack of support networks that they might have or not knowledge about how to negotiate school institutions like college, but also their high schools to get the resources and things you need. So, I really love that your program includes educating the parents and supporting the parents and learning how to navigate those systems, especially if they’re not familiar.

Chuck: Well, sooner or later, you should ask him how much he‘s spending on this. [LAUGHTER] Because it is a bargain of the century. But, what we noticed in Tangelo to expenditures, preschool and college scholarship at the beginning of the program, most of the expenditure was for college scholarship, and then it crossed over. And Harris became concerned. He was saying “What’s going on here?” …and what’s going on here is, as the students know how to negotiate the system, they’re getting other scholarships. So the Rosen scholarship becomes a safety net. If they don’t get a scholarship, he pays the full ride, but they’re getting other scholarships because they know how to operate the system. They work with the counselor, there are transitions of all kinds.

Harris: Yeah, I must confess that I was really quite concerned. All of a sudden, I’m looking at data…. I can now pronounce that correctly, right? It’s not data [said with a soft “a”], it’s data [said with a hard “a”], [LAUGHTER] and I’m looking at data and I’m looking at a line that’s declining… a line that previously was skyrocketing. And I was like, “Oh, my God, we’re failing.” No! Grade point averages in high school have skyrocketed from let’s say, 2.00 to 3.7. And these youngsters are qualifying for so many other scholarships. Rosen, you have become a safety net. And that’s actually what happened. Now, there’s one thing that Chuck mentioned that I can touch upon, crime in the neighborhood down almost 80%. Oh, my God. So, about a year ago, I met with Sheriff Demings, and he said, “Harris, I have to tell you something.” “What’s that Sheriff?” He said, “Tangelo Park. We just have to thank you so much. I said ”What have I done?” “Are you kidding, we hardly get any calls over there. We now consider Tangelo Park to be an oasis. There’s less crime in Tangelo Park than there is most of the gated communities here in Central Florida. Thank you.” Amazing, isn’t it?

Chuck: One more thing about data. I love data. John knows I love data. [LAUGHTER] People ask the wrong questions, or ask the wrong metric. And here’s the question they ask: “How many graduated from high school? How many scholarships did you give? How many went to college?” How many graduated, divide.” The wrong metric. Let me tell you, given where Tangelo was of the 500 or more college scholarships that were awarded, the expectation would have been 45 college graduates. You know how many we have? 154. We have increased the probability of graduating from college in Tangelo Park by 300%. We have produced 216 college degree. Why? Because they’re getting multiple degrees. We have 26 graduate degrees. So, what they do is they they get an Associates, they get a bachelors, they get a graduate degree. We have doctors, we have lawyers. It is amazing. That is the right thing. You’re offering hope to this community. And when you offer hope, amazing things happen.

Harris: That’s so much positive stuff. But there is a negative component. We’ve been doing this now for 26 years, we spoke to some of the wealthiest individuals in America and some of the largest foundations in America… maybe in the world. Nobody else has replicated the program, despite all of this incredible data. Why? They certainly have the financial resources to do it. We cannot figure that out. Why, why, why, why? Out of complete frustration and because I wanted to continue to do good things, we adopted the Parramore community three years ago, and the same results are forthcoming and yet no one else in the entire United States of America has raised his hand and said: “Rosen, the results are amazing. We have underserved communities in Ohio. We have underserved communities in Chicago. We have underserved communities in Baltimore, we’ll do it.” Why not? I don’t understand. It’s driving me crazy.

Chuck: John and Rebecca, what I like to say is the funding crickets keep chirping in three-0year cycles. You have to understand this is a 26-year commitment. This is not a three-year funded cycle.

Harris: Oh, yeah. And I think Chuck raises a very good point, because I used to foolishly… when people would say, “Harris, how long do we do the program?” I said, “Well, in perpetuity.” I would see them almost wanting to throw up. Well, that’s a long, long time. And so we just say now until the neighbor transforms into perhaps a middle income community, but that might be the obstacle. We don’t know how long we have to do this. And we might have to do it for a very long period of time. How sad it is, though, that that is a hurdle that can’t be overcome.

Chuck: Yeah.

Harris: What is so wonderful about this, is that those individuals who have wealth can benefit. “Rosen, how do they benefit by doing something good.” They have a good feeling. Oh, no, no, no, no. Because every youngster who graduates from high school will earn over his or her lifetime, a half a million dollars more. So, I don’t care what business I’m in in that community, I’m going to benefit from that, right? If I can get all of these youngsters to graduate from high school, they’re all going to be earning a half million dollars more over a lifetime. They’ll come into my store and buy stuff, or they will avail themselves of the service I provide. And the United States of America is a beneficiary. Because for every dollar we have provided, and I think it’s about $16, $17 million so far, society receives a return on investment of $7. So we if we invest a a million, it’s $7 million; if we invest $100 million, It’s $700 million. My God, what a wonderful investment is that if you’re in business, if you’re in the private sector, and yet not enough to persuade people to say “we’ll hop on board.”

Chuck: And this 7 to 1 is not off of the top of our head. We hired an economist from the University of Chicago to do a return on investment study of Tangelo and he came back with a conservative estimate of $7 put back to society for every one that is invested in Tangelo and Parramore. So, the thing that’s a side effect that we’ve just begun to figure out is the economic impact of this philanthropy is tremendous. We were always working around, this is the right thing to do. But now we discovered amazing things that there are 1.2 million students who do not graduate from high school; they drop out every year. If we created a program that allowed them to graduate each year we would add $10 billion to the United States economy. Those are facts. The reduction in crime would be astounding. There is a huge economic impact of the Tangelo model. It’s not just the right thing to do. It will change the economy of this country. It costs far less to educate a student than it does to incarcerate them.

Harris: What is so amazing is this. It’s almost as if God is watching us and is tormented as we are by the lack of others to hop on board. And he said: “Maybe we have to change the equation, guys. Maybe instead of it just being a completely philanthropic initiative, we could infuse some economic benefits also.” Oh really God, economic benefits. My God. That’s amazing. A half a million dollars they graduate from high school, add another 200,000 maybe a million dollars of graduate from college, depending on the degree… crime will evaporate and save billions and billions and billions of dollars. The return on investment is seven to one. So, if you invest a bit and we as a society get back 7 billion and we’re doing something really good. Isn’t that the perfect, perfect, perfect scenario? Excuse me, I get a little bit excited about that.

Chuck: He does.

Rebecca: So, I’ll say it sounds pretty good to me. One of the discussions that happens a lot in K-12 and also in college settings is about diversifying student bodies and bringing underrepresented groups to college and then, of course, transforming different disciplines as a result… like careers and fields. And it seems like if we can get kids that would normally be in college to college that starts to actually solve or address some of those problems or those things that we really want to accomplish in higher ed and really in our society writ large.

