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.

[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]

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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241. Teaching Matters

Graduate students often receive little or no training before their first teaching experiences. In this episode, Aeron Haynie and Stephanie Spong join us to discuss the need to support graduate students as they transition into their roles as teachers. Aeron is the Executive Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of New Mexico. And Stephanie is the Director of the Center for Digital Learning, also at the University of New Mexico. They are the co-authors of Teaching Matters: A Guide for Graduate Students. We are also joined today by Jesamyn Neuhaus, who is filling in once again as a guest host.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Graduate students often receive little or no training before their first teaching experiences. In this episode, we discuss strategies and resources we can use to support graduate students as they transition into their roles as teachers.

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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 Aeron Haynie and Stephanie Spong. Aeron is the Executive Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of New Mexico. And Stephanie is the Director of the Center for Digital Learning, also at the University of New Mexico. They are the co-authors of Teaching Matters: A Guide for Graduate Students. We are also joined today by Jesamyn Neuhaus, who is filling in once again as a guest host.

Jessamyn: Hi, everybody.

John: Welcome, Stephanie. And welcome back, Aeron.

Aeron: Thank you.

Stephanie: Thank you.

John: Our teas today are… Are any of you drinking tea today?

Stephanie: Yes. I was telling Aeron, I was most excited about this question because I drink tea every day. But yeah, I’ve got a really nice lavender chamomile today.

John: Very nice.

Jessamyn: Just hearing about that sounds soothing and calming: lavender and chamomile. [LAUGHTER]

Aeron: And I usually drink Earl Grey tea. But this afternoon because I’m having a little issue with my teenager, I’m drinking some mint tea. [LAUGHTER]

John: Which can also be calming.

Jessamyn: Yeah, that’s the theme. I’m drinking plain water. John, how about you?

John: And I am drinking Twinings Irish breakfast tea. So we’ve invited you here to discuss Teaching Matters. Could you tell us a little bit about how this book project came about?

Stephanie: Yeah, I think that this really is a testament to some of Aeron’s really wonderful mentorship of me when I was a graduate student. So we met when Aeron came to the University of New Mexico. I was finishing up my PhD there, and we had the opportunity to work together. And we had a lot of really great conversations about what it meant to teach as a graduate student, how often we were both told to put our teaching last, and really focus on our research. And Aeron was one of the first folks I met who really wanted to have serious conversations about teaching with graduate students. And so I think that that was the real kernel of where this book came from. And Aeron, I don’t know if you want to add to that.

Aeron: Thank you, Stephanie. Yeah, as part of a graduate teaching certificate that I helped develop at the University of New Mexico in cooperation with grad studies, I realized that although there’s some books out there that are specifically for grad students, and then some really nice new books that are coming out that are about teaching in general, that I was really having trouble finding a text that I felt really spoke to graduate students as complex intellectual people who could really think about teaching with the same intellectual excitement as they’re thinking about their research projects. And so we batted around the idea of: Why don’t we write a book ourselves? And that’s how the project started. And we, really, it took years for us to find time to work on it. But oddly, we finished it during the pandemic. So there you go.

Jessamyn: Following up on that, can you say more about that intended audience? Who do you imagine reading and using this book?

Aeron: Yeah, this is definitely a book that is written with graduate students in mind, but I think can still be very useful for new and actually established faculty and part-time instructors who didn’t get pedagogical training or who got some and would like a little bit more. But in terms of the writing of the book and the audience, we also really wanted to acknowledge the very particular positionality of graduate students, the competing demands that graduate students have, to be sometimes new instructors at the same time as they are learning to do important research in their fields. And we also found that we wanted to include as well one of the things that will be, I think, somewhat surprising in this book is that we really wanted to prioritize graduate students as human beings, not just as “brains on sticks,” Jessamyn. [LAUGHTER] That we wanted to think about them and really encourage them to address their own well-being, both mental and physical and social well-being, at the same time as they develop as teachers. We found that when that doesn’t happen, there can be a lot of oppression flowing downward. When grad students feel bullied or not supported by their graduate faculty, then what we sometimes see is a lack of empathy for the students that they’re teaching. So we thought it was very important in our book to really look at wellness and self care, as well as developing solid teaching practices.

Jessamyn: And just to give a shout out to the source there, that wonderful quote, “brains on sticks,” is from Susan Hrach’s book, Minding Bodies, also WVU press.

John: So this discussion of people as human beings might get us banned in Florida, [LAUGHTER] but other than that, I think is a really valuable approach. I thought it might be helpful if maybe we could all talk a little bit about our own experience in grad school in terms of preparation for a career in teaching. A very large share of the people in PhD programs end up in teaching colleges and yet tend to receive very little preparation in teaching. And I think the fact that there were no other books in this category is an indication that that’s an issue that has not been very well addressed in general in pretty much all disciplines. So what was your experience in grad school in terms of being prepared? Stephanie has mentioned a little bit about hers.

Stephanie: Yeah, actually, I think that I was really lucky. In the English department at the University of New Mexico, we got quite a deal of preparation in terms of writing pedagogy. So there was a two-week practicum. And then the culture of the department, when I was there, at least, was really focused on sharing, sharing with one another. So people shared materials, they shared syllabi, sequences, all sorts of things, people were really open to that. And then there was also a real welcoming atmosphere for graduate students to participate in different large assessment projects. So I feel like that was, even though not necessarily directly pedagogical training, it really was for me to really think about… How do people conceptualize learning outcomes? And what makes a good learning outcome? And what happens when you don’t have good learning outcomes? And we also, in the English department, did have a practicum for teaching literature. It was a semester long, but it was much more focused on creating a syllabus, thinking about how to select text. And it really wasn’t as focused on… What do you do in the classroom or online? What do you do when you’re interacting with your students? And what do you do when things don’t go the way that you had planned? I do think that I’m really lucky, though, in the amount of pedagogical training that I received. I think that’s a little bit rare.

Aeron: Yeah, and I’ll add to that. I’m a bit older than Stephanie, and so I had some training, but it was more minimal. But like Stephanie, I learned from my fellow graduate students. Also, I was really fascinated with pedagogy early on. And the one place that I found a community was going to the Pedagogy of the Oppressed Conference that is based on the work of Paulo Freire, and that was wonderful for helping think about early anti-racist pedagogy. But it was very theoretical at the time that I attended it. And what I wanted was… Yes! This is great, this is why I care about teaching. This is why it matters for issues of equity. But how do I actually do it? And how do I do it in my area of expertise, which is also literature? So I’m excited that there are so many more great books, including Jessamyn’s, and other books that are published by West Virginia University Press.

John: Jessamyn?

Jessamyn: I got zero training. I do think it’s changing a little bit, increasingly graduate programs include some attention to teaching. But why do you think it’s still a neglected area? Why does teaching get the short end of the stick when it comes to graduate programs?

Aeron: Yeah, I think that one of the tension points is that PhD programs are at research universities. And faculty at research universities are really brilliant and really good at getting jobs at research universities. And so they’re able to help mentor their graduate students toward those types of jobs. And for some of the graduate students who want a research-oriented job, and who are lucky enough to beat the odds, that works out very well. But I think, as we’ve mentioned earlier, that the majority of jobs, if you’re lucky enough to get a full-time job with benefits, it’s probably going to really emphasize teaching. So I think that that’s part of that disconnect, that faculty often are training their graduate students for jobs like the jobs that they have. I also think, and when we were developing the teaching certificate at the University of New Mexico, one of the things that I realized is that there’s a hesitancy to tell different disciplines how to teach because there’s such a difference in disciplinary teaching. So there’s a difference between having a teaching assistant who is grading for a faculty member, having a teaching assistant who runs a lab, having a teaching assistant in a large sociology class versus having a teaching assistant teaching undergraduates how to write. So because there’s such a difference in what we’re asking graduate students to do, I think that generally folks want to leave it to the disciplinary departments. And I think that that would be great, that would be ideal. As I joke, in Haynie University, when I finally am able to endow a private college in northern New Mexico with my younger brother’s music monies, then I think that ideally, we would have a faculty member who is an expert on pedagogy and an expert on training grad students embedded within each department. But until that happy day, I think that there needs to be a general orientation to the fundamentals of college teaching across modalities, and I think really importantly, that really focuses on equity and inclusion, and the costs when we do not try to teach to the students we have.

