330. Educational Developers’ Praxis

Teaching centers typically have a core group of faculty that actively engage in professional development while others are rarely seen. In this episode, Constanza Bartholomae and Terri Hasseler join us to discuss strategies they use to expand participation and build faculty community. Constanza is the Associate Director of Teaching Support and Terri is the Director of the Center of Teaching Excellence and Professor of History, Literature and the Arts at Bryant University.

Show Notes

  • Center for Teaching Excellence at Bryant University
  • Smith, M. (1994). Local education: Community, conversation, praxis. McGraw-Hill Education (UK).
  • Jeffs, T., & Smith, M. K. (2021). The education of informal educators. Education Sciences, 11(9), 488.
  • Thackara, J. (2006). In the bubble: Designing in a complex world. MIT press.
  • De Bono, E. (2014). Lateral thinking: An introduction. Random House.
  • De Bono, E. (1990). Lateral thinking: a textbook of creativity. Penguin UK.
  • Nunn, L. M. (2018). 33 simple strategies for faculty: a week-by-week resource for teaching first-year and first-generation students. Rutgers University Press.
  • Norell, Liz (2023). Supporting Neurodiverse Students and Faculty. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 313. November 1. (This episode discusses “podcasts and puzzles”)
  • Cavanagh, S. R. (2023). Mind over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge. Beacon Press.
  • Hochschild, A. R. (2022). The managed heart. In Working in America (pp. 40-48). Routledge.

Transcript

John: Teaching centers typically have a core group of faculty that actively engage in professional development while others are rarely seen. In this episode, we discuss strategies used at one teaching center to expand participation and build faculty community.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guests today are Constanza Bartholomae and Terri Hasseler. Constanza is the Associate Director of Teaching Support and Terri is the Director of the Center of Teaching Excellence and Professor of History, Literature and the Arts at Bryant University. Welcome Constanza and Terri.

Terri: Thank you.

John: It’s nice to talk to you again. I met both of you at the POD conference a few months ago, and that’s when we talked about you coming on the podcast. Thank you for joining us. Our teas today are:

Terri: Well, I’ll go first. As Constanza will tell you, I never have less than three beverages with me at any point in time. [LAUGHTER] So, I have a caramel macchiato, a diet Coke, and a chai.

Constanza: And I have a tea. I’m drinking a Mighty Leaf African nectar tea in the mug I have yet to earn. It’s a Tea for Teaching mug that John so generously gifted us at the conference. And so I’m working to earn it today. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Oh, we’re definitely glad that you’re here. I have cardamom cinnamon tea.

John: That’s a new one.

Rebecca: I’m trying to cut down on the caffeination.

John: So no more of that harsh tea?

Rebecca: Oh no, I will definitely drink some of that. [LAUGHTER] I’m not giving it up. I said cut down. [LAUGHTER]

John: And for the first time ever, I am drinking water in a Tea for Teaching mug, because I didn’t have time to get tea between my class and this recording session.

Rebecca: Is it warm water?

John: It is cold water, because if I could have heated up water, I would have put you a tea bag in it.

Rebecca: Well, it’s the start of tea. [LAUGHTER]

Terri: That’s so sad.

John: It is. It’s been one of those days, and so we’ll just leave it at that.

Rebecca: So we invited you here today to discuss your work as educational developers at Bryant University. Can you describe your roles and the role of the center?

Constanza: Sure. So I’ll go first. I’m the Associate Director of Teaching Support. And that means I get to spend a lot of time with our faculty. I work one-on-one with faculty in consults ranging from working on specific activities that they might need some additional support on to talking about overarching course goals or objectives, or perhaps speaking about pedagogy. And also I work with faculty in groups, we might be talking about a common theme or we might have unstructured get togethers and meetings. And that’s the best part about my job is meeting with faculty, and I really love what I do. I’ll pass it over to Terri.

Terri: Thank you. I use she/her pronouns and I am the Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and Professor in the Department of Literature and History in the Arts. As you noted a moment ago, I started at Bryant University where I am now almost 30 years in the mid 90s and I moved through the ranks of the faculty. I served as a department chair a number of years ago for a department in English Cultural Studies, and most recently served as the Associate Dean for the College of Arts and Sciences. My earliest research actually 30 years ago started in writing centers and pedagogy and I quickly moved into inclusion and social justice frameworks for teaching and learning. And I just moved into the Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence about five, six months ago. So I am very excited about this work, and the inclusion of the work that I’ve been doing in the scholarship of teaching and learning, and training and instruction and pedagogy.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the work that your center does?

Terri: Sure., so one of the things that we’re doing in terms of the philosophy of our work and a shout out to our educational technology person, Mary Boehmer and our wonderful faculty fellows. The work we do in the center really focuses on the concept of praxis that Mark Smith talks about, which is that idea of informed committed action. And when we talk about informed, we’re talking about what is it we know? We try to stay research- and evidence-based. We look at the theories and the current information that is out on any subject that we’re working with. And then the commitment, the committed, what we do and why we do it. The ethics… what’s the ethical framework for the work that we do? And then the action is: how do we do that work. And we look at, in the center right now, focusing on issues of creativity, inclusive communities, and the critical notion of kindness. These three concepts bring together student-centered approaches through a teaching-centered lens. We like that kind of inward and outward approach to the work we’re doing. And we are working to build more authentic relationships with teaching rather than performative teaching. And my job in that role is to run a lot of the different programs, work with a number of different partners on campus, and building out our strategic plan and then initiating it.

John: In an earlier conversation, there was some discussion of the Creativity Fellows Program. Could you tell us a little bit about that program, how it works, what its philosophy is and what its purpose is?

Terri: Sure, thank you. We’re very excited to talk about the creativity fellows. This is a program I started a number of years ago it was supported by Robert Shea who was our Director of our Center for Teaching and Learning at the time. Bob is now the Provost at Curry College. The work that we did In that is it was a seminar approach, a one-year seminar devoted to nurturing faculty members and their creative practices. The long-term goal is to fundamentally transform both the teaching practices and the educational philosophies. The program draws from faculty across all the institution, the different schools and programs on the campus. And one of the things that we’re finding is that there are heavy expectations on faculty, they’re expected to be creative… be more creative, and faculty are often at a loss for that. Many feel that they themselves are not creative. They’re trained in critical thinking and content providing, and they often have not been given the skills or the support to pursue what creativity looks like. We’ve also tried to think of creativity in contrast with innovation, innovation tends to be more product oriented, solution oriented: what are the viable solutions? What are the ideas, the methods, the products that one can produce? We’re much more interested in process when we work with faculty. So the premise of the seminar is that we start with the mindset. If faculty do not have an active creative practice, it’s impossible to model and to speak to creativity in authentic ways with students. So the seminar focuses on providing spaces to let faculty fellows develop a creative practice. And we are very literal about this. We talk about creative artistic practices, we do collage, hand papermaking, bookbinding, improv, ceramics, we bring in visiting artists, we have one-on-one creative mentoring, sketching, and we build a community of practice, where we focus on the inefficiency of creativity and learning. John Thackara talks about that in his book In the Bubble, says that creating and learning human beings are highly inefficient. So we make a space where we can be inefficient with each other. And that’s not a space that we create very often in academic settings, because we’re always very product oriented. So again, the emphasis was not on the final products, but the purpose was just to be in the seminar. And we do end with a final installation at the end of the seminar each year, we end with a process of creativity where faculty present their objects that they created throughout the time. And the last thing I will say, too, is what are some of the things that result from this… the work is very risky for faculty, many of them have never made art, or something creative. Many of them probably have not done art since high school or elementary school, or perhaps they have some secret creative practice that they haven’t shared in some time. So this is anxiety provoking, but also very exciting. And we focus on three different things. One, trust the process. We talk about this as purposelessness. Of course, it’s deeply purposeful. The work we’re doing is deeply purposeful, but the focus is on purposelessness, not publication, and in our syllabus we say to them, what if you were given space to play, time to think about it, and a cohort of colleagues to encourage you? What if you were able to participate in activities within which your very presence was the purpose? What if you could play with the distractions to see what they yield rather than immediately aiming for some objective? The second thing we do is we create a room and a space to play and some playmates to play with and do lots of kind of lower-stakes activities with the faculty. One of the first activities we do is we pull them together, and we give them modeling clay. And we say, “create an animal out of this modeling clay that represents your relationship with creativity.” Some might make a cat because they’re curious or a dragon because they hoard creative things, or whatever. And then we talk about why they created what they created. And then we put these animals in a habitat. And we say, “Now you’re all going to be working together with each other, what would be the habitat that would include all these animals?” And they might do something like a garden, or an amusement park, but it gets them immediately getting out of the self consciousness of creating, which we know is also something that is very real for our students. The final part I would talk about is the third tenet that we work with is the fear and its relationship with failure. Risk-taking is a primary part of creative thinking. And the biggest risk is taking these risks in front of colleagues. Our students do this all the time. We don’t. We’re very much experts in our fields. We don’t take beginner learning experiences and demonstrate them in front of our colleagues. And this is one of the things that we do with this activity.

John: As an economist, one of the things that struck me was your comment about inefficiency. Economists focus on ways in which people can use resources more efficiently to get more productive use of their time. So could you explain that inefficiency part of it?

Terri: Yes, no problem. I think that for faculty, a lot of the focus is on production and efficiency and sort of demonstrating to the institution that I published this number of papers, I’ve demonstrated that I know these certain things, I can teach these objects and these content principles. But as an artist myself as well, art is not very efficient, it’s often messy, you have to move between different projects, you have to make lots of mistakes, lots and lots of mistakes, and enjoy the mistakes and see what results from them. And it really takes a while to get faculty comfortable with that idea of being inefficient. There’s a reality to inefficiency too, we’ve got limited time, nobody has time to be inefficient. And so this process allows people to actually be able to put something down as I was a part of this group, and I was given opportunity to be inefficient.

Rebecca: How do you recruit for this program, or who do you tend to attract? Because if folks know that they’re risk taking, but they’re averse to risk taking, [LAUGHTER] then sometimes the people that we might hope really appreciate a process don’t always get included. So how do you nudge people to get involved?

Terri: So we’ve had three iterations. And we hope to have our fourth iteration soon. And we’ve had sort of different models. The first two models, we had small groups of faculty, eight in the first one, 12 in the second one, and then the third model, we did more a series of workshops across campus. And this was supported by two other faculty members who are part of the creativity fellows, Maura Dowling in Finance and Sandra Enos, who has since retired, but was in Sociology. And people are actually very interested in the past. We have had a carrot approach where we do have some perks attached to it that make people interested. But I think also we sell it as a place where you get to play and have some fun with some colleagues.

John: And I think all faculty should experience that process of stretching themselves a little bit, of being uncomfortable, to remind them of what it was like to be a student. So I can see the benefits of that.

Rebecca: I thought I almost saw the word play [LAUGHTER] come out of your mouth, but it didn’t actually come out.

John: I’m an economist.[LAUGHTER] We don’t play, we do serious work. [LAUGHTER] How have faculty reacted to this program?

Terri: So there’s a lot of different reactions… again, that notion of beginner learning experiences, that is really valuable. So people remember what it was like to sit down and do something for the first time. And then I also think it’s important for threshold concepts. When we’ve crossed over the threshold, and we know what is transformative about our discipline, we forget that other people haven’t crossed over that threshold. And this experience reminds them “Oh, yeah, there are things about my discipline that I take for granted that other people who are new to it may not understand.” We spend a lot of time with lateral thinking, Edward de Bono’s work about indirect approaches. So an economist who’s doing ceramics is definitely going to be thinking about this in a very different way. For faculty, they reported greater re-engagement with new learner experiences, a recommitment to a creative practice that they may have had in the past. That was actually a big thing that we noted. They enjoyed a like-minded group of colleagues that they were working with. And also, ironically, even though the focus was on purposelessness, this was probably one of the more traditionally purposeful activities because it produced a significant amount of scholarly research, new courses, new programs, conference work, so a lot came out of that. For the institution, it produced a commencement award in creative expression. Faculty instituted new courses, new programs. And then for students… this was the fun part…. so students also get to see what the faculty produced at a pop-up gallery, pop-up installation that we do, and the students talked about two things that they found were really moving to them about the experience. And they talked about how important it was to see faculty move outside of their comfort zone. One student said, “I found this valuable because it shows that these people who are experts in their fields are willing to take risks. I am sure doing these projects that it felt a little unnatural and it was interesting to see how they dealt with that and created something to be proud of.” And the second thing is that humanizing of faculty, they really saw faculty as human beings. This one is kind of cute. I just love this comment. A student said, “It was interesting to see professors doing the same things we are doing in class, and how proud they were of their work.”

Rebecca: One of the things I love doing is taking classes and learning new things, for some of those exact reasons: feeling vulnerable, remembering what it feels like to be a beginner, etc. You mentioned as you were laying out some of the things that your does, does your role in building community. We know that faculty often work in their own silos and sometimes feel like they’re facing their own unique challenges. But what strategies have you used to break down some of these silos and bring faculty together across campus?

Constanza: Yeah, that’s such an interesting question. And it’s so funny because we don’t often think of teaching as being an isolating practice. But really, if you’re teaching in a classroom, unless you’re co-teaching with someone else, or you’re being observed, you’re the only instructor in the room. So if something goes wrong in the classroom, you only have yourself to consult with in that very moment. And if you’re working through something, the best place that you can go to if your campus has one is a teaching center. Luckily ours does. Thank goodness, [LAUGHTER] because I love having a job. [LAUGHTER] But we find ourselves working with faculty to build these spaces for community because oftentimes, as an instructor myself, I’m not taking the time to build reflection and metacognitive practices into my own routine of teaching. So my teaching routine is “Okay, let me build my lesson plan. Let me do my grading. Let me meet with students for office hours.” But I’m not consciously thinking, “How can I reflect on my teaching?” Or “Where can I meet with other people to discuss this?” That’s our role of the teaching center. And so our job is to help support faculty in forming those connections and to build space for them to share their experiences. Sometimes we might coordinate a lunch to discuss a certain topic or invite one of our faculty to pose a question or discuss a certain problem that they’re facing. Some of the times we draw from our own teaching experiences to give examples of how we might approach a situation or some of the teaching wins that we’ve had or some of the teaching struggles that we’ve faced. Some topics that we’ve more recently covered are first-year teaching techniques, supporting first-generation students, managing student disruptions, course redesign, and Universal Design for Learning. But really, if faculty members come to us and they’re interested in a certain subject area, we’re more than happy to look into it if we’re not familiar with it ourselves, and then come back and design something for them.

John: You mentioned a first-year teaching techniques course to prepare faculty to teach first-year students, and in an earlier conversation, you mentioned that this was something you were hoping to spread throughout the entire faculty. Could you tell us a little bit about what the focus of that class is?

Constanza: Yeah, I got a lot of questions about this at POD actually, because this is something that a lot of universities are hoping to teach about, really. But I was having a conversation with our Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Veronica McComb, and we were casually talking, as one does, with the Dean over coffee. And she was saying it would be really great if we could offer something that would highlight some of today’s students’ challenges and some teaching techniques that would really complement their learning. And I looked at her, and she has a faculty development background, and I said, “Well, do you want me to build a course?” And she said, “Yeah, I’d love it.” And so the idea unfolded, and I began to design our first-year teaching techniques course. It’s a six-week course, which ends up with faculty creating new implementations into their own courses. And although it’s geared towards first-year students, it really applies to all students. So we’ve had two cohorts of faculty go through it already. Our third cohort is about to launch, there are five modules, and they talk about a variety of teaching techniques, some of which faculty may have seen before and may already use but not know that they’re actually evidence based, and some of which are entirely brand new. We use a variety of mediums. So they get to listen to some Tea for Teaching podcast episodes, as well as some other podcast episodes. They get to read some articles. And then we also all read Lisa Nunn’s, 33 simple strategies for faculty: a week-by-week resource for teaching first-year and first-generation students, which is really great, because there are anecdotes within that book from first year and first-gen students themselves with quotes of their thoughts and struggles and comments. And so it’s real and extremely relatable. And it gets our faculty thinking about how they’re delivering content or how they’re approaching students in an entirely different way. And so in the course, we’ve laughed together, we’ve cried together, we’ve met on Zoom, we’ve met in person, and folks get to know other faculty from different disciplines across campus. We’ve had folks who have just started teaching for the first time, we’ve had folks who have been teaching for a number of years at Bryant, folks who are new to Bryant. So it’s a really great way to build community. And I’m glad that you asked about it. But it’s also really helpful and a great way to show those who have been teaching for a really long time, especially, that it’s always really great to reflect upon their teaching practice and to think about how they can reinvigorate that practice and enhance it to fit the needs of today’s students.

Rebecca: One of the other programs that you’ve mentioned is the Course Redesign Institute. Can you talk a little bit about how this program is structured, when in the year it happens, and how many faculty participate?

Terri: Sure, this is something we’re very excited about that we just started this year. It was actually the idea of one of our faculty fellows, and we modeled it on our really wonderful writers’ retreat that we’ve had for a number of years on campus and big shout out to our colleagues in the Krupp library and the Academic Center for Excellence that we work with in planning that. The writers’ retreat is really just: show up, do your writing, we’ll feed you. [LAUGHTER] And we’ll be around to help you if you have questions. And we love that idea, and we love that structure. So what we did is we built into the structure a series of content experts. We brought in people with expertise and accessibility, course design, and open educational resources, and virtual reality and pedagogy, instructional technology, syllabus statements and design. And we brought everyone together in a space in the library. And we essentially just let people do their thing. So we structured it with: buy our meals, we structured it by the times we got together with our meals to be in community. We did not run any sessions in training. We did not have any required events other than strong encouragement to join together during the five meals that we shared together over our time together. And it gave people a chance to sit down and in real time reach out to the people who could help them with questions they were having in the moment. So a group of three or four math faculty, for instance, in our last retreat, were working together. And they would come across something as they were working, they’d say “We have an accessibility question.” They could go right to the person and ask that question. “Oh, we’d like to institute open educational resource in this,” they could go right to that person and ask them. And it was a very productive time, people love being fed. They love being able to just show up and do their work and have immediate response to the questions that they have. Our goal was to do this once a year, but it was so popular, we intend to do it in the fall and the spring, and keep this sort of a very faculty-centered event where they get access to the resources they need right away in real time.

Rebecca: I love the idea of having the meals to bring people together, because inevitably, that probably leads to conversations about the courses they’re all redesigning.

Terri: Absolutely. We’ve had wonderful conversations.

John: I believe you also do some things that bring faculty together a bit more informally. Could you talk about some of the ways that you do that?

Constanza: Well, as Terri has mentioned, we love food. So if there’s a way that we can bring folks together over a hot beverage or a meal, because we’re in New England after all, and as we were joking about earlier, the winters are rough, we’ll do that. So as we’re heading back during the first week of classes, we’ll have a welcome back lunch for faculty. But apart from that, folks will joke, I’ll sit in my office sometimes, but sometimes I’ll also go over to the faculty and staff cafe and I’ll sit over there and faculty will pass through and remember that they have a question for me, or they’ll see me and they’ll sit down and we’ll chat. And so that will be a way to informally catch folks, and remind them to come and visit us or perhaps chat with them about an idea that they have. And if I’m lucky, that’ll turn into a SOTL article or something like that. So I love to catch people in that way. It’s amazing how many questions folks suddenly remember that they have just by seeing my face, and it saves them from sending an email. But also, the more I get to know faculty on campus, the more I understand where their interests lie. And so if there’s a faculty member who has a question, and I know that there’s another faculty member who might have experience with that question and might be able to answer it, I might reach out via email and introduce them. In fact, I’m notorious for doing so. So it’s a way for them to get to know each other as well, because oftentimes, faculty will meet other faculty members in their department, but they may not necessarily know other faculty in other areas. So those are some of the ways that we informally network. Our faculty fellows allow for another space where faculty can get together and meet folks that are not within their discipline. And really any open session that we have in the Center for Teaching Excellence is another way for folks to get to know other faculty who are interested in pedagogy. I love Liz Norrel’s idea that she mentioned on your podcast a few weeks ago about doing podcasts and puzzles. And so shout out to her for that one because I really want to adopt that for our center as well.

Rebecca: Since the pandemic, we’ve dealt with a lot of issues related to student disengagement and increased reports of students dealing with mental health challenges and things like this, and this has really increased the emotional labor of faculty. Sarah Rose Cavanaugh in Mind over Monsters argues for a practice of “compassionate challenge.” How do you address the challenges that faculty are facing in finding a good balance between compassion and challenge?

Terri: So one of the things that we look at… and this is a really important question that everybody is navigating, so thank you for that question… one of the things that we look at is the concept of kindness. It’s one of our three principles. And there is a bit of a problem around kindness as a term, often wrongly defined as doing everything you can to help someone to the point where you start doing the thing that they needed to do in the first place. And this creates learned helplessness, it also can become manipulative. For those of us who are doing this kindness and compassion at work, it can become exhausting and frustrating. As educational developers, we end up doing all the work rather than teaching someone how to do it for themselves. And that can be really hard. So we’ve talked a lot about compassion fatigue, and what happens when working with students who have mental health challenges, as you mentioned, where we start to take on the experiences of the students, and sometimes not appropriately, because there are professionals who should be working in these areas, and we want to support students. So how do we do that effectively, but also make sure our students are getting the best care they can from the professionals who are there to do that work? So we have students who are disengaged, alienated, apathetic, worry about belonging, but we also have faculty who are disengaged, have burnout, have compassion fatigue, wonder about whether they belong to an institution that has changed so dramatically in such a short period of time that it makes sense anymore. The conversation about not being a great resignation, but a great disengagement that faculty are experiencing. And I think that a couple of the issues that we’ve been looking at is that performative care, the way that so much is required of us now as faculty and as educational developers to be caring, that the caring becomes a performance rather than something authentic. And, of course, this is a use of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s work on emotional labor, where you start becoming detached and alienated from that labor, because it’s taken over your identity, that you no longer authentically feel connected to that emotional labor. And when we’re dealing with so much endless change, we have to be careful of that boundary between compassion and challenge.

Constanza: Yes, and this is something that we’ve talked about in terms of layers, because if the students are feeling this way, it’s impacting the faculty. And then if the faculty are feeling this way, it’s impacting us as educational developers. And Terri knows the story, but it really hit me when I was at a conference with Terri last year. I’ve always sort of wondered, as one does, how did I end up in faculty development? What’s my real story if someone were to ask, and one of my mentors in graduate school, unfortunately, ended up taking their own life, because they felt as if they didn’t belong, and really, really suffered. And we’ve seen in the news recently, as well, that that is a topic right now that we’re grappling with in higher education too. So all of this to say that, as educational developers, we are seeing faculty being perhaps more vulnerable than ever coming to us with greater challenges than they perhaps have ever come to us with before. And we’re also feeling the ripple effects of all of this. And in some cases, it is very challenging for faculty to come to us with these issues, for all of those same reasons that we mentioned earlier, faculty thinking, “Oh, I’m probably the only one going through this, perhaps it’s not appropriate for me to come and talk about this,” or the opposite extreme, where they are oversharing all of the things that are happening, and we have to figure out how to help support them, and perhaps do that in a way that is most effective, while protecting ourselves at the same time from that compassion fatigue. So if faculty are to trust us, that means that we have to be willing to be vulnerable to a certain extent, as well. And that’s not to say that we bare our entire souls and say everything that is deeper or personal about what we’ve been through. But it does mean that it’s helpful for us to share some stories of our own teaching woes, or to talk about moments that things just didn’t go right. Or to let faculty know, “You’re the third person to come into my office today letting me know about this, so I just want you to know that you’re not alone,” or to let them know “this is a topic that has come up repeatedly, and just to let you know, we’ve heard about it so much that our director has gone and informed the provost too, so we’re going to start having greater conversations as a campus community about it.” And so those are the types of ways that we show up for faculty, because, again, if they’re going to be comfortable with us, we have to show them that we too, are willing to be vulnerable with them. The other thing that I should mention as well is that part of this process is for us to generate community too. So not only do we meet with each other as a team, but we’re also part of the Rhode Island Teaching and Learning Network. So we have educational developers from the entire state of Rhode Island on that network. And we meet monthly to talk about issues, ideas, and concerns that we’re seeing, and that’s a really great space for us all to get together and quite honestly, it is so supportive, and I’m not quite sure what I would do without that network.

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

Terri: Our next steps are, as we said a few minutes ago, actually, we were talking about how students feel alienated, discontent, apathy, belonging issues, and our faculty are also feeling some of these same things. And surprise, educational developers are also in that mix. And we are feeling that same sense of disengagement and burnout, and compassion fatigue. And our next steps are to take these subjects that we’re working with and really start thinking about how it impacts our work as educational developers and other educational developers. We do a lot of the support work, and much is required of us, and how are we supporting each other? As Constanza mentioned a moment ago, the Rhode Island Teaching and Learning Network has been a place where we’ve been having some of these conversations this year, and we hope to continue to have them there and on our campus.

Constanza: I think Terri said that perfectly.

John: Well, thank you. It’s great talking to you again, and we look forward to future conversations.

Constanza: It’s great to speak with both of you. Rebecca, so nice to meet you. It’s so funny when you hear someone’s voice and then, I’m sure you get this all the time, and then you get to see them and I hope to meet you both in Oswego sometime. We’ll make it happen. And I’ll bring Terri with me.

John: That would be great.

Terri: It was lovely to see you both. 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.

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

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328. MicroSkills

Formal education does not always prepare us well for the unwritten rules of the workplace. In this episode, Adaira Landry and Resa Lewiss join us to discuss MicroSkills: Small Actions: Big Impact, their new book, designed to support us in efficiently navigating professional environments.

Adaira is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. She is an entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and award winning mentor. She co-founded Writing in Color, a nonprofit that teaches the craft of writing. Resa is a professor of emergency medicine, TEDMED speaker, TimesUp Healthcare founder, designer, entrepreneur, and award-winning educator, mentor, and point-of-care ultrasound specialist. She hosts the Visible Voices Podcast, amplifying content in the healthcare, equity, and current trends spaces.  Adaira and Resa have written many articles together in CNBC, Fast Company, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Nature, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Science, Slate, STAT News, Teen Vogue, VOGUE, and USA Today. They have been quoted and featured in the Guardian, the HuffPost, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. MicroSkills: Small Actions: Big Impact, is scheduled for release in April 2024 by Harper Collins.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Formal education does not always prepare us well for the unwritten rules of the workplace. In this episode, we discuss a new resource to support us in efficiently navigating professional environments.

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

Rebecca: Our guests today are Adaira Landry and Resa Lewiss. Adaira is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. She is an entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and award winning mentor. She co-founded Writing in Color, a nonprofit that teaches the craft of writing. Resa is a professor of emergency medicine, TEDMED speaker, TimesUp Healthcare founder, designer, entrepreneur, and award-winning educator, mentor, and point-of-care ultrasound specialist. She hosts the Visible Voices Podcast, amplifying content in the healthcare, equity, and current trends spaces. Adaira and Resa have written many articles together in CNBC, Fast Company, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Nature, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Science, Slate, STAT News, Teen Vogue, VOGUE, and USA Today. They have been quoted and featured in the Guardian, the HuffPost, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. They are the co-authors of MicroSkills: Small Actions: Big Impact, which is scheduled for release in April 2024 by Harper Collins. Welcome back, Adaira and Resa.

Adaira: Thank you so much for having us. I’m excited to be here.

Resa: Delighted, delighted, delighted.

John: We’re glad to talk to you again. Today’s teas are:… Resa, are you drinking tea?

Resa: I am absolutely drinking tea. I am drinking Celestial Seasonings True Blueberry. And I like not only the smell. I like the taste. I like the name. I like the feeling.

John: And Adaira?

Adaira: I am drinking chamomile. I love chamomile, and I’m trying to actually get more into green tea, which I hear is the healthiest type of tea out there. But I’m starting with just chamomile today.

John: …all those antioxidants.

Adaira: Right. That’s exactly right. It’s purely for health benefits. I’m trying to transition to exclusively green tea.

Rebecca: Both of them sound nice and calming. For sure. I have Harsha, which sounds like the exact opposite of that. [LAUGHTER]

John: Which is a black tea, a very harsh black tea, apparently.,

Rebecca: it is not a harsh black tea.

Adaira: I can’t do black tea. It is really harsh. It is.

Rebecca: …so tasty.

John: And I have a Republic of Tea wild blueberry tea today, which is a black tea.

Adaira: I like that brand.

Rebecca: …popular flavor this afternoon. So we invited you here today to discuss Micro Skills. Could you tell us a little bit about the origin of your book project.

Adaira: I’m happy to start. So Resa and I have been writing together for about three and a half years. We started with articles writing about our everyday struggles in the workplace. And we recognize that the things that we were facing in academia in medicine were widely applicable to a larger audience. Things like how to communicate, how to write a letter of recommendation for yourself, how to deal with workplace toxicity. And so those topics, even though we were encountering them in the healthcare setting, people were encountering them in education and finance, and tech. And so we thought, what would be the next big thing? Like, where do we go from here? And I’ve always wanted to write a book, and I love writing with Resa. So it just seemed like an organic next step to pitch the idea to her, “How about writing a larger project, a book, together that is really focused on the workplace?” And we still have the same philosophy of teaching the strategic how to, and using a voice that really is approachable and full of easy-to-implement tips.

Resa: And what we found, as Adaira said, is that what we experienced and what we see in medicine is actually exactly what our friends are seeing in other industries. And we found that we were able to write about the workplace in ways that spoke to many audiences, many industries. And we’re both ambitious. And when she came to me with the offer and the idea, I said, “I’m in.”

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the intended audience? …you’ve kind of hinted at your connection to the medical field, but also these wider audiences….

Resa: I’m going to make a sports reference, and we’re going to talk about the playbook. And for different reasons, and sometimes overlapping reasons. Adaira and I have felt like, we didn’t get a copy of the playbook. And we certainly have been able to navigate this thing called academic emergency medicine, and we have a lot of accomplishments. But gosh, it definitely could have been easier if we had been told certain things, if we somehow got the inside scoop. And so the motivation was to provide that for everybody: to get there easier, get there sooner, get there in a way that everything…. goals, tasks, habits, navigating the workplace… just doesn’t seem as hard.

Adaira: I was going to add because a lot of people have asked if there is a specific audience we had in mind when we wrote the book, and Resa and I discussed upfront, “So we want to write a book for just women or just physicians?” And we’ve found ourselves wanting to really capture that wider audience. And, yes, we think this book is going to appeal greatly for those who are early in their careers who really know very little about the workplace because they have limited experience. And also, we have found that people who are more senior have benefited from a refresher, reminding themselves of what others expect of them. And we’ve even heard some feedback that people are going to use this as a guide in how they mentor others.

John: And even some of those who are later in careers, I think, can benefit from it. When Rebecca and I were working together in the teaching center, she saw some of the emails I sent out, and her response was, “I don’t know why people even talk to you, sometimes.” [LAUGHTER] I don’t know if you remember that conversation, Rebecca,

Rebecca: I think that’s a direct quote. [LAUGHTER]

John: I think it was a direct quote. It was a few years ago, but having this type of book could be really useful for people in pretty much any career. In the introduction, you note that the characteristics of successful people are often wrongly considered innate traits, rather than larger skills that can be dissected and learned in small pieces. Could you describe the range of topics that you address in this book.

Resa: So we have 10 chapters. And we actually did a lot of beta testing, beta reading, brainstorming sessions, the two of us, and then we opened it up to some people from all different ages, stages industries to see what resonated, and I’ll just name those 10 chapters. And that sort of will speak to the audience, in that they’ll understand really how comprehensive of a book this is. So we have micro skills for self care, micro skills to manage a task list, micro skills for polished communication, micro skills to build and maintain your reputation, micro skills for becoming a subject matter expert, micro skills to learn your workplace culture, micro skills to be a team player, micro skills to grow your network, micro skills for navigating conflict, and finally, micro skills to actively find new opportunities.

Rebecca: …such a great list of categories of micro skills. Can you give an example of what some of those specific micro skills might be?

Adaira: Yeah, I want to open with chapter one, micro skills for self care. And we purposefully put that at the front of the book, because we think, for anyone who wants to be better at work, they have to do this check in or audit as far as who they are, how they take care of themselves, how much compassion they give to themselves, and just making sure that they feel like they’re in a good spot, as a person, as an individual, before they start moving into work, and the team, and all of those things. And so we really love that this chapter is at the beginning, and we open with nine micro skills for self care. The first is to nourish relationships with people you trust, to really invest in those people to recognize the value of gratitude and demonstrate appreciation of others. The third is to make yourself an award-winning sleeper. As physicians, we of course, have a high emphasis on sleep and rest. Protect your ability to deliberately rest, and we talk about what deliberate rest means. Manage your personal finances. And we have a lot to say about that. Monitor your personal hygiene and physical health. And that was actually quite an interesting one to put in there, because there’s a lot about how someone appears that is very personal and sensitive, and it’s a very controversial topic. So that was a really interesting one to dive into. Number seven is offload routine tasks that bring you no joy or purpose. Number eight is place and organize everything on a calendar. And then number nine is to set limits on time spent in meetings.

Rebecca: I’d like to emphasize and underscore that one.

Adaira: Almost all of these were born out of our own personal struggles, or what has been told to us by other people directly, or our observations of how we have seen other people thrive or struggle within the workplace. But it’s not like any of it’s just coming out of thin air. Like what if this were a problem, it’s all grounded in some form of reality that we have witnessed.

Resa: And our approach is unique because there are many business self-help books out there. And when submitting a proposal and working with an editor, we had to give what we call comp titles. So there are plenty of books out there that talk about these things. What we know is different about this book is we break it down into these small steps, micro skills, and we tell people how. And I’ll just take the example of developing subject matter expertise, that seems like huge and people are like, “I don’t even know how to do that. How do you do that?” And we break it down. And one example about which we wrote recently is collaboration, and how collaborating with others can be a piece of building your own subject matter expertise. So we go into examples, and we break each one down with providing critical actions that are actionable, they’re discrete, they’re specific, and they build upon each other.

Rebecca: The other thing that’s really important to underscore is that these are all presented as skills, things that are learnable. And not just somehow, something we’re more or just supposed to somehow know. But it’s something we can take steps to get better at, and not just snap here today, we have this particular skill.

Adaira: That’s exactly right.

John: And early in your book, in terms of differentiating your book from other self-help, or self-care books, you note that a lot of other books come from a perspective of privilege, and may not work with a broader audience. Could you give us some examples of how you’ve tried to make your book relevant to a broad range of readers?

Resa: John, I love that question. And no one has asked us that question yet. They’ve noted what you just noted. But they didn’t ask how or maybe why. And so I think this comes from a place, and I’ll speak personally, of having had the experience of not feeling like I belong, feeling like I’m the only, and I’m not denying the plenty of privilege that I bring to the table. But being super aware that all of these environments are not built for inclusivity and belonging and for everybody. And so one assumption that is made often in these books is that people have access to resources, and the specific resource I’m speaking about is money and wealth. And it’s not said, but it’s definitely assumed by the way these books are written, or the way they talk about, “well just go do this.” It assumes that you have access to a savings and checking account, that you have access to caretakers like parents who can give you money, or who can support you, or that you’ve somehow inherited financial knowledge that maybe you didn’t inherit, and you didn’t have that kind of opportunity in the household in which you grew up. So financial is one assumption that we tried not to make. And that goes back to the why we told people how, because a lot of the books just assume, we’ll just go out and get a financial advisor. Many people don’t even know where to start. And the assumption is, that must cost a lot of money. And the reality is, it does not necessarily need to cost a lot of money, it may not cost any money. But again, we tried to really come from our own experience, or the experience of people that we love that are in our life, or quite honestly, we’re in the emergency department, we see the full breadth of society, and people come at the worst days of their life. People sometimes come with like, literally minor paper cuts, the range. And so I think it keeps, I certainly know it keeps me sober. And I say that a lot. And people are like, “oh,” and it’s a figurative aspect to staying sober about not everybody comes from the same place or has the same access.

Adaira: And the other thing that we wanted to do was really reveal our vulnerability and our own lessons learned. We don’t write from a place of “we know everything, because we have never made a mistake.” Well, that would be very untrue. I’m speaking personally for myself. I have made plenty of mistakes. And I would say that the book is really born out of the examples of how we have learned to be better communicators. And some of that is because we’ve made a mistake in the past. And we’re like, we should never make that mistake again. And we should also teach other people not to do the same thing. And so I think that level of vulnerability, that level of humility, is woven throughout the book because I tell a story about how I gave a patient the wrong medication dose. And so that’s like revealing a part of me that maybe someone else might want to hide. But I think showing that allows the reader to really understand that “Yes, here are these two physicians trained at Harvard who are successful.” Resa has a very successful podcast, I have a nonprofit. We have succeeded in various ways. And we have done that through making mistakes and learning lessons from it.

Rebecca: I really love the transparency component in underscoring that piece of it, and that making sure that you’re not making some of those assumptions, incredibly valuable and can’t be underscored enough. You’ve hinted a little bit at some of the content of individual structures, but they all follow a common structure. Do you want to share a little bit about how each chapter is structured? Kind of on this thread of transparency.

Resa: Love to. So as Adaira spoke, we put ourselves into this book. So every micro-skill and every chapter starts with a story, a vignette. And we switch back and forth who’s speaking, whose story, and its a real story. Some identifying features are changed, but they’re based on real circumstances and we wrote them so you can tell it’s our authentic voice. The goal of the story is to illustrate the micro-skill. And after the vignette, there’s an aspect where we talk about why is this skill important? …and some may be self evident. But sometimes these things are not evident. And that’s why people need to read this book. So we talk about why it’s important, how it can help you at work. This goes back to the humility and the transparency. We say, “Hey, listen, we get it. This is hard. And this is why it’s hard and why you may not want to do this, been able to do this, all the above.” And then we break it down into critical action steps, concrete steps, that the reader can take.

John: Can you give us some additional examples of some of the micro skills that you talked about in your book?