Harris: So, this really is, if there is a perfect kind of philanthropy, this is perfect. Look at the wonderful things we’re doing. Yes. And I’m not patting myself on the back. It does accomplish some wonderful things. In addition to that, the private sector, the United States of America is the beneficiary. Look, if I were president of the United States of America, I would invite some of the wealthiest individuals in America and I would invite Harris and Chuck and some other people Lance Lochner and I’d say “Guys, talk about your program because we have people here who can hop on board in a heartbeat… people here from Baltimore, from Detroit, from Chicago. We want them to do as you guys have done and guess what? They will benefit from this also.” That’s my dream.

Chuck: We want your dream to come true. We believe, deep in our hearts, that the talent pool in our underserved communities is as deep as any gated community in this country. We know it. We’ve seen it all of the time. And the things that you say, Rebecca, are absolutely true. We have to reform our universities to understand better how to deal with more diversity. We have to help these students when they get to college. We’ve heard lots of things about these students as they come on to college campuses. It’s just not walking onto a campus and succeeding. They need support all the way through. You know what? I love Oswego. By the way, these people are sitting where I went to school, I went to school in Oswego, and you just bury yourself in snow. [LAUGHTER] But, you’re right. We’ve gotta support from that two-year old program all the way through, and then we’ve got to pay it forward. But we can’t understand and I said this again, and I’d love to do it again. The funding cricket keeps chirping in three-year cycle, you cannot fund for three years. It will not work. It cannot work. You’ve got to stay with it. Think about this… 7 to 1. And it’s only a conservative estimate. And now we’re going to put together an economic package. The data we have are astounding. We have some data that suggests that 75% of high school dropouts commit crimes. You can’t have it.

Harris: This is not very complicated. Not very complicated at all. If we can convince wealthy individuals and foundations throughout America, to do what we’ve done, adopt underserved communities… if we can make sure that every underserved community in America has a preschool component, and every single one of those youngsters stay in high school until they graduate, we will change America, one underserved community at a time. And we will not recognize what we have become: the perfect nation in the world.

Chuck: Yes, you can see, he’s not very passionate about this. [LAUGHTER] I want to repeat, I have all the data. It is clear, it is compelling. Please have your people contact you, I will send them the data, the return on investment study, any videos they want. And when you hear the testimony of these young people, how their lives have changed, it makes you want to weep.

Harris: And so Chuck,, we can invite them to Parramore and Tangelo Park.

Chuck: …anybody who wants to come.

Harris: You would not believe what you see. Two-, three- and four-year olds reading! …enthusiastic about school… can’t wait until they finish high school and go to college. It’s amazing, transforming these underserved communities by infusing hope. That’s all that we’re doing.

John: And that does require that long-term commitment that you mentioned. Now, you talked a little bit about those preschools. Could you tell us a little bit more about how they were set up? You said they were groups of five or six or five to seven children in each?

Chuck: Yes, the original Tangelo, as Harris said, the school was simply not capable of adding a facility that would be a preschool. But, there was some talk about this in terms of what would you do? How can you get around this program? So, what Harris did is he refitted houses, he trained residents. Now, we had 10 preschool residents who were trained to work with the school system. This is an education, but he was providing employment for them as well. So, he infused an economic component into this preschool kind of thing. And they were wonderful. We have all kinds of videos, you would love it. John and Rebecca, you should come down and sit with these kids… learning, learning, learning… We’ll send you videos, you can see them. But what happened is… we’ve been doing this for 26 years and most of the daycare provider educators are retiring. So, the natural thing to do is Harris simply build facilities in the new school. We have a set up now where we have two facilities. The preschool program was just wonderful. It was wonderful because it was in homes. The parents knew the providers, they trusted the providers. They were in the community, so if the parents who were little late getting home to pick up the kids, it was no big deal. It was a perfect, perfect scenario for the community at the time. And the new school in Parramore is phenomenal. It is just amazing. Because the model was like going into schools and houses in Tangelo, it is now built so every classroom looks like you’re going into a home. It’s amazing.

Harris: And that is something that we learned from Tangelo Park that the youngsters just loved the home environment. They did so beautifully. They were tranquil and they were eager to learn and the caregivers were so wonderful. So, we said: “Now in Parramore, how do we recreate that feeling?” If you come down and visit the Parramore preschool, you will not believe it. It’s almost as though you’re entering a beautiful area with little homes throughout, because each school room has a door that looks like a home door with a little mailbox next to it and you walk in, and it looks like a little part of a home. And we have preserved the integrity of the six to one. We have 12 youngsters, two teachers… two caregivers… and it works beautifully. So, we can replicate it. You don’t need to have that home, you can replicate the environment and the feeling. And we’ve done that.

Rebecca: It just sounds like the next step in maturing that idea.

Chuck: Oh, absolutely. We have talked to experts all over the country. And we know without a doubt that this education has to begin early. Our adage is “the first year of college begins at two years of age.”

John: There’s a lot of research suggesting that. I know in economics, that’s where most of the cognitive differences start to show up in test performance. That’s an ideal time to start it.

Chuck: John, I forgot you’re an economist. We’ll have you come down and do the next return on investment study. [LAUGHTER]

Harris: The United Negro College Fund… I think Chuck touched on this… says “a mind is a terrible thing to waste.” We’re too great a nation to be wasting minds. We can do better than that. Preschool, and then the college scholarship program…, but make sure preschool and then high school graduation. That’s the key component. College… not required. Wonderful, but preschool and high school graduation… focus laser lik on that.

Rebecca: It’s clear where folks who could fund projects like this into the equation. What role do you see educators or higher education playing in advocating for programs like this or helping propel initiatives like this forward?

Chuck: Well, I can speak from the university’s side because I’ve represented the University of Central Florida 26 years and I can see that universities in many ways are going to have to change the way we do business. One, you need to ask about the organization of the Tangelo Park program. There is none. What we do is we make a decision every month in the community board meeting. That’s all there is. There’s no chart , no organizational chart. There are no CEOs, nobody is paid. We’re all volunteers. Harris provides the support that’s necessary, but it is the right thing to do. And it really puts organizations off because it’s so…. What did he use the term? K.I.S.S. That’s what it is. It’s very simple. It’s very informal. It’d be interesting for you to see Harris as the treasurer for the board. And his report is “I paid the bills, end of report.” [LAUGHTER] But the notion is, therefore then Rebecca, there’s no overhead. You know what I mean about grants in colleges and universities. Every dime goes to the program. So, universities are going to have to really change how they look at their notion of philanthropy. Our notion is to go to a foundation in the program and take our cut. There’s no cut in there. And then we’re working a great deal with adaptive learning. I did a podcast for you on adaptive learning. If you put a kid in college algebra for one semester, there’s going to be a difference in how much each of them learns. We have to rethink the way we deliver education. There’s no question. You can’t take a kid from Tangelo and put them in college and give them 21 hours, it’s the wrong thing to do. They have to acclimate to higher education.