John: In my own experience heading our search committee on my department, we normally get a couple of hundred applicants. And typically out of that group, there’s usually three or four who have had some background in teaching or something beyond a one- or two-hour session designed for teaching assistants at some point. And I think part of the problem is exactly as you said, that the people who are selected to teach in graduate programs are selected on the basis of their ability to publish in top journals, and that tends not to favor people who are spending more time improving their teaching and learning. The exceptions tend to be when the people who are in our department, at least in the field of economics, actually work in the scholarship of teaching and learning as their area of expertise. And there’s a few departments that do provide really strong training. And those are the people who tend to move right up to the top of our list when we’re going through a search. Because when we look at the teaching philosophies, for example, that people share… in economics, it probably is worse than in many disciplines… where it says, “Well, I use PowerPoint instead of the Blackboard.” [LAUGHTER] Or, “I try to leave room for students to ask some questions at the end of classes,” or, “I try to bring in the news once in a while into the lectures.” And most of them don’t really go much further than that. So it’s a scenario where I think graduate students would have a bit of an edge in many academic markets if they did have this sort of training. But there’s a shortage of supply given the emphasis on training within the disciplines. So this book is a nice step towards that. And I think one of the things included is that you include a section on writing a teaching philosophy. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Stephanie: Yeah, yeah, we can. It’s so funny that you all asked this question, just about a week and a half ago, a grad student that I’ve worked with before reached out to me and said, “Hey, a group of my colleagues and I are trying to write teaching statements, and we don’t know how. And can you bring up your personal experiences? Should we talk about things that we’re doing in classes?” And it was so nice and handy to just say, “Actually, I have this appendix, let me just send it to her.” And we try to give graduate students a really clear guide, like, “Hey, here’s what you want to do in the first paragraph, here’s what you want to do in the second paragraph.” And try to help them leverage the different kinds of experiences that they have. As Aeron mentioned earlier, you might get a TA for a course and only get to head up one or two sessions or just the lab session. So you’re going to want to think about how to leverage those experiences a little bit differently than say, if you’re the instructor of record for the whole semester. So that is something that I think is really valuable. And in that appendix, we also give graduate students a sense of, you know…If you’re doing a teaching demo on campus, here’s what to bring, here’s how to plan for it. Teaching demos vary wildly across hiring processes, so we try to prepare students for the range of things that they might be asked to do to make them really successful in that job hunt. And I think that one of the things that’s really helpful in the way that we describe, specifically, the teaching philosophy is this notion that you don’t have to be perfect, that the hiring committees really want to know… What are the interesting things that you’re doing? How can you really talk to a group of gen ed students and make this subject come alive? And then also, where are you going from here? You are not expected to be the expert in teaching this field yet. So what are you going to do to learn and grow? And specifically, what are you going to do for this student population to learn and grow and to serve their unique needs?

Jessamyn: I love that point about being perfect. I think everywhere we can chip away at this myth of the super teacher, that professor that we see in all the movies and TV shows, lecturing effortlessly, no notes, and students learn magically, just by listening to this incredibly entertaining person talk. Anywhere we can chip away that, hurray. [LAUGHTER] And actually, speaking of falling flat on your face when you’re teaching, I’m especially interested in chapter five, it’s called “Navigating Classroom Challenges.” I think there’s way too many books about college teaching that don’t adequately empower readers for when things go wrong. And something always goes wrong, one way or the other, at least once. So can you give us an example of a classroom challenge that you discuss and a navigation strategy that you describe?

Aeron: One of the things that we do in that chapter—we also think that’s a very important chapter because everyone is going to have things go wrong or unexpected things happen—is we think it’s very important to distinguish between what we term “rude, disruptive, and hostile,” because oftentimes, we lump them together: Students do things we don’t like. And how do we deal with that? And often, too often, the response is, “Let’s just write everything into the syllabus. Every time someone does something we don’t like, let’s add it. Don’t wear bright colors, don’t drink in class, whatever.” And it becomes a long list of “thou shalt not.” And so in the category of rude, we have a really great anecdote. For this book, by the way, we interviewed many current and former graduate students from lots of different groups and in lots of different disciplines. And I think one of our really interesting anecdotes comes from an international graduate student from Egypt, who had come here, he had gotten lots of training, and he came to the University of New Mexico. And he’s brilliant and a committed teacher. And one of his first classes here on an American campus, he went in, and there were students with their feet up on the desks in front of them. And in his culture, that would be seen as a sign of horrendous disrespect. And so he didn’t say anything, and he left the class at the end. And he went to one of his mentors and said, “I can’t believe this happened. Clearly these students are really rude, and they don’t respect me.” And this mentor, a fellow international graduate student, was able to say, “That’s actually just the American classroom. In certain contexts, it’s much more informal than in some countries. And so it’s not a sign of disrespect, in fact, it means that they’re feeling very comfortable and relaxed in the class, and they feel comfortable with you.” So that I think was a really great example because it, first of all, shows the fact that when we talk about teaching in our book, we really are very much talking about within an American college classroom, and that’s important. But it also highlights the importance of establishing community guidelines, and assuming the best about your students. So spending a day or so or part of a class period, with the students constructing some sort of common guidelines so that you’re all on the same page, and that you can reduce the number of, to use Boice’s term, incivilities in the classroom. Now, there is, of course, quite a difference between a student doing something rude, which could be falling asleep, putting their feet up, doing something disruptive, which Stephanie has a really good example of, or something that could be hostile or threatening. So let’s Stephanie give a really great example of what we would call “disruptive” and how we might handle that.

Stephanie: So I have a story about a class that Aeron and I were actually co-teaching. We were using specifications grading for this particular class, we were really interested in alternative grading methods for our students. And on one particular day, one of our students was, it was at the point in the semester where she was expressing a lot of concerns about her final grade. And so we were talking about it before class started informally, and then the rest of the class kind of filled in, she’s still trying to talk to me about it, I needed to get class started, get the activities rolling. The students were starting that particular day, taking a knowledge-check reading quiz. And she was still trying to engage me in this conversation, even as other students had started doing their work. And this is what we would call kind of disruptive, right? Her actions were making it challenging for the other students to proceed. And so on that day I went over, and I sat down next to her, and I just said, “Hey, other folks are starting the reading quiz. Why don’t we talk about this after class?” And that worked out just fine, she moved forward. I don’t think that she was particularly happy with me during class. But that’s that difference between rude and disruptive, if you are in class, and you’re simply exhibiting that you’re unhappy through your facial expressions or through crossing your arms, then that’s okay, I want to check with you after class, but you’re not keeping the other folks around you from learning. We chatted about it after class. It turned out that this particular student was honestly just really stressed out at that point in the semester about all of her grades. And I think having that 45 minutes to cool off a little bit was helpful for both of us. And then I was able to go through the grading schema with her and make sure she understood what she would be accountable for, what she wasn’t accountable for. And one of the things that was really interesting to me is, I said something along the lines of, “I was really surprised to see your reaction in that way.” And she thought about it for a while, and she said, “Yeah, I’m surprised, too, that’s not really like me.” So I think just making sure that there’s a time and space to talk with students, that doesn’t escalate the situation, we could have continued having this dialogue with everyone around, and that might really escalate the student’s sense of embarrassment, my own sense of needing to preserve some sense of order in the classroom. So having a little space and time was really helpful for that particular instance.