Adaira: Yeah, I will start with one that I think is relevant to me in my most recent days. And that is “learn what your supervisors expect of you.” And actually, in the book, I tell a story about how I went to a lecture many years ago, where it was a male speaker, and he was telling a story about how he was tasked to organize social, like mixers or journal club-type things during the day. And his co-fellow, a woman, was also tasked to do the same thing. And he spent like two minutes on this assignment, like he just sent out a quick email, and it was done, he didn’t really even order food. And she made a beautiful invitation and got this like artisanal food and had music and everyone was personally invited. And in the end, he ultimately got hired, he sort of summarizes this story, because they’re both fellows, but he was the one of the two who was hired because he didn’t really spend time doing the tasks his supervisor didn’t care about, instead of doing all the organizational stuff, what we call non-promotable tasks in the book, he spent time doing the research, giving the talks, networking with people doing other things that his supervisor valued. And so I think that’s something that’s like a favorite of mine right now. Because as an advisor for our medical school, I’m sort of teaching students to understand what is expected of you. And it becomes quite relevant. If you are someone who doesn’t really understand that there’s a difference between the work that is tasked to you and what you personally find valuable. And we talk about this other concept of non-promotable tasks. And there’s a huge gendered component to that, where perhaps the woman in that scenario was told or assumed that she needed to put this energy into something else that she shouldn’t have been doing. So that to me is a really interesting concept.

Resa: My favorite skills, favorite stories, change day-to-day and conversation-to-conversation. One that I’ll highlight is under the micro skills for self-care chapter, and this is specifically: recognize the value of gratitude and demonstrate appreciation of others. And in this micro-skill, I start by telling a story of working in the emergency department with an attending and I was a resident doctor, and this woman came in and she was clearly dying of metastatic cancer. And it was very recognizable to us how terminal she was, how sick she was. And the family that came in with her definitely did not recognize how end stage and far along she was. And no one had had a conversation with her, with them. There was no consensus decision about what to do and what measures to take in terms of her wishes as she was dying. So we went into the family room and had a conversation with the family, this attending and I, and I watched him very skillfully hold this conversation and, with the family, bring them to a decision where I visibly saw them feel better and feel relief, I should say. And it was remarkable. I’d never seen this type of conversation. So fast forward. I was finished with my training, and I was the faculty member working in the community. No resident doctors, just me, a patient came in, had metastatic cancer, but wasn’t that sick, and he and his partner, very friendly, very nice, very appreciative. He did get admitted to the hospital. And that was it. Three weeks later, he came to the emergency department again, I didn’t recognize him. His cancer had progressed. His partner was like, “Hi, do you remember us?” She recognized me and I had to do a double take. There’s a lot that we keep inside, we don’t say outside, and keep this sort of demeanor. But it was very clear this time, he was very sick. And so the same situation of the partner didn’t really have that recognition and insight. She’s like, “Well, I’m gonna go, do you think he’s going to be admitted?” And I realized I had to have that similar conversation. So I took her into a room, sat down, explained to her how serious it was and gave her specific directives and what to do to sort of prepare and that he was definitely going to be admitted, etc. I was not working the next day, however, she came down to the emergency department to look for me and she passed on a thank you through the nursing staff and they told me. I wrote a note to that attending who had taught me how to have that skillful conversation from back in my training. And he’s told me that he’s kept that note, and he pulls it out every once in a while to read it. And this concept of gratitude and thanking… yeah, it can be a thank you note. And I joke that growing up, I was always told I was supposed to send a thank you note. And I was like, eyeroll, thank you note. But now, there’s real value in authentic note writing, but just acknowledging, thanking, and realizing that none of us are doing this alone, everything we do is team. And acknowledging that those assists, and that those people that helped you along the way, is really important.

Rebecca: And those notes don’t take a long time to write often, but are incredibly meaningful and impactful.

John: And they’re also really effective for the mental health of the people who write those notes. There’s a lot of research suggesting that expressions of gratitude help improve the quality of life for the people who engaged in that.

Resa: That’s exactly why it’s in the self-care chapter. Bingo..

John: In self care, you mentioned earlier, though, a couple of things that I might have some challenges with, for example, you mentioned to give up those things that don’t bring you joy, that sounds like a good deal of my day today. [LAUGHTER] For those people who are in a position where their job requires them to do tasks that may not always bring them joy, do you have any suggestions on how they can find more joy in the work that they’re doing?

Rebecca: This isn’t a request for any personal advice or anything, is it, John? [LAUGHTER]

Adaira: There’s a part of work that we all have to do that is menial, and feels less enthusiastic or inspired by and I think, in the book, we make a caveat, like you can’t give up everything, because you have to again, go back to what your supervisor expects of you. What we really are talking about is when there’s room for optional stepping down, or stepping up, and there’s room for you to sort of voice your opinion or your objection. So if someone comes to me and like I have collaborators and peers who come to me and say, “Hey, would you like to join in on this project,” and I don’t find myself having joy in that type of work, I feel empowered to say no, and focus on the things that really do bring me joy. But if my supervisor were to tell me, “Hey, I need you to be at work tomorrow at 9 am,” I really couldn’t look at that person and say, “No, I don’t want to do that,” because then I might lose my job. But it is a good question to ask yourself, because that might mean to you that this job really isn’t where you should be. If the most basic expectation of you you don’t want to do it’s a nice thing to sort of stop and pause.

Resa: I do think that we have more agency and control at work than sometimes we think we do. And part of that is the self care. If you’re rested, if you have the Board of Directors, I love having my own Board of Directors, your go-to people that you can say, “Listen, I need to bounce this scenario by you. Are there any ways that you see that I can offload some of this?” And people you trust, people that understand your situation, sometimes they come up with stuff you’re like, “Amazing. That’s a great idea.” So I think realizing that, like I said, when we don’t feel we have agency, when we feel out of control, there’s actually usually more in our, I guess they call it the sphere of influence. And actually, a skill in the micro skills for self-help chapter is about setting limits on time spent in meetings, and time expands to fill that allotted. And so we definitely think that 60-minute meetings can often be 30-minute meetings, 30-minute meetings can often be 15- to 20-minute meetings, 15- to 20-minute meetings can often be an email or a phone call. And so there is a lot of play, and none of us can really, at the end of the day, we know and acknowledge, ignore our roles and responsibilities.

Rebecca: So your book is super comprehensive. There’s many micro skills in there. And for some, sitting down and reading from cover to cover might be a good strategy, [LAUGHTER] but it might also be really overwhelming having so many micro skills. Do you have some advice for how to engage with your book?

Resa: This is a fantastic question. And it’s almost as if you queued up… I’ll start. I have one of my besties from college. She’s also in academic medicine. She’s a dermatologist and she recently stepped into a leadership position and she has been one of the beta readers. She was bowled over… she’s kind of mid- to late-career… with its applicability and accessibility. And she said, and Adair and I specifically designed the table of contents, so, sure, you can read it cover to cover, but you can dip in and go to a chapter or a skill. My friend had to run a meeting, so she went directly to the micro skills on how to run a meeting. And she actually, as a part of this new leadership position, has had to have some quote difficult conversations. We talk about difficult conversations and conflicts. So my N of one is that you can actually piecemeal and go directly to topics that are relevant to your needs. We call it just-in-time learning.

John: So, it doesn’t have to be read from beginning to end in a continuous linear fashion…

Rebecca: …but it should be at an arm’s length away. I think one thing that stood out to me that I know a lot of our graduate students are constantly struggling with is growing your network and how to do that. I think it’s always very mysterious to people it seems daunting, it seems scary. It might be a skill set that feels like, if you’re not outgoing, somehow, you can’t build a network. So I think that component is something that I know that my graduate students would really benefit from dipping into.

Resa:In that micro-skill, when we talk about growing your network, we start from this premise that everybody has a network, everybody has a network, and people may think they don’t, but they do, whether it’s friends from elementary school, kids you attended clubs with when you’re growing up in high school, your high school friends, your college friends, in our case, our med school friends, our residency friends, our fellowship friends, our faculty friends, and then if there’s been any national experience or international experience, it just goes on and on and on and on. And one approach for people that still don’t buy it, that they have a network, is you can do something simple, like setting up one meeting a week, one outreach, and one meeting a week with the goal of building upon that. And eventually, over time you grow your network. And when you connect with someone organically and nicely and well, or it can even be a mentor, you can ask them, “Is there anybody that you think I should meet? Can you introduce me? Or can I reach out cc: you?” or say that you told me. So once you do it or know how to do it, it’s like not a big deal. And also I have 100% been there where I’m like, “I don’t have a network, I don’t know anybody.” And then I was like, wait a minute, oh my gosh, okay. And this goes back to the sort of thinking back and reflecting and actually feeling rested enough to have that reflection time.

Adaira: And I’ll just quickly add that for many people, myself included, I assumed my network would be built by people coming to me and like offering to just coach me or to be my mentor. And so for many years, I didn’t have a network. I would say from like, 21 to like 25, for sure. So really early in my career when I was in medical school, early residency, I didn’t really have like a network or a team of people who I could turn to. And it wasn’t until really someone showed me how they network and how they reach out to other people and normalized for me that like I’m in charge, and I really need to build this myself.

Rebecca: I think there were a couple others that stood out to me in particular, as well, like designing meetings to have a clear purpose. That’s a skill I’d like to share with others [LAUGHTER] as well as myself.

Adaira: There are some things in this book that I think we all struggle to tell other people directly. And so someone when I told them about the self-care chapter that has something about literally body odor, someone said that they felt like really relieved that we gave them guidance on how to check in with other people who might be struggling in this realm. We include uncomfortable truths that can hopefully be helpful for the reader like “this is how I can deal with this for someone else, for myself.” And yes, that meeting the agenda part is one too, like, if you’re in meetings all the time that have no agenda, just like how to ask someone, “Hey, do you mind sending out an agenda so we can understand what the goals will be for this meeting.”

John: One other thing that I remember, and this also relates back to our earlier conversation on an article you had posted, was using email efficiently and encouraging other people to use email more efficiently so that you’re not spending all of your time on email. Could you talk a little bit about some of your suggestions for using email for communication.

Resa: This is one we get asked a lot. To your point, we’ve written two articles about email. One is fuel-efficient mentoring, and another on compassionate email culture. And in the book, we talk about the role of the cc: line and the bcc: line, and 100% email and email inbox can get out of control. And so we try to teach how people can feel in control of their email inbox and how to email in a way that is effective, communicative, and generous not just to themselves, but to other people who are on the receiving end. So if we speak specifically about the bcc:, the blind carbon copy, most people think of it as a punitive measure, and it’s used against people or it’s used to create a paper trail. We flip that and we think actually, it can be a very generous tool to use and we think if used in that way, it can be very effective, and people will embrace it. So I’ll use an example. Recently, one of my friends wanted me to meet and mentor one of her younger faculty. And so she introduced us, meaning by email, she electronically introduced us. And I wrote back and I said, “Dear so and so let’s meet next week, here are some of my specific days and times, looking forward to it, Resa.” And then right underneath my name, I wrote my friend’s name in ncc:. And what that meant was, he knew she’s seen this, even though I can’t see her, she sees that I’m closing the loop and I’m responding to your young faculty. And her inbox does not get loaded with more emails when he responds to me. And again, closed loop communication.

John: Yeah, that reply all can get really messy. And bcc: can really reduce that to a much more manageable level.

Rebecca: There’s so many things we could talk about, because there’s so many good things in the book. I was looking at a lot of them in the micro skills to build and maintain your reputation. You might have some initial thoughts about what might be in that chapter, but there’s some really great micro skills around complaining carefully and sharing your failures to normalize humanness. So there’s such a good spectrum of things. And I wish we could talk about all of them, because I really would love to talk about them all. [LAUGHTER] But we always wrap up by asking: “what’s next?”

Adaira: Well, I think for us, next is like tomorrow and the next day, we’re like on a day-to-day level right now, because we are trying to spread the good message of the book and get people’s feedback and see how we can continue to amplify the book through lecturing, workshops, writing articles, and those sorts of things.

Resa: Yeah, we’re in a really exciting period. For listeners, we’re recording before the release of the book. And so we’re in full on marketing and publicity mode. We are doing exactly what Adaira just shared. And we’re just really hopeful that the content resonates with audiences and readers so that, yeah, they buy the book, but also they want to buy the book to get the book and sort of there’s that self-perpetuating aspect to its content being timeless and resonating with many, many, many people.

John: I think you’ve been quite successful in writing a book that should resonate with pretty much everybody. We really enjoyed it.

Adaira: We’re happy to hear that. Thank you.

Rebecca: Definitely something for everybody, no matter their stage of their career, or really what field they’re in. So, thank you for your work in putting this together. It’s important work.

Resa: Thank you.

John: It’s amazing that you do this along with all the other things that you’re doing, [LAUGHTER] which suggests perhaps that some of those tips can lead to more efficiency in terms of how you’re using your time.

Adaira: That’s correct. And that’s the goal. Well, thank you so much for having us.

John: Thank you. It’s great talking to you, and we’re looking forward to your future work.

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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.

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

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322. Accessibility Challenge

Digital accessibility can be intimidating for faculty and staff. In this episode, Michele Thornton, Laura Harris, and Kate DeForest join us to examine one example of a gamified approach to professional development. Michele is an Associate Professor of Management at SUNY Oswego, Laura is the Web Services and Distance Learning Librarian at SUNY Oswego. and Kate is the Digital Content Coordinator at SUNY Oswego.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Digital accessibility can be intimidating for faculty and staff. In this episode, we examine one example of a gamified approach to professional development.

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

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Rebecca: Our guests today are Michele Thornton, Laura Harris, and Kate DeForest. Michele is an Associate Professor of Management at SUNY Oswego, Laura is the Web Services and Distance Learning Librarian at SUNY Oswego. and Kate is the Digital Content Coordinator at SUNY Oswego. Welcome Michele, Laura, and Kate.

Kate: Hello. Thank you.

Michele: Thanks for having us.

Laura: Thank you.

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

Michele: I am. I’m having a London fog. It felt like a good choice given the kind of rainy day.

John: … and Laura?

Laura: I am drinking the Comfort and Joy tea by Republic of Tea.

Rebecca: Sounds nice for a chilly day.

John: …and Kate?

Kate: I’m enjoying a nice chai tea.

Rebecca: Look at the variety in this group. [LAUGHTER] I have Harsha today, which is a black tea.

John: That sounds rather harsh and a bit different than the comfort and joy. [LAUGHTER] And I have, in the spirit of the season, a Christmas tea today.

Rebecca: So we invited you here today to talk about the article that we co-authored, titled “10-Day Campus aAccessibility Challenge” in a recent special issue of the Journal for Post Secondary Education and Disability. The accessibility challenge was an initiative developed by the workgroup on accessibility practices at SUNY, which you’ve all been an active member of. So first, Can each of you briefly describe how you got involved with accessibility work at SUNY Oswego and some of the specific projects that you’ve worked on? And we’ll start with Michele.

Michele: Thanks, Rebecca. My first introduction was by being part of our initial cohort of faculty accessibility fellows in 2019. So that was a year-long fellowship, where myself and a handful of other faculty members from across the campus were able to learn the importance of things like Universal Design for Learning, build skills and capacity around principles of digital accessibility, and become part of the growing community on campus that was really advocating for a more accessible and inclusive campus.

John: And we do have an earlier podcast episode on the origins of that project, and we’ll share a link to that in the show notes.

Rebecca: Kate?

Kate: Okay, I was hired as the digital accessibility analyst and remediation specialist in 2018. I was primarily focused on assessing and remediating online course materials at that time. When I was hired, I was invited to be in the work group, and quickly became one of the main resources for remediation and accessibility at that time. I’ve been involved with creating our digital accessibility website, many of the written and video tutorials, launching the 10-day accessibility pilot program and other subsequent programs, and currently involved with creating accessibility course modules.

Rebecca: Laura?

Laura: One aspect of my job is to support online learning and teaching. And in that role, Rebecca and a former colleague invited me to be part of the workgroup focused on facilitating the creation of accessible materials for online courses. Over the years, the scope of that workgroup has broadened, and now we focus on accessible practices in general. One of the projects I’ve really enjoyed is providing training on different models of disability.

John: Rebecca, you’re one of the people who put together the accessibility challenge. So could you explain your role in it?

Rebecca: Sure. I am one of the two founding members of our workgroup on accessibility practices at SUNY Oswego, and was the first facilitator of our Faculty Accessibility Fellows Program that Michele was in. So Kate, before we jump in too far with our accessibility challenge discussion, can you first help our audience understand what we mean on our campus by accessibility?

Kate: Sure. So the bare bones basic definition, as paraphrased, would be allowing a person with a disability and a person without a disability, the same or similar experience in the same or similar manner. And we are speaking of it in the digital capacity, so using websites and digital content, digital documents, and allowing people to basically experience them in a very similar way.

John: And before we go any further, could someone tell us what the accessibility challenge is? Michele, can you set the stage for us by providing an overview of the accessibility landscape at SUNY Oswego and the circumstances that led to the development of the accessibility challenge, and also, what exactly that accessibility challenge was?

Michele: For me, it’s hard to separate out the genesis of the accessibility challenge from two other important existing factors. The idea came to us in fall of 2020. And so if we can all put ourselves back there, we had just come out of the first spring of the onset of the COVID19 pandemic. That took our campus, like many others out there, into this rapid switch to online learning, and one that really brought the harsh light on many accessibility barriers that parts of our campus had previously not really observed or had much experience with. We’ve already talked about and highlighted a couple of different ways that our campus has been thinking about accessibility with the workgroup, our Fellows Program, and so we have this long tradition of campus leadership and support around promoting accessibility. But the unprecedented need that the pandemic really illuminated revealed that we needed to move even quicker to build a more robust, more skilled, more engaged community that would be prepared to meet the challenges that our students and faculty were facing. We had historically been offering a lot of different trainings and one-on-one faculty support, but we felt like we needed something much more concentrated, quick, that would be fun and enjoyable for folks to participate in. The pandemic was just in its first 12 months, and people were stressed and feeling isolated, nervous or afraid. We wanted to create an opportunity to connect as well as learn from each other. So we’ve talked about this as a 10-day challenge. It was essentially two weeks of an online community engaged learning experience, where folks signed up and took different asynchronous and sometimes synchronous online courses to build their skills and capacity around accessibility.

Rebecca: So Laura, can you talk a little bit about some of the design considerations that went into the challenge?

Laura: Sure, Rebecca. The workgroup often discusses training and professional development opportunities we can provide to faculty, staff, and students. And as Michele indicated, when we had those discussions in late 2020, we knew that many people were feeling overburdened, disconnected, and disenfranchised. And we didn’t want to add to people’s mental loads, we wanted to craft something that was fun and supportive. So one of the theories underlying our thinking is self-determination theory, which suggests that experiences that support individuals’ experiences of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, or connectedness, will provide the best kinds of motivation. I want to talk about competence first. I think promoting competence around accessibility practices has always been at the core of what we do. However, the increase in online instruction caused by the pandemic made fostering this competence a necessity. We just didn’t have, and we do not have now, the staffing to remediate every course. Moving on to relatedness, I feel that offering a challenge instead of regular professional development opportunities really allowed us to foster that sense of connection. With challenges, there’s a shared goal, and when it comes to pulling people together, a shared goal can be more powerful than a shared interest. I also think that, with challenges, there’s often a more intentional effort at providing support and encouragement to participants. For example, the organizers behind National Novel Writing Month host live Q&As and have collected pep talk letters addressed to their participants written by well-known authors. So while competence and relatedness were things we considered early in the process at the macro level, the ability to foster autonomy and agency came through when we were planning the details. One of the other theories we incorporated into the design of the challenge is Universal Design for Learning (or UDL). I would argue that agency and choice are at the core of UDL, which focuses on providing learners with multiple ways of achieving a learning objective. So we made a point to offer multiple ways for Challenge participants to learn about and apply various accessibility concepts.

Rebecca: So Kate, can you describe the challenge and how it worked?

Kate: Sure, we wanted to basically simplify accessibility and allow all content creators to understand basic accessibility principles. So this challenge was centered around creating accessible Word documents through Microsoft Word and Google Docs. We broke it down, broke down accessibility into bite-sized pieces, and we focused on one topic each day. So we started off by introducing accessibility, we covered what it is, why it’s important, and who it benefits, because that’s sometimes lost in translation, depending on the definition that people think of accessibility. Then we went in and we focused on specific skills. So some of the topics included properly structuring content such as how to semantically make headings and lists. We covered writing alternative text for images, captioning videos, effectively using color, and providing descriptive hyperlinks as some of the basic principles. And then the last couple of days of the challenge ended with some self reflections, sort of what did the participants learn? Did the program help boost their competence around accessibility? …that type of feeling. So we send daily emails to the participants, and these emails give a brief background of today’s topic, again, who it benefits and why it’s important. We provided written and video tutorials that explained how to do the task, and then asked the participants to incorporate that principle into the documents of their choice. We also provided other related articles and sources of information, as well as links to live zoom sessions that were being offered that same day around that particular topic.

John: Laura, can you talk a little bit about the timing of the challenge and how participants were recruited to participate in it?

Laura: So for many years, the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching has provided a series of professional development opportunities that are offered for faculty and staff, and are usually led by faculty and staff. These usually are about two weeks before and after the spring semester. The ones that we have in January we refer to as the winter breakout sessions, we have been offering professional development on accessibility practices during the winter and spring breakout sessions for the last few years. So it really just made sense for us to offer the sessions related to the challenge at the same time. As far as recruitment goes, we worked with the Office of Communications and Marketing, they did a news story that was shared with the entire campus, they emailed all faculty, staff, and students. And we also communicated through some smaller communication channels, like the email list for the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching.

Michele: If I could just build on a couple of things that Laura said, I think that we really credit the success of our first challenge to the timing of it and the relationship with the Winter Breakout sessions. I think there’s two important reasons for that, is that this period of time is between semesters. So we know that while faculty certainly are anticipating professional development at that time, they also tend to have kind of allocated some time and space to work on it. Secondly, I do think that if we had tried to replicate this at another time during the year, and rebuilt the structure and rebuilt the marketing around it all separately, that would have been just an even heavier lift for our committee that was working on it. So that connection to our existing structure mattered for sure.

Rebecca: We also had students participating. So, previous professional development had focused primarily on faculty and staff. And this particular initiative really invited students into the scope as well. And most students aren’t taking classes at that time. So there was a little more flexibility for students to take on the challenge as well.

John: One of the things we should note is that the timing of doing this in the early stages of COVID probably helped because faculty were using much more digital content, and were aware of how much they didn’t know, in some cases, about using digital content effectively. So I think all those things came together to help make the program remarkably successful. Laura mentioned that we had been doing workshops for a while, but we should probably credit Rebecca with that, because that was one of the first tasks she took on, actually even before she became associate director of the teaching center. We asked her to do a number of workshops, I think, in your very first year here actually on accessibility.

Rebecca: Yeah.

John: …and that hasn’t stopped since then.

Rebecca: No, it hasn’t. [LAUGHTER] I think one of the other things that we might want to also point out about the success is not just the timing in terms of the January sessions, but also that our involvement in accessibility on campus was starting to mature. We already had campus-wide initiatives leading up to this particular one. And the first cohort of faculty accessibility fellows had completed in 2019. So we also had those fellows to support this initiative during COVID. So Michele, you spearheaded the evaluation of the challenge, can you talk a little bit about the methods used and the results of the challenge?

Michele: I think when we first came up with this idea, the first thing we did was tried to see if there were other models out there that we could pull from. And while I think there’s other examples of challenges, we knew early on, we had a hunch, that what we were doing was kind of novel and unique. And because of that, it was important for us not just to document what we were doing, but to have some attempt to gauge the impact that it was having, I think this would be helpful for us for a couple of reasons. One, just our ability to improve on future iterations or efforts that we would do in this space. But also, I think that you might start getting a sense that all of us feel really passionate and strongly about this. And so the ability for us to advocate beyond our own campus and share what we were doing and help others understand the impacts of it was important for us in terms of documenting and gathering data. So we took all sorts of approaches to gathering data, everything from monitoring the open rates on the emails that went out across campus, to looking at our website traffic through Google Analytics, but the majority of the data came from a pre- and post-set of survey questions. So we did everything from ask folks when they first started to reflect a little bit around their motivation. This gets at some of the things that Laura was sharing about our initial design, about why people were participating and what they were looking for from the challenge, all the way up to then in the post-survey asking folks, as Kate mentioned, to reflect on their experiences. From those surveys, we were really able to pull out key qualitative and quantitative data to get a sense of what motivated folks to join, really understand how their confidence changed and increased in their ability to do things like define accessibility, to be able to make a Word document digitally accessible, but also just understand what they enjoyed most. And over and over again, I think the thing that we learned that probably was maybe most surprising and really nice kind of unexpected benefit was folks reporting that they really enjoyed being part of the learning community together. and the sense of being part of something that was bigger than just “Hey, I’m learning some new skills to teach my class or to send out more accessible emails,” but understanding that they were sort of joining and connecting into this broader movement that was happening on campus was, I think, one of our most surprising and also exciting takeaways.

Rebecca: I think one thing that we didn’t mention that might be worth noting here, especially after you were talking about the surveys is that we did prime our audience at the academic affairs retreat in August, leading up to the fall 2020 semester, by having a few minutes on the agenda to talk about accessibility and to get the academic community aware of digital accessibility. And then the challenge followed up only a few months later.

John: Kate, can you talk briefly about some of the iterations of the project that follow that initial 10-Day Challenge.

Kate: So the initial challenge was held in January of 2021, as we mentioned, and March of 21, we held a presentations challenge, which focused on creating accessible presentations using PowerPoint and Google Slides. This was a weekly challenge, meaning that participants received one email each week for four weeks that focused on one topic. We also provided them with background information, written and video tutorials, and additional resources in the same manner that we did for the initial 10-Day Challenge. And then in January of 22, we ran a five-day accessibility challenge. This was formatted in a very similar manner to the 10-Day Challenge, but we basically split the content into two and created two tracks: we had a beginner level and an intermediate level. Each day, again, highlighted one topic, we provided participants with background information, the tutorials, and additional resources. But this time, participants could choose what content to work on for each day, whether they wanted to stick with the beginner track or go to the more advanced track or do a combination of both.

Rebecca: So Michele, can you talk a little bit about the newest iteration of the project that’s currently in progress?

Michele: I am so excited [LAUGHTER] to talk about the newest iteration of it, because really, this new version has given us a way to massively scale up what we started as kind of this idea of doing a 10-day challenge. Last fall, the entire SUNY system migrated to a new common learning management system. And when that happened, members of our team started imagining a way that we could use that common system to develop an asynchronous customizable version of our challenge that could be deployed across the 60+ universities, schools, campuses across SUNY. We applied for and got a nice grant to support the development of this idea. And there is a really fantastic team, committed faculty, staff, and even students here at Oswego now working to bring this to fruition. And our goal is to pilot it broadly this coming spring, but here at Oswego, we’re going to come back to our roots with the winter breakout session, and we’ll launch the first iteration of it and be able to get some feedback in the next couple of weeks here.

John: And the grant that funded it was a SUNY Innovative Instructional Technology Grant. We should credit SUNY for providing this competitive grant program. Could each of you provide a bit of advice for anyone thinking of doing this at their own institution?

Michele: I’ll start, and I think that we used a pretty big variety of resources. So we didn’t just kind of create material from scratch, we also linked out to things like existing resources from Deque, we pulled in literature and other articles that folks have read. So I think that the biggest takeaway, I would suggest, is that you can do this as big of a scale or as small, you could have a three-day challenge, it doesn’t need to be 10. But starting anywhere, and recognizing your capacity and reaching out to use other existing resources is a good way to supplement if you perhaps don’t have as big of a pool to draw from in terms of internally on your own campus.

Laura: I would add to that just starting wherever you are with whatever resources or personnel you have, it doesn’t have to be a fancy initiative. It can be sort of a grassroots within your own department or as small as you want it to be. But just getting started and sharing out whatever information you have is something, it’s movement in the right direction.

John: Following up on Kate’s comment, this is very consistent with Tom Tobin’s plus one strategy, start with some small changes, and then build on those every semester as you move forward.

Rebecca: In the show notes, we’ll link out to an overview of our challenge as well as the article that we wrote on the challenge.

Michele: You know, the only other thing that I would say is that it’s important to find support and partners and maybe places that you might not expect on campus. So thinking about how to connect this with your campus DEI efforts more broadly, or working with your accessibility resources. Again, we talked about so many different areas where we got support, even the communications and marketing team really helped us, but our CTS team, I think finding those collaborators is a big part of how to ensure something like this can be successful.

John: And CTS is Campus Technology Services.

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

Laura: So something that I’m working on right now is creating a guide that talks about the accessibility features that are available from each of our major database vendors like EBSCO, and ProQuest, just to make those features a little bit more discoverable… accessible… [LAUGHTER] to our users. We try to talk about those in our instruction that we do, but they’re not always obvious.

Kate: So I’ve presented at a number of different conferences, and I’ve talked about the accessibility initiative at Oswego, and this particular challenge and some of our iterations. So I hope to continue that and just kind of share the good word about what Oswego is doing and some of our projects that we’ve been working on and how we can help other campuses or help other departments or people implement similar types of projects.

Rebecca: And how about you, Michele?

Michele: Well, I think I gave it a little bit away, that most of my accessibility work right now is focused on making sure that our new iteration of the Challenge gets off the ground, and we’ve got everybody all hands on deck with that. Beyond that, though, Rebecca, you and I are working on a fun project when we find ourselves with time to take a similar approach in terms of documenting the impacts of accessibility work on our campus. And we interviewed all of the first few cohorts of our campus accessibility fellows, and we’re in the process of trying to figure out what we’ve got there and how that I think shares the story about how Oswego is maturing in its process of working to achieve accessibility, and a more inclusive environment.

Rebecca: Well, thank you all for your work in accessibility, and for sharing that today.

Michele: Thanks for having us.

Kate: Thanks for having us.

Laura: Thank you for having us.

John: Thank you. It’s great talking to all of you and we’ll be seeing you during the winter breakouts very shortly.

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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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300. Episode 300 Reflection

This is episode 300 of the Tea for Teaching podcast. Whether you are a new listener or have been with us for all 300 episodes, we are very grateful that you’ve joined us on our podcasting journey. In this episode, we celebrate this milestone by reflecting on what we’ve learned and how the podcast has evolved.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: This is episode 300 of the Tea for Teaching podcast. Whether you are a new listener or have been with us for all 300 episodes, we are very grateful that you’ve joined us on our podcasting journey. In this episode, we celebrate this milestone by reflecting on what we’ve learned and how the podcast has evolved.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Now that we’ve reached Episode 300, we thought we’d take the opportunity to reflect on some of the changes that we’ve seen in higher education since we launched the podcast in 2017.

John: Today’s teas are:…

Rebecca: I have Blue Sapphire.

John: I heard you just stocked up on a trip to your favorite tea store.

Rebecca: Yes, I was really excited to stock up on my favorite and I have a couple new ones too. So maybe in some upcoming episodes, we can try those out.

John: And I have Bing Cherry Black tea from Harry and David’s which is made by the Republic of Tea. When we first got started on the podcast, much of the focus was on specific teaching practices and techniques and interesting projects. Most of our guests were people that we knew or guests who were within our professional networks.

Rebecca: in the spring of 2020, as we know, [LAUGHTER] the focus shifted to the challenges associated with remote and online teaching, and the challenges facing remote learners and instructors.

John: As we became accustomed to pandemic teaching, we focused a bit more on faculty concerns as we transitioned into the transformed higher ed landscape. Historically, higher ed had been designed to serve the elites of society, and while higher ed gradually became more open and students have become much more diverse, many residual practices have worked against serving the students that we have. During the pandemic, faculty became much more aware of the inequities facing our students as well as faculty and staff.

Rebecca: Yeah, so one of the things that we’ve been talking about quite a bit is this more holistic focus on the needs of our students and faculty as humans, and really generating and creating a much more inclusive higher ed environment. How do you see that moving forward, John?

John: One of the things we’ve talked about is addressing the needs caused by the increased demands on time for faculty, staff, and students. As we developed new teaching techniques and tried to build more structure into our courses, it put much more demands on faculty in terms of redesigning their courses, in terms of paying more attention to the needs of students, and providing students with more feedback. And that has led to issues with burnout, which we’ve addressed in a number of podcasts.

Rebecca: And you’ve never experienced that, have you, John?

John: The day is not over yet. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Well, how do we think about supporting faculty as we move forward with all these demands on their time in trying to prevent burnout? We’ve talked about this in a couple of episodes, but as we enjoy summer and have a little bit of more downtime for some of us… maybe not you, John… and move into the fall, what are some things that we need to be thinking about for our own classes to prevent burnout?

John: One of the things that we’re trying to be careful with when we recommend new teaching techniques to faculty at the teaching center here, is that they change approaches gradually, that small changes, incremental changes, are much easier to accommodate than the type of rapid changes that people had to do when they first moved into remote teaching. And so I think we have to be careful in making sure that we maintain a balance and we don’t burn out ourselves, because we’re not going to be very effective in supporting our students if we’re struggling to get through each day ourselves.

Rebecca: Yeah, we need to be present, just like we want our students to be able to be present and have the supports around them to be present in their learning. I think one thing that we’re also talking about in grad studies in our office is really this increased stress on faculty, and how do we support faculty, but also how do we support graduate student populations through things like accountability groups, or ways where there’s another human for accountability, but also for support, and not necessarily a mentor model, where there’s a power dynamic, but really a peer-to-peer approach to connect people together.

John: And we’re running two reading groups this fall to address some of these needs. One of the reading groups is on Sarah Rose Cavanagh’s new book, Mind over Monsters. And the other one is the second edition of Jim Lang’s Small Teaching. We had done that a few years ago, but we’ve had a lot of new faculty since then. And while we try to reach as many faculty as we can in our workshops, there’s a lot of faculty who are still teaching in pretty much the same way as faculty were teaching a century or so ago. And we’re hoping that by encouraging small modifications in teaching approaches, it might encourage more faculty to participate in introducing active learning activities and evidence-based teaching approaches.

Rebecca: It’s really easy to slip back into past practices when we’re tired [LAUGHTER] and overworked. And it’s not surprising that people have kind of slipped back into assignments and stuff that they’re really familiar with to reduce the cognitive load around new stuff and the many stressors around. So having that added support to help faculty re-engage with some of those ideas is, I think, a really great idea at this juncture. And I love that Mind over Monsters is one of the reading groups as well, because mental health is such an increasing concern, not just for students, but also for faculty and staff.

John: And we’re very much looking forward to both of these reading groups. Among the things we’ve talked about more frequently since the start of the pandemic are the challenges faced by underrepresented and contingent faculty.

Rebecca: I think when we’re introducing new techniques, and we’re thinking about supporting students around mental health, or we’re thinking about evidence-based practices and engaging in active learning, we need to remember that contingent faculty or underrepresented faculty have different barriers or different obstacles in implementing these things… or even more pushback from students and implementing some of these techniques. So we really need to be cognizant of supporting each other and realizing that we don’t all have the same kind of supports in place. I think some populations of faculty are just overly criticized. And when they try something new, it’s not accepted in the same way that a more dominant group’s adoption of those same techniques might be.

John: And that’s true both by students as well as by their faculty peers. And one of the things that’s come up in many of the podcasts we’ve discussed are the biases in both student and faculty evaluation of teaching.

Rebecca: Yeah. One of the things that I think is on the minds of our faculty too, is, as we’ve seen increased diversity of our students, we’ve seen diversity in levels of preparation. And I think those inequities have always been there. But again, maybe it’s more visible now than it had been in the past. How do we work through that in our classrooms, especially in these more introductory classes as students transition into college?

John: Well, I think those inequities have always been there, but they certainly grew with remote teaching, because our students face very unequal resources in their school districts and in their households. And when people are physically in the classroom, they’re at least exposed to the same infrastructure within their institutions. But when students were taking classes from home, as we talked about in many, many episodes, during a pandemic, they had very unequal network access, they had very unequal computing facilities, they may have been sharing a computer with multiple family members, they may have been forced to work. And as a result, the inequities in prior education and prior learning became much more dramatic during the period of remote teaching. And that disproportionately affected students from low-income households and low-income school districts. And what we have to do is provide resources, I think, for all students to be successful. And while we always should have been teaching, or providing resources and support, for all students, those needs have become much greater now, because while we are bringing in a much more diverse student body, we’re also losing students who come in with less preparation at some of the highest rates we’ve ever seen before. And we have to make sure that we’re providing the students that we accept with the support they need to be successful. And there’s lots of ways of doing it, you can build in some additional resources, you can connect to YouTube videos, and such things and provide support to students, you can use mastery learning quiz systems, and many other techniques. But we have to work towards having more faculty building that in because while many faculty are doing these types of things, and trying to build more support and more structure into their classes, it’s not a universal phenomenon.

Rebecca: And maybe even acknowledging that some students in the class are quite literally working harder to get to the same level.

John: The last few years when I’ve been teaching my large intro class, that’s something I’ve mentioned explicitly. I said, everyone here has all the resources they need to be successful. But if you had taken an AP introductory microeconomics course, or something close to that, you’re not going to have to work as hard to attain mastery of many of the concepts. If you have not been exposed to these things, or if your background in working with math and using graphs is not as strong, you’re going to have to work a bit harder. And that’s not a message that a lot of students appreciate hearing. But if we want to get all of our students to the same level at the end, the students who do come in with a weaker background need additional support to get there. And using tutoring when available, encouraging students to come in and talk to their professors and use office hours, all of those things can help but we’ve got a ways to go. What are some of the things you do to try to provide support for the increasingly diverse student body?

Rebecca: Yeah, I think the reality is that what we give each student isn’t the same, because what they come in with is not the same. So I often am trying to assess where students are and then pushing them right at that moment where they’re at, rather than expecting everyone to be at the same point. And I can do that a little more efficiently in a small class than you can in a bigger class. But I think we need to use those smaller classroom spaces to be able to do that so that everyone feels challenged, but also has what they need.

John: My introductory course is a prerequisite for all upper-level economics classes, and most of my students will be moving on to upper-level classes, so they have to reach at least a minimum level of proficiency in the discipline in order to be successful in their future classes. In other classes, instructors can be more flexible, and just try to get the most learning gains in their students, no matter what their starting points were. In my introductory class, at least, I have to pretty much take the students where they are, and try to get them all to the same place, while making sure that they’re all challenged. And that’s a very challenging goal to reach.