Harris: So, we have been asked on occasion why, when we’re asked about the public sector, we say no. My understanding is that government now is about… is it 22… 23 trillion in the hole. They can’t afford to do anything like this. I’m a little guy, but our little company has no debt. I can afford to do this. There are thousands and thousands of thousand people like me out there. I want them to get off their tush. I want them to listen to what it is that we have to say, ask for whatever material or information they want, step out of their office, take a look at their neighborhood, find an underserved community and do what we’ve done. Now, I must confess that early on, 23 years ago, I wasn’t sure if the public school system would be able to do the job. They have done a brilliant job. I am so proud of them. We don’t need private schools, we can do it within the public school system. And what happens is when the teachers see these youngsters start school at two and enter kindergarten already reading and writing and knowing colors and numbers and everything, they’re motivated. And when they know that these youngsters will all graduate from high school, and some of them will go on to college and not have to pay a penny. So when they’re sitting around with their friends in college, and inevitably that conversation is “How much money do you owe?” and our kids silently smile. They don’t owe a penny. So, government doesn’t have to be involved. The public school system can do it. We, the private sector, might have to help with the preschool component, as we did. But, aside from that, let the private sector do what the private sector should do support this wonderful program.

Chuck: The lessons that have been learned, there is no question that this has worked. The lesson that is learned is that there is no question that it can be replicated in hundreds of communities across the country. We have people all over the country doing pieces of it: preschool programs, scholarships, but we have yet to have someone put the entire program together somewhere. We don’t give up. We’re going to keep trying. And I’m going to emphasize again, I have all the data, we have a template. If somebody wants to learn how to do Tangelo, we have it. We have everything. So, the lesson that we have learned is that we do have hope. We have so many stories we could tell you, but I know we’re getting to the end of the time.

John: I seem to remember in some of the documentation, some estimate of the cost per student. Do you have that offhand.

Chuck: I think it’s about $5000? Isn’t it?

Harris: Yeah, probably around that, yes?

Chuck: Yeah, probably around $5,000. Yeah.

Harris: I guess it’s something that I should know, but I really don’t… [LAUGHTER] We’ll get the number for you, but it’s close to $5,000.

Chuck: I have an interesting story, though, with the preschool. Harris has a graduation… preschool. When the students finish preschool, they have caps and gowns. They have a commencement ceremony, and Harris invites them to turn their tassels from the right to the left. And we do this by every preschool graduation. And I was in Parramore, and there were hundreds of students graduating and Harris said, “How long is this going to go on? He was flipping tassels. But, then at the end, a woman came up to me and said, “Thank you, this is wonderful.” “You’re welcome. Did you have a student graduating?” She said, “”No, I just live in Parramore, and I wanted to see.” That’s what this program does. It unites and supports and codifies the community. But it takes time.

Rebecca: So, you’ve already done so much. What are you going to do next? [LAUGHTER]

Chuck: We’re going to have you do a wonderful edit of this. It’s going to be broadcast all around the country, and we’re going to find someone else to do it.

John: That would be wonderful.

Chuck: That would be great.

Harris: That would be wonderful.

Chuck: Go Lakers.

John: Go Knights.

Rebecca: Thank you so much for sharing your story and your program with us today.

Harris: Thank you so much.

Chuck: Thank you so much. Have a good day.

[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.

108. Neuromyths

Posted in evidence-based practices, higher education, K-12, learning, learning science, metacognition, neuromyths, pedagogy, professional development, retrieval practice, scholarship of teaching and learning, teaching, teaching centers
November 20, 2019

Faculty design their classes based on their perceptions of how students learn. These perceptions, though, are not always consistent with the science of learning. In this episode, Dr. Kristen Betts and Dr. Michelle Miller join us to discuss the prevalence of neuromyths and awareness of evidence-based practices in higher ed.

Kristen is a clinical professor in the online Ed.D. program in Educational Leadership and Management in the School of Education at Drexel University. Michelle is the Director of the First-Year Learning Initiative, Professor of Psychological Sciences and the President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. She’s also the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology and a frequent guest on this podcast.

Show Notes

  • Miller, M. D. (2014). Minds online. Harvard University Press.
  • Online Learning Consortium
  • Betts, K., Miller, M., Tokuhama-Espinosa, T., Shewokis, P., Anderson, A., Borja, C., Galoyan, T., Delaney, B., Eigenauer, J., & Dekker, S. (2019). International report: Neuromyths and evidence-based practices in higher education. Online Learning Consortium: Newburyport, MA.
  • Mariale Hardiman
  • Tracey Noel Tokuhama-Espinosa
  • Dekker, S., Lee, N. C., Howard-Jones, P., & Jolles, J. (2012). Neuromyths in education: Prevalence and predictors of misconceptions among teachers. Frontiers in psychology, 3, 429.
  • Alida Anderson
  • Macdonald, K., Germine, L., Anderson, A., Christodoulou, J., & McGrath, L. M. (2017). Dispelling the myth: Training in education or neuroscience decreases but does not eliminate beliefs in neuromyths. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 1314.
  • “Universal Design for Learning,” CAST website
  • Mchelle Miller, “65. Retrieval Practice” – Tea for Teaching podcast, January 23, 2019.
  • Vygotsky, L. (1987). Zone of proximal development. Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes, 5291, 157.
  • Michelle Miller, “86. Attention Matters” – Tea for Teaching podcast, June 19, 2019.

Transcript

John: Faculty design their classes based on their perceptions of how students learn. These perceptions, though, are not always consistent with the science of learning. In this episode, we examine the prevalence of neuromyths and awareness of evidence-based practices in higher ed.

[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: Our guest today are Dr. Kristen Betts and Dr. Michelle Miller. Kristen is a clinical professor in the online EDD program in Ed.D. Educational Leadership and Management in the School of Education at Drexel University. Michelle is the Director of the First-Year Learning Initiative, Professor of Psychological Sciences and the President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. She’s also the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology and a frequent guest on this podcast. Welcome, Kristen and welcome back, Michelle.

Kristen: Thank you so much for having us.

Michelle: Hi, it’s great to be here again.

John: Were really pleased to talk to you. Our teas today are…

Kristen: I’m drinking Apricot Oolong, a green Tea. Nice for the afternoon.

Michelle: And, I have a wonderful hibiscus tea.