Jessamyn: That’s such an instructive example. And I know personally, learning that I could say, “Thank you for bringing this up, let me think about it,” was transformative. And the way you can de-escalate, as you said, both people’s emotions, just by taking a little bit of time is pretty magic. And the other important point of your story, for listeners, is the reminder that non-traditional grading can meet with a lot of anxiety and resistance. And we go charging in all fired up about our revolutionary practices, [LAUGHTER] thinking, “Oh, students are going to love it.” But if they haven’t done it before, there’s going to be a lot of anxiety and being prepared for that by reading chapters like this, is so important.

John: And that goes far beyond just the alternative grading system,it goes with any new technique that’s being used in the classroom that students are not used to. Because we’re all creatures of habit, and we don’t always accept change as nicely as perhaps we might like others to do.

Jessamyn: So what does your chapter say about the worst-case scenario, the real threatening or dangerous situation?

Aeron: Yeah, thank you, Jessamyn, the hostile or we could say threatening. We want to acknowledge that those exist. And that even if you do everything well, even if you start with the community guidelines, and you establish a sense of classroom community, and you talk to students about things, you can’t control for variables, particularly as we’ve seen in the last year with mask mandates and other unexpected things. So we acknowledge in that chapter that there are groups of instructors who may really feel that hostility more keenly: minoritized faculty members, younger faculty members, faculty members who have some kind of visible disability. So there’s all sorts of things to take into account. But I think that what we want to say for those folks is that, first of all, you want to think about this, [LAUGHTER] you want to think through what might you do in these situations. And then most importantly, realize that you do have the right to ask a student to leave. You do have the right to end class and have you and the other students leave. You have the right to feel safe in the classroom as an instructor. And we encourage everyone to seek out all of their campus resources, whether it be dean of students, whether there is a teaching center, campus security, etc., and really know what your rights are as an instructor. And without scaring new graduate student instructors, we want them to really be armed with that knowledge of what those resources and what their rights are.

John: It’s better to be prepared for the eventuality and to have resources available to address it than to be in that situation and not have an effective strategy to work through. Are there other things that you’d like to share with our listeners about your book?

Aeron: Yeah, I mean, I think going back to the question about our audience, our intended audience, I think, I want to say that we really see this book as being something that a graduate student could just pick up and read on their own, that we’ve written it to be not at all a textbook, but to be very conversational, as well as full of research and resources. We also see that it could be very useful in graduate seminars on pedagogy and a really nice supplement with discipline-specific texts. And sort of along the lines, though, about our intended audience that we realized that graduate TAs are often the least trained, doing the hardest job. That’s something that Stephanie’s always reminding me. And we’re asking them, also, to be in classes where student success matters keenly. Large general education classes are where students can make or break our students and particularly for first-generation college students or college students at risk. Having well trained, having supported graduate instructors is, I think, really key to student success and the health of our research institutions.

John: In my own experience, I had a fellowship, so I didn’t start as a teaching assistant. I was in my third year of graduate training when an instructor left, and they needed someone to teach an upper-level course. And so about three days before the semester, I was asked if I was willing to do that, and I agreed, but the amount of preparation was, as Jessamyn said, non-existent. [LAUGHTER] And I feel really bad for the teaching that I provided that year. And the worst thing is, I ended up with the highest teaching evaluations in the department, something that rarely happened after that. But it says something, perhaps about the emphasis on teaching in a graduate program. I think it was just my enthusiasm for doing it that got me through that. It certainly wasn’t the way in which I taught, it was very much entirely a lecture-based class with lots of exams and assignments. And it’s certainly not the way I would teach anything today. But it was not very good preparation. But you know, we still have a lot of people coming out of graduate programs without that training and arriving on campuses. Might a good audience for this book also be those people who are starting their teaching careers, having left grad school, in preparing for their first semester teaching?

Aeron: Stephanie, do you want to talk about our “Help! My Class Starts in Two Weeks?”

Stephanie: Yeah, absolutely. We have this really nice appendix, that is exactly what Aeron described, “Help! My Class Starts…” I think it’s even just a week, I think that [LAUGHTER] two weeks might be too generous. But it is for exactly the case, John, that you’re describing, when you get handed an opportunity, often, right at the last minute, and you really want to take advantage of it, even though you know, you perhaps don’t have the preparation that you need. And so there is a really nice condensed, basically a checklist in the book, like figure out what you can get access to, figure out what you need to build, here’s how you can move through week by week once the semester starts. So yeah, I think that’s a really nice asset to the book. And I think that there are other ways too in which the book might be suitable for somebody who’s a brand new professor who feels like, “I didn’t really get this in grad school. And now I’m here, and now what?” Because often folks who are brand new to departments feel not quite the same, but also feel kind of betwixt and between the different power structures in a department in ways that, you know, we’ve written about specific to graduate students. But I think that brand new instructors, or faculty, or contingent faculty might also feel particularly in their own experience as well. And I wanted to add this is building off of the story that you told, John, about your first time teaching. One of the things that I do also think is really unique about our book is the number of graduate student voices in the book. And how comforting it might be for a graduate student who doesn’t have anyone else in their department to talk to about this, to hear from some other folks who also maybe had a really hard time their first class and then figured out their way. Or someone who maybe felt like they were experiencing microaggressions in their class. And what did they do to seek out help? So I think that it’s really powerful to have access to in this book is the number of graduate student voices who were really willing to share their story, because they cared so much about it, and their own teaching. So I think that that’s a real gift for readers who are graduate students or who might be new to a job.

Jessamyn: It’s really astounding what a closed-door practice college teaching is, and how it would be seen as really rude to just come into someone’s class. And you have to be really careful if you just want to observe someone else teaching just for your own edification, but it would be a whole big thing. So that’s such an important point about this book. And the way… keeping in mind too departmental cultures might be especially, so that that message, “You’re not alone in this,” is really at the heart of all the best scholarship of teaching and learning, I think, and of professional development, generally.

Aeron: Absolutely. And I think that the notion, as you pointed out, Jessamyn, that we often valorize or highlight these extraordinary teachers, who by the way, are like Jaime Escalante in Stand and Deliver, have heart attacks or you know, that really burnout with that kind of teaching. But what we don’t really talk about are the rough drafts of our teaching, or the false starts, or the things that we’ve done wrong, and the things that we polished, and the things that we’ve had to change and adjust. And I think that’s what we try to really focus on in this book, as well, as a kind of growth mindset on teaching, if you will.

John: We try to encourage that in our students, and it’s probably really good for us to encourage that in each other as well. I know on my campus, we’ve been doing some open classrooms, where we’ve been encouraging people to open up their classrooms and have other people visit, and to meet to talk before the class and then after. It hasn’t caught on as much as I’d like. Partly, it’s because we really got it started in March of 2020, and things seem to be a little disrupted for a bit. [LAUGHTER] And that disruption hasn’t entirely changed. But it’s been a really valuable experience for those people who have participated and the discussions that they have after it are really helpful because, as Jessamyn said, we tend to do all of this behind closed doors, and when things go wrong, we tend to blame ourselves for what’s not working. And it’s really reassuring to hear from other people that they’re experiencing exactly the same barriers and challenges. And I know in the reading groups that Jessamyn and I have done jointly in our two institutions, it really helps people to hear from other people that they’re facing exactly the same challenges and to share some solutions that either have failed miserably, or that worked really well. Because it’s much easier when we recognize that these problems are global, and they’re not local to our own classroom.