Rebecca: …and the difference between teaching those introductory classes versus higher level classes within a discipline, for sure, I think one of the most efficient things we can do is making sure that all students know the most effective ways to learn, because they don’t necessarily know those things coming into college, or even into graduate school. What we need to just remember is learning isn’t something that we just magically know how to do, we need to learn strategies and techniques that are effective.

John: We’ve had a number of guests over the last year or two who’ve talked about books that they’ve provided, or resources they’ve created to help students be more successful. Because one of the things that’s been pretty obvious for quite a while is that the study techniques and the learning strategies that students use are not generally consistent with what evidence suggests is most effective. And as a result, students are not using their time as efficiently as they can, by engaging in strategies that they perceive as being useful, that really result in very little increase in long-term recall… strategies such as highlighting, repeated rereading, and so forth. And one of the things that might be helpful is if we all could shift students a little bit in the direction of using evidence-based learning strategies, and some of that could take place through course design, by building infrastructures that incentivize the use of these techniques.

Rebecca: Yeah, and I think the moment that students realize that they don’t have the most efficient way, or the moment that a student begins to struggle is different, depending on some of that background, that they have. Students that come in well prepared may have never really struggled in high school, and maybe eventually, maybe even in the first year of college, you don’t struggle, but maybe it hits a little later on in their education, maybe not until graduate school. And then other students might struggle the second they get to college, because there’s not as much structure in place as there was in high school. So I think we need to be underscoring these techniques at all levels, and not just in their first year.

John: And one other thing that’s been discussed in many podcast episodes, is the importance of making the hidden curriculum of higher ed transparent to students, so that we don’t expect students to know what a syllabus is or how it could be used, that we shouldn’t expect students to know what is expected on a term paper in a class without making those expectations explicit and transparent to students. Because in general, we see a lot of students coming in, and they see it as a game where they’re trying to guess at what instructors are asking. And many of those guesses, especially for students who have not been in college prep classes before, are wrong. And they wasted a lot of time and effort that could have been spent more productively developing their understanding of the subject matter.

Rebecca: And the reality is that there’s differences between disciplines and between courses. And so the more we can be explicit about expectations within our own discipline, and within our own courses, and beyond the classroom experience of higher ed, because there’s expectations in other spaces as well, like student clubs, athletics, and all of the rest of the co-curricular activities that support student learning are incredibly important. And those are also not obvious.

John: One of the things that we’ve talked about much more on the podcast, and higher ed in general has been addressing much more extensively since the pandemic, is alternative grading approaches. Because traditional grading approaches and traditional course structures generally incentivize students to cram and to focus on maximizing their grades, rather than maximizing learning, so that if we really want students to shift to evidence based learning strategies, it would be really helpful if we could shift students emphasis away from grades and faculty emphasis away from high-stakes assessed activity and shift it more to activities that result in deeper learning, more long-term learning. And we’ve talked to many guests who have shifted to using strategy such as specifications grading, mastery learning systems, portfolio assessments, and ungraving, which has become one of the most talked about topics in higher ed in the last few years.

Rebecca: Yeah. And I think one of the things that comes up in a lot of those conversations is concerns over students just wanting the right answer and not learning and not critically thinking about the subject matter and the knowing of why and how, and doing analysis. And I think every instructor [LAUGHTER] has a desire for some of those kinds of conversations to come out in their classes, rather than just regurgitation of things that they’ve said in class.

John: Part of the issue is that when we get students in college, they’ve already had 13 years of experience in K through 12, where grades were the primary area of focus. And as a result, it’s hard to shift that focus from grades to learning. Besides alternative grading, we might use some other strategies such as encouraging students to be more reflective on their work, to spend some time in reflection-based activities and metacognitive development type activities.

Rebecca: Yeah, I know, this is a space where I was maybe a little hesitant at first thinking like, “Oh, these are just quick assignments that have no meaning,” but quickly realizing actually the value in really good well designed reflective activities that challenge students to think through how and why they learned something and what it is that they actually got out of an activity. And I’m often very surprised about how much learning occurs that is not visible, despite the fact that I teach studio classes, so I’m with my students much more than the average instructor. So I actually do observe a lot of learning. But in the reflection activities, I’m hearing a lot about how students are spending their time or things that they really struggled with and worked through that I wasn’t aware of. It also helps me understand where they’re not aware [LAUGHTER] of their own learning, or where they’re using strategies that aren’t as effective and helps with interventions. I know you’ve done a lot around metacognition, especially in your lower-level classes, but also in your upper classes.

John: In at least a couple of my courses. I’ve been using the metacognitive cafe discussion forum, which was actually the topic of our second podcast, Judie Littlejohn and I jointly developed this quite a few years back. And it’s been remarkably effective. It’s basically a low-stakes discussion forum that I’m using in my online classes, where students will reflect on their learning and share their learning strategies and will also read a bit about retrieval practice and spaced practice and the benefits of sleep in learning. And every time I do it, even though it’s only a trivial portion of the grade, it’s 5% of their total grade for participating in that activity, the students report that it was the most valuable learning experience they had in the class. A large proportion of the students at the end of the terms say they wish that they had learned these things back in elementary school, that they had been using practices that were not efficient and they didn’t realize that because they’ve never been taught how to learn. And it’s something that students have found really valuable. And the other nice thing about it is because, in this particular case, it’s done in a discussion forum, it helps them build community and helps them get to know each other, because they’ll often talk about the challenges they face. In online classes, many of the students have families where they’re taking care of young children, they may be working different shifts, they may be faced with other challenges that normally wouldn’t come up in a content discussion forum in an online class. But when they share that, and they share those challenges, and they share their career expectations, and they talk about how what they’re learning might be useful in their expected careers, besides the sense of connection, it also helps students see the relevance of what they’re doing and sharing that with other students helps build a little bit more intrinsic motivation in learning.

Rebecca: It also seems like there’s a bit of an immediacy in that context as well, because the information can immediately be put into action in a real lived experience and not something that may feel abstract, which sometimes happens within a discipline when it feels like maybe it’s not a thing I’m going to do anytime soon, professionally. So I think this really highlights the reason why we need to help students hook into everything that we’re doing to make it feel like they have a personal, professional, or educational connection to their own goals.

John: One of the topics that I use in each class where I’ve done this, at a point where students face the first really challenging material in the class, is just asking them to discuss how they deal with challenges. They share useful strategies, but one of the main benefits of that is it normalizes the sense of struggle, that when students are struggling with concepts, they often feel that they’re alone on this, but when they hear that other people are struggling with exactly the same issues and exactly the same concepts, it normalizes it, and again, it helps them understand that challenge is an important part of learning, which is not the message that they’ve generally received throughout their prior educational experience before coming to college.

Rebecca: It seems to me like this is the same reason why our reading groups work so well for faculty development as well is this connection among peers, but also that the challenges we experience are not in isolation. [LAUGHTER]

John: One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about the reading group is when people will come up with a technique or describe something they’ve done in class and people in completely different disciplines who might never have considered that will make connections and see how they could do something similar in their classes. That understanding that we’re all facing the same challenges makes it much easier to deal with some of the day-to-day stresses that we might have in our classrooms.

Rebecca: I know that one of the things that has come up in our reading groups, and also in our conversations about the future of higher ed and where we’re going to be going over the next few years is student engagement, and then specifically, the role of AI tools like ChatGPT [LAUGHTER] in the conversation. So if students don’t feel motivated, and they’re relying heavily on these tools, how do we get students to re-engage with the idea of learning?

John: Well, going back even just a little before the introduction of ChatGPT, which kind of hit higher ed by storm in late November of 2022, we did see a dramatic increase in the use of sites such as chegg.com, and various other sites out there, where the use of those tools became normalized a little bit, which made it much more challenging to give online assessments. And I think that’s where most people are concerned right now about things like ChatGPT, because with other places, you could at least locate where answers were coming from. And you could address that with the students and attribute it to the specific sites where they got their answers, which was, again, a bit of a challenge. But ChatGPT is raising some challenges for assessment that are going to be difficult to deal with, because it’s much more difficult to determine who is the author of specific items submitted online for assessment. And a lot of people are struggling with that right now. I know I’ve been struggling with it. In my spring 2023 online class, the quality of student writing on essays improved fairly dramatically over the course of the semester. And that seemed to correlate with the spread of the use of ChatGPT a bit. AI tools are really powerful, and they can be really useful. And they have a lot of potential value in education and in providing support for personal and work productivity. Right now, I think, more people are focused on the challenges, but we’re going to have to start thinking about ways in which we can productively integrate this and prepare students for a world in which the availability of AI tools will be ubiquitous.

Rebecca: And you teach in some really challenging contexts, really large classes in person, a number of online sections, and I know ChatGPT is keeping you up at night. What are some things that you’re thinking about… maybe haven’t resolved… but that you’re really thinking about redesigning or rethinking or retooling in the fall to just respond to the moment that we are currently living in.

John: As of 2020, I had shifted all the quizzing to online quizzes and tests and midterm exams and so forth. I’m seriously thinking about in my large face-to-face class, moving back to at least in in-class midterm and an in-class final exam. I really appreciated the fact that I could let students do it at their own pace, and that it took some of the anxiety and stress away when students did not have this two-hour time limit to complete an exam in the classroom. But with the size of the class, a large proportion of the testing is done with multiple choice exams, or algorithmic questions, and those are types of things that ChatGPT answers really, really well. Not too long ago, someone posted that ChatGPT 4 received a score of a 99th percentile on the Test of Understanding in College Economics (the microeconomics version of that), and those are the same types of questions that I’d be giving students on these quizzes. And while I had 1000s of questions that I had created that students were selecting from, all of those questions now are vulnerable to the use of AI tools, which makes it much more difficult to assess in that large class. Right now, the only thing I’ve really thought about doing differently in my large class is moving back to at least a couple of in-class exams. Now some of the things I was doing, such as polling questions embedded in the class activities and working on problems in class, where students submit that in real time, are generally much less subject to that type of issue. I know there are tools where students can scan the questions and so forth, they get responses back a bit more quickly, but it wouldn’t be as easy for them to do in real time when they’re in a polling environment. One of the main benefits of that is when I use polling, it was always tied with peer-to-peer discussions. And those peer-to-peer discussions is where most of the learning actually occurred from those in-class problem-solving exercises. For my online class, I’m not sure what I’m going to do. One thing I have done in the past is I’ve had students do podcast projects. And again, it’s pretty easy for chat GPT to generate scripts, but these projects are pretty heavily scaffolded. Students submit a proposal and they go through a number of steps to get there. And projects that are scaffolded like that, are probably a little bit less sensitive to the use of AI tools to generate the entire project. What are you thinking about in terms of your classes, or in terms of the graduate program?

Rebecca: I think we’ve talked a lot about the concern over the validity of our assessments and wanting there to be accuracy, not just for our sakes, but for students’ stakes in the value of their degrees moving forward. Part of it, I think, is really engaging in conversations around ethics around these tools, and not necessarily discouraging the use of the tools entirely, or banning the tools. I think that just motivates people to want to use them more, but rather to use them in ways that are productive, or interesting, but are also well documented… [LAUGHTER] like students are disclosing what they’re doing. And we can analyze the use of the tools in particular ways because maybe it could save time in particular places and not take away from certain kinds of learning, as long as we keep the learning objectives [LAUGHTER] up front. And then we assess when we’re using particular tools to determine whether or not it’s taking away from the learning. But I think these are hard conversations to have, and certainly not things that I want to be policing.

John: And I’d much rather not be policing these things. Sometimes students haven’t given me much choice in that. One example that I’ve seen recently is students submitting exam responses that asked him to analyze recent data, where the response said something to the effect: “as an AI tool, I do not have access to this data.” And when a student submits work like that, it’s pretty clear that they haven’t even read the essay responses they’re submitting on that graded assessment activity. And we want to make sure that students do actually interact and engage with their learning materials. Perhaps we can also design assessments that are not as vulnerable to AI-generated text. This semester, with my online classes, one thing I have shifted to, instead of having them discuss general debates or issues in economics, I have them focus on interpreting videos online, for example, where economists are debating certain topics, or doing readings that are not in the training database for ChatGPT, which means it’s much harder for AI tools to generate responses when they don’t have access to the underlying content that’s the focus of the assessment activity.

Rebecca: Would hyperlocal situations or examples also be a strategy because there’d be less widely available information on something like that.

John: Definitely. Information on the local community or the campus community or other local things, information that would just not be part of the training database is a good place in which we can ask students to connect the materials their learning to real-world events so that you maintain that sense of relevance while ensuring that the students are actively engaging with the work themselves rather than using a tool.

Rebecca: One of the things that I’ve used historically in my design classes, and it’s a little easier again, because I teach studio classes and see students more often so I tend to have a hunch as to what they’re working on, because I’m seeing them working on things, is really documenting process and not just using language, but showing through a video and showing steps along the way that might not be as easy to capture as an end product using an AI tool.

John: In general, open pedagogy projects, too, could be less vulnerable to having work being done entirely by AI tools. So videos would be an example, wikis perhaps might be.

Rebecca: I think that things that combine text and image are more challenging to have an AI tool create, at this moment.

John: That may very well change…

Rebecca: …by the time this episode comes out. [LAUGHTER] I think one of the things that I’m hearing us say actually, is that a lot of the strategies to reduce intellectual integrity or academic integrity issues around ChatGPT are also the things that are more likely to engage students and foster their learning anyways because they’re more authentic assessments, they’re probably more project based, they’re probably more long term with milestones along the way. And these are things that students often deeply engage in. And I think when they can connect to their local community, whether that’s the campus or the community that campus is situated in, or even their own hometown, in different ways around the discipline, those are all ways that students get a hunger to want to learn more.

John: And going back to our earlier discussion of the importance of shifting students’ focus from grades to learning, students are using tools like ChatGPT to raise their grades, even though they recognize it does not support their learning. If we can shift students’ focus to recognize the value of learning as improving skills that they’re going to need later in life, that should reduce the incentive for students to use shortcuts to avoid learning material.

Rebecca: If we’re not just looking for the right answer, but the journey to an answer, and even if it’s an incorrect answer, being able to understand why it’s not correct, and allowing that to be the learning is a really different way than our education has historically worked. The future of higher ed seems really stressful, John. [LAUGHTER]

John: It does, but it always has. That’s nothing new. But certainly the last few years have seen a lot of rapid change that… I hate to use the word unprecedented… but that have been relatively unprecedented.

Rebecca: And I think it really does speak to this need to connect with other colleagues, where we can share some of the challenges that we’re facing and brainstorm together to improve our teaching, but also to improve the level of stress we’re experiencing. [LAUGHTER]

John: One of the other things that we’ve talked about, especially within the last year or so is growing faculty concerns over student engagement. When students first came back to the classroom, there was a lot of excitement about being back. But since then, faculty generally seem to be noting that the level of engagement of students has shifted or has changed somewhat. More students are not completing assignments. Students in some classes have been disappearing from class as the semester progresses. And there’s a lot of concern that students are not as fully engaged with their coursework as they had been prior to the pandemic. So Rebecca, how are we going to solve this?

Rebecca: That’s a good question, John. I think one of the things that this aligns with is the higher incidences of loneliness, and mental health. And so finding ways to connect students to each other, and establishing those peer networks, I think, is one of the most important things that we can do in our classes. And it’s something that I’ve maybe always done in some way. But I’m being much more intentional about moving forward, because I’m feeling like even if students are in the same room, they’re still feeling really isolated. And so we have to be intentional about creating those opportunities for students to experience connection and feeling like they want to show up for each other and for themselves,

John: …using more group activities in class where the work of each student depends on the contribution of the other members does help create that sort of pressure on students to be there for their peers, to be there for the rest of their team. And that could be very useful.

Rebecca: Yeah. And I think the key to that, though, is not just assuming that students know how to interact with one another, or how to depend on one another in a team context, but really scaffolding those learning opportunities that really start with making connections and establishing relationships, because it’s the relationship that’s going to cause the pressure to show up for someone. And I think when we’re seeing high incidence of like ghosting, for example, it’s because the individuals don’t feel connected to the people that they’re ghosting.

John: And there have been a lot of studies done recently that show the importance of a sense of belonging in student persistence. So helping students form those connections is really important, because we have so many students who go to college, build up a huge volume of debt, and then disappear without getting the degree which does serve as a signal that they’ve actually accomplished something as a result of their education. And they end up with more financial struggles than they would have had had they not started. So we do want to help students form those connections for their own sakes, for their own future success. And one of the books we used in a past reading group was Relationship-Rich Education by Leo Lambert and Peter Felton. And that summarizes a lot of the research on the importance of building community and building connections, and also provides some really nice examples of ways in which institutions can transform to help facilitate those connections.

Rebecca: As instructors, we have a lot of power in that space to help students feel a sense of belonging. We can do really simple things to make someone feel seen and if they feel seen, they’re more likely to feel like they belong. So personalized messages, getting to know your students a little bit, being approachable, calling students by name, all of those things help students feel like they’re a part of a particular community. There’s so much to still learn and to come together around. And so I know that we’re looking forward to having many more guests and many more conversations to help work through many of the questions and concerns and things that we’ve raised today and have been raised by our colleagues. Now, John, we always wrap up by asking what’s next?

John: Well, what’s next for me is I’m heading down to North Carolina to teach at Duke again next week. And I’m looking forward to this. And this time, I’m going to try avoiding getting run over by a car. So I can actually teach my classes down there and spend some time away from the hospital this summer,

Rebecca: #life_goals. [LAUGHTER]

John: Small goals are sometimes more achievable. And Rebecca, what’s next for you?

Rebecca: This summer, I’m looking forward to doing some more work on our graduate student online orientation, which we put together as we transition to our new course management system in the fall and also working with some colleagues on an accessibility online module.

John: And we’re looking forward to talking to more of our wonderful guests. I’ve really enjoyed the experience of interacting with so many great people doing some really good research and doing such good work in higher ed.

Rebecca: We’re grateful for all of our guests and all of our listeners. So thanks for listening

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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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298. Sustainable Professional Development

The rapid changes in teaching practices and teaching modalities during the last few years have provided challenges for both academics and the professional developers that support them. In this episode, Judie Littlejohn, Jessamyn Neuhaus, and Chris Price join us to discuss ways of moving toward more sustainable models of professional development.

Judie is the Director of Online Learning, an Instructional Designer, and an adjunct instructor of history at Genesee Community College. She is also the Chair of the SUNY Faculty Advisory Council on Teaching and Technology, or FACT2. Jessamyn is the Director of the SUNY Plattsburgh Center for Teaching Excellence and a Professor in the History Department at SUNY Plattsburgh. She is the author of Geeky Pedagogy: a Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to be Effective Teachers. She is the editor of Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. Chris is the Academic Programs Manager for the SUNY Center for Professional Development. He coordinates and leads system-wide professional development in the SUNY system. Before moving to this position, Chris served as the Director of the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at SUNY Brockport. Chris is also a member of the POD Core Committee. POD is the Professional and Organizational Development Network serving those who work in educational development.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: The rapid changes in teaching practices and teaching modalities during the last few years have provided challenges for both academics and the professional developers that support them. In this episode, we discuss ways of moving toward more sustainable models of professional development.

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

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John: Welcome to this live podcast recording session at the SUNY Conference on Instruction and Technology. The topic of this panel session is “sustainable professional development.” Our panelists are: Judie Littlejohn, Jessamyn Neuhaus, and Chris Price.

Rebecca: Judie is the Director of Online Learning, an Instructional Designer, and an adjunct instructor of history at Genesee Community College. She is also the Chair of the SUNY Faculty Advisory Council on Teaching and Technology, or FACT2.

John: Jessamyn is the Director of the SUNY Plattsburgh Center for Teaching Excellence and a Professor in the History Department at SUNY Plattsburgh. She is the author of Geeky Pedagogy: a Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to be Effective Teachers. She is the editor of Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. (Jessamyn will be joining us as soon as she finishes a presentation in a nearby room.)

Rebecca: Chris Price is the Academic Programs Manager for the SUNY Center for Professional Development. He coordinates and leads system-wide professional development in the SUNY system. Before moving to this position, Chris served as the Director of the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at SUNY Brockport. Chris is also a member of the POD Core Committee. POD is the Professional and Organizational Development Network serving those who work in educational development.

John: Judie, Jessamyn, and Chris have all been extremely active in helping faculty navigate the challenges of the last few years. Welcome, Judie, Jessamyn, and Chris.

Rebecca: This wouldn’t be a complete episode of Tea for Teaching if we didn’t ask about tea, so, our teas today are: … Chris, are you drinking tea?

Chris: English afternoon.

Rebecca: Well, you’ve made the correct choice.How about you, Judie?

Judie: And I have Darjeeling, which is my current favorite.

John: And I have a Tea Forte black currant tea today.

Rebecca: And I have Irish breakfast.

John: Jessamyn, you’ve arrived just in time to be asked about your tea.

Jessamyn: Well, I specifically arranged to have to be somewhere else when I was supposed to be here so as to demonstrate in this meta way, unsustainable faculty development [LAUGHTER] where you’re in two places at the same time.

John: During the past three years, faculty have engaged in professional development at unprecedented levels in response to the global pandemic, and here in SUNY, with the SUNY-wide transition to a new learning management system. From what you have observed in your roles, how has this changed instructional practices? We’ll start with Chris.

Chris: Yeah, so prior to the pandemic, online learning was was more optional. You were either an online instructor or a college had online instruction as part of its mission, but it was a choice. And so after the pandemic, the whole “Should I do online?” just went away and it became “How am I going to do it?” or “How are we as a campus going to move things online? And so the validity of online instruction, that question, just kind of went away. We know, though, that during a pandemic, it wasn’t the ideal time to transition to online instruction, it was just everybody doing it all at once by the seat of their pants, and instructional designers and everybody that supports online instruction were definitely stressed out. So it wasn’t an ideal situation. But I think where it’s left us now, is that we don’t have to have those debates anymore about whether or not online is a valid mode of instruction or not. And so it’s allowed us to take a step back and be a little bit more creative with how we incorporate online instruction into our courses, our programs, our colleges and universities. And so, for example, if you think about HyFlex instruction, before the pandemic, I had never heard of HyFlex instruction, and it really kind of has emerged since then as being something that many colleges and universities are considering as an integral part of their instructional plans. If you would have told me before the pandemic that folks were teaching courses asynchronously online, online synchronously via videoconference, but also face to face, I would have really questioned whether or not that was even possible, and now campuses are doing it all over the place. We just presented today about a Tools for HyFlex courses project that we’ve been looking at, investigating the different types of video conferencing tools that faculty are using in their courses. And so, just to sum up, yes, the pandemic definitely, a lot of residual trauma that folks have from it, but I do think that overall that now the acceptance of online as a mode of instruction has definitely been a positive.

Rebecca: How about you, Judie?

Judie: I do agree with what Chris said, we’ve seen a huge growth in HyFlex courses on our campus as well, and the exponential use of Zoom. But I think these changes are not finished. At the beginning, just before the pandemic really sent us all home, we started training everybody in Zoom on our campus. We were fortunate that that final week, we were on spring break, so we were able to literally herd everybody into computer labs. And each day, we were allowed fewer chairs in the lab as people had to start to spread out a bit. At that time, the focus really was on Zoom, and on using our LMS for the faculty who weren’t using it yet. But then, I think, as people became more comfortable with Zoom, and also we knew we were changing LMSs, the focus really shifted to the LMS training. On our campus, we don’t have the dedicated lab space and personnel to teach all of our faculty a new LMS at the same time, so we took advantage of all the SUNY trainings that were offered. We were in the first cohort onboarding to the system-wide Brightspace digital learning environment, and a lot of our faculty attended every virtual workshop that SUNY offered, and thank goodness that we had those opportunities for the faculty because we could not have recreated them all ourselves. So there was a huge growth, I think, in faculty participating in webinars and trainings offered by SUNY. And it all translates, I believe, into course quality. I think, as far as instructional practices go, the students are having better learning experiences because of the way the content is arranged in the new LMS. But along with that, though, I feel like most of the faculty are more open to engaging with students in Zoom, even if they are in 100% asynchronous courses. They have more virtual availability, I’ll say, than they would have had previously in their face-to-face office hours. So those are the two big things, the course quality, and the virtual availability, that have really increased through all this.

Rebecca: How about you, Jessamyn?

Jessamyn: I guess I’m thinking of something a little less tangible than the other two, which I totally agree with what was just said. I would say the awareness of students’ life circumstances, and how life circumstances can impact learning. I remember very clearly, my first semester after the emergency pivot and a faculty member saying to me, like it was just percolating through his head, and he said, “But what if my student doesn’t have access to wi-fi?” …like he was thinking it through. I saw it happening and the change happening, really thinking about how life circumstances impact student’s ability to engage in the courses. And I would say that it was a good shift, that awareness, but it’s also been very overwhelming. Because once you start down that road, it piles up fast, all the ways, and all the challenges that individual students might be facing.

Rebecca: The tremendous pressures of the pandemic broke down silos between faculty, departments, disciplines, and institutions to initially support the transition to remote teaching and to support the increased interest in inclusive teaching practices. How do we sustain this culture of sharing and prevent the silos from being rebuilt? Judie?

Judie: First, I think the way the silos were breaking down just as SUNY was working on new, updated general education requirements, is really helpful as far as sustaining this, because, with the DEISJ requirements, which are Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Social Justice, they help us maintain this level of empathy and concern. I don’t want it to sound like the faculty didn’t care about the students before, but I think the level of empathy really increased throughout COVID and the new general educational requirements will help to maintain that. Faculty will continue discussing how they are meeting all these updated requirements in our current programs, and they’re sharing ways to incorporate the DEISJ requirements into different fields that may not have overtly considered those topics previously. So, yes, I think it’s fortuitous timing with SUNY’s shifts in DEISJ requirements, as far as keeping those silo walls broken down so that people can continue having conversations and sharing.

Rebecca: So what I was observing when I was hearing both Jessamyn and Chris is that in professional development we should be implementing the good pedagogy that we’re trying to have our faculty also implement in the classroom.

John: So faculty have become more aware of the challenges that our students face in terms of mental health and wellness, access, and family and community resources, resulting in more interest in inclusive teaching practices. How do we sustain interest in these issues while faculty, staff, and students all feel overwhelmed, and overworked?

Rebecca: You don’t feel that, do you John? [LAUGHTER]

Jessamyn: Well, I would never underestimate the power of acknowledging the situation, acknowledging the reality. So I started both of my sessions by saying, “I know this is a tough time, I know that you are tired, I know that we are all tired.” I also have been taking care to frame and remind people that I would never recommend anything to you that’s not going to make your teaching life, working life, better, I would never tell you to do something just for the sake of checking a box or because I think it’s the right way. But this will make your life easier, your working life better. And finally, I’m really leaning into cut down on content, as much as you possibly can. That’s sort of an underlying advice I’m giving, is talk less and listen more, for me as well, but for faculty. And it’s not that creating more student-centered course design is less work, per se, but it definitely changes the energy in the room and feeds our teacher souls in a different way than nonstop lecturing does. Those are just a few ideas.

Chris: So, I’m gonna take a little bit of a different track here. One piece of advice that I would give is that you got to figure out ways to let things go, things have to go, we can’t burn the candle at both ends, but that, of course, is easier said than done. I’ve been privileged to be involved with, the last few years, online groups of tenure-track faculty throughout SUNY. These are sessions that are open to anyone in SUNY. They take place every couple of weeks. They’re about an hour. They’re not recorded. They’re in Zoom. But we just call them open mic sessions. And I do it with two colleagues at Empire State University. Alan Mandel and Shantih Clemans came to me and the three of us kind of put this together. And, and one of the things we keep hearing from new tenure-track faculty is that as the issue of service comes up again, and again, and again, they’re not really sure how to navigate that. And I think we know this, and I think the research bears this out, that women, minoritized folks, bear a disproportionate service burden on campuses. And so how do we get around that? We need everybody doing service, our colleges and universities just cease to exist if folks weren’t doing service. So I think what we need to do is do a better job of recognizing and rewarding service and distributing it more equally across campuses. Again, I know, that’s probably easier said than done, but I think that that might alleviate some of that disproportionate burden on many of our faculty. The other thing too, is I think, we need to encourage more of a team-based approach to instruction. So that, there are some things like you got to let go. And you got to say, okay, you know, maybe I don’t need to be tweaking every single thing in my course. And now I know instructional technologists and designers are also overwhelmed. But, I think they would all appreciate it if faculty didn’t come to them in an emergency and they came to them more proactively to figure out how to troubleshoot things in their courses. So those are two just very practical suggestions.

Judie: For me, on my campus, as far as sustaining interest in maintaining that level of empathy with the students when I’m overworked and overstressed… we’re short staffed right now, so I do a lot of things in a day and the day is long, and I also teach, but I teach as an adjunct, so I can’t grade or give feedback during my working hours, and I share this with faculty too. So when I what I do every single day when I get home, I go right to my computer, which sounds counterintuitive, but I just keep my day going and I sit right down and I grade all three classes for whatever the people did in the last 24 hours. So I grade every single day, all three courses, because I’m in that place, right? I’m home from work. This is what our students do. They’re working all day, they’re taking care of their kids, they’re doing whatever. And then they get home and they have to sit down at their asynchronous course, and try to rewatch the video, read the lecture, take the quiz, and do all of that. So I feel more connected with the student in that way. Because I do it every day, there’s not that much to grade. If I have classes of 25 students and they don’t all do their work on the same day, it’s spread out throughout the week. I’m real forgiving of deadlines and things like that, I suggest deadlines to keep them on track to finish on time, but I never penalize late work. And I don’t want to their I don’t want to judge their excuses, either. Because I always feel like, I end up being the judge of the best excuse if somebody needs an extension. So everyone has their extension out front. And I grade their work as it comes in and give them their feedback. And it just helps me keep my empathy that way, I think, because sometimes you’ll look and start to read a response or an essay and think, “oh, here we go… this again,” or you know [LAUGHTER] and then I always think, somehow, in my home space like that, it’s easier for me to take a step back and say, “I don’t know what their day is.” I always say “I’m not wearing their shoes…” Who knows what the students have had to go through throughout the day. And one thing that helped me a lot early on in the pandemic was we have a respiratory care program on our campus, and our respiratory care faculty were right there on the frontlines of COVID, like nobody else. And they’d never taught online. And they didn’t use the LMS. So I was constantly helping them get their materials online and their grading online and their announcements and so forth. And I could see the announcements that these people were writing to their students, and just how powerful they were, and they’d start off with, “Please take care of yourself. Please get some rest. We understand you have to take time…” and just how much concern and true love for their students that they were able to demonstrate in these announcements. And some of them I kept as just examples of how to show empathy towards your students. And I think having that sort of an example for me, as an adjunct, helped me set my own daily practice to be able to keep that empathy for my students. So I think just finding a good example like that and being able to share it, is how we can help keep it going forward.

Rebecca: So along the lines of resources, budgets and resources for professional development are limited, I hear. Where should professional developers place their focus, and their efforts?

Judie: So for me…we did assign these by the way, we don’t just randomly know when to talk… [LAUGHTER] I take a project management approach to a lot of these things, just because I like to keep records and details and know who’s done what and where we stand. So definitely, from that perspective, I start with a needs analysis, and who has what, who needs to know what, and where are the gaps, and how can we fill the gaps? So I don’t think there’s a way to identify that one key thing that all faculty need right now, aside from entire LMS training. So, we are in cohort one, so this summer, everybody’s teaching their courses for the second time. So we’re kind of over that hurdle. I tell them, we climbed the mountain and our sliding down the back side and able to focus more on course improvement than how does the LMS work. But beyond that, I’m still trying to get some of our own training materials that existed in our former LMS. we have to Brightspace-a-size things. So, [LAUGHTER], we have to Brightspace-a-size, for example, the RSI, the regular and substantive interaction training, and bring that up to the right standards in Brightspace, so that I can identify who wasn’t able to complete it before and things like that. But by and large, though, it definitely is a needs analysis, that we can’t throw all of our professional development energy into one bucket. We got to figure out what are all the buckets and who needs who needs a ladle full from each?

Jessamyn: Yeah, I’m gonna piggyback on that because I think campus culture really is key to answering this question. The campus culture around faculty development efforts, really has an impact on what’s going to land and what’s not. I’d also add to that, that we, as professional educational developers, should be keeping track better track of where our time goes, where our efforts go, when we make a yearly action plan. We should also be doing monthly activity reports just for ourselves, and to save us time at the end of the year, compiling everything we did, and that can help us see where our time and energy and hours are going and if it’s unsustainable. So if you’re spending… well, I know I can say 100% certainty… what’s your biggest time suck, audience? I bet it starts with E…

Rebecca: …and ends with mail.

Jessamyn: [LAUGHTER] and ends with mail… and ends with “oh my god, another three hours doing email.” So really sort of self reflecting and reporting on that, I think is important. But the last thing I would say… just I’m going to put a plug in for where professional developers should focus their efforts on inequitable teaching labor, and systemic discrimination facing historically minoritized faculty in the academy, and faculty with… a term I learned… invisible and visible disabilities, because we might have some power to move the needle there. Like, for example, student evaluations of teaching do professional and personal harm to faculty every single semester, or every single trimester. There might be a way that, in our role as professional faculty developers, we can mitigate that, change some policies or provide people with actual actionable strategies for lessening that impact. That’s on the top of my list right now.

Chris: Yeah, I’m gonna pick back up what Jessamyn said, because I think the most important resource a campus has for professional development, are the people who work in professional development on the campus. You may have no budget, but at least there’s someone, and hopefully it’s a full-time person, or someone with a significant course release to do that work on your campus. So, that is a resource, and so doing needs analysis is important. And knowing what you’re doing is important, because it helps figure out what is it that you can do most effectively. The Center for Professional Development, now that I’m there, I do a lot more program planning a lot less working directly with faculty. And we don’t really have a budget, like a lot of the things that we do are things where we find people to deliver programs, and then we charge a fee for the program, so that, you know, we can pay the people who do the do the programs. But we do a lot of other things that are free, and they’re mostly relying upon folks giving their labor for free to do it, because mostly they enjoy doing it. So I mentioned that new faculty open mic series for new tenure-track faculty, and that everyone who’s involved with doing that does it because they’d love to do it. And it really energizes them as well as the participants. And so, I think, having those groups of folks coming together… Yes, people do want resources, they do want curated things… to learn how to use Brightspace, and that’s really important, and I think it’s also important to bring faculty together whenever you can, just to talk about a topic… any kind of opportunity you can have them critically reflecting with one another and doing it in a way that’s meaningfully tied to things that they’re constantly focused on in their teaching. I think that’s low hanging fruit, frankly, just when you get faculty together. It’s helpful if you have a budget for food and that sort of thing, but that’s not always possible. It’s even better if you have stipends to incentivize them to do that, but that’s usually not the case. And so, I think that that, mostly when you bring folks together and talk about things that really matter to them, usually has good results and doesn’t usually cost much.

John: On campuses, there has always been some differences in the degree to which faculty participate in professional development: some faculty will go to every possible workshop or training program, others you only see if there happens to be a global pandemic and they need to learn how to use Zoom or their gradebook in the LMS. What are some of the major barriers to professional development and to faculty engagement with professional development?

Chris: It’s just not valued, recognized, and rewarded enough, right? And let’s face it… not as much on community college campuses. I have an example I’m gonna talk about in a minute, on one of the community colleges where it is recognized, valued, and rewarded, and what a significant impact that’s having on that campus. But, and I’m not going to call any campuses out, but on many of the four-year campuses, it’s kind of folks who do it, actively do it because they feel like they need to do it and they do it because they care about their students. Not that the others don’t care, but that’s front of mind for them, they really know that they need to be continually improving to reach their students, to engage their students, especially those who are hard to engage. And, they they do it on their own time, and they burn the candle at both ends, because they have to do the other things that are recognized and rewarded. So that’s the first thing. One of the things when I first thought about with the last question is rather than just strategies for developers to do that don’t cost much, we’re advocates as well. Jessamyn, you alluded to this, I think we have to be advocates with administration, with faculty leaders, for the value of professional development, professional learning, and you need the folks at the very top level to buy into it. So the campus I was thinking of, Rockland Community College, has a Provost Faculty Scholars Program, where they’re incentivizing their faculty to go through the Lumen Circles program, which SUNY invests in and makes freely available to campuses, which are critical reflective practice groups, and they give them a small stipend to do it. They have them report back on campus. And again, the Provost is actively involved in the development of the program, the promotion of the program, and it goes into their tenure and promotion dossiers, and it’s recognizes you are doing the thing that we want you to do. And they have a lot of folks on campus doing it. So it gets back to that critical point of tipping the campus in favor of being a learning organization and not just everybody for themselves.

Rebecca: Juide, how about you?

Judie: The major barriers to faculty engagement with professional development, I’d say, as I am on a community college campus, and we don’t have Teaching and Learning Center, we don’t have any faculty developers full time. So we are a really lean ship, I guess, on our campus. Faculty development happens in pockets in different disciplines or out of my office, basically. And it comes down to time and money. Community colleges are broke right now. Our funding is FTE based, and as we see the enrollment go down, or the population decline in the northeast, or enrollment goes down, every enrollment we lose is money we don’t have. And we can’t offer… I mean, we could give them a sandwich maybe… [LAUGHTER] but we can’t give people money for engaging in anything. And to be totally honest with you, that always baffled me that people expect to be paid to learn something, when usually, we expect our students to pay to learn and here we’re offering training, but you don’t want to do it unless we pay you to learn it. Like it’s wrong to me, it’s an ethical dilemma, maybe for me. But we also on our faculty… I’m certainly not slamming them or saying that they’re all greedy, and they won’t do anything if they don’t have any money for it. They teach five and five, and they are on Senate, and they’re on search committees and they’re club advisors. And nothing happens if they don’t do it. They’re a huge driving force on our campus, and they have just as many responsibilities as all the rest of us and then to try to pile you got to come to this training, and you got to finish this project. And if you do this, and you do that, like there just aren’t the hours in the day. So, untill something traumatic or tremendous happens like COVID or like an LMS change, it’s very hard for them to find the time and when they do find the time like you said, Chris, they’re burning the candle at both ends. So we have to balance burning out faculty versus helping them improve their practice. And we just try to do that by being available all the time and having drop-in hours all the time and troubleshooting where we can and offering consistent programs so they can come when they are able to attend.