Rebecca: And, I have… big surprise… English Afternoon tea.

John: And, I have ginger peach black tea.

We invited you here to talk about the study that you both worked on together on neuromyths and evidence-based practices in higher education. Could you tell us what prompted this study?

Kristen: Sure. As a lifelong learner, I decided I would enroll in a wonderful program being offered at Johns Hopkins University several years ago in mind, brain, and teaching led by Dr. Mariale Hardiman. In one of the courses, I read several articles that looked at the high prevalence of neuromyths in K through 12 education. And, one of the things that caught me by surprise was: One, I was a K through 12 teacher early in my career. I was, at the time, a professor in the School of Education, and in looking at some of the neuromyths, they actually looked like things that I had studied as part of professional development. And, I had not assumed they would be neuromyths. And, so it really intrigued me in terms of: Why is there this high prevalence and why are we not more aware of some of the evidence-based practices that are out there? Not just in the United States, but clearly these were studies that were taking place internationally. So, I decided to start looking at this through the lens of higher education, because that’s where I work and it’s my area of expertise, and I reached out to Dr. Michelle Miller. I was at the Online Learning Consortium conference. Her focus is on cognitive psychology. So, I approached her after the session and told her about this interest in looking at neuromyths within the field of education… really, across disciplines, in trying to see was it similar to what the findings were in K through 12 education, and what was really being done to integrate evidence-based practices into pedagogy or even andragogy. So, we decided to connect and start looking at this. I had a wonderful PHD student who I was working with at the time as well, who is from Armenia, very interested in this topic, and we quickly grew our small group to include a total of ten researchers from the total of seven different institutions nationally and internationally across three countries. And, everybody brought different expertise, everyone from two-year colleges, four-year colleges, public, private. And, we also were very fortunate because we were able to find, really some of the seminal researchers in the area of mind-brain education science, such as Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa. And, we reached out to the researchers who actually conducted the studies looking at neuromyths like Sanne Dekker, and we reached out to a Alida Anderson who worked with McDonald et. al. in their 2017 publication. So, it quickly grew from a point of interest in trying to identify what was happening in higher education, to really a much broader international study.

Michelle: Oh, and just echoing what Kristen has said here, we first did meet through the Online Learning Consortium, first at a conference and then they set up calls where we got to talk to each other and realize that even though we came from somewhat different academic backgrounds and published in some different areas, we really had this common ground of interest in how do we bring more evidence-based teaching to faculty in higher education and really throughout the world. And, to me, as a cognitive psychologist, it’s just an inherently fascinating question of, even though we live in our own minds, why do we not sometimes understand some basic principles of how the mind and how the brain works? So, that’s just an intellectually interesting question to me. But then it does take on this tremendous practical importance when we start to look at teaching practices throughout the world and bringing that really quality evidence-based design of teaching and learning experiences for our students.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how, once all of these researchers are now together, how did you put the study together and how was it conducted?

Kristen: I have to say it was not easy. Thank goodness, we reached out to some of the original authors. The survey instruments that looked at neuromyths and general knowledge about the brain. And, what was so interesting is almost all the studies were truly K through 12 focus, so the questions were very different. Even looking at lexicon, “girl and boy,” where we would want to look at male/female. So, we had a look at absolutely every question and make sure that we were able to revise that question within the framework for the lens of higher education. So, it was not an easy process, just in terms of time, because we had to go through so many iterations. And, I think that really helps with the integrity of the research. We had two pilot studies, even down to looking at the Likert scales that we used. One of the things that really stood out was the primary study that we looked at, which was a 2012 study by Sanne Dekker and several other researchers. They had a Likert scale that looked at correct, incorrect and I don’t know. There was a study by McDonald and colleagues in 2017 and they changed it to true and false. So, we decided early on, we would go with true and false. And, when we did that pilot, we ended up with half the participants stopping midway and simply putting, “I’m not sure if it’s true or false…” and they just didn’t complete the survey. And, I think, just looking at how we phrase the questions, it really affected the participation of our respondents. So, we went back, we modified some of the questions based on that, and we change the Likert scale. And, I think being able to have the ability to say whether it was correct, incorrect, or you didn’t know took away from saying it was true or false, because you can base it on knowledge or what you perhaps had been exposed to. And, we ended up having a wonderful pilot making some additional changes. And the feedback that we got, even after sending out the survey, we had a flood of emails saying “Can you please send us a copy of the study, we’re really interested?” So, we really looked at everything. And, I would say one thing that stood out most; and again I go back to the time we spent over two years on this study from point of inception to where we actually send out the survey, collected this study and then published it, was when we looked at the neuromyths, what we quickly realized was we needed to examine evidence-based practices as well. And, we looked at all of this from a metacognitive perspective. The prior studies that were done, looked at what they called “endorsing neuromyths,” and we weren’t so much looking at endorsing, we wanted to look at awareness, because all of us were involved in teaching… professional development. And, so it was a matter of trying to identify what the gaps were, what were instructors, instructional designers, and professional development administrators aware of and, if there is that gap, how could we develop a study where people would say “Wow, I also thought that was correct, but it’s incorrect… but, I would love to find out what the response is and how I can change my knowledge or understanding.” And, so we looked at absolutely everything and wanted to create a study that people would pick up and say, “This is where I am now. Gosh, after going through this in reading the report, this is where I am and my circle of knowledge needs to continue to expand, as things continue to expand through mind-brain education science.”

Michelle: As a collaborative effort, I haven’t been involved really in a study of this scale and scope. And, it’s simply the level of collaboration. You just heard about one of the iterations of the survey instrument that we put together and just how that piece of the study came about. But all the way through the analyses, the writing, it was such an opportunity, even apart from what we were able to share with the rest of the world, just from my own niche piece of the study as well. The opportunity, as a cognitive psychologist, to start infusing what I feel is more attention that needs to be paid to cognitive psychology and learning sciences. The opportunity to infuse that into this field in this area of thinking was also really exciting as well.

Kristen: So, in terms of how it was conducted, we sent the survey out for the Online Learning Consortium. When we originally started, we were just going to look at instructors, we were looking at neuromyth prevalence in instructors because all of the other studies that had been done were primarily K through 12 teachers and pre-service teachers. (although the McDonald study looked at a wider range). Once we started to bring together our team, then we started thinking, “Gosh, well, it’s not simply the instructors. It’s going to be the instructional designers, it’ll be anybody conducting some type of professional development as well because no course is truly an island.” There are so many people today involved in course design, course development and so the Online Learning Consortium was such an amazing partner for us and they touch on absolutely every part of that population. So, we reached out to them early on and said “We’d love to collaborate with you. You’ve got an extensive membership and listserv. Would we be able to develop this survey instrument, send it out through your membership, and ask them through snowball sampling to share it with others who may actually be involved in higher education, in one of these roles.” And, they could not have been a better partner. They’re just incredible to work with. So, that’s how it was conducted.