Jessamyn: And I couldn’t agree more about learning from our mistakes, having that growth mindset, we’re always learning how to be an effective teacher from our first class to our last. But the pandemic’s really taken a big chunk out of people’s energy and abilities in regards to pedagogical learning. The learning curve was so steep, I mean, really, for everybody, no matter how much you pivoted or not, we were all teaching and learning in this unprecedented time and conditions and still are. So how would you say these past… it’s two full pandemic years now, influence or shape the teaching challenges generally, including maintaining that growth mindset? And what parts of your book do you think are going to be really helpful for people right now?

Stephanie: Yeah, I don’t mean to be hyperbolic in this, but I do really think every chapter and every strategy. Before Aeron and I started this book, we both took very seriously the notion that, listen, if you’re getting a teaching job, now, you’re going to have to teach some sort of hybrid online course. And this was pre-pandemic, it was just like, if you look at the growth in online learning, there’s no way to believe that even in 2019, if you were entering the workforce, that you were never going to have to teach an online course in your career. So we built in the idea of teaching across modalities across the entire book. And then the other piece that we took really seriously, was this notion of asset-based pedagogies, teaching diverse student populations, and really capturing the strength, their cultural wealth, they bring to the classroom. We teach at the University of New Mexico, which is a Hispanic-serving institution, it enrolls a high number of first-generation college students. And it also enrolls a particularly high number of our American Indian or Native college students. So we wanted other folks to get that chance to learn from whose institutions will likely look this way, if they don’t already, in the years to come, to learn from the really great things that we’ve discovered about the kind of strengths and skills and ways of knowing that our students bring to the classroom every day, if we’re able to tap into those. And so I think that those are the two things that the pandemic really uncovered for folks, people’s discomfort with teaching with technology, who hadn’t been asked to do that previously. And then also, all of a sudden, instructors were confronted in a very different way with the variety of lived experiences their students were bringing in, because they were Zooming right into whatever their living experiences were. And so I think that the book really stands through the pandemic experience in a way that can actually really enhance somebody’s experience teaching, because those two things were particularly important to us when we started writing.

Jessamyn: That sounds really empowering for people going into a classroom, those two approaches.

Aeron: We hope so.

Stephanie: Yeah, absolutely.

John: You mentioned that our students bring in many different ways of knowing. How can we adjust our teaching to better serve all of the students in our classes?

Jessamyn: And following up on John’s question, one of your chapters is called “How Can You Create a Welcoming Classroom Community?” How do those strategies empower students?

Stephanie: Absolutely. I think that one of the things… you know, Aeron mentioned earlier, this sense of starting with a community agreement. And part of that process is really getting to know the students in your classroom, and what makes them feel like they’re gonna belong in this space. And what sorts of things make them feel like they wouldn’t. What kinds of things do they need to learn successfully? So there’s a lot in that chapter about establishing a welcoming space, making sure that students know that they belong, and are part of the classroom community. There’s an instructor that we work with here at UNM, she’s in the College of Education, and she always says, “The sum of us is smarter than any one of us individually.” And I think that that’s a really powerful thing to bring into a classroom and help students internalize. John, to your question specifically, in terms of alternative ways of knowing, we had a really great example of this from one of our graduate students actually, who works with the Center for Teaching and Learning. He was sharing recently on a panel, how he teaches in architecture and planning, and he does a lot with water management. Here in New Mexico, we have a really beautiful system of acequias, which is a way to bring water from the Rio Grande into agricultural communities. And so he talked about being able to explain the importance of water management and water resources to his students. And then for them to share back with him memories of being with their parents and cleaning out the acequias or those kinds of experiences. And so there is this way in which, when you take the time to learn about the students that have come into your classrooms, those opportunities can really bubble up for you. And those can be as simple as phrasing questions about course material that allows them to speak about personal experiences in relation to it. It doesn’t have to be a massive unit or changing an entire syllabus, it could be as simple as the kinds of things you do to warm students up for the beginning of a class period, or something you do at the beginning of the semester.

John: To remind students that they’re assets in their classroom, that their prior knowledge serves as an asset that can enrich the classroom environment and discussion.

Stephanie: Absolutely.

Jessamyn: But it’s such a vital point for your book, it’s so great it’s included because I think, coming out of graduate school, we all know that diversity is an educational asset. But it’s like it’s so ingrained and trained in us, I don’t think a lot of people are well equipped to help undergraduates get there as well and perceive diversity as an educational asset. So flagging it in this way in your book is so great.

Aeron: I wanted to add to what Stephanie mentioned that we also address that in our chapter on assessment and assignments. And that, if nothing else, giving your students choices in how they wish to demonstrate their mastery of the subject is quite important. Because they will surprise you, and no matter how clever you are at designing assignments, if you give them some flexibility and allow them to bring in their creativity, then they can show you what some of those connections are. And they can use the technologies that maybe they’re more familiar with even than you are, they can bring in a different approach to the assignment. So that’s something that we encourage as well, that really helps a student’s sense of belonging in that classroom, is choice and autonomy.

Jessamyn: Practically speaking for teaching, especially new teachers, offering students options like that, even if for some reason no student took any option except the very standard one, nonetheless, you have conveyed to them that you care about the diversity of ways that people might express their knowledge and learning. And that’s an important part of a teaching persona and communicating to students that you care about their success. So it works on many levels.

Aeron: Absolutely. And I think being transparent, as transparent as one can. And of course, we want to think about the positionality of graduate students, and there may be reasons why, for instance, graduate students don’t want to come in and say, “Hey, I’ve never taught this before!” I mean, that’s a kind of transparency that might not work for everyone. But as you do gain in expertise, and you do gain in experience, saying, “Hey, I’m going to be doing labor-based grading, and here’s why. Here’s why I’m doing it.” Or, “I’m going to be giving you some choices in how you want to do these assignments and show me your mastery. Here’s why I’m doing that.” I think that the students are smart, and they’re very invested in education, and they’re going to go on to be in lots of other classes. And it’s good for them to get the tools to understand some of the ways that their education can operate and should operate. And then also, I think giving them metacognitive tools as well, encouraging them to reflect on their own learning and their own learning strategies.

Jessamyn: Well, and I think the way you’re prioritizing making the classroom a welcoming, inclusive community goes such a long way. And I won’t say it’s a free pass to totally screw up your class but I also think that when you’ve established trust and communication with students, if you’ve flubbed something, it’s not the end of the world. You’ve already prioritized their success and demonstrated that you really care and hope that they do well. That’s going to cover a lot of, I think it’s Maryellen Weimer’s term, like, teaching sins. You might not be so great at XYZ, but if you’ve paid attention to the things that you’re laying out in the book that goes such a long way with students. Like you say, they know, they know, they’re smart. And when they know that somebody is putting effort into creating a welcoming classroom space, then that really goes such a long way.

Aeron: Absolutely. And I think, to sort of end on a positive note, that if nothing else, what we’ve learned in the last two years is the importance of compassion and recognizing the human, which means that instructors are human as well. And I think if they see, as you put it, Jessamyn, if they see that you are coming from a place of investment in their success, and of common decency, and personal compassion, then you’re going to see that in most cases, they’re going to extend that compassion to you. And we all know there’s going to be times when we need it.