Jessamyn: I think one major barrier is actually I’m just going to echo what Chris said about it being acknowledged and valued. And following up on Judie’s point about the financial compensation, I would say and not being rewarded, but not necessarily financial, like rewarded in the sense of being acknowledged as a vital part of one’s job as a college instructor, and therefore, part and parcel of how you’re evaluated and reviewed. And there’s even some kind of professional development that should be considered important campus and department service. So like the department delegate program I mentioned earlier, where one member of a department comes in, does some stuff at the Center for Teaching Excellence and takes it back to their department, that is valuable service, it needs to be in people’s employment review and their tenure file, not as a individual extra thing they did for their own pedagogical fun, but as service contributing to the betterment of the department and the campus and for students. So that’s a sort of top-down barrier to faculty engagement. And I think we also need to own, as faculty developers, something Flower Darby mentioned in her podcast with you that faculty development and advice to people about teaching can’t be a one-size-fits-all framework, that teaching contexts are very different, impacted by social identities and embodied identity. So that’s on us, on the people providing faculty development and advice about teaching, to better acknowledge disparate teaching realities. That’s Roxanna Harlow’s phrase: “disparate teaching realities,” inequities facing our instructors. So I guess that’s like the top-down, bottom-up and then sort of in the middle academic culture generally, academic culture that tends to not value pedagogical learning the same way it values research insights or knowledge production. It should be part and parcel. I mean, we’re a bunch of smarty pants academics, right? Like, we love knowledge, that’s why we’re here, it’s that this should be part of that. This should be respected and seen as part of the work we do, as knowledge creators in this world.

Chris: I just want to address the whole issue of if you’re lucky enough to have a budget or a grant to pay people to do professional development. So I’m totally of two minds on this. On the one hand, I totally agree with Judie, in that there is an ethical issue here, you’re being paid to do something that you should be doing anyway, just as part and parcel of your job. And yet, in many cases, campuses are investing in the resources that you’re taking advantage of. And that just added cost and makes it less sustainable over time, and more expensive, and it creates that culture of I’m not going to do it unless I get paid. And so there is a real, I guess, hazard there when you introduce the piece around paying people to do things that they ought to be doing anyway. But on the other hand, I’ve kind of come to see it as a way to help people be accountable for doing that work and whenever I’ve been in a situation where we’ve paid people to do professional learning, it’s usually not compensation for their time. It’s more just a way to kind of say, “Hey, here’s just a little sweetener to make it more of a priority and to remember, “Oh, yeah, I’m getting that money, I better do the thing I said I was gonna do. When we have the grants that we have through system, we gave everybody a stipend for participating. And, we had almost everybody complete all the surveys and give us all the data that we wanted for it. And so, I think it’s,, used correctly and used very judiciously, it can be effective, but it’s a problem that I think many of us would be lucky to have and most of the campuses that are using it are usually using grant funds and not just their budgetary state funds to do that sort of thing.

Jessamyn: One thing I’ve done for the department delegates which was a big investment of time, so it wasn’t like they came to one workshop, it was this big thing they did all semester. I was able to offer an honorarium. So honorarium sort of in the sense of like, what it really means. It was a miniscule amount of money. But it was symbolic of that I wanted to try to acknowledge in some way and honor the time and effort that they’ve made.

Rebecca: So now we’re gonna move to audience questions. There was a question early on, before we actually started recording about strategies to reach hard to reach students. And so I’m wondering what you all might be able to offer to that question.

Judie: On our campus, we have an early intervention system. And we have different departments that are involved in that, and they work together to create reports that can be disseminated between our success coaches who work with all students and our online specialists who work with what we call the truly distant students. And so if I can’t reach somebody in one of my classes, or another faculty member isn’t getting a response from a student, we can turn to these other resources, and ask other people to try to help us connect with the students to find out what’s going on. Sometimes that helps a lot when you reach out and say,” Hey, can you just check in with me? I want to know how you are.” But some you just never reach and they have different reasons of their own for just stepping away. And unfortunately, that happens sometimes.

Chris: I think this is where the siloing is the worst on campuses, between folks who work in the academic side of the house, and those who work in student supports, student affairs. That’s where I like to see student success initiatives. There’s a recent report by Achieving the Dream and it was about professional learning as essential for any student success initiatives. And those of you don’t know Achieving the Dream, they do a lot of work with Guided Pathways and they work in a lot of community college campuses. And so, that was the gist of the report is that, if you’re going to have a student success initiative, you have to involve the faculty and the faculty have to see their participation in those initiatives as part of their own professional learning, because they’re working with students daily in different capacities, they see students, you know, whole students, not just the student in my section, and those are the things that we said, faculty are doing more and more of now, trying to see their students as whole people and not just when they see them three days a week or whatever.

Jessamyn: Yeah, I really agree with both of you that there has to be a systemic response. And like, Kevin Gannon, I think on your podcast, I heard him say there are things we can pedagogy our way out of, and student success is one of those things that the broader system needs to support as well. I would just add one, one thing, and the only reason it’s on my mind is because I this semester was added to what was called as called the Student Success Consortium on my campus, and at the end of one meeting, they turned to me and said, ”So, if you could do one thing, what should we do?” I was like, “Oh, no pressure,” but I did think of something, and that is: if, on an individual basis, what instructors can ensure that students have numerous on-ramps when they get off track, and that a lot of students disappearing and ghosting is because they flub something, or they’ve made one misstep or they’ve missed one assignment. And if it’s not drilled into their heads: “there’s a way back, there’s a way back, there’s a way back,” then, it’s really easy to spiral into, “I’m done, I failed, I can’t. So I’m just going to avoid it.” So I ended up saying, ”that was one thing I could change was to ensure every class offered students clear, consistent, and repeated reminders about the ways to get back on track when you stumble.

Rebecca: Lots to think about for sure. There is one question that’s come in, and it’s an anonymous question, it says: “To the best of your knowledge, is it against the state rules to lobby vendors to provide professional learning programs to various colleges, or maybe even your take on doing that?”

Chris: So we just did these two projects, Tools for HyFlex courses and Tools for Large Courses, and we also work with Lumen Learning to do the Lumen Circles. So, I’m no expert on procurement, [LAUGHTER] but my understanding is that if whatever is spent is within a certain threshold, it’s acceptable to engage with vendors to try to meet needs that you have, and the POD organization actually, a few years ago, had in EDUCAUSE a guide for faculty development folks, for educational developers, to working with vendors, because when I first started doing this work, I tried to keep them at arm’s length, and like, we could do this in house, and I had this kind of can do attitude. But as I’ve gotten a fewer years under my belt, I have a different attitude now, and that we can certainly work productively with partners who are working in a space where they’re trying to make money off of whatever they’re doing, be it educational technology, or a faculty development kind of thing. And you just have to, as Jassamyn said earlier, do it within the context of your institution and what you need it for. You shouldn’t just think you’re gonna buy something off the shelf, and just think “I’m just gonna plop it in here, it’s just going to work.” I’ll bring Rockland up again, they’re incorporating the Lumen Circles in their campus with already pre-existing programs, they hired somebody to coordinate the faculty going through it. And so it just needs to be mindfully incorporated into the things that you’re doing. And so that applies, like I said, to either faculty development, educational technology, or anything beyond the LMS that you want to bring on your campus to help faculty work with students.

Rebecca: Sounds like a way to extend some sustainability to the work that you all do by leaning on some other resources.

John: We have a second question, which is, “Is there a repository that lists free webinars for faculty development?” and the person submitting said they pass out a list of those through email on their campus. How can you find free webinars?

Judie: Oh, I think lists like the POD listserv. I’ve been to so many AI webinars lately, and I haven’t paid for anything and then once you become familiar with who offers them, you get on their mailing list. For example, I did the Project Management Conference at Arizona State University, and those people are awesome. And they run all kinds of programs, and they’ve never charged anything to me. Oh wait, let me rephrase that. [LAUGHTER] They don’t say we like that, Judie Littlejohn, she’s free. though. They advertise their free offerings externally. And so I take advantage of those. But, once you start to discover these, it feels like they just lead to more and you can see like on LinkedIn, the different social media outlets, and even reading different articles. In Inside Higher Ed, you’ll read articles about different opportunities that are free. And that’s where I find them. I don’t try to assemble them in a list though. That’s an interesting idea. So, every Friday, I send an email out to all our faculty, it’s just our Brightspace update (that’s what I call it), but it’s not always Brightspace related what I list under there, but it generally is. But I will if I find things, especially the SUNY offerings, I always list exactly what faculty are welcome to take advantage of that they don’t have to go through us for, they can do that on their own. A lot of people are very appreciative of those. So it’s helpful, but I do like that idea of trying to put a list together to share or have posted on a site that people could go and look at when they want to.

Jessamyn: I’m gonna add a cautionary note, though, I do think people appreciate resources, but you can also overwhelm them with resources, when people are stressed and cognitive, you know, have a cognitive overload. And here comes Jessamyn like, here’s just five books you should read and two webinars you should attend and come to my workshop next week. I’ll have people that are like, “Uhhhh, guess what, I’m gonna ghost you now [LAUGHTER] and I’m gonna just avoid the whole thing, because it looks too overwhelming.” So, it’s an overused word, but I curate, like I really, really carefully curate before I send out any recommendations. I’ve cut way back, even on providing things through my site to people, because it got overwhelming. Again, campus culture really matters, but I would curate carefully.

Chris: Yeah, we have just at the Center for Professional Development, we do have a faculty development playlist on our YouTube channel. So if you just look up SUNY Center for Professional Development on YouTube, and faculty development playlists, we do have a bunch there, everything that we do gets tagged that way. The POD google group is a good thing. What I usually do when I’m looking for something is I do a Google search for whatever I’m looking for and then I look to see if it’s on a Teaching and Learning Center website. There are some that are really good, Vanderbilt is good. I know that there was maybe some issue of some of those resources being taken down. I hope they’re not. Carnegie Mellon, I know, has a lot of great resources. So there are a few teaching and learning centers that put a lot of time and effort and energy into curating great faculty development resources. So that’s what I would do. That’s what I do. [LAUGHTER]

Jessamyn: I’m gonna throw out another kind of maybe radical idea for the attendees here at CIT. I think webinars can be very valuable, but I also have seen and in my personal experience, building our pedagogical toolkit often happens conversation by conversation, or seeing somebody do something. So at a conference that we’re at right now, a lot of the presentations, sometimes it’s the content, and sometimes it’s just what somebody did while they were presenting the content, or the conversation I had with you… it could be via Zoom or it could be an email, but an interaction that flips a switch, “Oh, I could do that.” It seems like a lot of pedagogical learning, like all learning happens incrementally, it takes a lot of practice and hearing it many times and trying it out. Webinars definitely have a place for sure, especially for Brightspace-a-zation… [LAUGHTER] Brightspace-a-size, yes and LMS stuff for sure. But some of the things that we do in our classroom, it’s less about being buried under content and more about connecting with someone else talking about what’s working, what’s not working, repeat.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for wonderful advice throughout our panel today. But we always wrap up by asking: what’s next?

Judie: Well, I can answer that one. Jessamyn said some phrases that I’ve never heard on our campus such as yearly action plan, and monthly activity reports. And I thought, “Oh, my goodness, this is a thing.” So maybe we could, as we’re trying to add more staff into the Online Learning Office this fall, I’d like to try to come up with things like that and have a more predictable approach, perhaps for the, you know, from the faculty side, of what sort of professional development opportunities we might be aiming for. And when they can expect them to happen. I like that idea.

Chris: And I’m always thinking about how to connect folks across SUNY who do this work so that they can share with each other because I do think there are unique things about working within SUNY that would make it so worthwhile for folks in SUNY to connect to our supporting faculty. POD is great. It’s an national and international network, but I do think there’s lots of affordances of just talking occasionally amongst ourselves.

Jessamyn: Well, I knew this question was coming. And I am going to take this opportunity to give the world premiere of my working title for my next book project that I am working on this summer. It’s called Snafu edu:Teaching and learning when things go wrong in the college classroom, and I’m working on a manuscript, it’s for West Virginia University Press in their teaching and learning in higher ed series. And I know nobody in this room, nothing ever goes wrong in your classroom, but for the rest of the people who teach, things go wrong.

Rebecca: Snafu.edu?

Jessamyn: Snafu edu.

Rebecca: I like it. I like

John: Have you grabbed the web address yet?

Jessamyn: I have. [LAUGHTER]

John: Okay.

Jessamyn: I have.

Rebecca: Well, thank you, everyone. We appreciate you participating today.

Jessamyn: Thank you, John. Thank you, Rebecca.

[MUSIC]

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

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

[MUSIC]

285. The First-Year Experience Movement

Far too many students enter college without sufficient preparation to successfully navigate the college environment. In this episode, John Gardner joins us to discuss how first-year experience courses have been developed and adopted at thousands of colleges globally to reduce equity gaps and improve student success.

John is the recipient of numerous awards for his innovative work on first-year student success programs. In 3 studies, he was listed as one of the 10 most noteworthy innovators in higher ed. John is the author or co-author of numerous books and articles related to college student transitions. With his wife, Betsy Barefoot, he is the co-author of a series of textbooks for first-year student success classes. He is also the founder of the annual Conference on The First-year Experience as well as the Gardner Institute, a nonprofit organization that has served more than 500 colleges and universities. John is the author of Launching the First-Year Experience Movement: The Founder’s Journey.

Show Notes

  • Barefoot, B. O., Gardner, J. N., Cutright, M., Morris, L. V., Schroeder, C. C., Siegel, M. J., … & Swing, R. L. (2010). Achieving and sustaining institutional excellence for the first year of college. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Felten, P., Gardner, J. N., Schroeder, C. C., Lambert, L. M., Barefoot, B. O., & Hrabowski, F. A. (2016). The undergraduate experience: Focusing institutions on what matters most. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Gardner, J. N., Barefoot, B. O., & Swing, R. L. (2001). Guidelines for Evaluating… The First-Year Experience at Two-Year Colleges.
  • Gardner, J. N., & Barefoot, B. O. (2011). Your college experience: Strategies for success. Macmillan.
  • Gardner, J. N., Barefoot, B. O., & Swing, R. L. (2001). Guidelines for Evaluating… The First-Year Experience at Four-Year Colleges.
  • Gardner, J. N., & Barefoot, B. O. (2017). Understanding writing transfer: Implications for transformative student learning in higher education. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
  • Upcraft, M. L., Gardner, J. N., & Barefoot, B. O. (2005). Challenging and supporting the first-year student: A handbook for improving the first year of college (Vol. 254). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
  • Gardner, J. N. (2023). Launching the First-Year Experience Movement: The Founder’s Journey. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
  • Annual Conference on the First-Year Experience.
  • Gardner Institute
  • David Brightman (LinkedIn)
  • Marietta College
  • Federal TRIO Programs
  • Office Hours with John Gardner podcast

Transcript

John K: Far too many students enter college without sufficient preparation to successfully navigate the college environment. In this episode, we examine how first-year experience courses have been developed and adopted at thousands of colleges globally to reduce equity gaps and improve student success.

[MUSIC]

John K: 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 K: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

John K: Our guest today is John Gardner. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his innovative work on first-year student success programs. In 3 studies, he was listed as one of the 10 most noteworthy innovators in higher ed. John is the author or co-author of numerous books and articles related to college student transitions. With his wife, Betsy Barefoot, he is the co-author of a series of textbooks for first-year student success classes. He is also the founder of the annual Conference on The First-year Experience as well as the Gardner Institute, a nonprofit organization that has served more than 500 colleges and universities. John is also the author of Launching the First-Year Experience Movement: The Founder’s Journey, which we’ll be talking about here today.

Rebecca: Welcome, John.

John G: Thank you, folks. Glad to be here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… John, are you drinking tea with us today?

John G: I’m not able to drink… well, I guess I could, but recently, a physician told me I needed to stop drinking tea. There is some substance that is not good for the plumbing, and so I’ve switched to coffee, so I did have a cup of coffee before this, although I didn’t need the caffeine, but I’m already pretty alert. [LAUGHTER] But, if I were drinking tea, I’d be drinking a black tea, caffeinated, and I love tea.

Rebecca: That’s just my style. That’s so sad not to be able to drink it anymore.

John G: Well, I lived in Canada for five years as a child and I learned to do it up there. A lot of them have emulated their British Commonwealth forbearers and drank tea in the afternoons. And even as a middle school child in a Canadian school, we were served tea. So I really learned to like it.

Rebecca: No choice, no choice at all.

John K: And I mostly started switching to tea to cut back on caffeine because I was having so much of it. There was a bit less in tea than coffee and other things I was drinking. Today I’m drinking a ginger peach black tea from the Republic of Tea.

Rebecca: And John, I have your back. I have a fairly highly caffeinated black tea. It’s an English Afternoon. [LAUGHTER]

John K: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss Launching the First-Year Experience Movement. Could you talk a little bit about the motivation for writing this book?

John G: For one thing, I think it’s the only book I’ve done as a single co-author, it’s been my preference for my entire career always to partner with others in my writing, I just find it goes better and I like the sharing collaborative process. And I had done I think eight books previously with an editor that was the editor for this book. So he knew me very well. His name is David Brightman. And David’s the best editor for this kind of work I’ve ever encountered. And he was with Stylus Publishing but Stylus has just been sold to the Routledge Publishing house. But David had been talking to me about doing a book to try to really accomplish a number of things, but to tell the story of the launching of what’s now a global movement to pay more attention to first-year students, and also to connect that to other things that were going on in the world, and especially in the United States from the 1980s on and also to tell my own story and how I was prepared to do this kind of work even though I didn’t set out to do this at all. I didn’t set out initially to launch a global movement on behalf of a sector of students. But there were several developments in more recent years that I think influenced this and one was, the longer I’ve gone on in my career, and as the higher education community has become what our critics call “more woke,” I increasingly felt I was encountering, rather arbitrarily and irrespective of anything I might have said in any meeting, a level of hostility from people who were other than white males. And it was hostility that I think white men deserve for all the injustices we have wreaked on the American way of life. But I didn’t cause those. And I increasingly felt that there was a growing attitude that if you were white and male and especially privileged, that you just couldn’t understand the current needs of students the way you needed to, to really make a difference for them. And I began to feel more defensive, but generally, I didn’t acknowledge it publicly. So one of the things I wanted to do in this book was to argue that everyone needs to be involved in this movement, including privileged white men. And I wanted to lay out how I overcame all the blinders that I grew up with in a family of significant affluence, where the last thing my family would have wanted me to become, what some regard me as, which is an equity warrior. And by the time I was in my middle 20s, there wasn’t a cause I didn’t want to be part of. I had served in the armed forces during the Vietnam era, I had the coveted honorable discharge, which every young, healthy, able bodied American male like me wanted to have. And I was single and I had no debt and no dependents that I knew of, and there was just nothing I felt I couldn’t do. And so I became a really active civil rights warrior. And that cost me my first job. I was fired in my first job in higher education because of that, and that resolved me to be even more determined about how I pursue this. And so anyway, the book was about how did higher education change me? I want to use a word that some of us use trepidatiously, how did higher education transform me to be able to do this kind of work? Because I believe that higher education can and should transform far more than just me. And that speaks to the power of it. So this book is about the transformative power of higher education.

Rebecca: So in your book, Launching the First-Year Experience, you describe some of those challenges that you face as a first-year college student. Can you talk a little bit about how those experiences helped shape your future work?

John G: I went to a private liberal arts college in Ohio, Marietta College. I had a very traditional college experience, four years of residence, living on campus, did not work except for one brief period. Essentially, I was a non-employed student while I was in college during the regular part of the years. I never met a transfer student, I didn’t know they existed. there were only three persons that I can remember in my first-year class of about 500 students that were not white. So to say that I had a very traditional undergraduate experience was to understate the matter. And in the book that you’ve referenced, I devote the first four chapters to what happened to me as an undergraduate student starting in the first year, and the second year, the third year, and the fourth year, and it was a process of transformation. So in the first-year, I was a year younger than most of my peers, I was only 17. I did not want to go to college. It was an agreement I had made with my father, I was what we call now in contemporary higher ed language, I was a counter dependent adolescent, meaning I wanted to do the opposite of what adult authority figures wanted me to do. And my adult authority figure was my father. He’d attended an Ivy League institution, so that’s what I was supposed to do. And then I was supposed to go work in corporate America like he did and make a lot of money. It wasn’t that I was opposed to making money, but I didn’t want to work in corporate America. And I thought, one of the things I’d done as a high school kid was I had created a little landscaping service business, I had six other adolescent males who worked for me and I went out and got the jobs and then supervised them. And I loved working outdoors and having people satisfied by the work I did. I thought I could love doing this. And my father was horrified that I was earning a bit of money and I had this as a vocational aspiration. So I made a deal with him. And that is that he’d get off my back about going to college, if we could agree that I would go one year, and then I could quit. And so it really didn’t matter at that point where I wanted to go to college, as long as I didn’t go to college where he wanted me to go to college. So I went to college. And I got on academic probation pretty rapidly. I was 17, lonely, homesick, clinically depressed. The environment there was truly what we call sink or swim. And as a matter of fact, at the opening convocation, the President boasted about how if we look to the left and look to the right, we wouldn’t see the person sitting on either side of us four years later. And initially, I said, “Well, okay, when I graduate, I won’t see these two guys,” and then it dawned on me: “Wait a minute, both of them looked at me.” And I looked up at this man. He was proud of it. He was grinning. And what I later learned, of course, was that a benchmark of quality in the early 1960s… this was 1961… was the number of students you flunked out. That was a measure, that was a yardstick, and they were very good at it. And so therefore, there was no support services like we have today, no first-year experience, first-year college success course, no Learning Center, no tutoring. It was absolutely sink or swim. They did have advising. My first academic advisor told me, twice as a matter of fact, not once, but he told me twice, and I quote, “Mr. Gardner, you’re the stupidest kid I’ve ever advised.” And I thought about that…that guy’s probably advised hundreds of students, could I really be the stupidest? And that’s a bit far fetched. I wasn’t doing well, but anyway, maybe I better get another advisor. So I changed advisors. And that was one of the steps to my transformation. But my first semester grades were awful, and I got on academic probation. And of course, now, many institutions, when they put a student on probation, there’s a structure you have to comply with, or you complete the probationary period, but there was no structure. It was just a technical status. But somehow I managed to pull my performance up. And I thank the faculty for that, I finally discovered the four out of five faculty that second term that really got me engaged intellectually, but I had a student friend who befriended me, he adopted me. It was a student who was one year older, and of course confirmed that everything I’ve learned in the next 56 years in my career is that the greatest influence on students while they’re in college is the influence of other students. And now we try to deliberately get our high-performing students in positions where they can influence new students. That wasn’t done in Marietta at that time. But anyway, this student was taking a class with me, he was a year older, he was a sophomore by which the Greeks meant “wise fool.” And he said to me one day after class, “John, I noticed you’re not taking any notes.” And I said “So?” And he said, “Well, let me show you my notebook.” And it was like a fundamentalist opening any page of the sacred book, putting his finger down, And there was the revealed word. This guy had every word the professor had said. And so he showed me how one could predict the questions that you’d get on an exam by looking at the professorial notes. And he showed me how he could organize, or I could organize, my notes to make them coherent, and put headings and subheadings. And that I could predict the questions by observing what the professor said, repetitively, and therefore what he believed or she believed was important. By the way, it was almost always a he. I have done account fairly recently, in the 40 courses I took as an undergraduate, only three were taught by women, 37 to three, and one of the things I introspect around is, how would I be different if I had had more female faculty, that’s one of the ways I was cheated. I was disproportionately mentored by men. And we have made some progress in that regard. I can tell you a lot more first-year anecdotes, one I have in my book was and I should tell you this, other than having to wear freshman beanies… I burned mine… the most memorable thing that happened to me in my the first few weeks of college was something I didn’t do. And it was one of the most important decisions I ever made. It was a fraternity that rushed all the new males to try to find new members. And what they had been doing, apparently for years, was offering new young men like me, an all expenses paid trip to a brothel. And the brothel was about 90 miles up the Ohio River in Wheeling, West Virginia. And I was offered this experience. And while I was 17, I was interested in sex, I thought, “Do I really want to do this? No, I don’t.” And then I thought “Do I want to join a group that would put me in this position, and pay some women to service me? How denigrating. I don’t want anything to do with them.” And so I developed a real aversion to the whole so-called Greek letter social fraternity experience. And to fast forward to my junior year, that guy that influenced me in my sophomore year, once I started emulating his note taking my grades went up dramatically. A profound influence, and I never would have gotten through college, I don’t think, if that guy hadn’t taught me how to take notes. Marietta College today has an outstanding academic support service. And they don’t leave that to random. They want to teach the students how to do that. But anyway, this guy that saved me, we stayed in touch, he gave me a lot of advice on what courses to take. And he taught me to choose my courses by professor. That was more important than the subject, who I could really connect with, who would get in there and rattle my cage intellectually. So in my junior year, he persuaded me that I should join him in a campaign to persuade the college to abolish the fraternity system. And Don Quixote-like we challenged the fraternities to a public debate in the student union building to justify their existence in a liberal arts community. We took out ads in the student newspaper, we put up posters, and the day of the debate came around. And they taught me a very important lesson about politics. They taught me something about stonewalling, not a single one of them showed up. And there we were alone in the rented room in the student union building, and no students came, they all thought we were nuts, we were so counterculture. And I don’t know that I realized that then, but the perfect environment for somebody like me, who has some wild idea that may be really out of sync, the perfect place for me is the Academy. We are made for people like me. And so I went on and found other causes for the balance of my undergraduate career. I should say, parenthetically, that it’s been some years later in my career, that I’ve learned that Greek-affiliated males and females have significantly higher probability of graduation than non-affiliated undergraduate students, they give more money as alumni, and they learn, as my father told me I would learn. He wanted me to join a fraternity. And his reason was, and I quote, “Son, you join a fraternity, and you’ll learn how to run a company,” like he did. And that was not an aspiration. When I was at the University of South Carolina as a faculty member, a student affairs Dean came up to me one day and said, “John, I know you’re going to tell me no, but please listen to me, hear me out. I would like you to consider being a faculty advisor to a brand new fraternity.” I said, “Mark, you gotta be kidding. Why in the world would I do that?” He said, “Well, John, this group is different. They are not going to practice a white Christian membership drive, there will be no singing dirty songs in public and no hazing and no secret rituals. They’re going to be a different kind of fraternity. So would you at least meet with these guys once? They’re trying to organize this as a new fraternity” I thought “I gotta meet a group of guys like this” and he kept it up by saying that the President of this group is an art major. And I said “He’s got to be the only fraternity chair in the country who’s an art major. I got to meet him.” So I met with these guys, and they won me over and I agreed to become their faculty advisor and I did it for 16 years. And I learned from that, that it’s a lot easier to sit back and criticize the behaviors of undergraduate students, rather than trying to do something constructive with them. And so for 16 years, I did a lot of constructive things with them, and they were good for me too.

John K: The impact of fraternities and sororities are probably mostly because they form those connections that you were talking about. Those connections can be positive or negative, as in the case of some of the fraternity behavior you describe, like some of the hazing issues and so forth, which were pretty pervasive at that time.

John G: Well, they’re still very pervasive, many of them have been driven underground. But these are the elements of the traditions of American higher education that were created by white men in the late 18th century, early 19th century, and they endure, they’re powerful. The system was designed for people like me, white New England property owning Protestant males.

John K: So you mentioned that your first-year of college did not provide students with a lot of support in terms of how to learn effectively, how to take notes, and so forth. Did high schools provide much preparation for college at the time, or today for that matter?

John G: Well, I think there’s a difference, then I think they did a better job for white students anyway, particularly in school districts that had high tax bases, which is where I lived, I lived in one of the wealthiest communities in the United States, New Canaan, Connecticut, where I went to an outstanding high school. So yeah, I had great experience in critical thinking and reading and writing. As a matter of fact, one of the aspirations my father had for each of the three children was that each of us had a library, he wanted each child to have a library. And so I had bookshelves in my room, and I read a lot. And of course, he thought that we would read more if we didn’t have television, so he deliberately eschewed any television in the house. And when the last kid went to college, he bought three televisions. So yeah, I was well prepared intellectually for college, but I was not well prepared in terms of my maturity, or my attitudes. And this is important, I think, to the larger focus of your podcast series, because even the students that are well prepared can have developmental issues that impede their progress in college. And I was definitely structured for lack of success. And it had not been for especially a fellow student and the faculty that took me under their wing, I would never have made it and I owe them everything. And there’s a huge unpaid debt on my part. Years later, I became a trustee at my alma mater. I did that for twelve years, I’m still connected to alma mater, and working with them on several things. So yes, your question about my preparation had been outstanding, it was necessary but not sufficient, because the transition to college is not only an intellectual one, it’s a psychosocial, physical, spiritual, emotional process. And I wasn’t ready in many of those respects.

Rebecca: One of the things that you describe in your book is your military experience in the Air Force. And you indicated that that was more equitable than society as a whole. Can you tell us a little bit about that, and how that experience may have impacted the work that you’ve done moving forward?

John G: Well, I was a college student from undergraduate from 61 to 65. And during that period, the only good thing I ever heard about the military from my professors was praise for the veterans who had come to Marietta College after World War Two, those largely, in many cases entirely, men, they were so good. I couldn’t believe they were real, but the attitude about them was that the military was conservative, it was reactionary, pro war. I had negative attitudes about that whole class of people that do this, even though I was living in college in a town, Marietta, Ohio, that was founded by military veterans of the American Revolution, who were the recipients of the first largesse from the new government of the United States that didn’t have the currency to pay them. And so they gave them land grants. And this notion of the government owing something to the men and women who serve us in the military, it was a foundation for a tradition. And of course, after World War Two, you had over 12 million GIs who received the GI Bill, and I was in college, and I graduated in a terrible year to graduate from college, 1965, If you were male, and able bodied, and mentally competent, you were fodder for the American draft. And so young men like me who were moving towards graduation in the year 1965, we were strategizing about what we could do to keep out of the army because the buildup was occurring, and young men like me were being sent to die, and many of us were dying. And so what you did was you tried to get a so called deferment, and you could get a deferment for going to graduate school, for being married, for going to seminary, or working for a defense contractor. Those were the four criteria. And I had several women that I considered whether or not I could marry, not simultaneously, but I wisely decided I was not mature enough, that that would have been unjust of me to do that. But many of my classmates did exactly that. They married women to stay out of the military. And eventually, as the war went on, it wasn’t sufficient just to be married, then you had to have dependent children, and we even got to the point where they were drafting them with dependent children. But at the time I graduated, ‘65, if you were married, you would not have been drafted. I didn’t want to go to seminary, I was not a conventionally religious person. College had eradicated the Christianity I’d been grown up. I was skeptical, agnostic.So, I don’t want to become a minister. And I didn’t want to work for a defense contractor. My father was a very senior executive who managed 60 factories in the United States. And they produced war materials, he could have arranged for me like President Bush, 41, arranged for his son to stay out of the military, but I didn’t do that. So anyway, I went to graduate school, like I’d been an undergraduate, I liked so many things intellectually, I never chose a major. So I had gotten an interdisciplinary major, and I found there was a graduate field where I could do the same thing, it’s called American Studies, and I could study American literature, history, sociology, and I did that. And I thought, “Okay, I’m safe.” But Uncle Sam had a surprise for me. My second semester of graduate school, I got my draft notice, because in my draft jurisdiction in Connecticut, there were not enough unemployed, uneducated young men to draft. They started drafting college graduates in 1965, one of whom, a friend of mine, was killed in Vietnam. So I was about to be drafted, and so I decided I got to leverage my odds here. And so I opted to go into the Air Force, Air Force officer training, and the Air Force, in its infinite wisdom, made me something I had never been. They trained me as a psychiatric social worker, and assigned me to a base in South Carolina as one of two personnel in the base hospital psychiatric clinic. We have one psychiatrist and one social worker. Now the military, to specifically answer your question, was like going into another planet. Growing up in a very affluent white community, and nobody who didn’t look like me in college and graduate school, I had never been in an environment that was significantly racially integrated, or that was significantly integrated in terms of social class. In the military, it was very different. I was surrounded by people who weren’t like me, and I was living with them and serving with them. That had a huge impact on me. My first day on my base, my squadron commander called me in. He braced me at attention. I looked down over my glasses, and I saw that I was standing very properly alert in front of a black man. And I said, “Wow, this is going to be different, John. The only black people you’ve been around are people that work for your family. This man you work for.” And I had to do what he told me to do. And he gave me this homily. He said, “Gardner, although we’re in the Air Force, we’re an occupying army, and we’re occupying the state of South Carolina. This is only two and a half years after the Civil Rights Act, and we are going to do the best we can to transform South Carolina.” And I will tell you, when you went on the base, it was like going into another country. I left a totally segregated environment at the base gate, on the base, everything was racially integrated: drinking fountains, toilets, residential accommodation, schools, golf course, PX, movie theater, bowling alley, everything. And it was just transformative. And my commander also said to me, “Gardner, you’re the most educated person in the squadron other than the physicians.” And I didn’t know he was going somewhere with this and I said, “Yes, sir.” And he said, “Gardner, that means you’re going to do community service.” And I said, “Yes, sir. What is that?” Now, I would hope that nobody who listens to your podcast and who’s a higher educator or any kind of citizen will allow somebody to get to be 22 years old, and never have said to them, “You have some obligation to perform community service.” I didn’t know what that meant. So I told him, I said, “Sir, yes sir. But what is that, sir?” And he said, “Gardener, it’s exactly what I tell you. I own you. The Air Force owns you, seven days a week, 24 hours a day.” “Yes, sir.” He said, “And Gardner. In your case, community service is going to be teaching at night when you’re off duty in an on-base program we have for the University of South Carolina, for our active duty military personnel to earn college degrees while they’re in the Air Force.” “Yes, sir, But sir, I’ve never taught anything. I’m not prepared to do that.” “Gardner, the Air Force needs people like you to do this, you will do this.” “Okay.” Two weeks later, I started teaching my first class. And that was an epiphany. At the same time, my patients were overwhelmingly male. They were white, and they were black. And they all had something in common. They were all anxious because they were all going to Vietnam, not all of them because some of them were coming back from Vietnam because our base had a very specialized function that was only performed at this base. This base was responsible for the reconnaissance mission over Vietnam, the photography that was done to plot the bombing runs, and these were very specialized functions. And so we saw these troops before they went over and when they came back. And when they came back, of course, they were profoundly different. They all had VD and they had, oh my God, all kinds of types of dysfunctions that they didn’t have before they went over. I taught on the military base, I taught off the base at a rural regional campus at the University of South Carolina where all my students were mill workers, or children of mill workers. They were so different from me. And they had courage to be there, nobody in their family had ever been to college, but they were, in effect almost untouched previously by education, they were so deprived of the kind of education that I had had. But they had such enormous potential. And it was so exciting teaching these students. I just loved it. And I look forward to going to class, I was teaching five nights a week and Saturday mornings. I was really busy. And I found that college teaching and this is something we do with undergraduate students… We asked undergraduate students, can you think of anything that you really love to do that you could convert to a legal living and support yourself and your family, and that would have socially redeeming value, and maybe contribute to our country. And as I started teaching, I thought, I love to do four things. And the first, when you’re a college teacher, you get to talk, and they were paying me to talk… never thought that I could earn a living talking, I got a D and speech 101 in college. a Secondly, in order to talk, you have to have something to say you have to prepare to talk. So how do you prepare? You read. Oh, my God, they were paying me for reading, I love to read. And then you read and you wrote something. You had to have a script. And I never thought I could earn a living writing. And the fourth thing was helping people. I was talking, reading, writing, helping people, all together. And the other thing, talk about a benchmark, when I compared it to sex, I thought, God, this lasts a lot longer. I can do this with all kinds of people. There are no complications from this, well, maybe some but anyway, I want to do this for life. And so the Air Force was a laboratory in social justice. It was the military that expanded opportunity for black people in this country. It was the military that provided opportunities for women that they had never had before. I was in an environment where, for many people, what mattered was their competence: could they perform? …and that was revolutionary. So I got a hint of the fact that we could do better. And a very important lesson from this was, and I’ve carried this through my work as an educator, that what transformed South Carolina ultimately, to the extent it’s been transformed, and it’s backsliding right now, because of the Republican right, but it’s going to get over that, it’s going to join the United States again. But what transformed it was policy, law, the law changed in 1964, by mandating that based on the interpretation, previously, of the Supreme Court and then the enactment by Congress, there would be no discrimination in terms of employment and housing and health care and a number of other areas as a function of race and ethnicity. And unbeknownst to many Americans, at the same time, Congress slipped in gender in the middle of the night, that made it into the bill. And so now, we didn’t instantly desegregate South Carolina. but the process began. The South Carolina State Government fought desegregation of public education until 1970, it took 16 years to integrate the public schools. But when you get the policy right, policy sets parameters for people’s behaviors, and a lot of the work I do now with colleges and universities is trying to get the policies right, trying to get the rules that students operate under that get them either to do or not do certain things. And if you get them to do things, certain things, they’re going to be more successful. So the big takeaway lesson there was that, if you get the rules right, to create a really democratic, more egalitarian culture where everybody gets an opportunity, well, you can transform things. So the Air Force, it gave me my profession, I love the psychiatric social work, but I decided I didn’t want to do that as an occupation, and that I could take a lot that I learned from that into my work as an educator: how to talk to people, listen to people, coach people, advise people… the advice giving process, just be willing to listen to people and offer them different perspectives on their lives. That’s what college faculty do. There’s a long body of research now that students who interact with college faculty outside of class, they have qualitatively different kinds of experience in college. And I learned that that’s what I want to do.

John K: So after leaving the military, you moved into college teaching. And you mentioned already that you had some issues because of your advocacy for civil rights. Would you like to talk a little bit about that?