John: And, we were actually part of that snowball. I sent it out to a list of about 1200 faculty, staff, and professional development people on my campus alone. How large was your ultimate sample?

Kristen: We ended up with approximately 1300 respondents. And, then we actually looked at the full study, we ended up with 929, who met the criteria for inclusion. So, one of the things we wanted to make sure when we looked at the criteria for inclusion that they worked in higher education. You’d be surprised. So many people complete surveys, but they don’t necessarily meet the criteria. Even when you explicitly state you have to be within higher education: teaching or one of these areas. So, we had a total of 929 who met the criteria, and of those they also had a complete 95% of the questions for the neuromyths, and also for the evidence-based practices because we didn’t want to have any gaps. I would say it was an incredible response rate, especially for those completing the survey. They filled out I would say the majority of everything within the survey itself. The respondents were just incredible as well, because you talked about the cross section of participants, but we ended up with really an incredible number of instructors and that was broken down into full-time, part-time, instructional designers, the professional development administrators and it allowed us to run a lot of different tests that we’ll talk about when we look at the findings.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that’s really interesting about how you discuss the setup of the study is thinking about how many different individuals play a role in perpetuating myths, or even perpetuating good evidence-based practices too. That administrators is where funding comes from, so you have to have everybody in the institution on board with what you actually want to essentially Institute.

Kristen: Well, what’s interesting, and you bring up such a great point. One of the top neuromyths out there is learning styles. And, so when you’re looking at learning styles, this is something that almost seems to permeate. It doesn’t matter when you started teaching, whether it’s K through 12, or higher education at some point if you’ve been involved in education, you’ve come across learning styles. Now there are learning preferences and there’s lots of wonderful research on that. But this concept of teaching to learning styles, I think, unfortunately… we talk about this in section seven of our report kind of got mixed in with multiple intelligences. And, that is not at all what multiple intelligence was about, but it was almost the timing of it and so, having been a K through 12 teacher, I remember going through a professional development where we learned about learning styles and how it was something to look at in terms of teaching to learning preferences. And, even to this day when I do presentations, and I know Michelle has run into this as well, especially when we co-teach some of the OLC workshops, somebody will inevitably raise their hand or type in the chat area “Are you kidding? Learning styles is a neuromyth? We just had somebody on our campus six months ago, who taught us how to do an assessment to teach to learning styles.” So, it’s still out there, even though there’s so much in the literature saying it’s a neuromyth. It’s still prevalent within education across all areas.

John: So, you mentioned the issue of learning styles. And, that’s something we see a lot on our campus as well. We’ve even had a couple of podcast guests who we edited out there mention of learning styles and then had a chat with them later about it. I won’t mention any names because they had some really good things to say, but it is a really prevalent myth and it’s difficult to deal with. So, you mentioned learning styles. What are the most prevalent myths that you found in terms of neuromyths?

Kristen: When you look at the report, the first part of our survey had 23 statements. We had eight statements that were neuromyths. If you look at the K through 12 studies, they had many more neuromyths, but we had eight. And, I will tell you, the top five neuromyths in higher education, very closely parallel what you find in K through 12. Now our prevalence is not as high, but it still shows that instructors, instructional designers, and administrators are susceptible to them and that goes back to awareness. So, the top one: listening to classical music increases reasoning ability and that’s really that Mozart Effect. Another one: individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning styles. Some of us are left brained and some of us are right brain due to hemispheric dominance and this helps explain differences in how we learn. So, that’s really that concept of “Oh, I’m right brained. I’m left brained.” And, this again, is something that goes across higher ed and K through 12. Two other really big ones: We only use 10% of our brain. And, if you look at section seven of the report, you will find all of the responses, literally evidence-based practices or research-supported responses to make sure that people aren’t simply saying, “Oh, it’s incorrect. Well, we want people to know why it’s incorrect. So, they can reflect on that and change their understanding, really the rationale and the research behind it. And, then lastly, it is best for children to learn their native language before a second language is learned. This, again, is a big neuromyth. And I think one of the things I’m hoping that will come out of this study, because we talked about this really when we go into evidence-based practices, is this concept of neuro-plasticity, the fact that the brain changes every time you learn something new. When you’re engaged in an experience, the brain is changing. And, sometimes the brain is changing at a cellular level before you might even see that change in behavior, and so we’re able to see now through technology through f-MRI through fNIR so much more than we were able to see before. So, really keeping abreast of what’s happening in the research should be informing our practice because we have more information available than ever before. But, somehow we need to get that into our professional development training, seminars, and workshops or into the classes that we’re teaching in our schools of education or into our onboarding. But yeah, these are the top five neuromyths in terms of susceptibility, and they cut across higher ed and K through 12.

John: In your paper, you also provide some crosstabs on the prevalence by the type of role of individuals, whether they’re instructors, instructional designers, or administrators. Could you tell us a bit about how the different groups due in terms of the prevalence of these neuromyths?

Kristen: Well, the one thing I will say is, everybody is susceptible to neuromyths, so it wasn’t as if there was one group, and I know that’s always in the back of someone’s mind, “Gosh, who’s the most susceptible?” Well, we didn’t find any significant differences, and one of the things that we wanted to do as well was to really be break the participants down and look at other factors. So, when we look at full-time versus part-time faculty, is one group more susceptible to neuromyths. And we found no significant difference in terms of gender, in terms of age, in terms of working at a two-year institution, a four-year institution. And I really think that talks to the amazing reality of the opportunity to integrate professional development in looking at the learning sciences and mind-brain education science in the opportunity to decrease that gap. So, it wasn’t one group over another. But it’s everybody who has this opportunity to increase this awareness across all of these areas.

John: Didn’t you also find that some of these myths were less common among instructional designers relative to faculty,

Kristen: We found with evidence-based practices, when we looked at significant difference with evidence-based practices, instructional designers actually had in terms of percent correct, higher awareness of evidence-based practices. It wasn’t a large difference, but there was a significant difference and Michelle can certainly talk to this point as well. But, this is really the importance of having an incredible team when you’re looking at course design, course development, and part of that may have to do with, when you look at instructional design, there is so much new literature and research that’s getting infused in to that area, and so that may have something to do with it. But, I think there’s lots of additional studies that we could do to follow up.