John: Certainly, that’s been a lesson of the last few years, if there’s no other lesson that came from the pandemic. We always end with a question, What’s next?

Aeron: I’ll start and then I’ll let Stephanie add to it. So here’s my boring administrative answer. [LAUGHTER] What’s next is a reorg. We have, at the Center for Teaching and Learning, we’re actually doing away with some of the boundaries between student success, faculty success, online success, face-to-face teaching. And that’s very exciting. So we’re a very large 30-person center that helps support students in terms of student tutoring and student learning, graduate student support and online support. Stephanie and I are also part of a group of staff who are working on a culturally-responsive teaching research project, where we’ve interviewed a number of students to find out from their point of view, what’s working to help them feel a sense of belonging and inclusion in the classroom and what’s not working. Stephanie?

Stephanie: Yeah, I think overlapping with that, the only two things I want to add is, Aeron sort of glossed over this in the reorg, but I think it’s in keeping with the ethos of the book, is that one of the things we’re really focused on as a team in CTL right now is how to treat ourselves as whole humans at work. And how, I think a lot of CTLs all over the place, really took on a lot of work during the pandemic. And some of that is very visible, and some of that’s really invisible, the kind of affective labor that I feel like Lee Skallerup Bessette talks a lot about, that particularly comes to people working in centers for teaching and learning. And so we want to make sure that we’re also a place to work where you can be a whole human in this place, and where we’re also extending compassion to ourselves and taking care of ourselves. And then we’re also working on a project on literary pedagogy. So we’ve been doing some interviews with folks who teach intro to lit courses and trying to figure out… What do you really value? And how are you imparting that to your students? And it’s a project that really grew out of some early research dissertation project from Dr. Angela Zito, who is at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And she’s been partnering with us and was kind enough to let us expand upon her project.

Jessamyn: Great, all of that stuff sounds great.

John: It does. And you know, if you’d like to come back and talk to us about this on the podcast, we’d love to have you back.

Jessamyn: That’s right. [LAUGHTER]

John: So, let’s stay in touch.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Jessamyn: Thank you so much.

John: And thank you, it was really great talking to you. And I’m looking forward to seeing the book. I’ve got it on preorder, and I’m looking forward to its arrival.

Aeron: Thank you so much. Lovely speaking with both of you.

Stephanie: Yeah, thank you so much, everyone.

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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.

John: Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle, Annalyn Smith, and Joshua Vega.

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237. Latina Educational Developers

Our intersectional identities impact our positionality in the work that we do. In this episode, Carol Hernandez joins us to discuss her qualitative research addressing the experiences of educational designers from an underrepresented group.

Carol is a Senior Instructional Designer and Faculty Developer at the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at Stony Brook University. Carol recently successfully defended her dissertation at Northeastern University. In it she examined the simultaneity of the multiple identities experienced by Latina educational developers working in higher ed. Before moving into higher ed, Carol was an award-winning journalist.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Our intersectional identities impact our positionality in the work that we do. In this episode, we discuss a qualitative research analysis addressing the experiences of educational designers from an underrepresented group.

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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 guest today is Carol Hernandez. She is a Senior Instructional Designer and Faculty Developer at the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at Stony Brook University. Carol recently successfully defended her dissertation at Northeastern University. In it she examined the simultaneity of the multiple identities experienced by Latina educational developers working in higher ed. Before moving into higher ed, Carol was an award-winning journalist. Welcome, Carol.

Carol: Hi, thank you for having me today.

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

Carol: I’m not drinking tea right now.

Rebecca: Oh.

Carol: Should I go get some? [LAUGHTER]

John: We have had a number of guests, probably about 40% or so, who are not drinking tea. So you’re in very good company.

Rebecca: Yes, excellent company in fact.

Carol: I’m usually drinking tea, but it just so happens that right now I’m not.

Rebecca: Do you have a favorite kind of tea?

Carol: Yeah, I guess I like chamomile.

Rebecca: Oh, that sounds nice and refreshing and calming.

Carol: Mmhmm, or something fruity. There’s something called zesty raspberry zinger or something like that. I like that.

John: Raspberry zinger, yeah.

Rebecca: Yeah, I’m familiar.

Carol: Yeah.

John: And I have a peppermint spearmint blend today.

Rebecca: Okay, we’re calming down now, huh, John?

John: After the last four or five cups of black tea, yes.

Rebecca: Yeah, I’m still hyped up on my Scottish afternoon tea.

John: We’ve invited you here because we were intrigued by the title of your dissertation, I’m Not Like You. I’m Different. But before we talk about your research and your dissertation, could you tell us a bit about your pathway, which is somewhat unique, from being a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist to an educational developer?

Carol: So it starts with me going into journalism. At 19 I was an intern at the Miami Herald, and I loved it. I was so happy there, and I met all these famous writers. It was really such a dream, and I learned everything there. And then finished college and started working as a journalist, and really enjoyed it all throughout my 20s. And then I started editing, so I went to the editing side. And the way I think of writing and editing is like… writing is the creative, messy part, and then the editor comes in and analyzes it, and looks for fit, and cleans it up, and tries to make it even better. So the two really complement each other. I would never say one’s better than the other, but I think as a writer you have to be aware of those two approaches, because sometimes you just want to be in the writing space and sometimes you just want to be in the editing space. And I think what happens is sometimes you end up doing both at the same time, and you can’t get out of your own way. So anyway, in journalism, the things I really loved about it were writing, I love writing, reading. I love talking to strangers. [LAUGHTER] I love asking questions. I’m very curious, and I love learning. I love doing research, I love looking up documents, going to the courthouse and pulling lawsuits, reading things like that. That’s fun for me. And I realized I had this skill set, and there was an opportunity to teach as an adjunct at Stony Brook University in the School of Journalism. And so I started teaching, and I realized I am a subject matter expert, but I have no teaching background. I had never taught anything to anyone, and I needed help with the teaching. And I found myself at the faculty center talking to people who know about teaching, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t know this was a job.” [LAUGHTER] And I thought, “Wow, this is interesting.” And I realized that the skill set that you use in instructional design is very much the skill set that you use as a journalist. And I also realized that as a journalist, you are, in a sense, an educator, because you need to quickly learn something, and then you need to explain it to your reader in a way that they will understand and be able to take some action, some informed action, based on the journalism that you have provided. So that opened my eyes to a possible career. And it coincided with the time that I had small children, and the life of a journalist, at least for me, when I was really having fun, that’s all I did, and it just took up all my time. But if you have a family that wouldn’t be fair. [LAUGHTER] So I looked around and I thought, “Well, what would be some other possible work?” And I decided, “Okay, higher ed seems like a very civilized workplace.” [LAUGHTER] Little did I know. [LAUGHTER]

John: At least it’s nice to think of it that way, yes.

Carol: You know, I just thought, “Well, I won’t have to work on Thanksgiving. I won’t have to work three to midnight. I won’t have to go ask people about their loved one who just got shot down in front of them, right? I don’t have to go to school board meetings.” There were so many pluses. [LAUGHTER] And when I was a journalist I did a lot of cops, courts, crime, really tragic stories. It was rough. I think I see myself as an upbeat person, and it was hard to stay upbeat when I was covering those kinds of events. And now that I’m not in daily journalism anymore, in that field they now discuss trauma and how it affects you as a reporter, and when I was a reporter nobody was thinking that way, and so it’s like a totally different way to see it. So I think that’s good, that it’s changed over time. So that’s basically my journey from journalism to higher ed and instructional design.

John: And working as an instructional designer, being upbeat and positive is actually a very useful asset when you’re working with faculty who are often a little bit anxious at the time, I would think.