John G: Yeah, what I did was I was a faculty member at a state supported all female college in Rock Hill, South Carolina, what is now Winthrop University, and myself and another radical young professor, we decided that what this little town needs is a chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. So we formed a chapter of the ACLU and proceeded to sue several prominent members of the community for doing what we thought was violating the Constitution. The problem was, I wasn’t too careful about determining whom I might get ACLU attorneys to sue for us, and I ended up suing the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the college that employed me, because he was practicing racial discrimination, the assignment of employment duties and wages and other working conditions to members of a black church whose pastor came to us and asked if we would intervene so we sued this company and when the owner of the company found out who was behind that he contacted the president of the college and who promptly fired me. Now we don’t of course fire people usually promptly in the academy, we give them a notice of non-renewal. So I had the rest of the year to work out my appointment and I had to get another job. And at that point, thankfully, the folks at the University of South Carolina remembered me well, because of my adjunct teaching when I was in the Air Force. And so I got a job at the University of South Carolina where I worked for the next 30 years and rose from the rank of instructor to distinguished professor and had a wonderful career there and was treated with total respect for my academic freedom, and was never muzzled in any way. And I have nothing but respect and appreciation for that university for giving me the opportunities to do the national and global work which I’ve been doing ever since. So that’s what happened to me in that starting experience.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how the university 101 course was developed at USC?

John G: I better define that. University 101 is the University of South Carolina version of a type of course that has been in the American college curriculum since 1882… 1882. But it’s evolved and waxed and waned, and it had a resurrection in the 1970s, thanks to something the University of South Carolina did. And the course, University 101, has been replicated now at hundreds of institutions…1000s, actually… primarily in the United States, but in a number of other countries as well, Canada most notably but in other versions of what’s done in 101 with a number of nations, Europe and elsewhere. University 101 is a three credit hour letter graded course, where we introduce students to how to be a successful college student, we teach them the knowledge and the skills and the behaviors and the attitudes to be successful in college. Why did we do this? We did this because in May of 1970, the week that the United States invaded the sovereign nation of Cambodia, there was a protest on the university campus, over 1000 students demonstrated, the governor called out the National Guard, the South Carolina National Guard and tear gassed the students. They went into the building with the president, occupied his office. They set the building on fire. They made him sit in for 24 hours after the Fire Department put out the fire. And he emerged from this by saying something very profound in a press conference he held. He said that: “The students have given me an extended opportunity for reflection on the meaning of student behavior.” That’s the key. You look at students, you look at their behavior, and you say, “What do you learn from that? What do you learn about what students need and what kind of experiences are they having?” And what we learned was, they were furious. They were angry. And so the question institutionally became, instead of producing angry students, how might you produce happy campers? And so the President had this radical idea he said, It was like he was channeling me or I was channeling him. Because in the Air Force, I learned you could teach anybody any set of attitudes you want. You could teach him to hate, to kill, to help, to learn, to grow, to regress. What do you want to teach them to do? And he decided, What if we tried, at the University of South Carolina, to teach students to “love,” the active verb, love, love the University? How would you do that? If they loved the University, they wouldn’t riot anymore, and they would stay longer, and they would flourish, and they’d get degrees, and they would serve South Carolina, the public. So we set out to redesign the first year and I was one of 25 faculty and staff that this man called on the phone, had me paged, gave me, like I was back in the Air Force again, a direct order that I was to go to a workshop to learn how to humanize the University of South Carolina. And so we spent three hours an afternoon five afternoons a week for three weeks, this President and 25 faculty and student affairs staff, to create this concept of University 101. University 101 has just celebrated its 50th anniversary, going stronger than ever, even though, maybe and because of the fact that I have not been its director for 25 years. But I did become the director after the first two years. And it was the joy of my life to develop this experience, which has helped 1000s of students and significantly increased our success rates. So that’s what university 101 is.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what some of the most critical components of a successful first-year experience are?

John G: Yes, the most critical components are certain types of knowledge that you acquire, certain skills, and certain types of behaviors that you practice. One of the biggest enemies of first-year student success is making stupid decisions with all the freedom you get in college. So we focus a lot on this theme of freedom versus responsibility. Yes, we’re giving you a great deal of freedom to be here, it’s one of the gifts you get when you join a university or college family. The question is, what are you doing with your freedom, what kind of choices that you’re making? So we put a lot of emphasis on decision making. We also know that there are a set of core academic skills, like I didn’t have when I started, like note taking, that you can teach students. We know that if you engage in certain behaviors in college, you’re more likely to persist. If you participate in certain organizations, if you have what we call in American culture, a support group, if you can find a mentor, if you can find people who you admire and want to become like, and not only if you learn about what are the helping services and resources, but if you use them. So we’re trying to get students to engage in what we call assistance-seeking behavior. And that’s much harder to do for men than it is for women, which is one of the reasons that women persist and graduate at higher rates than men. And so there’s no question we know what to do to make students successful. We just, as an institution, have to have the will and the intentionality to do this. is deliberately. Hugely important is making students feel like they belong. This is a home for them, they fit, F-I-T, and there are lots of ways you can help students fit. And that’s what we try to do in what has become known as the first-year experience. That’s a succinct answer to your question.

John K: One of the things that I found interesting about your description of the University 101 class was the time spent in professional development, because I don’t think that’s very common for most college faculty, before teaching a course, that there was a lot of professional development. And it was interesting to see that happening so early. Could you talk to us a little bit about why that was put into the process.

John G: This all goes back to my President at the time, it was his vision. He was a native Mississippian, who had managed to get a scholarship to a high school completer, to go to, of all places, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he become an engineer, he went on from there, he became dean of engineering at Purdue. He came to the University of South Carolina in 1962, let it 12 years, presided over the peaceful integration of the university. We were one of the few southern universities that did not need federal marshals or troops or sheriff’s deputies to integrate. What he learned from this was that in the period, particularly after the Higher Education Act of 1965, when we were expanding higher education, creating larger and larger institutions, that these environments became less friendly to undergraduate students. And so what he learned was that we had to, “humanize” the university environment to be more accommodating to first-generation students who did not come from college-educated families. And the principal agents of humanization were the faculty because they had the most interaction with students. But in their graduate school preparation, that’s not what they’ve been taught to do. They’ve been produced as experts in a discipline, and they’ve not had any experiences and how to teach that discipline other than to emulate their mentors. And so his vision was, if you wanted to humanize a whole university environment, you had to change the behavior of the students. But to change the behavior of the students, you had to change the behavior of the faculty. So he used this course as an excuse to require the instructors who taught this course to go through a 45 hour professional development human relations training seminar, to get them to learn new ways to understand college students and learning principles and theory and more about psychosocial adjustment transitions and new communication and pedagogical strategies for undergraduate students. And his hope was, “Well, if you completed the professional development, you could use what you learned in the other things you did for students, you wouldn’t use them just in the University 101 course. So we established the finish, and that is alive and well 50 years later, nobody teaches this course without having gone through the training. And we’re still doing the training. And that is really the secret sauce to the success of this. And I can confidently predict over the next 50 years, we’re not going to give that up because we’ve seen what it can do. So the mission then of the University 101 program became really twofold: it was to develop students, but in order to develop the students we had to develop the faculty and staff who taught them in ways that they had not been developed in graduate school.

John K: One of the other things you talked about was how the success of the program was evaluated. Could you talk a little bit about what the results were in terms of the impact on student outcomes, in terms of student success?

John G: The founding president, to say the least, was rather controversial. And the university had tried to absorb 12 years of extraordinary change. And when he left the university to go to MIT to become their Executive VP for Research, we got an interim president for three years, and he made his hallmark for his interregnum, the idea of evaluating a number of the initiatives of his predecessor. We didn’t call that assessment then, but that’s exactly what it was. Matter of fact, the University of South Carolina has been really a forerunner and a pioneer in the assessment movement. So the new President, the first candidate he picked for evaluation was the President’s pet, and that was the University 101 course. And he announced this in the faculty senate meeting in September of 1974 and I was the brand new director of the course, and I was then untenured. So it was a shock to my system to know that what I had been asked to lead was about to be on the presidential evaluation chopping block. And so the university had to figure out how might you evaluate this. And they stipulated that I was not to do the evaluation because I was not objective about it, I was the leader of it. So what they did was they did a careful examination of what were the goals of the course. What were we telling students and their families and ourselves on the faculty and staff are the goals of the course and how might you measure the attainment of the goals? So we did a number of things. First of all, we developed a first time ever software adjustment in the university’s computing capacity to trace the proportion of first-year students who took University 101 to be able to compare them to students who didn’t take University 101, and we wanted to compare those two populations in terms of their predicted grade point averages, how well our algorithms were predicting they would do in the first-year of college versus how well they actually did. And we wanted to disaggregate the differences. We wanted to look at white students, black students, male students, female students, residential students, non-residential students, as many variables as we could think of to see who fared better than others. We also wanted to figure out what might the similarities and differences be between what students actually did, what were their behavioral choices in the first-year of college. And so we developed a survey that we administered in the required course for all students, first-year composition. University 101 was not a required course at that time, it was an elective. It’s still an elective, as a matter of fact, now it’s taken by about 85% of the first-year class, then less than 20. it was a very, very small population. There were about 275 students the first time we did it in 17 sections. But these questions we asked on the survey that we gave out in the freshman English class in which we did not tell the students who are taking the survey that the purpose of the survey was to evaluate the University 101 course, because we didn’t want there to be any kind of spillover halo effect. And so we asked them a whole set of questions about what did they know about the services that had been designed to help university students? And then we asked them which of these services had they used? And we asked them, what kind of groups had they joined? We asked them if they went to plays, concerts, lectures outside of class? We asked them about their relationships with their advisor. We asked them about the level of satisfaction and benefit they received in orientation. So we looked at all their answers, and we differentiated two populations. What did University 101 participants tell us? And what did the students tell us that hadn’t been in University 101, And, oh my God, we were shocked at the differences. The University 101 students were much more likely, not only to have known where to go get help, they actually went to get help. They were much more likely to have join groups. They’re more likely to have gone to extra co-curricular activities outside of class. And the biggest difference of all was that the students who elected to take this optional course, they had a lower predicted potential, meaning a lower predicted grade point average, which is a weighted factor of the high school rank in class and score on the SAT than students who didn’t take the course. In other words, the students who didn’t take the course were better prepared, and therefore we predicted they would have a higher grade point average and a higher persistence rate in the first year. What we found was exactly the opposite. The students with the lower predicted grade point average fared better and longer than the students with a higher predicted grade point average, they had higher retention rates. That was stunning, totally unanticipated. So of course, we wanted to know why… what explains this? Well, the explanations were in the things that students told us they were doing. And so we realized, if you do certain things for first-year students by design and not leaving it to chance, you’re more likely to get more of them to stay longer. One of the biggest takeaways of all was that the students who were initially predicting to do less well, it was a function of race and ethnicity. And we found that the gaps between how they were predicted to perform and how they actually performed were the greatest in the black students. And 50 years later, we’re still finding that the developmental changes and evolution of these students during, not only the first-year, but the undergraduate experience, that changes are greatest for the black students at the University of South Carolina. They are reporting the highest levels of involvement and engagement, which is astonishing, given the fact that it’s a predominantly white institution and the proportion of black students has been declining, I’m sad to say. And this is true of research universities all over the country where we are, perhaps unintentionally, I think some of us would say intentionally, re-segregating these organizations. So anyway, we learned a great deal about what you have to do to make first-year college students successful. And that body of research has been picked up and adopted by hundreds of other institutions now that do the same things we’re trying to do. They don’t always do them the same way. But they’ve got the same lessons. And so we know now what to do to make more students more successful in college, if we don’t leave it to chance.

John K: And by doing those things, you’re closing some of those equity gaps and providing more equitable rates of student success across all groups.

John G: Absolutely. We’re showing it can be done. There were pockets where we knew that before. As a matter of fact, when I learned about a campus before I visit a campus… I’ve been on 500 campuses, give or take, in my career… and generally the two highest performing groups on any campus are the honors population and, if the institution is so fortunate, students who participate in what are called TRIO programs, TRIO programs are provided by the federal government. There used to be three of them, hence, TRIO. There are now eight of them. But these are restricted to the criteria for eligibility, which has primarily revolved around Pell eligibility and financial means. And what we find is the lowest financial ability populations are doing as well as the honors populations who are disproportionately the more affluent middle, upper-middle class students. And why? …because in both those populations, they are getting levels of attention and support that the majority of students are not getting. So for any of us who cared to look, the TRIO programs were authorized in 1965. And we’ve known that if you do certain things for the students who are the least well advantaged, they are going to flourish. But we don’t do those things, many of us, for the majority of college students. Now at the University of South Carolina, that’s not true. We do all those things for all the students that want it. And most of them participate, about 85% of our first-year students have this, what we call, a First-Year Experience Program. So we know it can be done and American higher education just needs to be more intentional about doing that, has to have the will, the political will.

John K: And you mentioned visiting about 500 institutions, it sounds like this has spread quite a bit within the US and globally.

John G: It has, and the principal means for dissemination was a set of conferences that we began in 1982. And this is a really simple idea, but any of our listeners could do this. And when you really get immersed in something you’re doing in higher education, and you’re getting to know what students want and what they respond positively to, you look at that and you say, “What of this, could we tweak? What adjustment could we make? What are we not seeing that if we did something different, we could boost the outcomes.” And in my case, I looked at our higher ed enterprise in the early 80s and I thought if we wanted to learn more about first-year college students, and what colleges and universities were doing with them, and for them, how would you do that? There were no conferences, there was no literature base, no research, no journals, and I thought, “Damn, why don’t we just get people together to talk about this?” And so that was my rocket science idea. Why don’t we create a meeting to bring faculty academic administrators, state and Student Affairs people together? And we did such a meeting for the first time in 1982. And I want you to know that the state that sent the largest proportion of educators to that first national convening around the first-year experience was the state of New York. I thought, why was that the case? Well, hell, it snows up there, they want to get out of New York State in February to come down to South Carolina to see if we wear shoes in the winter and play golf, and I don’t care why they come down. As long as they come to the conference, they can do other things. Don’t blame them. And so we had a disproportionate representation of the colder climates in the United States when we started this work. We also had a significant contingent of Canadians who came to the initial meeting. Well, we’ve done 42 of these annual meetings since then, one a year, plus a lot of other meetings, and we founded a National Center at the University of South Carolina, it’s the National Resource Center for the first-year experience and students in transition. I founded that, actually, and left in 1999. But my successors have done a marvelous job with that. And when I left, I founded, with my wife, Betsy Barefoot, a new national organization that does not replicate the activities of the University of South Carolina. And we’re not offering a course, we don’t provide instruction, we’re not on a campus. But it is about focusing on the success of undergraduate students. Initially, your principal mechanism for espousing and disseminating this first-year experience concept was through a series of conferences. But, in addition, the other mechanism which has reached even more people is publishing, writing. In the higher ed community publishing is the currency of the realm. If you’re doing any legitimate work, you’ve got to write about it, and somebody’s got to want to read it, somebody’s got to publish it. And so my work, as it’s evolved, well actually long before I left University of South Carolina, has been significantly focused on publishing about this work, to get more people to read it and consider it, and decide how they could replicate it in their own fashion,

John K: With the success of these programs and with the training that’s often provided to faculty teaching them, those faculty often teach other classes, and the lessons learned in developing these classes and working with them have been spreading more widely throughout higher ed.

John G: Yeah, and that’s been documented. We wanted to know “Okay, you go through this training, you teach a first-year Seminar, do you use these pedagogies in any other context? Does it affect your attitudes towards students? Do you learn things that you wouldn’t have learned otherwise?” I’ll give you an example of that. This may sound prurient, but I think it’s appropriate. We, America, the world, we discovered the AIDS epidemic in 1981 and nobody was prepared for that. But the thoughtful institutions, particularly research universities said, “Well, what can we do about this? This is killing people. And part of it’s a medical challenge, but it’s also a behavioral one, and what can we do in the realm of preventive medicine?” And so we decided that a purpose of the first-year seminar is to sustain and extend life and to help people lead lives of different qualities. And so we thought, “Okay, here in the conservative South Carolina, the students are not getting sex education in the public school system. What are we going to do when they come to university?” They are at their… not peak, but their prime of sexual activity. They have a lot of freedom, privacy, curiosity, creativity, and they’re in good health, but they’re doing things that are very unhealthy. They’re making poor decisions, health wise. So we in effect had to become educators in preventive health medicine, which we did, and that was transformative for our work and so It meant that the people who were teaching this course had to learn more about sex than they had ever known in order to facilitate the discussion and the absorption of the information that we were getting from our medical school and our public health, all those experts that universities have, that we put together an educational intervention like this to literally save people’s lives. And so that’s another function of these courses. The basic purpose of higher education is to help people live longer and healthier, and more fulfilling lives. And you got to lay the foundation of that in the first year to help people stop making stupid decisions.

John K: And we know that sometimes first-year students do make stupid decisions, as we know, from our own experiences, as well as what we’ve observed.

John G: Absolutely, yeah.

John K: And I think that’s a good note to wrap up on. We always end with the question: What’s next?

John G: I started a year ago, what you’re doing, I started a podcast series, and it’s called Office Hours with John Gardner. And I’m interested in one primary question, which is innovation in higher education. How do some people become innovators and what sustains them and what’s the impact? And so I’m going to take these interviews that I’ve been doing, and I’m going to convert them into some kind of book and hopefully develop theory around higher education innovation. So that’s going to be my next writing project. But my next crusade is around graduate school education. We made a tremendous contribution starting in the early 80s by looking at the first-year student experience. I’m working with a small group of colleagues right now to figure out how to launch a national set of conversations around the graduate student experience. And I want to do that because we’re losing huge numbers of graduate students who fall out of the pipelines. But the public’s largely unaware of this, because the federal government does not make institutions report that. It’s not in the domain of public data. And most families are more interested, understandably so, can I get my kid into undergraduate school, get them through undergraduate school, but now for many of them, undergraduate education is not enough. And we know that the same inequities that operate in undergraduate school, they are present in graduate education. And so we got to get more people who don’t look like me, and for whom graduate education was not designed, to flourish in graduate education. And graduate education is the most traditional component of university college life. We are more likely to be doing that the same way we’ve been doing it for several centuries than anything else we do. And so I’d like to do that. Another project is I’m working with the Association of Governing Boards on a model to get college and university trustees working in more partnership with higher education campus based leaders to better understand and support student success efforts. I’m doing a lot of work around transfer. The transfer outcomes, and our student outcomes in our country are shameful, and I should have started much earlier in my career. On that, 80% of entering community college students indicate that their ultimate goal is to earn a baccalaureate degree and only about 14% of them do. Shocking, shocking failure rates that if we were a hospital we would be shut down. So I got lots of things to work on, lots of needs in the academy. The academy is a wonderful environment. I’m privileged to work in it with people like you who are trying to disseminate the ideas and experiences of others to help our fellow educators. And I thank you for your role in that.

John K: Thank you for all the work that you’ve done in building programs that allow more of our students to be successful.

Rebecca: I really appreciate the opportunity to learn from you, John, thanks for sharing your stories with us.

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John K: 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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277. Write Like a Teacher

Teaching faculty regularly help novices acquire new knowledge and skills. These same skills allow faculty to write effectively for audiences beyond their academic disciplines. In this episode, James Lang joins us to discuss his new book that is designed to help faculty write for broader audiences.

Jim is the author of six books, the most recent of which are: Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (now in a second edition); Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty; and On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching. He is currently working on a new book, tentatively titled: Write Like a Teacher. A former Professor of English and the Director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption University, he stepped down from full-time academic work in 2021 to concentrate more fully on his writing and teaching. Jim has served as a keynote speaker and workshop leader at over 100 colleges and universities, including SUNY Oswego.

Shownotes

  • Lang, J. M. (2020). Distracted: Why students can’t focus and what you can do about it. Hachette UK.
  • Lang, J. M. (2021). Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning. 2nd ed. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Lang, J. M. (2013). Cheating lessons. Harvard University Press.
  • Lang, J. M. (2008). On course: A week-by-week guide to your first semester of college teaching. Harvard University Press.
  • The Saratoga Tea and Honey Company
  • Articles by James Lang in the Chronicle of Higher Education
  • Sarah Rose Cavanagh (2023). Mind Over Monsters. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 272. January 18.
  • Julie Jensen
  • Sathy, V., & Hogan, K. A. (2022). Inclusive teaching: Strategies for promoting equity in the college classroom. West V

Transcript

John: Teaching faculty regularly help novices acquire new knowledge and skills. These same skills allow faculty to write effectively for audiences beyond their academic disciplines. In this episode, we discuss a new book that is designed to help faculty write for broader audiences.

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

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Rebecca: Our guest today is James Lang. Jim is the author of six books, the most recent of which are Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (now in a second edition), Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty, and On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching. He is currently working on a new book, tentatively titled: Write Like a Teacher. A former Professor of English and the Director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption University, he stepped down from full-time academic work in 2021 to concentrate more fully on his writing and teaching. Jim has served as a keynote speaker and workshop leader at over 100 colleges and universities, including SUNY Oswego. Welcome back, Jim.

Jim: Thank you.

John: Today’s teas are: … Jim, are you drinking tea?

Jim: Of course. Always.

John: …still David’s Tea or some new tea?

Jim: No, actually, I have two children at Skidmore. And there’s a tea shop there called The Saratoga Tea and Honey Company. I have to go to Saratoga Springs every few months, and I stock up on tea there. So I totally favor robust black teas, so I’m either drinking English breakfasts or Irish breakfast, Irish breakfast gives you a little more of a boost.

Rebecca: It sure does, it’s one of my favorites too.

John: And I am drinking a Tea Forte black currant tea, but with some honey from Saratoga Tea and Honey.

Jim: Ahh!

John: I love that tea shop. I go there at least two or three times a year. There’s lots of conferences up there.

Rebecca: Yeah. And I have Awake tea this afternoon, so I can be more awake this afternoon. [LAUGHTER]

Jim: I know that feeling.

Rebecca: We’ve invited you here today to discuss your new book project. Can you tell us a little bit about the project?

Jim: Sure. So this is my first book focused on writing, even though I’ve always been interested in writing and about how academics can reach wider audiences for their work. And the premise of the book is that the reading experience for nonfiction work, whether it’s an essay or book, should be a learning experience. And so we want to think about how do people learn from the page, as opposed to learning in the classroom or outside of the classroom in real life settings. And so the argument that I make is that those of us who teach, whether we are academics or teaching at other levels, we have either sort of education or experience or instincts that help people learn. And so this knowledge that we’ve gained from like a doctoral programs, or our teaching experiences, or we have good instincts about what to do in the classroom, and we can take that knowledge and put it into our writing practices in order to help create good learning experiences for people on the page. So that’s the core argument of the book. And what I try to do is bring together the many years I’ve been writing about teaching and learning, and sort of take the research I’ve done and arguments I’ve made about effective teaching, and to put them into this new context. And my goal really is for academics who want to try to reach out to broader audiences, whether that’s academics outside of their discipline, or even outside of academic readers altogether, and to help them achieve the goals that they might have about how to promote their work. And a big part of it is we have the opportunity to make the world a better place, if we can help readers understand the importance of the work that we do. So that’s kind of a sense of what’s kind of driving me into these arguments. I think it’s a good idea if they can, and they’re interested in doing that, reach out to readers outside of their discipline and I want to be able to help them to do that.

John: So much academic writing is written to a very narrow academic audience, which tends to exclude most people from reading the work that most academics do. And as you said, academics, especially those who are heavily involved in teaching, have skills in taking complex concepts and trying to relay them to an audience that does not have the same background. But most academics don’t tend to do that. And you seem to be in a really good place to write a book like this, given all the writing that you’ve done, your role as the longtime editor of The West Virginia University Press series on teaching and learning, as well as your role as a faculty member. So how did these roles come together to help you prepare for this book? 4:09:25

Jim: So obviously, I’ve had a lot of experience writing as a writer myself, trying to reach out to outside audiences beyond my discipline. And I think one of the things you just said is important. Most academics know how to write like, this is something we have to do to get degrees and promotion and tenure and all that kind of stuff. We know how to do it. But when we’re writing to other academics, they’re in our discipline, so we have a lot of shared disciplinary background information. And then we also can sort of assume a little bit more attention to our work, essentially, from disciplinary readers because I can push your attention a little further than I can someone who is outside of the discipline, so like, you’re willing to stay with me for a little bit longer to go a little bit more deeply into the core ideas. But a non-academic reader needs more information, they need some more background information. They need to be kind of guided along with kind of signposts along the way, to be told stories, kind of different forms of evidence. So all these things are things that we do in the classroom. And so I think one of the things I really want to be able to do with the book is to sort of empower people. And my work as a writer about education, I view that as empowering as well. I want to be able to show people, for example, in my book on Small Teaching, I want to show people, there’s a number of small things that you can do, that are going to make a difference. And I hope that’s an empowering message, and I hope this message will be the same for writers. You know how to do this stuff, you’ve been doing it for a long time, and you’ve seen that other people do it. So it’s a kind of a process of kind of taking your knowledge here and just applying it to a new context. Now, to get to your question, I’ve been trying to do that for a long time. And I have a column I’ve written for the Chronicle of Higher Education, I’m approaching 200 columns at this point. And then I also have always been interested in seeing where else my writing could go. I like to challenge myself as a writer. So I’ve reached out to places like newspapers and magazines, and probably have a couple of dozen essays published in those places. And some of my books also kind of reached out to broader audiences. So first of all, I was drawing from my own experiences. And that’s not just about the writing, but also the process, like what does it look like to reach out to an editor, for example, at a major newspaper and try to get your work in that forum. So with the writing, but also then the process of getting yourself published and promoting your work, the book kind of covers all that stuff. But also, I think the reason that I really kind of wanted to address this topic is because I edit a book series as well. And so I’ve acquired, I think, 15 books for that series. Now, I co-edit with Michelle Miller. But I did probably all those first 12 to 15 ones that I worked with the authors all the way through from the first getting that query email to getting it through being approved, revised, and then getting it out there and trying to help them with promotion. So like guiding multiple people through that process, which I love, it’s like one of my great joys in my life now is to help people get their first books published. I really learned a lot. And I kind of found myself saying the same thing to authors, like, “Here’s a few things that you need to do that can help make this book more successful.” And so with that knowledge, I kind of want to say, “Okay, I want to be able to put this stuff down.” I get all these hopeful email queries when people have a lot of hope in their voices, or even on the page. And, you know, they want to get their books published, and they’re stumbling on some very common obstacles. And so I wanted to be able to have this stuff available in print so I could not only share with those folks, people who are looking to publish with us, but anybody who wants to publish, whether it’s a book or even an essay. So I do try to cover both of those things as well, writing books, but also writing about essays or various kinds of media platforms: newspapers, magazines, websites.

Rebecca: It’s interesting, because no matter what discipline you’re in, you’re usually trained on how to publish in a very particular way. And then all the other ways seem very mystical.

Jim: Absolutely, that relates to the fact that we’re so very familiar with the sort of processes and the kind of arguments that we make in our discipline. But then we kind of just jump a little bit away from that and we’re kind of in a different world. That’s true, not only of the publishing process, but also the writing process. So like, one of the things I often have to explain to authors is you have a disciplinary tradition of evidence. So in your discipline, evidence looks like this, right? It’s numbers, or its experiments, or its literary texts, whatever it might be, but you’re trying to reach now beyond your discipline. And so those people are completely used to seeing evidence in this form. And it’s fine for them to just sort of stay in that place. But when you’re reaching out to other readers, in the same way as a teacher, you have to try to reach out to multiple kinds of learners, you have to do the same thing as a writer. So yes, I might write for an audience of people who are interested in writing in literature, but I have to be aware that some people are gonna say, “Okay, well show me the facts,” essentially, right, or the statistics, or what experiments have been done to sort of show this is really true? So like, as a writer who’s trying to reach people from multiple fields, or even outside of academic fields, I need to think about how am i varying my evidence? What kind of evidentiary traditions am I drawing from? So like, when you start looking at these kinds of things, you see, yes, the things that I normally do in my academic writing, I have the skills, and I just have to learn to kind of expand them a little bit and sort of move them around a little bit in order to reach some different kinds of folks.

John: We’ve been doing two reading groups a year here, and most of the books that we’ve worked on have either been books that you’ve written, or books in the West Virginia University Press series. And there’s some things I’ve noticed that tend to be common to all of those. And I’m curious to see if you’d agree, [LAUGHTER] but all of them are very solidly backed by evidence with appropriate citations, either in the footnotes or in the bibliographies. But they all tend to be free of disciplinary jargon and they tend to have a lot of use of narrative where they’re bringing in examples with actual faculty members from a variety of disciplines, showing the wide range of applicability of the techniques that are being discussed. Was that something you tended to focus on explicitly? And is that something you encourage faculty moving into these new areas to focus on?

Jim: Absolutely. I mean, those things are definitely core messages that I’m giving to authors. The first is having some kind of practical application to it. Now that should be a true teaching book, right? There’s to be some kind of takeaway for the reader. But no matter what you’re doing, I always try to emphasize to academic authors, there should be something that the reader can take away that’s concrete. It might be a new way of thinking about the world, but it could be new advice about something, how to do something differently in your life, join a movement, or make a change in something you’re doing. So having some kind of takeaway, I think, is really important. But again, when talking about the sort of evidence piece of this, the fact that stories are really important in this because stories, they’re not like a logicians perspective, maybe they’re not the best forms of evidence, but they still really help people understand the ideas, and so they put the ideas into sort of a place where I can try to relate them, and see like how my experiences compare to the experience in the story. And so one of the things that I often will see academic authors who have this sense, “I should give an example or two,” those examples are often very lifeless, they’re like a one sentence sort of very abstract description of something. And I try to say to people, “Look, if you’re gonna tell a story, tell it well, use images, give me a little bit of detail about it, the story is going to really resonate with me when it’s a story that I kind of enjoy reading and that I can somehow try to relate to.” I kind of came to this discovery for myself as a writer, because I typically tell some personal stories in my own writing, right? So Small Teaching includes a story about me ordering green tea at my local coffee shop. And so what I’ve discovered is that when I go to like conferences or workshops, people will remember that story. And they’ll use it to kind of reach out and make a connection with me. And so like, I’ve also had people say, “You told this story about teaching your daughter how to drive and then I was thinking about that when I was doing the same thing and I had the same ideas that you did.” And so it creates these opportunities to let people share their own experiences with the book or with the author. I try to tell people, you don’t have to share your whole personal life, but just occasionally, having stories like this, whether they’re about you or somebody else, they do help people see the material in a new way.

Rebecca: It definitely makes them far more readable and brings things to life. I’m curious about this book project and the timing, and why write this book now?

Jim: Yeah, so this book is sort of coming out of, first of all, the West Virginia University series definitely has been growing and so it’s really kind of exploded in terms of the number of titles that we’re putting out. And so seeing more and more of these kinds of issues coming up in the proposals in the books that we are seeing, and so I wanted to try to get these ideas out, as I’m going out through new manuscripts and working with new authors. That was a part of it. I also had a kind of big personal issue that came up with me over the last couple of years. And so that gave me a new sense of commitment to this kind of work, not only teaching for me, but also about writing. And you kind of feel like this kind of sense of that I wanted to start working with writers in a more formal way, both in this book, and then maybe going forward and also doing more developmental editing for academic authors who would like to expand their audiences. So this is like a moment where I’m trying to make a transition here. I still want to teach and I’m still going to write about teaching. But I do want to also think about moving more into the space of working with writers and writing about writing myself. And part of that was… the short version of the story, which is a long story. [LAUGHTER] In October of 2021, I was diagnosed with something called myocarditis, which is inflammation of the heart. And that often heals itself for people when they get it. But in my case, it went the other way, this happens sometimes. It kind of essentially destroyed my heart over a space of a few weeks, the time between I went into the hospital, just because I was having like an irregular heartbeat… otherwise, I was fine… and the time I was on advanced life support, it might have been two weeks. And so this sort of crashed into our lives. I was on advanced life support for a couple months. I wasn’t expecting to survive, but I did. And I got a heart transplant and I had a stroke during the surgery, which is a long surgery. I woke up from all that. And finally, initially, I couldn’t speak also because of the stroke I had. It was complete aphasia, so I had to learn to speak again with flashcards and speech therapy, and my wife would work with me every day. So after all of that, that kind of focuses your mind a little bit, it kind of helps you realize, okay, you only got so many years left on the planet, what do you really want to do in those years? And so it has helped me realize that I want to still continue teaching. I’ve made incredible connections across the world with teachers by writing about teaching, and I love to talk to academics. They’re the audiences I feel most comfortable with. But I feel like at this point, now I have something different to offer them, not just sort of advice about teaching, but also to help them become more successful as writers.

John: And now you’re sharing it with writers, not just the dozen and a half or so writers you were working with at West Virginia, but with writers all over the world. And I think that’s providing a really nice service.

Jim: Thank you.

Rebecca: It’s amazingly incredible, for sure.

John: We’re awfully glad you have recovered so amazingly well. And I remember seeing you post about that on Twitter after you were already in the process of recovering and I had wondered why you had gone into the background there and you hadn’t posted anything for quite a while and it was a bit of a shock. And I think when you posted that you got many, many people commenting.

Jim: Yes, yes, definitely. The community was very supportive, not only the community of my family and my friends here where I live, but also many people around the world, sent me messages and asked about how things were going and offered support and prayers and thoughts and all that stuff. It was very heartening.

Rebecca: You mentioned multiple times about kind of shifting gears a little bit or shifting focus. But to me, if we look at the things that you’ve been involved in, and the things that you’ve written about, you’re really staying true to faculty development. [LAUGHTER] It’s just faculty development with a slightly different focus, but certainly the kind of support that we’ve seen from you in different ways of faculty life.

Jim: Yeah. And actually, in my last years at Assumption, before I decided to step away from full-time academic work, I was moving in that direction as well, because I was responsible for our new faculty orientation as the director of our teaching center. I like to work with junior faculty to help them navigate the different channels of academic life, including service and research and teaching. And so because I had visited so many other institutions where I had often been invited to give workshops or lectures, and had visited many teaching centers and had opportunities to have dinner with lots of people around the country and talk about academic life, I felt like I was kind of gathering a lot of good ideas from all these different places. And I wanted to be able to bring those ideas back to my own campus. So I was always trying to give this information or these ideas or this advice to faculty I knew and were working with. And again, as I’m kind of just stepping away from those concrete roles on campus, although I’m still going to continue to teach on a part-time basis, I want to be able to keep expanding that work outside to other academics who could benefit, not only in their teaching, but also in their goals as writers too.

Rebecca: I think it’s helpful to hear stories as faculty think about different ways that their faculty lives unfold over time, and how that might evolve, as they shift focus on things and maybe want to focus more on teaching or want to focus more on research or more on writing as they develop over time.

Jim: Yeah, this was definitely something that characterized my career. I started as a normal tenure-track faculty member in English and I did that for quite a few years. And I was just kind of looking for a change, a lot like many people after you get tenure, and I was kind of looking for something new to see like, “Okay, I’ve kind of cleared that hurdle, what could I do differently now?” And then I became the director of our Honors Program. And that kind of captured my interest for a while. And then I got kind of interested in these kinds of semi- or part-time administrative positions. And so then became the director of our teaching center. And so I think it’s a good point, especially as we move along in our academic careers, we can look out for other opportunities, and make shifts and draw on different strengths over the course of our careers. So stepping away from full-time work was a big one. And I actually made that decision just about five months before I went to the hospital. So I had five months of like a “early retirement.” [LAUGHTER] But that was a big decision. But I still am very happy with what I’m doing now. And I’m sure gonna continue to look for other ways to challenge myself. And again, kind of keep that focus going on faculty development, though, because as I said, I just was at Williams College last week and giving some presentations there, went out to dinner with folks. And I was just kind of sitting there thinking, “These are my people.” Like, I feel very comfortable with the faculty. I love to have the fascinating conversations that learning about people’s… all the strange stuff they research and the very specific things that people write about and think about, the cool courses they teach. I just love those conversations. I love being in those rooms. And I kind of want to keep doing that work. And as a writer, it’s a huge audience, right? The amount of people in this country, for example, just alone, that are working in higher education, right? So I’m not limiting myself as a writer, I’ve got this huge audience that I can try to reach. And I just feel very comfortable writing to folks in those positions.

John: And you’re still serving as a teacher, just to a much broader audience than when you were in the classroom.

Jim: Yes.

John: In January, we released a podcast with Sarah Rose Cavanagh, and she talked about how you were working with her on a writer’s group. Is that a strategy that you’d recommend for faculty who are working on writing?

Jim: Yeah, writers’ groups are essential. All my recent books have emerged from writers’ groups. There’s different kinds of writers’ groups. So it’s worth noting the kind of taxonomy of these different kinds of ways to work with other people on your writing. The first is to sort of get a bunch of people who sit together and try to write in each other’s company, essentially, right? So that’s just: you make a time, identify a place, we come together and we kind of support each other, just sort of by being together essentially, right? So that’s one kind of writers group. There’s an accountability kind of group, that’s a second kind, where we’re gonna say, “Okay, everyone needs to have 2000 words by this date, everyone’s going to finish their articles by this date.” And then we’re gonna get together, we’re going to celebrate that or, for example, we’re all working on an article, we’ll get together every month and we’ll share things that we’re struggling with or the things that we’re doing well. It’s almost kind of like a little bit writer’s group therapy, essentially, we’re like supporting each other. The last kind is critique groups, and that’s what I’ve always been part of, where we actually send each other’s work in progress and we read it and then we get together and we give each other feedback. So to me, you can have any kind of writer’s group that you want to be in is going to be good, it’s going to support your writing, and that’s a good idea. Julie Jensen does a lot of work on writing, she argues that academics should not be in content critique groups, because you don’t need people outside of your discipline to be giving you feedback, because that’s going to happen as part of the peer review process. But if you’re going to write for readers outside of your discipline, then I think content critique groups are actually essential, because we’re gonna get from that is that people who are outside of your discipline, who don’t have the same background information that you do… “actually, I’m confused by this, like, you give me this big explanation, but there’s something that I’m missing here.” You’re not gonna get that from somebody in your discipline, because they’re gonna know what the background information is. So I think content critique groups are really important if your ambition is to write for people outside of your discipline. And so content critique groups, for me, they have the function also of accountability, because we meet essentially, once a month, and we have to have something for that meeting. We don’t put a hard number on it. But for me, it might be a Chronicle essay, or it could be current chapter. And I know that group meeting is not going to do anything for me, unless I’ve given something to the group. It’s helpful for me to give feedback to other people too, but I want it to be helpful to me, so I make sure that something is ready for it. So essentially, it’s an accountability group and we also talk about problems too. It’s like it does the other things, but I just think it’s really important for writers to have someone outside of their narrow field, give them their perspective on whatever you’re writing.