Michelle: Kind of circling back to the point of the design and delivery of instruction in a contemporary university or college is fundamentally more collaborative than it was in prior eras. And, so I think we definitely need to have everybody involved start to really break out of that old school mold of class is identified with the teacher who teaches it and that’s what a course is. And no, courses reflect, today, everything from the philosophy and the support that comes down from the top to the people that the students may never meet, but who put their stamp on instruction such as instructional designers. And, this is something that I get pretty fired up about in my just practical work as a program director and just being involved in these things in the university, that there are still faculty who you say, “Hey, do we have any instructional designers who are working with us on this project to redesign? Is anybody assigned to help us as we develop this new online degree program or something?” …and you sometimes still get blank look.? Or you get “Oh, aren’t those the people who you call when the learning management system breaks down and that’s their specialty?” I mean, this report, I think, just really hammers home that idea that instructional designers are a key part of this collaborative team that goes into really good quality higher education instruction today. And it isn’t just about the technology. I think that they’re getting exposure to and staying abreast of what’s going on in research that relates to teaching and learning. And, what a great opportunity for faculty to not just rely on them for technology, but to learn from them and to learn with them as we build better courses together.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the awareness that you found in general about evidence-based practices? So, we focused a lot on the neuromyths, but what shook out when you started looking at the evidence-based practices?

Kristen: Well, one thing that stood out was awareness was much higher. And, that’s really exciting. I think that’s a huge testament to the professional development that we are offering. But, there were still gaps in areas where there certainly could be a lot of improvement. So, a couple of examples that I’ll give because we literally spent months looking evidence-based practices, and we wanted to make sure that we could support them. So, for example, when we look at percent correct, where most individuals across all three groups were not as aware, like “differentiated instruction is individualized instruction.” So, we know that this is incorrect. But most of the respondents did not put that that was an incorrect statement. So, they either stated it was correct, or they didn’t know. So, again, this is an area that we certainly want to explore. Because differentiated instruction is something that really, I think, adds to the classroom. And, there are other ones. For example, we’ll look at Universal Design for Learning. So, one of the statements we had in there actually comes directly from the CAST website, and it says “Universal Design for Learning is a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn.” Well, the instructional designers, they were the most aware. So, 87% of them got that correct. Of the professional development administrators 74% got that answer correct. For the instructors, 58% got that correct. So, you can see the difference in the responses and when we share this nationally or internationally…. when we talk about the study, you’ll have a lot of individuals who’ll say “No, universal design for learning, that’s about accessibility.” Well, it certainly is about accessibility. But, most importantly, it’s about learning and how humans learn. It is probably the most dynamic and the most powerful aspect that we can add into pedagogy or into andragogy. But just by looking at the data here, it may not be something that everybody’s aware of, and that’s again a great opportunity to integrate that into professional development. So, there are a number of things. I mean, it’s exciting because when you look at it, there are 28 statements. And, as I mentioned, overall, the awareness was much higher across all three groups, compared to neuromyths or general knowledge about the brain.

Michelle: Just to jump in here, again, from my kind of cognitive psychology perspective, those evidence-based practices that we’re talking about also include, specifically, some items that are related to memory, a topic that’s really close to my heart. So, I think those are just fascinating as well. So, for example, we asked a variation on a classic question that many cognitive psychologists have looked at: “whether human memory works a lot like a digital recording device or a video camera.” So, is your memory basically taking in information that’s in front of you? And, here again, we’ve got 69% of our instructors saying, “Oh, yeah, that’s right. That’s how it works.” And, that is not how it works. 79% of our instructional designers identify this as an incorrect statement and 74% of our administrators, and we have a few other related things such as we asked people whether testing detracts from learning. And, as Tea for Teaching listeners know, that goes to retrieval practice. Testing doesn’t detract from learning, testing builds up learning. So, these are some as well that I think it’s very interesting to tap into what people know and really think about while these maybe seem like inside baseball, or very metaphorical or philosophical questions, if I’m an instructor, and I believe these things, that students are basically just running video cameras in their heads… well, that is going to lead to some different practices. I might be very puzzled as to why I got up and gave this lecture and the students eyes were pointed at me and yet it didn’t end up in memory. So, those are some of the items that I was particularly interested to see when we got all the numbers in.

Kristen: You know, I would say one thing: when anybody reads the report, what we want them to do is look at how it’s presented in terms of the tables, because everything is looking at the percent of correct or accurate responses. So, as Michelle said, when we look at “human memory works like a digital recording device,” 69% of the instructors got that correct. 79% of the instructional designers got that correct. And, 74% of the administrators got that correct. So, that means we still have a fairly large percentage, basically 20 to 30% that either got the answer incorrect, or they didn’t know. And, even looking at these responses, do they actually know why they knew it? Or did they guess or did they make that assumption like, “Oh, that’s got to be right.” And so, really, the intentionality of this study was awareness, really bringing out statements from the literature to help anybody who’s involved in teaching, course design, professional development to look at these questions, and really think “Do I know this?” And, “If I know it, how do I know this? Is it based on some type of research or literature? Could I defend that? If I don’t know with certainty, where do I find that answer? And how can I learn that? And, how can I integrate those practices?”

John: On the day when your report came out, we shared that on our campus to everyone on our mailing list. One of the nice things about the report is that it has all the questions and also provides references for the answers explaining why the specific answer is true or false. And, it’s a really great resource and we’ll share a link to that in the show notes. It is long. When I shared it two people sent back email saying “Maybe we should use this as a reading group for next semester.” And it’s not a bad idea, actually. But, much of that is appendices and so forth. And, it’s a really informative document. I believe in your survey, you were asking people about their participation in professional development, and you looked at the relationship between participation in professional development and the prevalence of these myths. Is that correct?

Kristen: We did. So, one of the things that we wanted to look at was trying to find out if educators were involved in professional development, whether it be neuroscience, psychology or in mind-brain education science, did that actually increase their awareness of neuromyths, general information about the brain, and evidence-based practices? And it did. We found that that it was definitely a predictor and it was found to be a significant predictor and so, for us, again, it looked at what a wonderful opportunity to be able to say that training does have a positive impact. And, that was really the crux of the study… and it’s interesting, you talked about the length of this study, because originally we had thought about doing two different or three different studies. So, we do one on neuromyths, one on evidence-based practices, one on professional development. Then when we brought the data in, the question was: “Do we separate them out into three different long articles or three different reports?” And, we collectively, across all disciplines said, “No, we need to bring them together.” Because first and foremost, it’s about awareness. You can’t really talk about evidence-based practices, until you’re aware of what the neuromyths might be. What are some of the fallacies that you might actually believe? What are things about the brain that you may or may not know? And, once you’re there, and you have that understanding, you can then move into the evidence-based practices, because it’s all really connected. So, when Michelle talks about memory, you can’t really talk about memory without having some understanding of the mind or the brain. And, so we decided collectively, we would bring it together as hopefully a seminal piece that would really present anyone with a continuum as to: “Where am I? What am I possibly doing in my classroom?” …being able to really do that self assessment and then find the answers, as you said, in that section seven, and realize that they’re not an outlier. I mean, chances are anybody that goes through this is going to fall within that span in terms of their understanding and knowledge.