Carol: Oh yeah, yeah. Yesterday somebody came in, and the person was so upset, and distraught, and just beside herself, and I felt almost like a counselor, “It’s okay, let’s talk about it.” [LAUGHTER] And then by the time she left, she was smiling and she wanted to make a date for coffee, and I was like, “Oh, thank God.” And I really felt like, I don’t know, she just needed, in that moment, somebody to hold some space for her, look at her course, and make some suggestions and commiserate with her, and then she was able to keep going.

John: Excellent.

Rebecca: We have to rise to all kinds of different occasions in these roles, right? Like far beyond what we think our actual job description [LAUGHTER] is sometimes.

Carol: Yes, yeah. So another job that I’ve discovered when you work in a Center for Teaching and Learning, that nobody told me about, is event planning.

Rebecca: Yup. [LAUGHTER]

Carol: Which I do not like at all, but I have to do it. So I feel like we need to tell people about this, warn them ahead of time.

John: Or not, because someone has to do it, [LAUGHTER] and sometimes it’s better to be surprised once you’ve already committed to it.

Carol: Yeah, we have a Teaching and Learning Center faculty commons space, it’s beautiful. And we used to have coffee, and people would stop in to get coffee. And so for some reason we would always run out of lids, and that became like a crisis, “We’re out of lids!” [LAUGHTER] “Somebody needs to order coffee lids.” And that was always an issue.

John: We used to offer coffee, but it just became too much of a pain for me to clean it, so we switched to tea, and that’s worked well for us since then. It’s pretty easy to clean up hot water.

Carol: Yes, yes. So because of the pandemic we stopped, so we don’t offer anything. We do have the water, so you could bring a tea bag and go for it.

John: We have probably over 100 different varieties of teas here, so we still provide that, but it’s all in nice sealed containers.

Carol: Yeah. Good.

Rebecca: Yeah, so we definitely want to talk about your dissertation. Can you provide a little overview of your dissertation and the methodology that you’ve used?

Carol: Sure, so my dissertation… I used a methodology called narrative inquiry. And narrative inquiry is a qualitative methodology, it’s based on stories, so the unit of analysis is the story. And you are looking at things that are literary concepts. So symbols, metaphors, emotion, humor, all the things that make for a good story, become the markers of what you’re analyzing. Because as people, that’s what we’re drawn to, and so that’s what you’re looking at. And in my study I had a small number of participants for a couple of reasons. One is I was looking specifically at Latina women, Hispanic women, who are working in higher education institutions and are doing educational development work, and there are not a lot of us. So I put out a national call, and I ended up with not that many people. So it actually works well with narrative inquiry because it really is for a smaller number of participants. It works well for populations that are marginalized in some way or have experienced some marginalized status. So there’s fewer of us. And it’s qualitative, so it’s based on interviews. It requires you, at least for my study, I did three interviews with each person, and so it also looks at past, present, and future. So you’re looking at people’s stories about their experiences, past, present, and future. So that was the methodology that I used.

John: And that interview process seems to track very nicely with your prior career too, that experience of interviewing and extracting information.

Carol: Yes, absolutely. I don’t think of it as extracting information so much as trying to immerse yourself in the lived experience of another person. And while I’m not saying you couldn’t do it in one interview, the approach that I used really emphasizes building a relationship with the participant, and it emphasizes that storytelling triggers the stories of those who listen and that it is a co-constructive process. So you tell a story, and it reminds me of a story that I can share with you, and so both of us are enriched by sharing these stories. And so that was the vibe the whole time. And I would say good journalists are aware of that. They’re aware of… getting a story isn’t just turning on a tape recorder, it’s really about connecting to people, to their humanity, and sort of trying to put yourself in their shoes. So I agree, it was something that… I felt so happy, and so lucky, I could not believe that this approach existed. Because when I started my doctorate I thought that I would be doing some statistical analysis, that I would have to have thousands of participants. Well, I didn’t know, I didn’t know anything about that stuff. So through my doctoral program, when I found out that there are other ways to do research I was just like, “Thank you!” [LAUGHTER]

John: So instead of gathering a lot of details on specific values over a large sample, you were exploring in much greater depth the experiences of those participants. So you’re acquiring a lot of information, but it’s a much more intensive process it sounds like.

Carol: Yes, and so in my doctoral program we were taught that the methods complement each other. So if you are drawn to quantitative, good for you, do it. And if you’re drawn to qualitative, do that. And those will complement each other, one is not better than the other. So the program I went to is at Northeastern, and they focus on the scholar practitioner, and they focus a lot on disrupting that hegemony. They’re really into social justice, and having us look at our own positionality, our own bias, our own privilege, and making us question ourselves as being scholars, as contributing to knowledge. So for me, again, I lucked out, because I got into this program, and it was just such a good fit. And again, I lucked out with my advisor, my advisor, I feel like she was an angel sent from heaven, I love her.

Rebecca: Can you talk about some of the challenges that the educational developers that you interviewed identified as they navigate within their institutions?

Carol: Sure. So there are a lot of challenges within the space that we know as higher education. It’s its own world with its own language, and its own culture, and its own tradition. And so many of those are just understood, so that makes them hidden. And when you are coming from a family, let’s say your family is an immigrant family, or English is not your first language, or your parents never went to college, your name is in Spanish. So there’s so many challenges where you constantly are reminded that you don’t belong there, or you don’t fit there. So one challenge, for example, one participant was saying that her name is a Spanish name, and early in her career she changed it to a name in English. And it worked for many years, and she realized one day that she had changed it to make other people comfortable. Other people couldn’t pronounce her name in English, so she changed it. And she realized that that was the power dynamics of the workplace, and that was a challenge. Another participant is Afro-Latina, and so people in her workplace didn’t know what to make of her, and just assumed that because she is not white appearing that she is an expert in diversity, and that was not her background at all. And so they kept pulling her into workshops to do stuff on diversity, and she’s like, “Why are you asking me to do this?” So that’s a challenge, and another challenge is… you can be a Hispanic woman and be white passing, and that’s a challenge because then people just assume that you have no other culture except the American culture. So this one participant, she was born in Puerto Rico, and her family moved here when she was young. And so her entire cultural identity was Puerto Rican, but in a higher ed space she was treated like a regular white woman. She felt weird about that. She’s like, “Well, do I need to tell people who I really am? Or should I just let them think whatever they want to think.” So those are some of the challenges that came up.

John: One of the things you mentioned was that people are often singled out because they are underrepresented to serve as representatives of that whole group. Was that something that was commonly experienced by participants in your study?

Carol: That depended on how their appearance communicated their identity, their ethnicity. And it really depends because for Hispanic women there’s colorism, there could be language differences, if you have a heavy accent that kind of becomes a marker for being different, hair texture, it really depends. So if you are different sounding enough or different looking enough, yes, somehow you do become the spokesperson, or you’re asked to comment on something that may or may not be your area of expertise. Unfortunately, you’re pulled into providing some extra labor and extra education and teaching around certain issues. Which, it depends, some people want that, and some people don’t want that. Across all participants they wanted to have an impact on their workplace, so they were looking at different ways of doing that. Could it be mentoring? Could it be creating affinity groups? Could it be collaborating to do research? So they were aware of it and actively trying to disrupt the system so that other generations of Hispanic women would have more space for them.

Rebecca: So one of the things that we’ve started talking a little bit about is representation. So there’s growing representation in college students, but Latinas are underrepresented among faculty, educational developers, instructional designers. What might be missing in our course design practices as a result of this under representation?