John: One thing has struck me as being common with each of those groups is that issue of accountability. We often refer to it in economics as a commitment device, that when you have that deadline, when you have to provide something at a certain time, or even if you’re just going to sit together and write at a certain time, it’s so easy to postpone things like writing and having that commitment makes it so much more likely that people will actually achieve their goal.

Jim: Yeah, absolutely, wespecially when you’re doing a longer project, like a book, you’d start the process with, like a deadline two years away, right? But the writers group, for me, gives me the structure, I need to actually finish it, because I know, “Okay, I want to get this chapter done, so that I can then get the next one done. And if I do all those things, at the end of the two years, I’m gonna have a book. Otherwise, there’s no hard deadlines, except for the one. And so to produce 80,000 words, for something that’s two years away, we’re not good at that kind of thing, [LAUGHTER]as humans, unless we really kind of put deadlines along the way. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Are you implying that faculty needs structure? … and scaffolding too? [LAUGHTER]

Jim: Yeah, absolutely. Giving structure. And that reminds me, that’s another thing that I like, as a part of the book actually is thinking about the importance of structure, not only for writers, but also for readers. When you look at an academic article, for example, in social science disciplines, it’s got a set structure to it. It’s got the introduction, it’s got the literature review, the experiment, the method, that kind of thing. But if you’re in like a humanities discipline, and you’re looking at reading an article about like literary theory, it’s just gonna be like, sort of paragraph after paragraph after paragraph like just kind of a long series of paragraphs, which just kind of guide you from beginning to end. But when you look at work that is published outside of the academic world, it often has lots of sections, subheadings, little titles along the way, those things are really important to help a non-academic reader through complex material in the same way we do it in the classroom. We help students, we guide them through our slides, for example, our stuff on the board, or like dividing the class in three or four parts or something like that. Again, this is stuff that we kind of do instinctually in the classroom, because we know the students are gonna zone out. [LAUGHTER] So we kind of guide them through the material, we need to do the same thing in our writing, too. And I like to think about these as attention tools of writing. And so the use of breaking up the text, and that’s sometimes may mean just like sections and subheadings, and all that kind of stuff. But also like bullets, you don’t need to go crazy, but you want to make sure that you are breaking up the page, or the argument, with these structural elements.

Rebecca: Jim, you’re suddenly like an interaction designer. [LAUGHTER]

Jim: Okay. Wait, what do you mean exactly by that?

Rebecca: So, an interaction designer would say something like for usability purposes, you would do all the things that you just described, and they’re also accessibility principles. So they’re good for so many reasons.

Jim: Yeah. Okay, I like that.

Rebecca: It’s gold. [LAUGHTER]

Jim: I like that.

John: And right before I arrived here, I went over to our provost office to pick up a couple of big cartons of books by Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan from West Virginia University Press for our reading group this semester. And one of their main arguments is the importance of structure in helping people make connections to help break down complex topics into these manageable chunks to help people understand things much better. And it sounds like this is, as you and Rebecca have both said, is really important in many, many different contexts.

Jim: Yeah, I believe their work about high structure is so important. And I’ve definitely kind of imported that into the chapter in which I discuss these issues. But the other thing to think about again, from like a reading perspective, so if I’m reading a work, for example, I’m not going to sit and read a book, a 300-page book by an academic writer in one sitting. So I need places to stop and come back. And so maybe I can’t get a 30-40 page chapter in. But if I have opportunities to stop, [LAUGHTER] close the book, and come back to it, and I can come back to a subheading, which is going to tell me, “Okay, that’s what next. Oh, right, that’s what I was just before, and here’s what’s coming.” These are opportunities to come away, come back, and be able to return to the argument, and not be lost when I return to it. And this is just probably always the way that we’ve read. But this is how we’re definitely doing it now, as we’re bombarded with so many different things that can interrupt us. So having those kinds of opportunities to pause and renew the reading experience are important.

Rebecca: But the use of subheadings, in particular, I find helpful as a reader to just get reoriented, especially when you’re coming from a different place. And then I need to transition to an entirely different place, just looking back to those couple of subheadings that came before can immediately get you into that place again really efficiently. So I love it when writers do that, for me as a reader.

Jim: If they’re done well, it will show you an overview of the whole argument, essentially. So I think those are really important to help guide the reader through what they call the through line. The through line is the thread that connects everything in the book, the overall argument, and the subheadings, kind of hanging off that through line. And so I think they really are important for academic writers to do for other kinds of audiences.

Rebecca: Heck, I would like it sometimes just with my own discipline… more subheadings, please. [LAUGHTER]

Jim: I agree, I agree.

John: This is a little bit different. But one thing that really bothers me when I’m reading a novel on my Kindle late at night. I always like to stop, if not at a chapter break, at least at a paragraph break. And I was trying to read last night and I had to skim through about six or seven pages on there before this paragraph ended, [LAUGHTER] and it helps to have those little breaks that are logical stopping points. And writers don’t always do that.

Jim: No, no, one of the points may be I’m trying to push you through some difficult materials, so I get that. But even if you don’t have the sub headings, for example, if you look at the articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education, they might not have subheadings, some of them do, but sometimes will just be a break. So like the paragraph ends, there’s like some whitespace, and then a new section starts, even that’s better than just the sort of constant unbroken series of paragraphs. And I also think it’s also just good for visual, your eye glosses over when you open to a page, and it’s just a huge block of text. That’s intimidating. And so the subheadings, the breaks, all those things, they give a break both for your eye and for your brain.

Rebecca: And even just encourage a moment of pause and reflection, like, “Oh, we’re moving to a new thing. Do I know what I just read? [LAUGHTER] …so I can move to the next thing?” I’m at that moment to double check.

Jim: Yeah, that’s true. They’re great transitions, too. And those moments of transition are often the times when we step back and say, “Okay, so I have this, and what am I curious about as we’re gonna go forward down here.

John: One of the things you mentioned earlier is that your book includes a discussion of the whole process of publishing. Because while academics do a lot of writing all through their academic careers, most academics have not been very heavily involved in publishing. And I don’t think most of them have many ways of getting that information unless they happen to know other people who have been successful in it. So having a book like yours, I think, would be really helpful in providing faculty with information that they just don’t have in their own experiences.

Jim: Yeah, so there’s a chapter which just focuses on guiding people from a query to publication. So like, what are the actual steps of this process? What are the kinds of things you will need in order to be able to get to that moment when you see your work in print? And so, essentially, I tried to boil it down to four things: three stages and then one sort of central recommendation about how to get this process started. The three things are essentially the query, the query is sort of the short email they’re gonna give. And for me, those are really important because they give me a sense of what’s the question or the problem that you’re addressing? What’s your argument? And why are you the right person to do it? So like, to me a query has got to do those three things, but not much more than that. It’s not like an academic job letter, where it’s five big paragraphs that covers two pages. No, I want to be able to read this thing very quickly and get a sense of who you are, what the project is, what’s going to be interesting, what’s unique about it, all those things. A query letter is like our handshake, where we’re going to kind of introduce ourselves to each other. The proposal, often, that’s all you need for a newspaper or magazine is a query and then the article or something. But for a book, you have to have this next stage of the process, which is a book proposal. And those are a lot of work. A book proposal might be 50 pages, because it’s going to include a overview of the book, which is usually like one to two pages, it’s going to have an author biography, which might just be a page or so, it’s going to have a chapter outline and that might be five or 10 pages. A chapter outline, not just a table of contents with like titles, but at least a paragraph or two for each chapter, and then a writing sample, which should be like at least like a chapter. So that we’re talking about like a 50-page document here. And it also should include… this is gonna vary from publisher to publisher… but it probably will also include a short analysis of the competition, so that you can use that as a way to show what is gonna be different or new or unique about your book. And sometimes publishers will also want like a marketing or promotion overview, like what are you going to do to help support the marketing and promotion of this book, for example. If you have a podcast, if you have a huge social media presence, if you are planning to attend a bunch of conferences in this field, you have connections, all those things can contribute to a sense of what kind of marketing or promotion you would be able to offer for your book. So that’s a big document. It’s really important when we see like student writing, for example, or those of us who teach student writing, sometimes the first page or two kind of gives you a sense of, okay, kind of the quantity of the students writing. Often, the same thing might be true for the proposal. From a couple pages, I can usually get a sense of how experienced the author is, is this project right for our particular series, what kind of writer they’re going to be, in terms of both of their writing, in terms of what kind of person they’re gonna be to work with. But as long as I get over those sort of initial couple pages and I’m still interested, then the proposal really has to show me that it’s going to work as a full book. Once you get past that, then it kind of just goes through the different processes of what’s going to happen to your book when you turn it in, essentially: the review process, copy editing, proofreading, working with a cover designer, the author questionnaire, which is a huge document that is going to help support what you’re going to be able to do support the book. And then also, often there’ll be a call with the marketing and promotion team, so kind of guiding people through that whole process. So those are the three stages I talk about in the book and try to give basic information and advice about that. But the thing I start with is, whenever possible, submit your work to a person. And what I mean by that is not just submitting to “Dear editor” or something like that, do a little bit of basic research on the publication and the person that is going to be sort of giving the initial review of your work. And there’s easy ways to do that, you can look on the web pages of the publisher, acquisition editors will typically have like a short description of what they acquire. You can also look at, like what other books they published. And one of the ways to do this is very simple. Most books will have an acknowledgement section, you can see who edited the book, and whether it was an agent. And so you see those two things. And if you look at books in your area, at the publisher you’re trying to target, you’ll be able to piece together a sense of “Okay, what kind of books does this editor tried to publish?” then you can sort of reach out to that person and say, “Look, I’m a huge fan of this book, which I know you edited and I feel like mine would fit well with this series that you’re overseeing,” whatever it might be. So try to get a little sense of the person that you’re writing to. You can be specific about why you are writing to that particular person at that particular publisher. And that’s something that we don’t have to do typically for academic disciplinary journals or something like that, right? We’re just sending it off to like a email box or just sort of being very objective, “Dear editor, here’s my work,” essentially. But as you’re reaching outside of your disciplinary journals, or academic books, you want to be able to be a little bit more deliberate about reaching out to a specific person.

Rebecca: What you’re describing also sounds a lot more relational, just generally.

Jim: Definitely, and I also make the argument in the book that it sometimes can seem like an adversarial relationship, sometimes between you as an author and an editor, because they’re like the gatekeepers. And they’re going to tell you, “No, we don’t have the money for that table to put in your book,” or an sometimes you can get frustrated as an author. But what’s really important to remember is, we are on your side, the editor always wants you to be successful. And so sometimes we might say things which are like, “You shouldn’t do this,” or “we don’t want to do this,” and “we can’t do that.” And that can be frustrating for an author. But I promise you, I am not like waiting there to kind of stamp an F on your query, [LAUGHTER]. I want you to be successful. Every query that comes in, there’s like a little sort of grain of hope that I’m hoping that this is going to be an amazing book, it’s going to change this person’s life. That’s the best scenario for me, I help someone write their first book, and it’s really successful. And so I’m hoping for that for everybody that writes to me. And I think that the same thing is true for editors. So always keep that in mind. These are the people that want you to be successful, and you have to treat them accordingly. Just be aware of that in terms of how you respond to them, react to them, and then you try to be like a good citizen of the book in the process.

Rebecca: So Jim, when can we get this book?

Jim: Yeah, so I’m finishing it right now, actually. I have one chapter left, I expect to finish it within the next month. So it’s probably be late 2023 or early 2024.

Rebecca: So I’m looking forward to it.

Jim: Thanks.

John: And as you mentioned before, that publishing process does take a lot of time.

Jim: That’s one of the places where it can seem adversarial to an author, right? Why are you taking so long to do this. I gave you a manuscript, why does it take a year to come out? But, I try to go through that stuff in the book. But there are good reasons. And all those reasons are is trying to help you make the most successful book

John: incentives are compatible between the author and the editor, because both parties benefit from having successful books.

Jim: Absolutely.

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

Jim: Yeah, so this book. It’s funny because I had the idea for this book. And I’d written the proposal for it partially, because I had also left my full-time academic position. I was thinking about these issues. And so I sent the proposal actually out before I got sick. And then I signed the contract in the hospital. actually. [LAUGHTER] So that kind of renewed my commitment to it. So that’s kind of been all I’ve been doing since then. But then once I finish that, and I just have already in my mind now, probably I’m going to write some kind of memoir of what I have experienced and what I’ve learned from that. My first two books actually were memoirs. And so I haven’t been in that genre in a while, but I think I had experiences now there’s probably memoir worthy at this point. [LAUGHTER] So yeah, that’s probably the next thing that will happen.

John: Well, we’re looking forward to reading all of them. So we wish you success on that. And it’s great talking to you again.

Jim: Likewise. Thank you.

Rebecca: Yeah, thanks, Jim.

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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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271. Should I Say Yes?

Busy faculty and staff are known to get things done, resulting in additional requests to engage in service activities. In this episode, Kristin Croyle and Kendra Cadogan join us to discuss how and when to say no throughout your career trajectory.  Kristin is a psychologist and the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at SUNY Oswego. Kendra is the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer and Interim Director of the James A. Triandiflou Institute for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Transformative Practice at SUNY Oswego.

Show Notes

  • Ansburg, P. I., Basham, M. E., & Gurung, R. A. (2022). Thriving in academia: Building a career at a teaching-focused institution. American Psychological Association.
  • Thriving in Adademia. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 252. August 31, 2022.
  • Webinar:  The Art of Saying No, National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity.
  • Monday Motivator – “Just Say No”, National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity.
  • Five Ways to Say No, Chronicle of Higher Education (August 28, 2014),Transcript.

Transcript

Rebecca: Busy faculty and staff are known to get things done, resulting in additional requests to engage in service activities. In this episode, we discuss how and when to say no throughout your career trajectory.

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

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John: Our guests today are Kristin Croyle and Kendra Cadogan. Kristin is a psychologist and the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at SUNY Oswego. Kendra is the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer and Interim Director of the James A. Triandiflou Institute for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Transformative Practice at SUNY Oswego. Welcome, Kendra and welcome back, Kristin.

Kristin: Thank you, John.

Kendra: Thank you so much.

Rebecca: So today’s teas are:… Kendra, are you drinking tea?

Kendra: I’m not. I’m drinking a protein shake [LAUGHTER] if that counts.

Rebecca: I think that might be the first protein shake that we’ve had. [LAUGHTER] So that’s good. Usually we get coffee, diet Coke, etc. How about you, Kristin?

Kristin: I got a tea for Christmas, an early Christmas present. It’s turmeric chamomile, And it’s very tasty.

Rebecca: Oh, that sounds tasty.

Kendra: …sounds good.

John: And I’m drinking an Irish Breakfast tea today.

Rebecca: And I have blue sapphire tea again,

Kristin: Oooh. It’s got the best name

John: …that’s getting repetitive.

Rebecca: I know. [LAUGHTER] But I only have like one more pot left. And then I’m gonna switch to something else. Because I’m running out. I think I have one pot left.

John: Maybe you can play a green sapphire or something?

Rebecca: Yeah.

John: So we’ve invited you both here today to discuss the challenges faced by those faculty and staff who made the mistake of being productive in some service role, and then continually get asked to do more. We often hear that expression, “if you’d like to have something done, ask someone who’s a busy person.” And we know both of you have experiences as volunteers to do service work, as well as in your current positions, asking other people to do some work to assist in your roles. Why do we end up with such an uneven division of service requests of faculty and staff?

Kristin: One thing I love about starting with this question, because we’re going to talk about some strategies that people can use to think about service and say no, but you didn’t ask that as the first question. What you asked was about the structure of the institution, and what makes the structure of higher ed create uneven service roles. So, without answering to start with, I’m just gonna say, I love that as an entry question, because it’s easy to talk about the difficulties people have saying no as an individual issue, but it’s an issue that people can develop individual strategies for. But it’s not an individual issue, it’s an institutional issue, it’s an academia issue, it’s a structural issue. So, good question. And I’m gonna start by saying that there is no good institutional tracking of service. I’m sure all of us on this podcast have asked people to serve. But it’s not like we’re looking at a list and saying, “Well, this person is already advising two student orgs and serving on six committees and doing all of these other things.” There’s no master list. So we can’t look and say, “Oh, it would be so much.” And, at the same time, I also realized that’s a total cop out answer, because, even though there’s no institutional lists, we also know, don’t we? Like I could ask this person who is chairing faculty assembly… you know that’s what she’s doing. I could ask this person that I’ve seen at the last 12 committee meetings that I went to, and that’s not at one committee that’s at 12 different ones. [LAUGHTER] So, on the one hand, there is no institutional tracking, but on the other hand, the frequent targets, we know who they are. So, why don’t keep asking the same people? What do you think, Kendra?

Kendra: I think that those are all great points, Kristin, and I totally agree. You mentioned the chair of the Faculty Senate, who happens to be a woman. And I think that segues into another trend that we see really well, which is that we often see women and minoritized faculty being asked to do things more frequently. I think some of that is related to just some antiquated stereotypes that we have about gender and ideas about human being nurturing, and all of those things, and maybe willing to please, or able to serve and roles that we might not traditionally ask male faculty and staff to serve in. But I think that some of it, particularly for women, and I guess for minoritized faculty, too, is about the pressures that women sometimes face in the workplace around their careers and around advancement and wanting to make sure that they’re always going above and beyond to prove themselves. And we never want to say no, because you don’t know how that will reflect on you. And you certainly don’t want to be seen as less capable or not a team player or not willing to take charge or take initiative. So all of those things in ways work against folks and I think make it easier for us to continuously burden certain people with a plethora of requests.

Rebecca: One of the things that you both highlighted a little bit is that the faculty and staff who are regularly involved, regularly volunteering, regularly providing service, become more visible in these spaces. So those are the people that you think of first because they are visible. There’s a lot of faculty and staff who may actually be great folks for particular things but they’re just not as visible as well. I’m not really sure how we raise the visibility of some of those folks too, but I think that is just something that does occur.

Kristin: And part of what you’re mentioning is also that service really is a skill, and that when people do certain things they get better and better at it. So if the Dean is looking for an interim chair from outside of the department, the list of people who has both the skill set and the temperament and proven leadership skills, that’s a shortlist; that’s a very short list. Certainly, as people serve in more challenging roles, they really do develop unique skill sets that make them more easily tapped in the future. But on the other side of it, in asking newer faculty and staff to serve, I don’t know what you do, Kindra, but I actually, in the college, I look at a list, like, here’s the entire list of faculty and staff in the college. And I look down the list to make sure that I’m not just thinking about the people that I have run into and talked to in the last few days, or that have served in a similar role in the past, so that I can think about and tap people who could potentially grow from a service opportunity. So it is both a skill set, but also an opportunity for a lot of different people.

Kendra: That’s a great strategy. Kristin. Typically I try to ask around, I ask for referrals, I ask for deans or the provost or whoever, faculty who maybe live and work in those spaces already to provide recommendations. “Hey, is there someone that you know who’s up and coming or who’s looking for more experience in this particular area that could benefit from me tapping them to do this thing?” [LAUGHTER]

Kristin: One thing we didn’t talk about specifically, is the desire to have diverse voices in many of our service opportunities, and how that is unduly burdensome for some faculty and staff.

Kendra: Yeah, that’s a great point. And I think that’s a big conversation. On one hand, of course, you want representation, representation does matter. Like we say that all the time, and I think that we really, really mean it. But then again, it’s also very easy to fall into the patterns of “these are the diverse faculty that I see or interact with regularly, or who are very active in these spaces, so I’m gonna keep tapping them for the same things.” I think part of the solution to that or a path toward a solution is to make sure that we are centering inclusivity and belonging in our institutional priorities, and really thinking about how we help others develop their DEI skill sets and elevate their DEI practice, so that they can step into those spaces and be impactful and provide leadership and guidance in the way that we heavily sometimes rely upon faculty and staff of color, in particular, a diverse faculty to provide. It’s kind of a long path toward a solution, but I think it’s one way of really beginning to eliminate that problem of constantly overburdening diverse faculty and staff with requests.

John: And part of the issue is the underrepresentation on college faculty and staff of the groups that we have been referring to… and those same faculty and staff, though, often have more demands on them from students, because while our student bodies have become much more diverse, the faculty and staff have not been, and many students will reach out to people from affinity groups that are again, often somewhat limited on many of our campuses, which puts additional burdens on those faculty and staff.

Kendra: Yes, absolutely.

Rebecca: And that service… that’s often invisible, it’s easy to count or say like, “oh, this committee, that committee,” but I think advisement and mentoring that takes a lot of time and energy, and it’s not as well documented. Clearly Kristin already [LAUGHTER] raised the flag that we don’t have a great way of tracking these things anyways, but I think that, in particular, is something hard to quantify, because it doesn’t look the same for everybody.

Kristin: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I think that one of the difficulties with this is that the recipient of the service is the student, which makes it highly visible for students, and almost invisible for faculty colleagues. So if you’re advising a student organization that is really active, they may be doing amazing work, and the work that a faculty member is doing as that advisor may be the thing that makes the difference in retaining those students and mentoring them to successful careers, but their colleagues may not see any of it, because it’s happening directly with the students and their colleagues are not going to the student org meetings, because their student org meetings, not faculty organization meetings. So not only is it downplayed sometimes in tenure and promotion materials, their faculty colleagues don’t catch that it’s downplayed. If they were serving in Faculty Assembly or on the Gen Ed Committee, or the Curriculum Committee, their colleagues would say, “Wait, hey, didn’t you do all of this stuff that you didn’t talk about?” But it’s both not given as much credit as sometimes it deserves at some universities, but it also is sometimes literally not recognized because people didn’t see them do it.

Rebecca: So why do we say yes to so many things?

Kristin: Why do we? Rebecca, I feel like you should ans….. No, I’m kidding. You’re actually very good at this.

John: I’m actually asking because I need some advice here. [LAUGHTER]

Kristin: Kendra, why do you say yes?

Kendra: Oh, man, that’s a loaded question. [LAUGHTER] It’s hard to say because it’s hard to say no. It’s hard to say no sometimes. And when you feel like someone is coming to you, because there’s a need that you can fill, sometimes you can get carried away with this idea that you are the person who has to do the thing, because if you don’t do it, it can’t be done. And then there are some of the other things we’ve talked about: the pressures of our careers, wanting to be taken seriously, wanting to be credible, wanting to be able to advance. You can often feel like your path to advancement is going to be barred at some point. If you keep saying no.

Kristin: The number one reason that I say yes, is one that Kendra mentioned, it’s usually because the ask comes from people I care about in professional terms, colleagues that I respect who are doing good work. And if they say, “Can you help me with this good work?” I want to say yes to them. And they’re often asking about issues that I care about… colleagues that are doing good work on things that I think are really important… I want to say yes to that. But I also say yes, because I am interested in a lot of things. And if people say, “I’m going to work on this thing that you haven’t worked on,” sometimes that’ll be a yes, because I just want to learn about that new thing. And when I learn about new things, that is a type of personal growth for me and I get renewed from that. So saying “yes” sometimes also means that I get that personal growth boost. Or there have been times when the ask has been like “You’re the only one who can do this, can you please step up?” …and I know that faculty have that implied experience too, not always like the explicit, someone literally says, “You are the only one who can do this, can you please do this,” but sometimes it’s just implied. And it can be a strong implication like ‘In your small department, you are the only tenured faculty, how about you become chair?” So I do want to question… just push back a little bit. If you stick around in higher ed for longer than about 15 years, you’re going to start realizing there are ways to get the business done, it is almost impossible that you are truly the only way, almost… not 100%, but like 95%. Now, I don’t want anybody to think that they’re really not irreplaceable, because everybody, at least at SUNY-Oswego, I think, is irreplaceable. But do you really have to do that one thing you really don’t want to do? Isn’t there another way that the institution can find a way to get the work done? And if you think about your colleague who’s really good at saying “no,” you see how that works, that there is a way that if this really is going to push you beyond your limits, there’s a way… there’s a way.

John: So what are some good ways of saying no to those requests that push you a bit beyond your limit?

Rebecca: …or that just provide inequity?

Kendra: Well, I think it depends. One of the things that we didn’t really mention was that the flip side of always saying yes, you know, there the positive reasons that Kristin really just highlighted, but there are also some more practical reasons that aren’t always so positive, like tenure, or time spent as an institution. For newer faculty and staff, it can be really scary, or unclear even, about how much can I say “no” to? What is a directive and what is an option? And if you’re new, if you’re not, I think too a lot of times, maybe at even a public institution where you do have some backing of unions, the employment structures are a little more forgiving. In some cases, it can be really scary to say “no” as a new person, a new faculty member, a new staff member. So I think that there have to be strategies for someone tenured and who have been in a place for a long time can employ that will work really well for them, that might not work so well for someone who’s newer. And it’s important, I think, to maybe flush out what’s a good idea for someone who’s been here for a while and what’s the strategy that a newer person might employ to say no.

John: For new faculty who are struggling with all the other commitments they have to do to be successful and advancing towards tenure, what are some good strategies to say “no?”

Kristin: I think it’s a good question that speaks to learning academic culture. And even if you’ve been around a long time, you’re still learning the academic culture, because your role is always changing. It’s a strategy that an Associate Professor uses or a full professor or someone who has transitioned from faculty to staff, there are all kinds of culture change questions. How do you negotiate this new culture? And the first thing I would say is to be clear what you need to do for your job. And if that’s, “I need to make tenure, so I need to publish this much,” if that’s “I now am in a staff position and staff often have less flexibility in saying yes and no, and these are the outcomes that I need to achieve to keep my job.” So part of it is being absolutely clear. You can say yes to 50 things right now. But if you’re on tenure track, and you don’t get your publications, your master service is not going to pay off. So being very clear on what your job is. And if you don’t know, which is a real possibility sometimes, you develop your kind of committee of mentors. Who do you go to and say, “Hey, I got this really interesting request” or even like “I got a cold outreach from a publisher to write up my course as a textbook. I got a cold outreach from this person I don’t know on campus to fill a university wide-service role.”? You got to have somebody to ask So developing your committee of mentors, not one mentor, but your committee of mentors, because they’re all going to have a different view. And then you combine that with delay, especially like the sidewalk ask, you know what I’m talking about, right? Or like I caught you after this meeting, or I’m just going to do this quick ask. So the first answer is to delay. Say “that sounds like a great opportunity. Let me think about it for a day or two and look at my other commitments,” delay, then you go to your committee of mentors. And if you don’t literally have one, John, you had this great book for a new faculty reading group in the fall Thriving in Academia. And I think you also did a podcast, right?

John: We did, with all of the authors.

Kristin: So in Thriving in Academia, there’s a table, a little flowchart, a flowchart that says, with this service request, what do you think about first? And what do you think of next? So if you can’t go to your committee of mentors, you can go to these three authors, as your committee of mentors and check the flowchart. Does the flowchart say you should do it? Or does the flowchart say, Oh really, think hard about this one. This is a no. What would you add? Kendra?

Kendra: I’m just thinking about myself now. How do I usually say no? And now I’m wondering if I say no often enough? [LAUGHTER] Probably not sometimes. But when I do say no, on the rare occasion, what I try to do is also think about who I can point to, to the person asking me for whatever, to actually fulfill the request. So is there someone who’s better suited to complete this project or do this thing than I am? I think about resources. And I try to make sure that rather than just saying a flat no, and leaving someone hanging, I’m pointing them in the direction of someone who can help, someone who can fill the need and hopefully benefit from it, not just someone that I can shove the work off onto, but someone who can really fill the need, benefit from fulfilling that need, and it can be a mutually beneficial situation. I also think about just being mindful of self in those moments. So re-centering self care, we talk about self care all the time in higher ed, we write about it, we research about it, I think we’re actually really bad at it a lot of the times. You have to really center yourself. When someone is making a request, you have to think about yourself. What am I able to do? It’s like they always say on the plane, you have to put your oxygen mask on first, before you put someone else’s oxygen mask on or else both of you will be out of luck. So I think in those moments, you have to really be mindful about centering yourself and tuning in and knowing where you are: what your bandwidth is, what can you give, and is it something that you can do and still be healthy and still be whole and still be able to do all the other things that you’ve already signed up for, that you’re already responsible for? So I don’t know that those are necessarily strategies, per se, but they’re things to think about when you say no. Sometimes you just have to say no, very clearly and concisely, [LAUGHTER] you can’t do it.

Kristin: Kendra, do you have a script in mind when you say no? Like, do you have the words?

Kendra: That’s actually a really good question. I think when I do say “No,” it’s usually something very pleasant. Like, “I’m sorry, I’m not able to do that.” Sometimes I’ll literally just say, “Unfortunately, I don’t have the bandwidth, but here is someone who might help.” Or “here is another option,” maybe another way of accomplishing this task, another group of people who are already doing this work and can give you some additional assistance. So it’s usually like the nice thing that like the pleasant but clear, “No, I’m not able to do that.” And then the “but here’s how I can help you by sending you in this direction or sending you towards these resources.” That would probably be my script.

Kristin: And part of that is because I think your role is unique. And so when people are asking you, they’re really asking you. [LAUGHTER]

Kendra: Yes.

Kristin: So being able to provide another alternative, or another way that you could contribute, is a really nice option. In other choices. There could be just “That sounds like a great opportunity, but right now, unfortunately, I don’t have the time. I look forward to seeing what the results are. I look forward to seeing the report from that committee.” And no, of course, you don’t always have to provide an explanation. You can just say, “No,” you don’t have to say “I’m too busy.” You can just say no. But perhaps that person is going to be someone you’re asking to serve in the future. So it can be nice to continue to develop the relationship even if you have to say no. Something that frequently serving people sometimes forget that they can do is also think about how much time this commitment is going to take and asking for that time back. So let’s say you’re in a small department and your colleague is injured and is out for half of the semester in the course that only you can double up on. So this is one of those where you’re almost irreplaceable, there really isn’t anybody else who can step in. And you know that if you’re injured in the future, you’d really like your colleague to step up. So there’s a little bit of a social contract where you want to say yes, but that’s a significant time commitment. So what are you going to lose from spending your time on that and how can you get it back in the future? So you could ask, if the area of your rub is really financial, you can ask for extra pay, and you probably should get extra pay either way, because it is extra work. But if your area of rub is research productivity, that you’ve been really trying to write, you can say, “Well, if I’m going to do this, then I need a course release the next semester” and negotiate for the thing that you are having to sacrifice to see if you can get it back in a different way. And that is not an unusual thing. So it wouldn’t be like the weirdest thing that anyone has ever asked for, even if you’ve never thought about it before, someone else has thought of that and asked for it before. So you can always ask, what is your trade off =and how can you trade that back? If you’re a junior faculty and your chair is asking you to do something that you really don’t think you have the time to do, but you’re a little concerned about the chair ask you can say these are the things I’m doing right now, w hat would you suggest I take off my plate? How would you suggest I reorganize this? I’d love to say yes to this, but right now I don’t have the time. How would you suggest that I prioritize so that I am ready for my next tenure review? So there are ways… there are ways. But it is good to have a script in mind because we can all say “no” when we’re actually not being asked to do anything, you could just make one up right now. But if you’re in a higher pressure situation where someone you care about their opinion is making an ask right at that moment, it can be hard to come up with an answer unless you already have one in mind. So “that’s a great opportunity. Let me think about it for a couple of days.” Go ahead, use that one, just go right ahead. Even if it’s me doing the ask, you can say it right back to me, I’ll be okay with that.

Rebecca: One strategy I’ve used too is, in that delaying tactic, is always asking for clarification: what the responsibility will be, what the time commitment will be, what the meeting schedule is, so that you actually have enough information to make an informed decision. Because often the ask doesn’t come with all that information.

Kristin: And you know what happens when you ask those questions, right? The person making the ask is like, “Oh, I don’t have answers to all those. We should have goals and a timeline.” … you know, good stuff.

Rebecca: Sometimes you really want to say yes to something because it just is very appealing for whatever reason. What are some strategies so that you can say yes? We’ve mentioned negotiating for time or other resources. But the other thing that I think about is you look at all the things on your plate, and see what are some things I could roll off of, if I want to roll on to something new? Or if I want to pursue something different? What can I get rid of or step away from? Are there strategies for being able to step away from some of the things that you were committed to before that we could think about in terms of strategies for ultimately saying yes, but saying no to something else? [LAUGHTER]

Kendra: One of the things that we didn’t necessarily mention before in the saying “no,” but that applies here is this idea of acting as a consultant. So if a great opportunity comes up, and you really want to say yes to it, but you have a whole bunch of other things that you’ve already committed to, it might be a great time to reevaluate those other things and determine what are the things that I really need to put the legwork into and be boots on the ground on? And what are the things that I can provide a perspective on or give some guidance on in a more passive way, that then frees me up to maybe actually do the heavy lift for this other opportunity? That’s really great that I really want to be involved in. So I think that’s one way to move yourself closer to a yes [LAUGHTER] and an offload of some of the other things that might be standing in the way of that “yes,” Kristin, if you have any thoughts?

Kristin: Yeah, and again, thinking about I say, a five year plan… some people actually have those. I’ve never had a five year plan. But I admire people who do. But I do have my idea of my career trajectory, what I find really rewarding and what I don’t. And when I’m offered a service opportunity that aligns to the things that I find really rewarding, that it is exciting and I’ll learn something new about, and be able to contribute about things that I value, I want to say yes, even if it’s really time consuming. So yes, I look at the combination of things that I’m doing, think about how they contribute to both the things that I value and what the institution has hired me to do, because I do have a job that I have to do. And there are always ways to rollback your commitment on some. Many service opportunities require only an intermittent time commitment, you got to really hit it hard for a couple days here and then you can back off for several months, and figuring out how to fit that together. And consult, consult, consult, ask other people, I actually used the flowchart myself in the book at one point a couple months ago saying, “Oh, this looks interesting. Should I do that?” My flowchart says no. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: And the flowchart can’t possibly be wrong. [LAUGHTER]

John: Actually, the flowchart most often says no, because of concerns about faculty taking on too many responsibilities.

Kristin: Yes, because the first question in the flowchart is, “Do you have the time?” which leads you to “no” a lot of the time but it was also of low institutional value and not really important to me and not really important to anyone else, and I didn’t have the time and like “flowchart says, “no.” I was like, “well, probably right, [LAUGHTER] those are all good points that I should have been thinking more about.”

Kendra: Well, Kristin, I think to your point, too, about going back to your five-year plan and think about your career trajectory, and how well the things you’re involved in are serving you toward that end, it is absolutely okay to go back to previous commitments, and say “I had a wonderful time, this has been a great opportunity. I’ve learned a lot. but this doesn’t necessarily fit anymore in my larger plan. This might not be as helpful for me in my trajectory as it once was, and so I’m going to maybe end my involvement as of such and such a date.” Sometimes it helps to give folks a timeline on your end, clearing your plate for other things doesn’t mean that you have to immediately walk out the door on whatever else you had going on, right? …It’s probably not advisable, actually. But I can tell you that I’ve reached out to folks to ask them to serve on things or to participate in things that they’ve been participating on. And they’ve had really nice responses that are like “Kendra, I really appreciate this opportunity. I’ve really enjoyed the work that I’ve been doing, but I’ve taken on some new responsibilities that are more in line with some of my other interests or other needs or professional development, and so I won’t be able to participate in this anymore.” And I can’t be upset about it, it’s a lovely response. And I totally understand that folks want to develop, they have other interests, they need to be able to spend their time and spread it around sometimes and they’ve really been helpful to me in the time that they were able to engage in the thing that I needed them for. And I’m more than happy to say, “We’re going to miss you so much, you’ve been amazing, but I wish you the best of luck in this new thing that you’re really interested in. And let me know if I can be helpful to you.” Or let me know if these two different interests have any synergies or if there’s ever any way we can collaborate in the future. So it’s certainly okay to sometimes walk back from previous commitments very tactfully and very appropriately, but it can be done.

Rebecca: I think it’s also possible to say yes to just a part of something…

Kristin: Yeah.

Rebecca: …like, maybe the ask is like this big, like, it’s huge, but what they really want you for, or where you could provide the most value, is during a brainstorm session, or designing how something might be implemented, but not actually work on the implementation. So there’s a way to sometimes contribute without committing as much as the ask was originally.

John: …and defining a scope upfront.

Kristin: Yeah, that’s a great point. With all the searches that we do, I hear a lot from faculty about the incredible amount of time that goes into searches, and different ways that departments organize them that burden some people versus the others, but I think that’s a great example. If you can say, ”I’m gonna take candidates out to dinner,” which is a huge time commitment, but it’s very focused, it only happens during the visits, “I don’t have time to review all of the applicants and to serve on the committee in that sense, but I can take them all out to dinner,” there are trade offs that can work better for life in the way that your time is structured, that you can see that other people can’t see. So nobody’s going to suggest to you, how about you just do part of this, but they may be very open to that response.

Kendra: I would say in 9 times out of 10, someone’s asking you to do something and your response is, “Here’s the piece that I can do, I’m not able to provide assistance in these other areas,” that person is going to be more than happy with what you are able to contribute. So those are great points and great ways to be able to clear room to say yes.

John: What are some of the differences in the constraints of faculty and staff when they’re being asked to engage in service roles?

Kristin: I think the differences there are really baked into the differences in the roles, that faculty are expected to serve institutional priorities, but in some ways, almost work as independent contractors. It’s like ”here’s work to do, figure out how you’re going to get it all done in this amount of time, we’re going to come check on you in a year, see how you’re doing,” whereas staff are expected to stress institutional goals on a day-to-day basis. They work much tighter in teams, and their collaborative skills are usually much more highly valued. And because of that, if a faculty member says no, the expectation is well, that’s because they’re busy doing the other stuff that they’re supposed to do. We don’t even need to ask them what that is right now, because they’re hopefully writing. But if a staff member says no, in some ways, it’s weird. Staff say yes. Because so much of their work is being asked, being asked to lead, being asked to run a program, being asked to show up at 11 o’clock at night to serve a midnight breakfast… being asked, and the expected answer in many cases is yes. So being able to constrain the role and say no is often more fraught for a staff member. Kendra, what has been your experience working with staff and helping coach them to shape their time as much as they can?

Kendra: Yeah, that’s a great way to articulate the differences between faculty and staff, I think. I don’t know if faculty have performance programs.

Kristin: …not like that, not like staff do.