Michelle: And, what I hope is coming out here is that this study is unusual, not just in its scale, its scope and that we focused on higher education, but that it is so explicitly geared to not just identifying gaps in knowledge or awareness, but addressing those. It’s not like we came along six months later and said, “Oh, by the way, here’s a really nice resource we put together.” It is one stop, it’s right there. And, what an exercise that was, as well. Kristen, I think you’ll remember back just saying, “Okay, in a paragraph… this item, all of us look at this and go ‘oh my gosh, that’s wrong’ or ‘that’s right.’ Why is that? and what are the very best empirical sources that we will trace back to, to demonstrate that?” So, we are trying to provide that and also to really be a model to say: next time that you get that handout or that workshop that says, “Oh, here’s some great stuff about the brain.” What are they backing that up with? Can you trace it back to the solid research sources that makes some of these really powerful principles for learning, and make other things just misconceptions.

Kristen: One of the things that I would say was probably the most exciting and the most challenging. We had 10 researchers, we had 10 researchers from different fields: people from nursing, biomedical engineering, psychology; we had people who work in the area of neuroscience, education (as I mentioned), and we needed to come out with a collective voice, writing a report that would be understood across disciplines. And, so when we wrote section seven, all of us had to be reviewers and we vetted it multiple times. Not just within our group, but outside, to make sure when you read about neural pathways, it actually made sense. Because to write something where somebody would not understand or not be able to connect would be a challenge. And, we wanted people to walk away. I know one of the things that we were looking at: Why neuromyths? Well, a lot of the research out there looks at the fact that when you teach, your teaching and your pedagogy is based on your knowledge, and in your understanding of how people learn, and so we wanted to really look at this area in terms of awareness, because it may impact pedagogy. Our study did not do that. And, I want to make sure it’s really clear. Our study was not designed to say, “Oh gosh, the awareness of neuromyths wasn’t very high in this area, therefore, you must be integrating neuromyths into your teaching. That was not the intentionality of our study and that’s not something that we’ve ever said. There are certainly recommendations we put in the study to look at. If there is a high prevalence of neuromyths,how does that affect pedagogy? But ours was simply looking at awareness and could professional development address gaps? So, we could do this across all different groups that would be involved in course design and delivery.

John: That’s one of the things I really like about it, that you do address all these things well, you provide the evidence, and it’s going to be a great go to reference for those of us when faced with neuromyths, with issues about evidence-based practices. We can just go and grab some of the citations and share them back out or refer them to the whole document as I’ve done several times already. These things are really common even in professional development. I was at a session not too long ago, where there were two neuromyths presented during the session. One was the learning styles thing. But the nice thing is, unlike other times when I’ve seen that done, there were two of us who went up and waited until everyone else talked to the presenter. And, we were both ready to do it after other people had gone so we didn’t embarrass her, but it’s starting to get out there. And, I know on our campus, we’ve got a growing number of people who are aware of this partly because of the reading groups we’ve had, where we’ve had a growing number of participants… and that all started actually with Michelle’s book about five years ago now when we first did the group. You came out, you visited, people wanted to do more, so we started a reading group. We’ve done four additional reading groups since then. We’ve had many of the same participants, but it’s spreading out wider. I’m hoping we’re making a difference through these reading groups.

Michelle: And, that’s so gratifying as an author and as a researcher, and I remember well working with your group in Oswego and the great ideas I took away as well. So, I’m a big believer in virtuous cycle. So, maybe we’ve started one.

Kristen: I think what really came out of this study is the passion that everybody has for student success. Everybody from those that are offering the professional development, the instructional designers that want to make sure that the students are successful, even though they might not be teaching the course. And, then the instructors themselves… and so to be able to work with that many individuals who are not only subject matter experts across their disciplines, but so passionate about making a difference. But I think being able to integrate all of this new research relating to neuroscience, psychology and education, it’s going to transform not only how we teach, but it’s going to transform pedagogy, andragogy, and this whole concept of learning.

Rebecca: I really appreciate the bringing it together and that you decided to keep it all together and not to make three separate reports. I think it’s actually really important to understand how these are all connected and related. And, I think that’s one of the most unique things about the report. I think the community is probably very grateful that we have this resource available now.

Kristen: Oh, thank you.

John: One of the things I’ve often been concerned about is how some of these neuromyths, particularly the left brain – right brain thing, and the learning styles belief, often serves as a message to students that they can only learn in certain ways or they only have certain types of skills, and they’re not able to make progress in other ways. And, it can serve as a barrier and can lead, perhaps, to the development of a fixed mindset in students which may serve as a barrier.

Rebecca: …or not even allow those students to feel like they can enter particular disciplines.

John: If people become more aware of this, perhaps it could lead to more opportunities for our students or fewer barriers placed in the way of students.

Rebecca: …or maybe even just more inclusive pedagogy in general.

Kristen: You bring up such a great point. So, if you believe in learning styles, and you believe that you are truly a visual learner, Michelle and I’ve talked about this a lot, it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But you probably are an incredible visual learner because you’ve been told you learn better in this learning style, so you’re going to seek materials in that learning styles. So, the challenge with that, especially when you’re looking at younger students or anybody during their education, you’re precluding really other ways to enhance your learning. So, when you look at Universal Design for Learning, it’s so important because you’re looking at multiple means of engagement, representation, action, and expression. And, when you’re looking at learning styles, if a student believes they’re a visual learner and suddenly asked to go in and take a Spanish oral exam, it could trigger, all of a sudden, stress. Well, what do we know about stress? And, Michelle can talk more about that. But, when you’re stressed, it affects working memory. And, so just that thought of, “Oh my gosh, it’s an oral exam. I’m a visual learner. How can I perform well on that?” And it’s really creating, as you talked about, a barrier or it may decrease, possibly, performance. I know that Dr. Tracey Tokuhama-Espinoza is very passionate about this. And, you’ll see in her presentations, she’ll come out and say “Neuromyths do harm.” And so, I think it’s certainly something that needs to be explored. And, Michelle, from a psychological point, I’d be curious to find out what you have to say as well.