Carol: What might be missing in the course design? I think not just the course design, but just thinking about higher education in general.

Rebecca: The design of higher education. [LAUGHTER]

Carol: Yes, the whole thing, the whole thing. For example, we have so many programs where we have good intentions, but maybe we’re not thinking about it from a perspective of someone who doesn’t have access to social capital, or outside resources, or transportation. So one I think about all the time is how many institutions promote internships, and many institutions, they’re very proud of their outreach through internships, but if they’re unpaid internships you’re not helping anyone because students who are not self-funded are not going to be able to afford to do your internship. So things like that. Programs, for example, one of the participants is in engineering education, and she talked about programs that are meant for students who are underrepresented, so enrichment programs, trips, conferences, things like that. And what she found was that the target students were not taking part because they didn’t have the time, or the money to go on these trips, because they were working to pay for their schooling or their rent. I think that’s one design flaw. And even, just in general, I think higher education so often we have good intentions, but then we end up becoming gatekeepers and becoming very exclusionary, and I would like to work on that more. So when I work with faculty at the course level we might have conversations about… Who are the authors you’re assigning? Do you ever have students reflect on the positionality of the authors? And sometimes I’ll say, “Let’s look at your assessment. Are you doing a lot of multiple choice exams? Or do you have options for students to do other kinds of ways to demonstrate what they’ve learned? Are you diverse in how you assess learning?” So those are some things I could do with individual instructors, or in a workshop, or something like that.

Rebecca: You’ve talked a little bit about some design flaws for students. Can you talk about some of the design flaws in higher ed for faculty and staff?

Carol: So in the literature a few things happen. When we talk about, for example, a hiring committee, is your hiring committee diverse? And when you advertise or you promote a job, are you promoting it within networks that are diverse networks? And are you looking for a PhD or an EdD? Because if it’s a PhD it might be more restrictive, you might not get as many diverse candidates. And who are the leaders in your organization? Are they diverse? And are they assessed on how well they develop? Not just hire, but develop and promote diverse candidates. So often in higher ed we focus on just hiring people, but then we kind of forget about developing them, and promoting them, and thinking about how we want them to develop to the point where they leave and they tell other people about how great we are. So it’s not just about hiring people and keeping them there, but hiring them, developing them, and seeing them launch for the benefit of your institution, seeing that as a positive.

Rebecca: That’s a good point. I think that’s something that we don’t often talk about. Certainly, not developing community and helping someone develop as a member of a community, but then also that it’s important that they just have a good positive experience that they can share no matter where they end up, whether they stay or whether they go. I really love that you’ve highlighted that.

Carol: Yeah. So absolutely, what you find is that people are part of networks. For example, I’m part of this network, it’s Latinas Completing Doctorates. And so you get the inside scoop on everything, and that’s good because I want to know the inside scoop. So if I’m thinking about a job somewhere, I would get in there immediately and be like, “Tell me what’s going on.” So those networks do exist, and we need to be aware that if people come to our institutions and they feel isolated, it’s not going to be good.

John: And one of the problems we talked about in our previous podcast, and you’ve alluded to, is that often people who are from underrepresented groups get all these extra workload issues which makes it much harder to progress through the ranks and so forth, and make that sometimes a much more stressful experience than it is for people who are not in those categories. What can Latina educational developers do to have more influence in their positions?

Carol: That’s a good question. So one of my participants, we did talk about that, and basically she said she’s at an institution where, I think she said she might be the only Latina professor. And she said, “I’m white passing, and I like it that way. I do not want to have any conversations about diversity.” [LAUGHTER] She felt like she just had to protect herself. I said, “How do you communicate your identities to your colleagues?” And she said, “I don’t, I don’t need to do that.” She said, “I save that for my students. With my students I can be more honest, and I can talk a little bit more about myself. But with colleagues…” She said, “No, I don’t want to go there because I already know about the bias and assumptions.” She said, “I’m not going to go there.” So I think it really depends, unfortunately, on who you are and how visible you are.

John: One of the things you’ve chosen to work on, though, is the area of inclusive teaching practices, as a major focus of your work as an educational developer. Could you give our listeners some recommendations on some inclusive teaching practices that you encourage faculty to adopt?

Carol: I have chosen that. One of the things I noticed is… that doesn’t come up, maybe it’s coming up more often now, but when I first started in my research that was not something that would come up a lot in the research of educational development. We talk about excellent teaching and learning, and it’s excellent, and it’s active, and it’s high impact, and all of these things about good teaching. And I get excited about all that stuff, I love all that stuff. But I noticed that we never really talked about language, or accent, or ethnicity, or low income. I felt like there was this whole area that we were just kind of ignoring, and were saying like, “This is how you can be an excellent instructor, excellent teacher,” and ignoring things that, for students, are very at the forefront of their experience, like language. So, when I started school, I didn’t speak English. I learned English in school, right? So my teachers had to deal with that, and some teachers were cool, and some teachers were not cool. And the ones that were not cool, they were kind of nasty about it, and so then that affects how you feel about going to school, and how you feel about learning. And there’s a lot of research that looks at that, at being shamed because you’re not an English first language learner. Or your parents, they’re immigrants, and they don’t come to the school, they don’t come to open houses, and you know… Why? Is it because they don’t care? There’s all these things that come up for students, and it carries over to the college level even with graduate students. So one of the studies I read for my own dissertation looked at Hispanic women who were going for higher degrees, and how their own family sometimes would say, “That’s not a good idea, because who’s going to want to marry you with all this education?” Culturally, it was like, “This is not good. You need to focus on mom, family, caretaking. Do you really need to get a PhD? No.” So that came up. One of my participants said as soon as she told her mom she was pregnant, the mom said, “You need to stop with that little hobby that you have.” You know, her dissertation. The mom said, “Leave that alone.” To me, that tells you something about some of the barriers that you might face as a Hispanic woman, not just from society at large, but from your own family.

John: So one of the challenges we face is, many of our students are faced with that, particularly people who are from first-generation households, who may not understand the benefits of education and the role it can play. Often, it’s pressure from parents to choose a particular major, one that will guarantee a job in business or something else, but often students will want to pursue a career that they’re very interested in, but there may be some family pressure. And from what I’ve seen, it seems to be more common for first-generation students to pursue fields where the parents believe the job prospects are better based on their own experience and interactions. So I think that is something that perhaps faculty often are called on to address at least.

Carol: Right. In general, what I found through my reading is that higher education’s very expensive. And so families, of course, are questioning the value, and what is the outcome of investing all this money and time? Will my child end up working? Or just being in debt? Like what’s going to happen? So yeah, I think a lot of that is happening. We’re looking at higher ed and trying to assess it. Are students really learning what we’re saying that they’re learning? So yeah, there is more of a spotlight. When I went to college, you know, a hundred years ago when I was in undergrad, [LAUGHTER] the syllabus was one page. [LAUGHTER] It was like, “Here are the dates, there’s a midterm and there’s a final, and if you miss it, you fail the class.”

John: And maybe there was a list of topics you’d be addressing with the chapters corresponding…

Rebecca: Maybe.

John: …but that was about it.

Carol: Yeah, but I remember the syllabus was one or two pages, and it was a different time. We now expect a lot more, and I guess it’s good, but then when I see a twenty-page syllabus I just want to cry. [LAUGHTER]

John: So what are some other strategies?