Kendra: Yes, exactly. Staff have sometimes very prescriptive performance programs that literally layout, area by area, theme by theme, what all of the duties and expectations are going to be. And then of course, there’s the other duties as assigned. So it can be very difficult for a staff member to say no, and it can also be very confusing, I think, in some cases for staff to understand “What are the things that I can potentially say ‘no’ to? What are the things I’m given latitude on to exercise autonomy and say, ‘No, I’m not interested in this,’ versus what are the things that are more imperative.’” When working with staff, what I try to do is be very clear with the folks I work with, with my colleagues, about what are the expectations and the needs versus the options and opportunities. So I tried to be really collaborative with colleagues and say, “Hey, there’s an opportunity that’s coming up,” or “there’s a need that needs to be filled, you have expertise you have, whatever the reason, I see you as a great fit for this.” Now, the conversation can then go one of two ways. One way, which is what I try to always have it be is, “Please let me know what you think. What are your thoughts about this opportunity? Are you interested? Is this something that you would want to do?” And that gives the staff member agency to think about what’s on the table and to make a decision about whether or not they want to be involved. The other option is to say, “This is something that needs to be done. you’re the person strategically for the job, so I really need your help in completing this.” And that’s less of an option, but at least it gives folks and understanding of like, okay, this is not necessarily optional. This is something that I need to do to be a strategic and fully collaborative member of this team. So sometimes it can be a little tricky. But I typically find that if I’m really transparent with my colleagues, and let them know, “Hey, here’s what I’m thinking about. Here’s why this makes sense. And this is either something that I’m offering to you that you have agency to say yes or no about, or this is something that is part of our strategic plan that I really need you to be responsible for. And here’s what you being responsible for it looks like.” Folks seem to deal with that really well. I think it’s much harder for staff when there aren’t clear expectations and when they’re also not given any input in decision making, when you’re just “voluntold.” …not even really voluntoldl, like literally just, “this is what you’re going to be doing.” It’s always better to include folks in the decisions that you’re making, and to provide as many opportunities for options as possible.

Kristin: Absolutely, you can see the differences in other ways too, like if a faculty member is asked to serve, usually no one is asked except the faculty member, the department chair isn’t asked, the dean isn’t asked, unless it’s someone like, “Can you think of anybody?” and then you suggest them, but usually it’s straight to the faculty member and it’s up to them to figure out whether or not they want to say no. Oftentimes, when staff are asked to serve in different roles, their supervisor is asked first, could you release them for this? Would it be okay with you if they do this? And sometimes faculty who move into administrative roles will start to experience that difference in culture in subtle ways and may not understand, like, what is happening around them? How come when I’m in this committee meeting, only the faculty say no to something. the staff say yes, or how come when I approached this person for help, I got a little cranky email from their supervisor. So it’s good to know that there’s a difference and also to respect that the two kind of different cultures, that both have a role and their pros and cons, and to know what you’re stepping into when you’re asking people to do things.

Rebecca: I think this highlights a little bit of what you were mentioning before, Kristin, about knowing what your role is or what your position is. Because sometimes staff would also have the opportunity to ask a clarifying question like, “How does this fit into my performance plan?” or “How does this help us meet the goals or initiatives that my division or my group is meant to be achieving?”

Kristin: Absolutely.

Rebecca: Because if there’s not alignment there, then that’s a pretty easy “no.”

Kristin: Absolutely. Do either of you two have strategies that have worked for you?

John: I have never been very good at these decisions. Rebecca?

John: I say no, sometimes.

Kristin: How do you do it?

Rebecca: I’ve worked really hard to make sure, and it took a long time to do this, but to align my scholarship and research and creative practice with service and my institutional responsibilities. And there’s pretty good alignment with those things at this time. And when something seems like it’s not in alignment, that’s when I have a pretty clear “no.” When it does seem aligned, that’s when I have a harder time saying “no.”

Kristin: And you don’t want to.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Kristin: That’s a great strategy. And the people I have known and worked with that say no the best, they have developed over time clear guidelines, very much like that. I worked with someone who was really good. This is something I could never do. I could never say no to a student who wanted to work with me in research. I don’t think I’ve ever said no to a student who wanted to work with me in research. I have occasionally matched them to someone who’s a better match. That’s different. But he was very good at saying no to students who wanted to work with him in research, which was like my Achilles heel, but he just had very clear guidelines: “I only work with students who are at this point, X, Y and Z,” and they were not unreasonable things. And then he would say yes to those students. And it opened up time for him to really mentor them. And I’ve been lucky to work with people like you and him. You have a way that you approach your career that you have thought about. This is where my limit is, so I can say yes to these students who want to work with me and really work with them. But I can say yes to this giant time commitment, because I know it contributes to my research and to my service,

Rebecca: I think that it can help to also just have colleagues around you who say “no.”

Kristin: Yes.

Rebecca: …and seek out that camaraderie. [LAUGHTER]

Kendra: I think that’s a great point. And it goes back to something Kristin said about when you’re that faculty member, you don’t understand the faculty staff. dynamic and you reach out to a staff member to ask for help and get a cranky letter or cranky email back from their supervisor. That does happen. But the reality is, I think we need to, again, be more supportive, particularly of newer colleagues. I’m thinking of new staff very specifically, and I’m thinking about this from the perspective of a supervisor. I think it’s really important when we’re mentoring new staff, and helping them develop professionally and think about what the next steps are for them, we also need to provide some additional support to them in helping them to say no, helping them to really prioritize and think about what serves them and what doesn’t. And one of the things that I’ve said to folks that I’ve worked with in the past is they’ll come to me and say, “Well, Kendra, someone’s asking me to do this, or this or that, and I’m not really sure that I want to do it, or I just don’t know.” So like, okay, let’s talk about how this fits into your professional trajectory. Does it makes sense for you, does it make sense in the work that you’re doing? And if the conclusion that we come to is really no, this doesn’t serve you, then by all means, feel free, if you don’t feel comfortable saying to this person, for whatever reason, no, if you’re too new to feel comfortable doing that, then by all means, I’ll be happy to reply as your supervisor and say, “This is not going to work, this doesn’t fit into whatever,” I’ll just say no for you. Or you can always feel free to say, I spoke with my supervisor, she doesn’t think it’s a great time for this, I don’t have the bandwidth. Feel free to throw me under the bus. Because I do think that part of what I have to help folks learn is, of course, how to advocate for themselves and how to be full adult professionals, but it’s also to be supportive, and to help them to kind of get their legs under them. And sometimes part of that is helping them say no.

Kristin: Awesome,

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

Rebecca: Please tell us how you’re going to redo higher ed [LAUGHTER] and make this better?

Kristin: That would be awesome. And you know, the funny thing about that question is that it’s always a problem that we don’t keep track of service better. But the other side of me is like, “Oh my gosh, what a pain that would be, a huge amount of work for very little payoff.” Is there a better way to do it? So I don’t have an answer on what’s next for supporting service, except to be more proactive in my request to say this is what the commitment is, let’s talk about your current commitments and how we can shape what you’re doing to support both what you want to get done and what I’d really like to ask you to do, [LAUGHTER] not just the single ask, yeah, not just like, here’s the one thing, but instead to ask in a more comprehensive way.

Kendra: And I also don’t have any solutions for fixing higher ed, unfortunately, at this time. [LAUGHTER] But I do think that we can also make sure to just model the behaviors that we’re talking about, again, just being mindful of our own personal practices and making sure that we’re not just talking about saying no, but that we’re actually doing it for ourselves and so that the folks that we work with and work for can see what this looks like and be mindful for themselves too, about how they need to think and work through this space. I think that’s one small thing we can do.

Rebecca: Well, thank you for joining us.

Kristin: Thank you. It’s always a pleasure.

Kendra: It’s been fabulous. Thank you so much for having me.

Kristin: It’s great talking to both of 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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269. Faculty Book Clubs

College teaching is often a very solitary endeavor and can result in feelings of isolation, especially in turbulent times, such as those we’ve experienced recently. In this episode, Jessamyn Neuhaus joins us to discuss the role that a faculty book club can play in building a learning community in which the participants share their successes, concerns, and strategies.

Jessamyn is the Director of the SUNY Plattsburgh Center for Teaching Excellence and a Professor in the History Department at SUNY Plattsburgh. She specializes in the study of pop culture, gender studies, and teaching and learning. Jessamyn is also a recipient of the State University of New York’s Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence and the editor of Teaching History: a Journal of Methods. She’s the author of Geeky Pedagogy: a Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to be Effective Teachers. She is also the editor of Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning, which was released by West Virginia University Press.

Show Notes

  • Neuhaus, J. (2019). Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers. West Virginia University Press.
  • Neuhaus, Jessamyn (2022). Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. West Virginia University Press.
  • Jessamyn Neuhaus (2019). Geeky Pedagogy. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 82. May 22.
  • Miller, M. D. (2014). Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology. Harvard University Press.
  • Darby, F., & Lang, J. M. (2019). Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Felten, P., & Lambert, L. M. (2020). Relationship-Rich Education: How human connections drive success in college. JHU Press.
  • Lang, J. M. (2020). Distracted: Why students can’t focus and what you can do about it. Hachette UK.
  • Addy, T. M., Dube, D., Mitchell, K. A., & SoRelle, M. (2021). What inclusive instructors do: Principles and practices for excellence in college teaching. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
  • Miller, M. D. (2022). Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World. West Virginia University Press.
  • Sathy, V., & Hogan, K. A. (2022). Inclusive teaching: Strategies for promoting equity in the college classroom. West Virginia University Press.
  • 268. Advancing Inclusivity while Mitigating Burnout. Tea for Teaching podcast. December 21, 2022.
  • Resources developed by Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan for reading groups for Inclusive Teaching

Transcript

John: College teaching is often a very solitary endeavor and can result in feelings of isolation, especially in turbulent times, such as those we’ve experienced recently. In this episode, we discuss the role that a faculty book club can play in building a learning community in which the participants share their successes, concerns, and strategies.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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John: Our guest today is Jessamyn Neuhaus. Jessamyn is the Director of the SUNY Plattsburgh Center for Teaching Excellence and a Professor in the History Department at SUNY Plattsburgh. She specializes in the study of pop culture, gender studies, and teaching and learning. Jessamyn is also a recipient of the State University of New York’s Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence and the editor of Teaching History: a Journal of Methods. She’s the author of Geeky Pedagogy: a Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to be Effective Teachers. She is also the editor of Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning, which was released by West Virginia University Press. Welcome back, Jessamyn.

Jessamyn: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

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

Jessamyn: I’m not, I’m drinking sparkling flavored water. The people here at Plattsburgh know that the Center for Teaching Excellence fridge is always fully stocked with flavored seltzer water and today I’m drinking Bubly grapefruit flavor.

Rebecca: Oh, I like that one.

John: And I’m drinking English breakfast tea today.

Rebecca: I have blue sapphire tea.

Jessamyn: Yum.

Rebecca: Very tasty.

John: Is it blue?

Rebecca: It has these little dried flowers in them that are a sapphire color. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know what kind of flowers they are, but they’re tasty.

Jessamyn: It sounds like a power blue. Like a powerful blue.

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s like a really intense, bright, wonderful blue.

John: So, are you feeling blue today?

Rebecca: I am feeling like the blue that I want to be feeling. I want that intense blue. So I’m channeling the blue.

John: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss the use of book clubs for professional development. We’ve been jointly running some between our two institutions at SUNY Plattsburgh and SUNY Oswego every spring and fall since fall 2020. Could you tell our listeners a little bit about how the collaboration began?

Jessamyn: Sure. Well, I met you both in 2019 when I came on Tea for Teaching to talk about Geeky Pedagogy. It was actually the first interview I did and I was super nervous and I prepared like 25 pages of notes. [LAUGHTER] And you were so great. It was so much fun. And we just stayed in touch after that. I was working as the interim, really part-time, Director for the teaching center going into the fall of 2020 after, as everybody knows, the semester that changed everything in the spring of 2020. We don’t have a staff here, this is a center of one. So resources and budget concerns were always an issue in trying to develop programming that would work with just this one person in the part-time role, and that faculty would be able to take advantage of during these unprecedented upheavals and challenges. The book club was something that my predecessor, Dr. Becky Kasper had been running that had pretty good attendance. And that semester, since we were all getting used to Zoom for the first time, it occurred to me that maybe we could do the book club via Zoom, which opened up the possibility of collaborating with another teaching center. And that was you. [LAUGHTER]

John: And we had been running book clubs for quite a few years. Our very first one was Michelle Miller’s Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology the semester after that came out. Our’s started in a less planned structure. We had Michelle on campus for a talk. And everyone was so enthused about her talk that they said, maybe we could start a reading group to discuss this. So that’s how our’s got started. And we had been doing it every semester since then. And it had worked really well. But, it’s worked much more effectively with the collaboration between the two institutions. What were some of the things that you saw as being the benefits of doing a book club?

Jessamyn: Well, one of the first things that strikes me about doing a faculty book club, and this is coming from my perspective as somebody who writes and talks about the geekiness and nerdiness of us in academia, is that a book club really builds on something we as academics do very, very well and are very, very, very comfortable with: reading, absorbing content, and then talking about it. Even the introverts among us tend to be pretty comfortable discussing ideas and tossing around concepts and getting a starting place like a book is something, even across various disciplines, people are very skilled at and comfortable at. So I think, in that sense, it’s not a big lift when it comes to faculty development. It’s working with skills and abilities that most people teaching in higher ed are already pretty comfortable with. So I think that’s one advantage, or one benefit.

John: One of the reasons why we started this and why we’ve been continuing it is that we had given a lot of one-off workshops where people would come in for a session, maybe half an hour, maybe an hour and a half, maybe three hours, perhaps even all day, and then often very little happened following that up. And one of the nice things about doing a book club is that you’re working with a group of faculty for an extended period, discussing the same topics and reflecting on those topics in a way that doesn’t generally happen with short one-day sessions. And that’s been really effective. On a related note, you mentioned bringing together people from different disciplines, we often had trouble bringing in people from other disciplines when someone was presenting on one topic, but when people are discussing any of these books, they find that everyone they’re talking to in this group has been having exactly the same problems and have been struggling with the same issues in ways that they might not have recognized otherwise. So the opportunity to bring people together and discuss it is a great way to remind everyone that we’re all facing the same challenges. And sharing solutions can be really effective.

Rebecca: I think it’s interesting to think about how the one offs are just one offs. But a reading group builds a routine, and a schedule, and regular practice and reflection around these topics. And so having a regularly scheduled time, and we’ve certainly made sure in our collaboration, but also prior to that at our institution, having multiple times for reading groups to meet, you don’t have to come to the same one every time. But earmarking that time during the week for this practice, I think is really helpful. It’s really easy to put it into our schedule.

Jessamyn: Yes, that’s right, it’s hard to make time for our own pedagogical development, it’s hard to always and I’d say it’s probably even harder now, as the world continues to burn… but the group setting, and I never thought of it this way till just now as we’re discussing it, but both those components that you were talking about: the routine of it, and the by default, the multidisciplinary setting, it’s almost like it reduces any disciplinary defensiveness people might have, or sense of resistance, maybe, because we’re there to talk about a book together, we’re not there to lay down the law, this is what you must do to teach effectively, XYZ.

Rebecca: So I think also, the idea of bringing everyone together has that accountability factor. And you see some of the same faces and the same people regularly and you start treating it almost as this little accountability club to make sure that you’re doing your homework and staying engaged with the subject matter. And the other thing that I was hearing in what you were saying, Jessamyn, that I think is useful to think about is that it’s a shared experience… reading the book, it’s a shared thing. So we have a common place to start a conversation, which is what you’re getting at with the academic defensiveness or disciplinary defensiveness that might come out. Just kind of interesting to think about. I had never really thought about that before.

Jessamyn: Well, and here at Plattsburgh, we are still very much in the early stages of building a campus culture of educational development. For us here at Plattsburgh collaborating with Oswego was pretty mind blowing, I’d say, for a lot of people besides just the factor of it’s not the same old faces that you see at every workshop. But even beyond that, I think it’s really expanded a lot of people’s, I will say, maybe view of what educational development is, it’s not just Jessamyn saying, “Hey, try this in your classroom,” that actually it’s out there in the world and lots of people are doing it, and it’s a professional endeavor, maybe chipping away at the sense of isolation that we can feel. Certainly I think it’s true lots of places, but Plattsburgh is geographically very isolated. And there really is a sense sometimes that we’re just out here all alone in the cold North Country. And the Zoom setting just really blew that apart. I think it is helpful that our campuses and our student populations are quite similar… at least there’s a lot of overlap. So when people in the book club share their experiences and their perspectives, there’s a lot of nodding and recognition. Many of our teaching contexts are similar.

Rebecca: And I think what I’m hearing both of you nodding towards is a sense of belonging, like it’s a shared experience where people feel like they belong, in part because they’re sharing experiences that are similar. And in reality, we know there’s a lot of small departments where you might be the only one teaching a particular thing or teaching in a particular way…

John: …or the only one considering teaching in a different way.

Rebecca: And being a part of a community where there’s other people doing some similar things, or experimenting in the same way, can really be helpful in just feeling a sense of community, and ways that you can bounce things off of one another. I know from my own experience, as a designer teaching studio classes, I’ve done a lot of exchange with folks that are teaching lab-based things or a lot of hands-on-learning, whatever that is, in whatever discipline, there’s a lot in common about doing hands-on-learning. Or you could talk about how that might apply. And you can learn a lot from something that’s happening in a different discipline and I’ve always really loved that about our book clubs.

John: Going back to a point Rebecca had mentioned earlier about the commitment of time to this, many people will see a speaker who they think is interesting, and will decide to pick up a copy of the book, they’ll buy that book and put it on a shelf, and it will stay there with the expectation that someday they’ll look at it. But having the meetings every other week, or however they’re scheduled, does serve as a commitment device that people, if they haven’t done the reading, will apologize often at the start of the meeting, and say “I wasn’t able to get this finished.” But just the implicit pressure of having these meetings, encourages people to do more reading on the topics than they would have done otherwise. And that’s as true for me as it is for all the participants in the group.

Jessamyn: I will say that I try not to inflict guilt on people, I took a page from my colleague Jessica Tinklenberg, who’s the Director of the teaching center out at the University of the Pacific, she ran a no-guilt book club. So that’s what she called it, No-Guilt Book Club. And I definitely emphasize that to people as well, encouraging people to Zoom in, even if you haven’t done the reading that week, or whenever you can, to just emphasize that. But you’re right, people will still say, “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get to it.” Although as academics, they always still have a lot to say.

John: Yes, that’s never stopped anyone from participating. [LAUGHTER] We also have encouraged people to attend, even if they weren’t able to complete the readings, because they’re going to get something useful out of the conversation and often will contribute something useful as the topics are discussed.

Jessamyn: In fact, that was something I did want to touch on, that I’ve been really surprised by, I guess, as the club has continued, is how the book is definitely the starting point, but it’s these conversations, which I don’t know why it surprised me, because the same was true at every teaching conference I’ve ever gone to. The workshops are great, the speakers are great. But then, often, the thing that I do when I get home is the thing I talked about with somebody at lunch, or while I was talking to them before the session or there was an example on the slide and I was talking to so and so about it. That’s, in the long run, what ends up actually changing my teaching. And I see that happening with the book club at times, that the content is this great springboard, and it’s definitely a key part, but sometimes it’s the talking that really seems to make an impact.

John: And we’ll talk about this more in just a few minutes. But one of the things we’ve been doing is we’ve been having multiple sessions for each chapter or set of chapters that we discuss, and both Jessamyn and I have been attending all of those sessions, or nearly all of them and Rebecca had attended most of those when she was a co-director of the teaching center here. But what happens is every day’s meeting, the discussions are very, very different and they’ve all been really valuable. And I’ve enjoyed the diversity of discussions. So it’s just not repeating the same things every day, that would get kind of tedious. [LAUGHTER] And we’ve encouraged participants to consider coming back for other group meetings if they wanted to. We haven’t had a lot of people take us up on that, but the variety of topics and the richness of those discussions has been really an important part of the benefit of this, for those of us who do attend multiple sessions.

Jessamyn: Yeah, it is. It really is.

Rebecca: One of the things that’s been interesting is a lot of the books that have been chosen work well if you can’t read the whole thing, because many of them have nice little summaries at the end, too, to give people a little bit of a chance or some insight into what was in the chapter. And maybe that’s some good book selection on both your parts.

Jessamyn: Yeah, I was thinking as you were talking, John, that maybe we can pat ourselves on the back a little bit here about the book choices we’ve made. Although, then again, there are so many great books about teaching. It’s not too hard to reach your hand out and find an incredible book to talk about. But I totally agree that every meeting, even when it raises very different points, has a valuable take away. But I do think that part of that is the book selection that we’ve made.

John: Yeah, we’ve had some really superb books, maybe we can talk a little bit about some of the benefits of the collaboration. One of those is that if we tried to do three group meetings at my institution alone, we’d probably only have two or three people at some of those sessions, and the sessions wouldn’t be as rich. By doing the collaboration, it allows us to get a full group of people there on more days, which opens up more opportunities for people to attend at times that’s convenient for them. And that I think, has been really beneficial.

Jessamyn: Yeah, I’ll add that, in a very practical way, it lessens the workload for us as facilitators, it’s like co-teaching… that knowing “Okay, so it’s the Wednesday book group, I woke up with a headache. I don’t really feel like talking too much, but John’s facilitating it today.” But even more than that, is the sense of… Rebecca, you said belonging for our faculty. But for us, as teaching center directors, small, small, small centers with not an overabundance of resources, it’s easy to feel alone. And certainly when we began, it was especially isolating, really overwhelming, with having coped with the emergency pivot and faculty’s needs at that time and our own classes as well. It’s very easy for educational developers to start feeling isolated while often we’re in this sort of weird in between place where we advocate for students, but we advocate for faculty, but we advocate for the administrators too and we’re supposed to be everything to everyone. So making this kind of collaborative connection has been sustaining to me in my teaching practice, for sure, but also just as the teaching center director as well.

John: And it really helps having multiple perspectives approaching these books, because we’re from different disciplines, and we bring different perspectives. And that’s been an important part of it, I think, too.

Rebecca: I’m wondering if folks are interested in starting book clubs, if both of you can talk about some of the logistics behind how running the book club and each individual session might work?

Jessamyn: Well, it’s been an evolution in how we’ve run it. And when we started, I think I should take credit for being like overly anally retentively prepared, [LAUGHTER], and I think maybe especially like, right at the beginning, when we were still really like in the grips of the worst pandemic era changes and upheavals, that maybe it was helpful to have some very specific discussion questions ahead of time. And as we were getting used to Zooming, but now, at least in the past book, and we’ll see what the spring brings as well, it seems like it’s worked a little bit better to be a little more hands-off and let whoever happens to come in that day, those faculty, lead the discussion, maybe have a few questions in your back pocket, in case there’s quiet, but I don’t know, John, what do you think?

John: I agree. When I put slides together, they were pretty plain. They didn’t look as nice as your slides did. Mine were kind of ugly but when Rebecca did them, they looked nice, [LAUGHTER] given her background in graphic design. But I think it was important to have a little bit more structure, because the very first book that we used was Small Teaching Online by Flower Darby and Jim Lang. And everyone was kind of panicking at that time. And having that focus, I think, was probably really helpful. But we’ve moved away from that, in general, with all the sessions we’ve been doing. And partly though, I think it’s because we’ve got a lot of repeat participants. Many of the people we have come back term after term. And they’re very comfortable at leading much of the discussion, and I think that’s been really valuable.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think that maybe there was a need for some trust building early on, in understanding that everyone was equally panicking. I remember using a lot of Jamboard and stuff in some of those very early sessions just to get some shared ideas in a base. But I think that also helped people feel connected, because they realized they had some of the same ideas, and then felt more willing to talk later on. And then I think John’s right, some of the same people help with that nice welcoming atmosphere.

Jessamyn: Sometimes things take on a momentum or life of their own. And I don’t think community is too strong a word. I think that is what’s being built in this collaboration. And it’s funny, I haven’t reflected on it until just right this moment, but that’s something that really came out of a panic, like flat out and out pants-dropping panic, [LAUGHTER] has led to something so productive. And it’s only because of Zoom. I mean, it’s only enabled because of the comfort level of Zoom and the convenience it offers people, enabling people to participate and enabling them to collaborate, like we are across a pretty major distance.

Rebecca: I think it’s important to remember that in either of our institutions, we already had issues getting people in the same space at the same time. And obviously, to collaborate between institutions, we would need some way of doing that. But I think it’s afforded people the opportunity to join the call from home after they get their kids off the bus or whatever thing is happening in their lives that might cause them to have to participate remotely, anyways, whether or not we were all at the same institution.

Jessamyn: Yeah, it kind of acknowledges and recognizes the fact that people are burdened, that they have a lot to do in their own personal lives, at work, teaching. So the Zoom format, it really kind of sets a tone for the book group. We know that you have many, many demands on your time, like, it seems like it’s a very concrete way of respecting people’s time. We are offering the three different meeting times and having them via zoom. I’m not sure that I would even go back to just in-person book clubs after this experience.

John: Well, we had actually been offering things with video conference ability, going back to 2008.

Jessamyn: You are an early adopter, John, let’s clarify this.

John: I was…

Rebecca: He’s a very early adopter.

John: …but most of our faculty were not.

Jessamyn: That’s right. [LAUGHTER]

John: So, there would be a screen up with potential participants. But it was rare that we’d have more than one person coming in online. [LAUGHTER] But, the pandemic certainly made people much more comfortable with Zoom and gave them access to web cameras, or at least let them know that they had a web camera that they could use for this type of thing. So that it became really comfortable in ways that we had the ability to do that before, but it was very rarely used by most faculty.

Rebecca: Even if we’re thinking about faculty computer replacements and things institutionally, the institution is moving towards using laptops to make sure that people do have these tools. And so I think that’s really helpful because it does help with collaboration, not only within our own institution, but across institutions.

John: One of the things we’ve been very fortunate is that our administration has been very supportive of this and has been buying the books for faculty. And when faculty get a book delivered to them, they’re much more likely to actually participate because they feel guilty if they didn’t read it and if they didn’t show up, I think that’s really been helpful in doing it.

Rebecca: Does that also come with a commitment device of some sort?

John: In a sense, yeah, [LAUGHTER] there’s a little bit of guilt associated with not showing up. But the other thing that we had often done, it hasn’t worked this way for the last several book groups… we have an academic affairs retreat before the fall semester and we had often had the reading group focus on a book written by the keynote speaker at that event. And one of the things that happened when we’ve done that is that we keep the signups open through that academic affairs retreat and the number of participants normally almost exactly doubled every time when we had that keynote speaker because they tended to inspire people. We had some issues where we were hoping to have keynote speakers, but their books were delayed because there was this pandemic going on.

Jessamyn: Yeah [LAUGHTER].

John: … or other things come up that interfered with it. But that was something that, when we could make that connection, it was really effective in getting more people joining in, because we’d normally have a couple hundred people at the academic affairs retreat. And it was a nice way of marketing that.

Jessamyn: Yeah, and if I’m remembering correctly, you gave Plattsburgh Zoom access to one of those for when we read Relationship-Rich Education, Peter Felton came and spoke, and I noticed something very similar with this faculty group as well, as attracting a wider range of people.

John: I’m hoping we can get back to that at some point. But again, things have been a little bit more hectic. [LAUGHTER] And it’s been harder to plan for the contingencies of what is most appropriate next year in the environment we’ve had for the last two and a half to three years.

Jessamyn: And that also raises the point that selecting the book, we have had to think really carefully like, who will this appeal to most? What do people really need and want right now? And we try to vary it a little bit thinking about well, this book will be really appealing to XYZ, so then the next semester looking for something that might be a little bit different and mostly, I think, we’ve guessed very well.

John: I think so. Maybe we should mention some of the books that we’ve used.

Jessamyn: In fall 2020 in direct response to what was happening, we did Small Teaching Online by Flower Darby and Jim Lang. And then in the spring of 2021, we read Distracted by James Lang. In fall 2021, we read What Inclusive Instructors Do, by Tracie Addy and co-authors. Last spring, 2022, we did Relationship-Rich Education by Peter Felton and Leo Lambert. This semester, fall 2022, we read Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology by Michelle Miller. And we are excited to be reading next semester Inclusive Teaching by Kelly Hogan, and Viji Sathy..

John: And even if you are not able to arrange for the authors to visit on campus, many authors have been willing to come in over Zoom to give a talk to the reading group, either at the beginning of the session, or at the end. And I think that’s also been really helpful.

Jessamyn: Yeah, yeah, many people are willing to do, at no cost, an informal question and answer session with book clubs. Many scholars of teaching and learning are willing and able to do that.

Rebecca: So it’s probably not fair to have a conversation about logistics without asking about some challenges you might have faced during this time, or during the collaboration, or just in running reading groups generally.

Jessamyn: This is not a challenge that we had, but maybe people should be aware that, as human beings, [LAUGHTER] some people don’t like other people, and collaborating with someone that you haven’t worked with before is an unknown in terms of your strengths and weaknesses together. Are you going to complement each other? As luck would have it, John and Rebecca and I worked very well together and our strengths complement each other, John mentioned too, all three of us come from very different backgrounds and training. But that’s seen as a benefit, I do think scholars of teaching and learning, generally, are more open to collaboration than some academics might be. So it may be less of an issue than other kinds of intellectual projects, but that’s maybe something to keep in mind.

John: One practical problem is that pretty much all colleges have classes that meet at different times. And trying to find times that work for both institutions can be a challenge. If we want to get faculty involved, we have to find times that don’t overlap with too many class schedules. So we’ve been fortunate to be able to do that. And once we found times, we’ve been keeping them at the same times each semester, because there’s enough of an overlap there that each session will overlap at most one class time period at each institution, making it possible for more people to attend.

Jessamyn: John, you mentioned it as a benefit, but it can also be a challenge that we have returning members participating, because we also have new people every book as well, every session as well. And it’s sometimes can be challenging when someone’s like, “Oh, we read all about that two books ago, I totally get it.” Okay, but the person Zooming in next to you has never read a book on this before. But that’s part of community generally, the issue for developing any kind of community is trying to balance the needs of the ongoing longer term members with the needs of the new members. How do you make it meaningful to everyone? It really reminds me of a class in a lot of ways, where you have one student sitting in the last row who’s never gonna get anything out of the class, they’ve decided you are stupid, and they hate the whole class, and they’re never gonna be there. Then right next to them is a student who’s ready to have their whole life transformed and they’re about to declare a major, they love it so much. You’ve got such a range in any group of students. And similarly, you’ve got a wide range with faculty, especially everybody’s context changes all the time. And some people Zoom in for our book club. And they’re in the midst of a semester from hell… everything going wrong, their department is toxic, and they are just burned out, next to someone who’s on top of the world and the book is speaking to their heart because everything’s falling into place. And they’re in the same Zoom call, talking about the same book.

John: And we actually did have someone on our campus who gave that sort of feedback, that there was nothing new that they hadn’t learned from previous books that we’ve read. And that kind of shocked me because there was a lot in this book that I had not read before, and I was part of all those other groups, but that can happen. And I think we’ve been able to choose books that no matter what you had read before, will bring something new to everyone. Because each of the books has brought in a lot of new research findings and some new things that we hadn’t covered, even though some of the basic principles are the same. I only remember hearing that from one person, maybe other people felt that, but I didn’t feel that way unless maybe I just forgot all the other things we had read before.

Jessamyn: I don’t think that people participating in the book club are as necessarily as hyper aware as we are of the benefits of just having the conversation. And of course, they can’t see like, over the semesters, the bird’s eye view. They might have a general sense that… and this is actually now that I’m talking like maybe we should have done more rigorous assessments [LAUGHTER] now that I’m talking and getting feedback. But my feeling is that, often, they are enjoying the benefits of having the conversations about teaching with not necessarily that facilitator view of “Oh, I see where we are talking about the book, but now people… they’re moving into more of these strategies or ideas or just moral support, like at certain times, in certain meetings, just Zooming in with other people who care about teaching, and are thinking about teaching” like you can tell that this is uplifting and encouraging. And that has less to do with the book content than being there in that call together.

John: And I think some of the people you mentioned, who were having just this horrible semester, and lots of people have been feeling that recently, especially the last few semesters, often get the most benefit out of those discussions and that sense of community, as you said, is really valuable.

Rebecca: Well, there’s a lot of shared brainstorming and troubleshooting. When someone has identified a need, or has just expressed some anxiety or stress around what they’re experiencing, people are there to say “it’s not just you,” or “I’ve tried this and it’s been successful,” or “I tried that that you’re thinking about and these are the barriers that I faced” … that just makes all of us more aware of what to be thinking about as we implement new things.

Jessamyn: Yeah, the last book we read. Michelle Miller’s book about Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology, it’s only a small part of her book when she’s talking about specific classroom phone policies, but we had extended conversations about classroom phone policies, and for good reason, it’s on a lot of people’s minds and there’s a lot of experiences and issues to unpack with that. So I think that’s a good example of how it wasn’t a huge part of her book, she does address it and address it very well but it was less about going through point by point her argument and her evidence, and more about: “So, she’s saying this, alright, so what happened in class last week with the phones, with the devices? So then this happened, then this happened…” and people were just sharing that: “What went on? And what did you do and what worked, what didn’t work?” And in fact, it gave me the idea. I’m creating a new workshop starting next semester, it’s just called “Classroom phone policies.” And it’s basically going to be, let’s talk about your classroom phone policies. What do you think?

Rebecca: I think one thing that we might want to talk about as we’re thinking about challenges is not one that we faced, but one that collaborators could face if they’re not similar kinds of institutions. I want to just underscore that, again, that that’s, I think in part, why the collaboration has been so successful.

Jessamyn: I think so too. I think it would maybe raise people’s hackles if the teaching context was really different, the student populations were really different. Well, you can’t really understand if it could work, but you’d have to be aware.

John: It might be harder to find common ground between a university center where faculty’s focus is often on research and a community college where the focus is primarily on teaching and lots of classes and lots of students. It would be really hard to get topics that would work well in both contexts, I would think. But again, as you both said, we’re very similar institutions,

Jessamyn: Yeah, it’s sort of the basis for the trust you were mentioning, Rebecca, because there have been big differences. John, you teach very large classes, larger than even the largest classes here at Plattsburgh. So there are big differences that have come up. But there’s this starting place of trust, this is another SUNY institution, similar student population, some general similar challenges with teaching centers that have some similar approaches. That starting ground of trust for faculty to talk honestly about this.

Rebecca: Sometimes in the books too, there’s examples that don’t feel relevant to our institutions, like a med school example, for example, but then we can take that and as a conversation point to say, “I didn’t find this relevant,” but then someone else might chime in. “Oh, but I’ve done something similar in this other context,” and that can be incredibly helpful in helping people think through how different concepts or strategies might apply in their own context.

Jessamyn: That makes me think, though, that another challenge to keep in mind, for other people looking to start faculty reading groups, is that it might be hard to measure or assess the long-term impact of some of this community building and the connections that I’m seeing happen. It would be hard to pin it down and show a direct systemic correlation between this and improved teaching. I think we might be able to, if we were to find the perfect moment, get people to say it or write it down: “We did this in the reading group, and I applied it this way in my classroom,” but I’m not sure how you would measure just like… I know, for myself, this past semester, just knowing I was going to Zoom in with people, like looking forward to a Zoom call, like how do you assess that? But that is… I mean, what? …that never happens. So I know it’s good, but I’m not quite sure how I’m going to document it for my annual activities report.

John: Yeah, we haven’t been able to do randomized controlled experiments [LAUGHTER] where we assign some people to reading groups and other people not to participate. We don’t have so many applicants to participate that we’re able to do a lottery and then evaluate the impact on student learning. It might be nice if we were in that position, but the people who participate tend to be some of the best teachers on campus, or the people who are most concerned about their teaching, and I’ve seen that the people who attend are also much more likely to attend other workshops and get involved in other professional development. So it does lead to a little bit of a contagion effect, in that it spreads to other aspects, when they see that this is something they find valuable, they’re much more likely to engage in other professional development.

Jessamyn: I wonder too, if there’s something to be said for… sorry to use the “u”word… but it’s unprecedented, the times we live in. Our unprecedented challenges in higher education are really things we’ve never faced before. And a collaborative Zoom-based faculty reading group, I mean, it’s new. We’re like, “oh, it’s old hat.” We’ve only been doing it like two years or something. But we’re like, “oh, yeah, our book club” and people around like, “Oh, of course, that’s just how it is,” but it’s a radical major change. It’s an innovation. And we’re kind of still in the midst of it, we’re still figuring out what it might be able to do or how this might work. I’m still framing Zoom, not as an emergency measure, but something that could actually add support and encouragement to our teaching life.

Rebecca: I’m hopeful for the opportunity in the future, maybe, to continue connecting faculty across institutions, maybe with similar disciplines or ways where they may not feel connected at their own institution, but have ways to connect with others at another institution where they might feel some alignment and feel a sense of belonging. I think there’s opportunity to continue scaling up, which is kind of interesting.

Jessamyn: Yeah, I think as the question of how do we mitigate teaching burnout, not only is that not going away, but that’s probably going to really slam into us big time in the next few years. And that seems to be more and more that’s what I hear. What could we possibly do? I just came back from the POD Network Conference. And there was a lot about what can we do? How can we chunk out faculty development? How can we support and encourage faculty? And collaborations like this, these kinds of connections, they’ve gotta be away, I think.

John: We’d both came back from the OLC conference where we ran a session on this, which was in the episode that we just released last week. Yeah, that was a concept we heard a lot about at other sessions, too, that everyone is feeling burned out. And it’s going to be a challenge, as we deal with issues of student motivation, student engagement, in a world in which there are so many problems that make it a little bit harder for students and for us to focus on developing a more productive learning environment.

Jessamyn: Yeah, our next book on inclusive teaching, I think, is a good example of that. It’s something so many people care about so much, but it can start to feel overwhelming. It’s something you’re always having to keep revisiting and learning about. That’s by its nature. That’s what inclusive pedagogical practices require, that you continue to build your pedagogical skills over and over and over and without a place like a book club that kind of just is there to reinforce and support your growth mindset about teaching. Yes, everybody’s really tired this semester. It’s not easy to do, but we’re here together.