Michelle: When you say “self-fulfilling prophecy” and things like that, it also kind of reminds me of a placebo effect, in a way… and learning styles, and continuing that as an example, yeah, I might go: “Oh, visual learning. It is absolutely me,” like “Now I feel like I can tailor all this to myself. I’ll just find teachers, opportunities, and disciplines that are right there in visual learning.” And, I might have some subjective impression that that’s helping me, or from the teacher’s perspective, I might feel like “Well, I brought in some different materials and engaged different modalities and, what do you know, because of learning styles, we’re doing better.” Well, there’s lots of different reasons why that might be happening. An individual may walk away, and maybe they weren’t individually harmed. I just feel like… just like in modern medicine, there’s sort of a promise that we can do better than mere placebos. I think that ought to be the promise of modern pedagogy as well, that we can do better than simply trying to build up expectations or giving people a false sense that they have something based on science that’s going to help them individually do better. And, I hear so many kind of missed opportunities that really kind of get me activated as well. I think about, for example, the energy that goes into faculty professional development. These things come from good impulses. I really believe that. I believe that people who really pursue something like learning styles or things like that, they want to do better and they want to be more inclusive, but that effort is directed down the wrong path simply because of this gap in knowledge and gap in information in getting the right information to the right people at the right time. And, I can’t stand the thought of faculty, especially as limited as faculty time is and as spread as thin as faculty are, to think that they might try to pick up on some better information about teaching and learning and go down the wrong path. I never want that to happen again. And, maybe our report will be a step in the right direction.

Kristen: I’ll say one thing that we’re trying to do with the report, is really to align the report with best practices and evidence-based practices. So, when you look at the concept of neuromyths the wonderful study that was written by McDonald (and this was in 2017) and her colleagues, the title is “Dispelling the Myth: training and education in neuroscience decreases but does not eliminate beliefs in neuromyths” and so professional development is not a silver bullet. Simply offering one workshop that’s going to address neuromyths is not going to necessarily get rid of neuromyths. So, we have to do what? We have to look at spacing. We have to look at interleaving. So, with professional development, how do you take information related to evidence-based practices and integrate spaced practice into our own professional development? How do we integrate interleaving? How do we integrate low-stakes assessment? So, maybe when faculty or instructional designers come in, you do a quick self assessment and find out what that baseline knowledge is, and then at the end to say, “Okay, at the end of professional development, we need to get to 95% or higher.” But, they’re able to actually test their own knowledge. So, we need to kind of turn professional development upside down and make it active learning and really engage everybody in what we’re looking at within pedagogy and andragogy.

Rebecca: Yeah, I always find it really ironic that a lot of training and things on evidence-based practices is not using evidence-based practices… or using really traditional formats: lecture or getting lectured at and not really engaging with the material. And, it’s no different when we’re working with our students. And, if they’re practicing in a way that’s not going to be effective for them, and they’re not successful. They could spend tons of time on something and just not really make progress. The same thing can happen with our faculty and staff who are designing curricula and what have you as well. They can be really invested.

Michelle: Absolutely.

John: We do have an excellent podcast on retrieval practice. In fact, it’s one of our most popular episodes. We’ll share a link to that in our show notes. We don’t yet have any podcasts on interleaved and spaced practice, but I’m sure we’ll be asking Michelle to come back and talk about these things at some point in the future, if she’s willing. So far, we’ve been focusing on the types of neuromyths that are common. What can we do to reduce the prevalence of these neuromyths?

Kristen: Professional development is certainly key. But, I would look at things such as onboarding, making sure that when people are getting hired on, that they’re really introduced to evidence-based practices from the very beginning. And, even individuals that would say, “Gosh, I’ve been in instructional design for 20 years, I’m familiar” …there may still be those gaps. And, it’s almost like adaptive learning. Everybody that comes in very much like the Vygotsky’s work of zone of proximal development, they may have all been teaching for 20 years, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t have neurodiversity in terms of experience, knowledge about different practices. So, it’s important that it’s from the very onset of when people get hired and making sure it’s understood that we’re committed to best practices, evidence-based practices and what we do builds upon the literature and the research. Not only do we introduce it here, but we move it forward and integrate it into our pedagogy and what we’re doing in our classrooms.

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

Michelle: Conference season is upon us. We’re recording this fall of 2019. I’m gearing up to go to the Online Learning Consortium’s Accelerate conference in November. And so, I will just personally say come find me if you’re there and you want to talk more about this. I will be presenting on a related but different topic having to do with our ongoing Attention Matters project, which is also the subject of another Tea for Teaching episode. So, I’m really working on getting ready for that, and also the upcoming POD network conference. So, for those educational developers who will be attending that, I’ll be speaking there and hopefully having lots and lots of sidebar conversations with plenty of other people who are interested and fired up about these very topics. So, I/m working on those. I’m working on what I will now call a forthcoming book. It’s under contract with West Virginia University Press, tentatively titled Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology. So, maybe someday in the not too far off future, we’ll be talking about that project as well.

John: We should note that this podcast will be released during the OLC conference. In particular, it’s coming out on Wednesday of the conference.

Kristen: Oh, that’s exciting.

John: And, I should also note that we’ll be presenting there as well. I’m hoping we’ll get some people to listen to this podcast because we’re presenting the next day. So, we might get some new listeners. [LAUGHTER]

Kristen: Oh, that’s exciting. In terms of projects that I’m engaged in and working on. We’ve just launched a new lab in our School of Education at Drexel University. So, we’re bringing everything together and trying to align projects coming up for 2020. But it’s a lab called ELABS, Education, Learning, and Brain Sciences Research Collaborative. So, we’ll be looking at different studies related to the learning sciences and mind-brain education science. I am wrapping up an article with several researchers at Drexel University, some of our PhD students, that looks at immersive virtual reality and practice as well as transfer of learning. We also have a report that I’m working on. It’s an update to research that I conducted earlier on online human touch. So, I’m wrapping up that study and putting together an article there. And, then also looking at two publications for books looking at neuro plasticity and optimal learning. One would be for students to really understand neurodiversity, neuroplasticity, how you can optimize the stress response, and then looking at neuroplasticity and optimal learning from the instructor or instructional design perspective. How do you integrate this into your practice? So, those are the initiatives that I’m working on.

Rebecca: Sounds like lots of things for all of us to look forward to.

John: Thank you very much for joining us. This was a fascinating conversation. And, we’ve been looking forward to this report since I first heard a bit about it when you initially did the survey, and when I saw a preliminary presentation at all see last year.

Kristen: Well, thank you so much for having us. It’s such a pleasure to discuss this topic with you. And, I’m looking forward to listening to many of your upcoming podcasts that clearly is connected to this report.

Michelle: Thank you so much. It makes all the hard work worthwhile and we love the opportunity to get the work out to exactly the people with the power to spread it to faculty and instructional designers and leaders in universities today.

Rebecca: 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

Posted in collaboration, community based learning, higher education, K-12, learning, mentorship, professional development, teaching
July 3, 2019

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.