Rebecca: And it’s scheduled reflective practice.

Jessamyn: That’s right, exactly.

Rebecca: It’s already on the calendar.

Jessamyn: And it is a big benefit, John, like you said that we’ve been able to do it at the same times, the same three times three days a week is like sometimes I say my superpower is consistency. This is a good example.

John: And at Oswego, most faculty either teach Tuesday/Thursday or Monday/Wednesday/Friday, so by scheduling our meetings on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, it makes it pretty easy for people to find a time to participate. They don’t always participate at the same time every week. And again, they get the benefit of meeting and working with a different group of people if they show up at different times.

Rebecca: And minimally, even if they can’t come to a meeting, there’s a schedule for how to read the book.

Jessamyn: And now that I’m thinking about it, we do have quite a few people who Zoom from home or other places working around their childcare. So it definitely increases people’s ability to attend.

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

John: Well, what’s next, I think is our next reading group, which will be starting up in February 2023.

Jessamyn: We are very, very excited to be reading Inclusive Teaching. It’s one of the latest books out from the West Virginia University Press Teaching and Learning in Higher Education series. We’re super excited that the authors, Dr. Viji Sathy and Dr. Kelly Hogan, are going to be Zooming in for a Q&A with our book club when we’re done. They provide everyone a book club guide, some discussion questions, through their website. So we’re really really looking forward to that discussion.

John: If you’d like to consider a reading group on your campus and if you’d have any questions about how this operates, feel free to contact any of us. We’ll put our email addresses in the show notes.

Rebecca: Thanks for joining us, Jessamyn. It’s always great to talk to you.

Jessamyn: Thanks for having me.

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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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252. Thriving in Academia

Graduate programs focus on preparing students to become researchers and practitioners in their disciplines, but generally offer little support for those choosing to pursue teaching careers. In this episode, Pamela Ansburg, Mark Basham, and Regan Gurung join us to discuss some strategies that new faculty can use to support a transition to a career at a teaching-focused institution.

Pamela is a professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Metropolitan State University of Denver, Mark is a behavioral neuroscientist at Regis University, and Regan is the Associate Vice Provost and Executive Director for the Center for Teaching and Learning and a Professor of Psychological Science at Oregon State University. They are the co-authors of Thriving in Academia: Building a Career at a Teaching-Focused Institution, which was published earlier this year by the American Psychological Association.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Graduate programs focus on preparing students to become researchers and practitioners in their disciplines, but generally offer little support for those choosing to pursue teaching careers. In this episode, we discuss some strategies that new faculty can use to support a transition to a career at a teaching-focused institution.

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

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John: Our guests today are Pamela Ansburg, Mark Basham, and Regan Gurung. Pamela is a professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Metropolitan State University of Denver, Mark is a behavioral neuroscientist at Regis University, and Regan is the Associate Vice Provost and Executive Director for the Center for Teaching and Learning and a Professor of Psychological Science at Oregon State University. They are the co-authors of Thriving in Academia: Building a Career at a Teaching-Focused Institution, which was published earlier this year by the American Psychological Association. Welcome, Pamela and Mark, and welcome back. Regan.

Mark: It’s great to be here.

Regan: Thank you, John and Rebecca.

Pam: Thank you.

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

Pam: Earl Grey, because I like a classic.[LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: How about you, Mark?

Mark: Well, we’re in Colorado, which is home of Celestial Seasonings. So when I’m drinking tea, I’m always drinking a Celestial Seasonings tea, usually Sleepy Time, even during the day.

Regan: Are they sponsoring this podcast or something, Mark?[LAUGHTER]…

Rebecca: …Right. Yeah…

MARK’: …I’m in the Pacific Northwest, hours behind all of you. So I’m actually still on my morning cup of coffee.

Rebecca: Alright, that’s fair.

John: And I am drinking ginger tea.

Rebecca: Nice. I have some Jasmine green tea now.

John: Oh, very nice…

Mark: Nice.

Rebecca: And for John’s benefit, It’s been like an evolution over the day of what kind of tea I’m having. [LAUGHTER]

John: Rebecca is at home. I’m sitting in this control room for this old recording studio. So I’ve got this tea… and this tea…. And this tea.

Rebecca: He had to pack them all this morning [LAUGHTER]…

John: …and this tea. And, two of them were insulated, so they’re still warm. [LAUGHTER] We’ve invited you here today to discuss Thriving in Academia. PhD programs generally provide fairly solid training for grad students planning for a research-focused career, but most PhD students don’t end up in research institutions, they end up in teaching-focused institutions, and your book is designed to ease this transition. How did this book project come about?

Pam: It came about from a conference presentation. We were at a conference, the three of us met up and started catching up and talking with one another, and thinking about where our careers had led us. Regan and I have been friends and colleagues for, I don’t know, 25 years or so. And even though we were never in the same physical location, we had a long history. Mark, and I are married, and so when we all got together, we’re kind of talking about where the time had taken us and what we wanted to do, and what are the things that we were learning about, and basically, our interactions with our junior colleagues and the questions that they were asking. And we started to realize that we had some knowledge that we thought would be helpful for people going on this career path.

Mark: One of the things I think we all talked about that first dinner was we were all in positions where we were mentoring younger faculty or newer faculty, and we were seeing them have the same challenges and make some of the same mistakes that we had made, that we had seen early career faculty make over and over and over again. And we thought, well, there should be some resource. There needs to be a book. Certainly, there must be a book out there. And it turns out there wasn’t. And so then we were like, well, we should write it, a guide to having the career out a teaching-focused institution, instead of how to do research.

Regan: Yeah. And I think just an important thing for me to add is, picking up on what Pam said about we met at a conference, it was a teaching conference. And I think that’s important. It was a teaching conference, and it really made us realize how often it was only at teaching conferences that people felt like they could out themselves as being passionate teachers. And I think all three of us have had the occasion of being at a non- teaching conference, a conference in our field and going to a session that was on teaching. And then especially having grad students come up and say, “Oh, I’m so glad I can talk about teaching here, because I can’t do that at my research institution, or with my mentor or anywhere else.” And I think that really fueled our fire to say, we need to sort of unpack that hidden agenda about how it is at a teaching-focused institution where service and research is still important, but the fact is teaching is primary, and what does that do to your psyche, by things like that. So that’s why it’s sort of neat that it happened at a teaching conference, because we looked around at all these people who really didn’t have another home to really talk about teaching and share what the additional challenges of teaching does when you’re in higher education.

John: We were so impressed by the book here that our Provost is buying copies of the book for all of our new faculty and we’re going to have a reading group this fall with them working through it through the semester…

Pam: …Oh, thank you,…

John: …we were very pleased by this…

Pam: …we really appreciate it. And, we hope it will be very useful. I think it will be.

Rebecca: You’ve talked about this already a little bit. But can you talk about who the primary audience for the book is? And is it while they’re in school? Is it right when they’re looking for a job? Like, when’s the best time to engage with this book?

Mark: We really tried to write it for all of those audiences. So certainly, the book starts with just a finding: what is a teaching-focused institution, how do you know one when you see one? How do you find one? We talk about how do you find the jobs that are there? How do you prepare yourself for those jobs? But we also talk a lot about what does that job look like? As John said, during the intro, most PhD programs don’t train you to teach, certainly, and they definitely don’t teach you about advising. They don’t teach you about how to be a good committee member, how to do mentoring, all of those sorts of things.

Pam: And you also don’t have those role models. When you’re in a PhD program, your advisors are researchers. And so that’s who you get to model yourself after. So that was another reason why we thought this book was useful.

Mark: And then as we started writing it we started to realize, well, what about people that are in the middle of their career? There are some unique challenges to that at a teaching-focused institution. So then we said, well, we should include that. So that’s another potential audience. There’s a whole chapter on mid and late career, how do you stay invigorated? How do you handle a transition into being a chair or a dean or a provost? How do you handle potentially switching institutions? So we really think the audience is anybody who is in a teaching-focused career or contemplating a teaching-focused career.

Regan: And I think one particular fun part is by virtue of the fact that we’re all and maybe I should put my co authors on the spot here. What are you guys? Are you mid career? [LAUGHTER] What do you call yourself? Yeah, don’t let the gray hair or lack thereof fool you. I mean, the reality is, all of us have been around for some time. And the neat thing of that is we not only reflected on folks where we are, and a few years ahead of us, but… and this is the part of the book I loved in particular… was it’s packed with our stories of different points in our career. So we’ve got stories in there from when we were grad students, from when we were junior assistant faculty and associate faculty. And so in that way, I think you can really see yourself no matter where you are in your career. And there are three of us, we all read each other’s chapters, that was one of the most fun parts for me was to read Mark’s and Pam’s stories, because each chapter ends with a personal story. And each of us took turns writing that and it was a lot of fun to get the first look at Pam’s story or Mark’s story. Because there were things that even though we’ve known each other for some time we haven’t talked about, but it immediately, I think, invites the reader into the different stages of careers.

Pam: And I think depending on where you’re at in your career, parts of the book will resonate differently with you. So when you’re just beginning, if you’re in graduate school, you really are just trying to understand what the job is, once you take on the decision to become a professor at a teaching-focused institution, then it gets real. And you really have to figure out what do I need to do here. And then, even if you’ve been in the role for a little while, we have some, I think, neat tips about efficiencies and ways to take and model your career and make choices to help you really feel fulfilled as you go through.

Regan: I just want to add one more thing, I think educators or especially grad students, but even educators in general, forget often that there are close to 4300 colleges and universities in the US itself… 4300. Yet, when we’re in grad school, so many of us are so often just thinking about that small number of research schools. And what’s neat about this was it was the recognition of the fact that there are so many varieties of institutions…. 4300 out there… that’s a lot of variants. And I think all three of us have realized in our careers, in the work that we do, that the absolute bulk of faculty and instructors at those 4300 institutions never get the chance to talk about teaching or talk to peers about the challenges of being at a teaching-focused institution. And I think that’s the eyes in which we set out to write this book is to say, if you’ve never had the chance to be to a teaching conference, or to have that support structure or have your teaching champion, join us and read this book, and it’s really written with that voice. And I mean, it’s not your dry book, the three of us let ourselves and the publishers let us, be more conversational in places, which I think really invites you into that conversation.

John: The faculty that grad students are working with see the reputation of their institution being partly reflected by how many of their grad students end up in top universities within their discipline. And there’s generally not a lot of discussion of other options or, if there is, it’s often a discouragement of that, that maybe people should apply at teaching colleges as a backup rather than as their primary market. Yet, that’s not why all grad students chose to go to grad school, many people would like a career in a teaching-focused institution. What advice do you provide in the book for students who are looking at alternatives, who are trying to choose between a research-focused institution or a teaching-focused institutions? What sort of guidance do you suggest? What factors should they consider?

Mark: Before I actually answer your question, or let one of my co-authors answer your question, I think you hit upon one of the real driving forces about this book, which is that as a grad student, as Pam mentioned, your mentors are researchers typically, but the whole incentive structure… You’re right, at a big research university, the things that are prioritized, that are incentivized are doing research, and then making sure that your students do research and contribute. And so once you go to a teaching-focused institution, even though you’re still going to do research, you’re still gonna do scholarship, you’’re still gonna do all the parts, but the incentive structure is much different. And that’s a big change from being a grad student. But as far as the advice, it seems sort of obvious, but one of our main pieces of advice is get experience teaching. The more experience you can get, the better. And we have a lot of sort of suggestions about how to go beyond just being a TA as a grad student, but how do you connect with maybe community colleges or teaching-focused institutions that are nearby so that you can become an instructor of record for a course or two, because really, that’s the only way to know which way you want to go. You’re trying to research, you’re doing that, as a grad student, you really need to try your hand at the teaching part and see how that feels.

Pam: And I would also add that reaching out to find somebody who is at a teaching-focused institution in your field and, send an email and just explain who you are… you’re a graduate student, you’re exploring this as a potential career path… and would they be willing to give you 15 minutes of time just to explain what their daily life is like? Because I think as a graduate student in a PhD program, you don’t really have a good window on what the daily activities of a professor at a teaching-focused institution is. And so just hearing somebody talk about what do they do on a daily basis and what are the challenges and what are the advantages and why they made the decision to go into a teaching-focused track is another strategy.

Regan: Yeah, this is why I love having two co-authors because we all come at things from such different directions. When I heard your question, John, I immediately thought of the importance of mentoring. And we had a really good time writing about mentoring: both how to find a good mentor, but then also how it’s important to be a good mentor. And that’s where I first went to, which is many times our mentors are very well meaning and looking out for us and looking out for the best, but it’s often the best according to them. And I think I was very fortunate that I had some mentors who, even though they were really training me to be Research I University people, when I said I really wanted to teach, they said, “Okay, I respect that and let me help you.” And I know that’s not the case with many mentors who you may even shudder to mention the fact that you are looking at a small liberal arts college, or that’s where you’d like to go. Full disclosure, Mark and I both went to Carleton College, a small liberal arts college where teaching was a big deal. And the faculty were passionate about teaching. And I know I took that with me through my grad schools. And I was a postdoc at UCLA. I was in grad school at the University of Washington, both big Research I schools, but thankfully, my exposure to a liberal arts school where faculty loved to teach, I knew it was possible. I knew it was possible. I always hung on to that. And I always think about those grad students who didn’t have that kind of exposure to passionate teachers who only have a Research I exposure but who still want to teach, how do we let them know that teaching is an option and that’s where I think Pam’s advice is so good. Find somebody who is passionate about teaching, either at one of those teaching schools, or I will add, elsewhere in your discipline, but find your champion who is willing to say I will support you in going to a teaching-focused institution.

John: One other thing I think that is becoming much more common is, even in research institutions, there are more people hired as professors of the practice or some similar name, where there are some people who specialize in effective teaching. So there may be people in more and more departments now who could serve in that mentoring role without even having to leave the institution. That was very uncommon when I was a grad student, but it is becoming a bit more common now.

Rebecca: Thanks for sharing your story, Regan. One of the things that you made me think about is how lucky I was to have some of the mentors I had in graduate school because I got to teach a special topics class as a graduate student and write my own class and try it out my last semester. And it was a really great experience for me. And I also wanted to just note here, we’ve been talking a lot about PhD programs, but the same thing also happens in programs like MFA programs that are also terminal degrees, but might have a slightly different context. But there are those that are really focused on the creative practice and being in a research institution versus teaching as well. So that does kind of span across those kinds of programs as well.

Mark: Regan, I think is more tenacious than I am. I remember sitting in that Carleton classroom, looking at my professors and thinking, hey, this is what I want to do. But then I also know that as I went on, and got a master’s degree and PhD program, and then as a postdoctoral researcher, I kind of forgot that, I forgot that dream. It was easy to get indoctrinated into the “I’m going to be a researcher, I’m going to strive for the Nobel Prize, I’m going to do this.” And it wasn’t until I almost accidentally ended up teaching my first class, which I did only because my first child was born and I needed the extra money. And I sort of surreptitiously, without my PI and my postdoc knowing, signed up to teach a class. And then when I got in front of a classroom full of students, it sparked that memory of like, “Oh, I remember why I started this journey, I started this journey, because I wanted to be like those passionate professors that I had as an undergrad.” And I had forgotten that along the way. And then I’m one of those people who had to sort of do a pivot without a lot of support, where I had conversations… I adore my advisors and the PIs I’ve had over the years, and they were wonderful mentors in many ways, but they were lukewarm at best in supporting that transition to a teaching-focused institution. So I’m one of those people who had to sort of swim upstream to get to where I am.

Regan: I love that story, Mark, because my undergrad experience actually was the opposite. And when I sat in class as an undergrad, although I respected the passion, teaching was the last thing I thought I would do, I had absolutely no idea. I was brought up in the classic Indian tradition of, “Hey, go be a doctor, go be a lawyer.” And I’m grateful to my parents to saying: “Psychology, sure, give it a shot.” But I was completely PhD research. That was all I could think about. And I mention this, because there will be many people listening or reading, who likewise may have come to teaching out of the blue. Through my grad program, we didn’t have to teach. So Rebecca, when you said you got a chance to teach, wow, that’s great. There are many folks out there who never get the chance to teach because it’s not part of the plan. In grad school, I did not have a chance to teach. But a friend invited me to do a guest lecture in their class. And that one hour changed the trajectory of my life, because the highs that I got from that 50 minutes, of the reactions, of the feedback of what it felt like, and I knew that’s what I wanted to do. But, and this is what I was gonna say Rebecca, in response to your story, but then it was hard work. People be prepared. If you want teaching experience, sometimes you’re gonna have to work very hard to do it. And that’s why, I think, Mark, you mentioned going and looking at if there’s a course at a community college that you can teach, that’s what I had to do at a postdoc. I was a postdoc at UCLA, fully funded, and I wanted to teach. So I went and taught at a college an hour away, because that was the only place that had an opening for a course. So, be prepared to really fuel that teaching passion. It may take time and effort as part of the whole deal.

Pam: I’ll just tag on to Regan. I had the same experience as Regan, I was research all the way, no interest in teaching whatsoever. In fact, when I got into my PhD program, I was really upset because there was no research assistant positions, and I had to have a TA position. And I fought, I went to see the chair and I said, “I really don’t want this. I really want to be a researcher.” And he said, “Well, do you want money? Do you want the TA? and I thought, “Okay, I guess I’ll be a TA” and I just was like, “This is gonna be horrible. I’m gonna hate it, but I’ll do it for the money, fine.” And the same experience, Regan, I had to run review sessions for an introductory psychology class. I walked into the class with the worst attitude you could have ever imagined, and within two minutes, I was in love. A total turnaround. It was a really amazing experience. And so I would say like, sometimes you don’t know where you’re headed, and the advice I give to my students is: “Be open.” I wasn’t particularly open. I got forced into a situation and then it changed my whole life.

John: Which comes back to that advice that you talked about earlier of trying to teach your class just to see what it’s like, because it would be very easy for many people to go through grad school without realizing that that’s something that they really do have a passion for, or that may be something that they just never want to do. So,[LAUGHTER] having that experience is really essential. I was in a position where I was planning on going into research until one of the professors left very suddenly. And with a couple of days, notice, I was teaching a course. And I decided from that point, that’s what I wanted to do. I was on a fellowship, I didn’t have to do any teaching. But once I did, it pretty much determined the path of my career.

Mark: It was one of the fun things about writing this book was, we would write two thirds of the chapter, and then we would read it and we would email each other and say, “Man, we’re making the sound like a terrible job. We’re making this sound like it’s really hard.” And then we would say we need to add in, what’s the reward? Why do we do that? And I think the final product does a good job both sort of addressing how difficult it is, how much time it’s going to take, what is this job really like? But then also, why do we do it? Because it’s not for the money. We all do it for the joy you get from doing all of these things. And even not just the teaching. But we talked about the satisfaction of service done well, the satisfaction of involving students, particularly undergraduate students, in your scholarship and your research. And so I think, as Regan was saying earlier, it’s a very accessible book, because it does talk about the difficulties, but it also talks about the joys and rewards from doing this job..

Rebecca: It’s funny, Mark, that you mentioned that you had initially taught for the money. So did I. I didn’t do it, because I wanted to teach, necessarily, but then we stay because of other things.[LAUGHTER] So one of the things that you talked about is thinking about some of the challenges and surprises and maybe positive things of working at a teaching institution. What are some of the things that are different at a teaching institution than at a research institution that people should think about?

Mark: There’s so much. [LAUGHTER]

Regan: I have actually a number because when we first talked about this book, talked about it, even the idea for it, I was at one institution, which is a very teaching-focused institution, and then very recently moved to a Research I institution. Now, that said, I sit in the Center for Teaching and Learning, so I am surrounding myself with teaching and learning. But it really opened my eyes to some of those really big differences that I do see out there. And I think the biggest difference, is in the fabric of a teaching-focused institution, our constant conversations about teaching, where I know that next to every day, I would get coffee with a colleague at my teaching-focused institution, the University of Wisconsin Green Bay, and we talk about teaching, or we’d pop out of our office, and we’d talk about teaching, or we’d walk to somebody else’s office and we’d say, “Hey, I’m playing with this assignment. What do you think about teaching?” …and that doesn’t happen with the same frequency at Research I schools. I think, what does happen though, here and this goes back to Pam’s comment that I’m going to take up a notch, Pam said, “Hey, find somebody at a teaching-focused institution.” I’m going to modify that a little bit to say, even at Research I schools, if you’re interested in teaching, find somebody who’s interested in teaching, because just a couple of weeks ago, I had lunch with a colleague here at Oregon State. And he said a very interesting thing to me at lunch, where he said, “I don’t get to talk about teaching a lot. But I wondered what you thought about this.” And it was this great conversation about student attendance and recording lectures or not, but the way he tentatively put it forward as the “I never get a chance to talk about this. But here, was what I want to talk about.” That was so neat and in stark contrast to when I was at a teaching-focused institution, we had chances to talk about it all the time. In fact, for me, at a teaching-focused institution, I needed to create opportunities to talk about research, because our default was to talk about teaching. So that was one big difference.

Pam: I would also add that service is a much bigger expectation at a teaching-focused institution than at a research-focused one. So not only are you balancing the demands of teaching, and having all the pleasure of talking about teaching and experimenting with teaching, and keeping your scholarship reasonably productive, you’re also really expected to contribute quite a bit to your institution or your department through service. And sometimes that can get a little bit out of control if you don’t make smart decisions about where you’re going to spend your time in terms of doing service. So I would say that that that is one of the things that is really never really explored very much, but really is a large part of the job at a teaching-focused institution, is service.

Mark: And since Regan and Pam talked about teaching and serving, I guess I could talk a little bit about advising, because I think that’s another big difference. When I was in grad school, when I was a postdoc, when I looked at the people that were at the research institutions, they never talked about advising. If they did, it was sort of obligatory, get it done as quickly as possible. Whereas at most teaching-focused institutions, although there are some that have professional advisors that are doing that, but oftentimes, it’s the faculty that are advising students and doing that academic advising, the career discernment advising, and I think that’s a big difference, too. And I think that’s one of those things that isn’t obvious at first, when people think about a teaching focused institution, they obviously think about teaching, they know that they’re probably going to do some scholarship. But many people, until they have the job, don’t realize how much time you’re going to spend, both formally and informally, advising students, …and especially that informal advising can take up a lot of time at a teaching-focused institution.

Pam: So to tie it back to the question about applying and being prepared for an academic position, these are things that would be helpful to be at least conversant in: “How would you approach your service commitments? Where do you see spending your time? Be able to speak about your advising philosophy as well as teaching and your research.” I think that would make a competitive applicant.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the advice that you offer related to balancing things like academic advising, teaching, research, and service, and all the other things that we didn’t even talk about? [LAUGHTER]

Mark: Well, this is the big challenge. We talk a lot in the book about trying to do two things at the same time. So can you integrate some of the research into the classroom? Can you combine those so that the research becomes part of the teaching? Can you involve your students in part of the research process, both as part of the research lab, but also as part of the classroom experience? We talk about being really intentional about service, not saying yes to everything. There’s great pressure, especially on early in the career faculty, to say yes to service requests, particularly when they come from a chair or a dean, how can you possibly say no? And we discuss in the book that you actually can say no, and sometimes you should say no. And how do you do that gracefully? How are you intentional about those service activities, so they don’t take over everything. And then I tell this story in the book about my early advising, I got no training in how to do academic advising. I was handed a sheet that had the degree requirements and told, “Hey, meet with these students.” And I memorized the sheet, and I got pretty good at getting students registered for classes. And I could get students in and out of an advising session in 20 minutes. And I was looking at all my colleagues who were spending an hour or more with every student, and I thought “You guys are crazy, get the student in, tell them what classes to take, get them out of your office, sign the form, so that I had time that I could do research.’ I didn’t want to be spending time advising them. it took me several years to realize I was actually missing the point, the point of academic advising at teaching-focused institutions, and particularly the institution I was at, was not just get the students registered for the next semester, it was to help them figure out career discernment, help them figure out how they were going to navigate the difficult courses, how they were going to balance the courses, to get to know them, so that I could write letters of recommendation for them. And with several years of experience then suddenly, I became one of those people that spending an hour or more with every student. But it takes a while to figure out that balance.

Regan: To add to that is the notion that how you balance is going to vary and what you balance is going to really vary at where you are in your career. And I think going back to your earlier question, Rebecca, was “Who’s this book for?” …and our very neat response, which is “everybody along the spectrum,” …something we really tried to address in all over the book is remember, this will be different for you depending on where you are. And so we have parts where we’re like, “Hey, if you’re a grad student, remember this, if you’re a tenured faculty member, remember this.” So I think that how to balance varies on where you are in your career. Now that said, that’s not answering your question on tips to balance, it’s just kicking the can down a little bit. So I will address how to balance. I think at the end of the day, there are just so many different productivity tips and tools. And I think our best suggestion is, remember that there’s no one planner or app that works for everybody. And in fact, I’ll go so far as to say for many of us, an app is not the way to go. Go old school. Something we did in our household yesterday is my spouse pulled out a sheet of paper, a ruler, and a felt pen, and drew out the month of July so we could write on what our two kids would be doing during the week so they could plan and balance their summer. And I think sometimes, in this world of apps and technology, we keep looking for an app to help us balance where sometimes it’s going old school and writing it out or drawing it out in a journal or a calendar and going that route. The key suggestion here is: find a way that’s good for you. Don’t stick with something that’s not working. I think that’s a really key part that we wanted to share over the years is… I don’t know about Pam and Mark, but I know I have tried different things and have settled on what works really well for me in terms of creating balance.

Mark: And one of the things I learned from writing the book with Regan, is this idea that sometimes you have to be creative about thinking about how you’re going to get scholarship done. I was in this mindset that I needed to be able to block off big chunks of time to research. And so I was constantly trying to find six hours on three consecutive days so that I can do this. And then in reading Regan’s, what he wrote for this book and talking to Regan, I had this realization that well, I can reconceptualize how I do that and maybe it is work on scholarship for just long enough until it loses efficiency, and then switch to something else. And do that until I lose efficiency, and then switch to a third thing, and then come back. And this sort of not trying to say, “Well, I have to have these huge blocks of time, but say I’m gonna do something as long as it’s productive. And as soon as that stopped being productive, I switch to the next thing,

Pam: Both Mark and Regan offered very practical, down-to-earth, advice and mine’s going to be a little bit more abstract, philosophical. It’s important for me to always know: What am I doing this for? Why am I doing whatever the thing is that I’m doing? And is it important to who I am as a professional? Does it match my goals? And my goals may be determined sometimes. If I’m not tenured yet, it may be determined by other people, but always sort of looking at it from a strategic holistic viewpoint so that you can make the decisions about what kind of research do you want to do? How do you want to integrate that with teaching? What about service? How can you come up with a coherent, connected professional life? And for me, that has always been really important, and it’s really helped me balance because I can have a sense of what I’m trying to do and who I’m trying to become as a professional. And then when opportunities are available, I can always match that against “Does this fit what I want to do and how I want to proceed as a professional?” Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do and things that don’t fit exactly. But for the most part, there’s so much to be done. You really do have a lot of control about what specific things you do. It’s just important to know who you are and where you want to be heading.

John: One of the things you address in the book is mentoring and finding support for your work. Many campuses, maybe most campuses, will provide formal mentors, but that doesn’t always work as well as institutions hope. Could you give some suggestions on how new faculty can develop mentoring support in their new positions?

Pam: I think one of the best things to do is to look around your institution and identify people that you admire. Who has the career that you’d like to have? Who is involved in the things that you’d like to be involved in? …and then reach out to them. So I think that’s a quick short answer. But you can do that relatively easily. Just being around in any university, you’ll start to notice people who are doing different things, and you’ll start to develop admiration, reach out to those people.

Mark: And I agree with that and the only thing I would add is it doesn’t have to be at your own institution. Look around, look at your professional societies. Look at the people that you’re collaborating with, find the people, like Pam said, who have the career you want. Reach out to those people. Most people are flattered to be approached and say “Hey, can you give me advice? Can you informally mentor me?” Most people are happy and eager to do that if they’re approached..

Regan: And something that relates to both of those, especially at your university, you will see some usual suspects, the people who are always showing up at the things that you’re showing up at, those are great people to grab some coffee with or another beverage with…

Rebecca: tea…

Regan: tea… exactly…

Rebecca: always tea. [LAUGHTER]

Regan: Kombucha. This is Oregon, go for some Kombucha… [LAUGHTER] and just chat some more. So be on the lookout for those people you see often because there is actually something to connecting with somebody in a different discipline at your university. There are many, many benefits to that and we talk about that a fair amount. But I’m going to take what Mark said and some folks may say “Oh, I’d never do that.” So here’s something that I would actually underscore. You’d be amazed at what you will hear if you reach out to somebody else and say “You know what, I’ve either read some of your work or I’ve seen you at conferences or whatever, would you mind touching base every so often?” And I say this because this happened to me, where somebody out of the blue, who I did not know just reached out and we’ve been meeting every month for close to a year now. And this was somebody out of the blue. And I think there are many of us out there who would be happy to do those kinds of things, especially if your discipline doesn’t have a built in mentoring connector kind of thing. And for all of you out there who are psychologists, the Society for the Teaching of Psychology has a mentoring site where you can find mentors for you. So not every discipline has that, but do not poopoo the possibility that just reaching out will get you a connection. Now mind you, just like anything else in higher education, reaching out may get you nothing, and the person may not even respond, but like I tell my students in this day and age of things going into your junk folder, don’t give up after one email, give up after three, because who knows where email messages go nowadays.

Rebecca: One of the things that you address in the book is about preparing for all different roles in all different stages of the career. And I know that when I was applying for jobs, I was peeking around the corner of what tenure might look like. And then after I was tenured, I was peeking my head around wondering what it’s like to be a full professor. And now I am peeking my head around wondering what’s next. [LAUGHTER] So what advice do you have, as folks are moving through their continuum of their career and peeking around corners? It’s often a mystery what happens next.

Pam: I think seeking a mentor who is at that next stage is a great way to get a better view of what that looks like. And maybe more than one because my experience is that as you progress in your career in academia, there are lots of different paths you can take, lots of different ways people can go. So I know that Regan’s definitely in the administration and of things, Mark is heading there, I’ve popped in and out of administrative roles, but I keep coming back to faculty roles. I think there’s a lot of ways you can design your career as you go, and so having multiple mentors and multiple models is a good way to get that look ahead.

Mark: My answer, Rebecca, to your question was: “Well, that’s the reason we wrote the book is so that you could get a better peek around those corners.” And I would add also to what Pam just alluded to, there’s a reason that this is a three-author book, that it’s not just a single person story. And sort of serendipitously, the three of us have had very sort of different careers within this umbrella of teaching-focused institutions, and so you get those multiple perspectives. And so peeking around the corner, looking at my transition from pre-tenure to post-tenure looks different than peeking around the corner and looking at how Pam did it or how Regan did it. But in our book, you get all three of those. And so you really do get more information that way.

Regan: Yeah, and Rebecca, going back to your situation, I’m going to say something I think somewhat controversial in that I don’t think everybody needs to go through the same rung of higher education and climb one rung after the other. We talked about balance a little earlier, let me say this bluntly, you may be able to get a lot more balance if you’re not a full professor. You may be able to get a lot more balanced just once you get tenure without needing to then push yourself to that next level. There’s more responsibility with more levels. And I think to get a little Pam and philosophical here, it’s a state of mind. What are you comfortable with? And I like to say: Are you being challenged? Do you look forward to going into school? Or do you look forward to your work? If it is, do you need that rank? Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s a whole separate story about the tenure track versus the fixed term. That’s a separate issue. But especially in the traditional tenure-track moves, and also in ranking more for fixed term. And really ask yourself, are you happy where you are? Are you happy with the challenges? And that’s when you look around the corners and look around different corners? Because as Pam alluded to, maybe you look around into the administrative corner and you go, “No, I don’t want to go that route.” But by the same token, you may look around that corner and go, “Wow, I love the challenges there.” But it’s totally okay, if you don’t. You’re not a lesser person if you decide not to go up for full, if you decide not to go into administration. And the last thing I’ll say that is a little pragmatic, is this is why volunteering for committees is wonderful, because then you get a taste for those different corners and whether you want to go those routes or not.

Mark: And one thing I would add, we’re talking a lot about tenure and, more and more, there are institutions that are not tenure institutions. In my institution right now we have two different types of faculty, some who are on a tenure-track tenure system and some who don’t have a tenure system. The title of the book is Thriving in Academia, and we do talk about: “Can you be thriving in academia as an affiliate faculty for your entire career?” I think that’s very possible. I know people who’ve done that, so it doesn’t have to be that traditional route of a tenure-track position and then tenure and then department chair. We really want people to thrive, whatever works for them. And if that means that you’re at an institution where you’re just on multi-year contracts for your whole career, that’s great. How do you make that work? If you are in a position where you want to be an affiliate faculty member and teach classes at multiple different institutions? Can you build a thriving career out of that? Yes, absolutely, certainly you can. All of that is part of the book.

Regan: Mark’s commenting about the different tenure-track versus fixed term and contracts… To push that a little further, I think the constitution of higher education and how it’s done is looking very different. Something that we didn’t touch on at all in the book, because it was written mostly prior to the pandemic was remote learning. There are things coming down the pike, how do you deal with different teaching modalities? How do you deal with remote work? These are two major ways that higher education is changing. And you’ve got to hope that folks at your institution are looking ahead and not just rushing to get back to normal, where normal wasn’t the best place to be.

John: So maybe another book on How to Continue to Thrive in Academia, when the world’s falling apart?

Regan: There you go. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I’ll look forward to reading that when you guys are done with that. I’ll be the first purchase. [LAUGHTER]

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

Mark: For me lunch, lunch is what’s next. [LAUGHTER]

Regan: With the message being: don’t forget about your physical needs to thrive in academia. [LAUGHTER]

Pam: Exactly, exactly. [LAUGHTER]

Regan: That was the subtle subtext over there.

Mark: ….self care, Regan.

Regan: Actually, I was mostly jesting, but I just finished a project writing about how to help students study. And the last chapter is self care. So, sleeping and eating and family time and social support, and we don’t talk about that enough. I think something I have seen over the last year is a lot more of us on social media and in these places, being more direct about “Look, people take time for yourself.” And I think, honestly, my big answer to the “what’s next?” is how do we give each other the permission to do that. And I don’t think we in higher education are very good at that yet.

Mark: I had a colleague one time that was from Europe. And he was just appalled at what happened at our institution, which was that everybody ate lunch in their office at their desk working. And he just thought this was crazy, that you wouldn’t stop working, go somewhere, have lunch as a separate event. And I often think about that when I’m sitting in my office having lunch and thinking this is ridiculous, I should be able to take the time that it takes for me to have lunch away from work, not trying to eat and answer emails, I should be able to go somewhere, have a mug of tea, have my lunch, and have that time. And that’s just a small example, I think, of what Regan’s talking about. We need to set up a system…

Rebecca: Well, you all had me at lunch….

Mark: At my university, I was instrumental a couple years ago in just getting a faculty lounge so that we had a place that faculty could go that wasn’t in their office, that wasn’t open to students, so that we could spend a little bit of time not doing the job for a moment.

John: There was recently a podcast sometime in the last month or so, I think it was Rough Translation, where they talked about someone who went from the US to France, and that person wanted to have lunch at her desk, but there was a tremendous amount of peer pressure to get her outside, to leave the office, even if it was raining or cold, there was pressure on her to get out of there. And it was a bit of a transition for her.

Mark: I think one of the next steps that I think we’re all interested in and hoping for is really just continuing to share this information. So the book is out there now. There are starting to be conferences that are in person. We are starting to do presentations at conferences about parts of the book. And I know, talking to Pam, we’re very excited about being able to go to conferences and talk about: How do you be intentional about your service? How do you deal with feeling burnt out as a mid-career faculty member. …These workshops and conferences and, as Regan alluded to very early on in this conversation, talking to each other, about teaching, about teaching-focused institutions. For me, that’s the thing I’m really looking forward to is getting back to where we can gather as a community and have those conversations and share each other’s knowledge.

Pam: And I think hearing feedback from readers also will be really helpful because, as Regan said, we conceived of the book before the pandemic, finished writing a little bit of it during the height of the pandemic, and we’d like to hear from readers about how things are different for them now and how we can address some of those challenges that they might be facing that we didn’t anticipate in the book?

Regan: Yeah. And I think, definitely striding into next steps, I can’t help but think how we… and I mean the three of us… can better leverage psychological science, because this book was about teaching and teaching-focused institutions and the three legs of the stool of teaching, research, and service. But especially when you try to address the bulk of the questions, whether it’s balancing, whether it’s productivity, the reality is the psychological knowledge out there that can help you do it better. And what I haven’t seen yet is how do you really explicitly leverage what we know about stress and coping and planning and judgment and decision making, and all these psychological topics to help the teaching enterprise. So if you were to say, “Hey, what’s a potential fun next project that builds on this?” That’s definitely something that comes to mind where we unabashedly say here’s how you can do these things. Because I think it’s the pragmatics of how to do things that are important. We have a lot of pragmatics in the book, but especially and I love the reader feedback element, Pam, especially with reader feedback. I know people go: “Give me an example. Give me another example. Give me another example.” So pragmatics and leveraging some of those theoretical things that we know about aS psychologists, I think, really good scope for that.

Pam: I think about maybe adding a workbook component to this sort of thing where there are really practice exercises and practical, even though I do like the philosophical. But, as teachers, we do know that people need concrete examples. They need to work through things. They need to try to problem solve, not in the situation where they’re doing the problem solving for real. And so adding some piece like that, I think, would be valuable. And some of that is figuring out how to do your balance. I’ll admit I’m not very good at that. I eat at my desk all the time.

Mark: I’m happy to say that I have become somewhat notorious on my campus for skateboarding during lunch. I do a little laps around the campus on my longboard and everybody laughs at the old guy trying to be cool, but at least gets me out of my office.

Regan: Mark, we need a Tik Tok of you skateboarding with the book. Viral… That’s gonna go viral.

John: …holding the book.

Regan: That will go viral. That’s gonna go viral.

Rebecca: I think so. Well, thank you all for joining us and sharing all your insights in this book. We’re happy to share the book and share this episode with our listeners.

Pam: Thank you and we’d love feedback from the book once you run your sessions. We’d love to hear what people have to say.

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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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