Carol: Some other strategies… So what I’ve read is that first, as the instructor, it’s recommended that you talk a little bit about your own positionality. Whatever you’re comfortable with, you don’t have to tell people your life story. But by just acknowledging your own ethnicity, or race, or positionality, or first-gen status, that just by doing that, you are making it okay for others to reflect on theirs. Not necessarily even asking them to share that, but just kind of acknowledging your own. And so I tried it out, and I found that my students were receptive to that. It gave them words to talk about themselves if they wanted to. And another practice would be… Look at your syllabus and make sure that you’re assigning underrepresented authors. So are you assigning black women? Are you assigning trans authors? Are you assigning people who are not represented in your discipline or in your profession? Can you bring in guest speakers? Can you offer some choice in how students show what they know? Can you get students working on some kind of community project, helping them make some connections? What is the community impact of their learning? Helping them make connections to their personal goals. So those are some ways to address maybe some areas that we’ve overlooked in the past, and having students reflect on who they are and also who their instructors are. So Hispanic women, that segment of the labor force is one of the fastest growing. Hispanic women are also one of the fastest growing populations that are going to college, but they tend to be also the least likely to complete, and the most likely to be living in poverty. So by the time they get to higher ed they’ve already jumped through lots of hoops and surmounted a lot of obstacles. So the literature is looking even farther back, like preschool. So some of the things, yes, we can address, but it’s almost too late at the higher ed level.

John: Or at the very least, we need to provide more support for students who come in with backgrounds that may not be as enriched because of the quality of the educational experiences up to that point.

Carol: Right. Or let’s flip it, and say that their experiences are enriching, right? That they have experiences that they can share that are valuable. Why am I saying that they haven’t had enriching experiences? Maybe they were translating documents at age eleven for their parents. To me, that is a high level achievement. Being bilingual, that’s something important. Working for your family, supporting your family, that’s important. That’s another practice, is reframing… What is enrichment? And what is social capital? And what is cultural capital?

Rebecca: And what are those achievements? Because we often don’t value some of those achievements in our culture…

Carol: Mmhmm.

Rebecca: …the culture of higher ed. But those are so important, those are things that they can share with their colleagues in class, and that they can learn from each other. And I find that when I’ve had opportunities to find out things like that from a student, they’ve shared, and I’ve said, “Please share that experience with your colleagues in this context. This is actually really valuable.” They always seem so surprised.

Carol: Right!

Rebecca: They wouldn’t necessarily think of that as being a valuable thing to share, or they’ve been treated in a way that hasn’t made it so that it has been comfortable or optimal to share.

Carol: Right. So since you are the instructor, you sort of have a magic wand, and you can wave your magic wand and give them the words and the frame to say, “This is knowledge, and this is valuable, and you should be proud.” That’s the power you have in the classroom.

John: As an instructor, one of the most important jobs is to treat diversity as an asset within the class environment. And in fact, just telling students that they all are bringing in their own unique experiences that can enliven our discussion of these topics, and we need to hear all these perspectives in order to fully understand the topics we’re addressing in class. So welcoming that diversity is very important.

Carol: Yeah, for sure, for sure. The other thing I was thinking is… and my thinking changed over the course of working on my dissertation. So it took me six years from start to finish, and [LAUGHTER] I think I started with like, stars in my eyes, like, “Education is going to fix everything!” And then by the end I just was like some curmudgeon… I don’t know. I think I’m recovering from finishing the dissertation.

Rebecca: Yeah, but I mean, there’s so many barriers that sometimes it feels like it’s completely impossible to overcome those barriers, or to redesign a system that has such a legacy. It’s difficult to change a system. It takes a lot of time, and it’s really slow, and it feels like change doesn’t happen fast enough. [LAUGHTER] So it can be really easy to get frustrated, rather than trying to work to change the system further.

Carol: Right. So the theoretical framework that I use is a theory called simultaneity. And the scholar that proposed it, she was looking specifically at the system, and that they are all happening at the same time. And so when you talk about systems, that, to me, is the key, because an individual can be very prepared and go into a system that just chews them up. One strategy is numbers, we need numbers. We need more people who have had these experiences to come into these spaces, and that’s where a lot of my participants wanted to connect, and they were just so happy to be able to tell their story. And that was interesting to me because sometimes you think, “Who’s going to want to tell me their stories?” But they were so happy to share, they really loved it, and I was so grateful to hear them. So connections, mentoring, networking, affinity groups, supporting each other, joining committees, meeting people who are interested in the same things. Those are some things that I’m trying to do, personally.

John: So that’s important both for faculty and instructional support, as well as for students having those connections and networks.

Carol: Definitely. That’s why I came to talk to you both because I thought, “Wow, this is an opportunity,” and I love talking, so. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, we very much appreciate you joining us, and sharing your story with us.

Carol: Thank you.

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

Carol: So for me, when I finished with the dissertation, I felt like I immediately needed to publish something. I felt like I was in a race. And I don’t know, at some point I realized, I need to do something totally different. So I signed up for an improv class, and that was so much fun, I loved it. And then I signed up for a TV writing class, so now I’m writing sitcoms. And that’s totally different, and I’m learning again. I’m terrible at it, I’m trying to learn how to do this other kind of writing. So for me, that’s been my way to recharge, to figure out what the next step is. Because I don’t know what the next step is.

John: Those types of experiences are something that I think all faculty should experience, too. And Rebecca and I have talked about this in the past, because having the experience of struggling with something helps put you in a better mindset for dealing with students who are facing the very same sort of challenges when they’re approaching a new subject for the first time.

Carol: Absolutely, yeah.

Rebecca: It’s funny too, as a lifelong learner, that [LAUGHTER] it can be just as frustrating and scary to do something new, but also, I think as people who are in higher education, there’s something about that feeling that we must like because we keep going back for it. [LAUGHTER]

Carol: It’s fun, to me, to learn new things. So I guess I decided I should have fun. And not that my dissertation wasn’t fun, but it was such a long journey, and I feel like I deserve just some fun.

Rebecca: I think so too.

John: And it certainly helps maintain that positive attitude that you mentioned before.

Carol: Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. I love comedy, so I feel like it’s recharging my battery.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for sharing your story and some ideas about how maybe we can instigate some change in our institutions and in our classrooms.

Carol: Yeah, thank you 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.

John: Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle, Annalyn Smith, and Joshua Vega.

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232. The EmTech MOOC

The technology tools that we use in our daily lives are constantly changing and evolving. In this episode, Cherie van Putten and Nicole Simon join us to discuss the development of a MOOC and a wiki project designed to assist us in learning how to effectively use emerging technologies. Cherie is an Instructional Designer for the Center for Learning and Teaching at Binghamton University. Nicole Simon is a Professor in the Department of Engineering, Physics and Technologies at Nassau Community College. Cherie and Nicole work together to support a SUNY Coursera MOOC that focuses on exploring emerging technologies. Cherie is the Associate Director and Nicole is the Administrative Fellow and future Director of the Exploring Emerging Technologies for Lifelong Learning and Success, or EmTech, MOOC.

Transcript

John: The technology tools that we use in our daily lives are constantly changing and evolving. In this episode, we discuss the development of a MOOC and a wiki project designed to assist us in learning how to effectively use emerging technologies.

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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 Cherie van Putten and Nicole Simon. Cherie is an Instructional Designer for the Center for Learning and Teaching at Binghamton University. Nicole Simon is a Professor in the Department of Engineering, Physics and Technologies at Nassau Community College. Cherie and Nicole work together to support a SUNY Coursera MOOC that focuses on exploring emerging technologies. Cherie is the Associate Director and Nicole is the Administrative Fellow and future Director of the Exploring Emerging Technologies for Lifelong Learning and Success, or EmTech, MOOC. Welcome Cherie and Nicole.

Cherie: Thank you. Thank you for having us.

John: It’s great to talk to you again. Our teas today are… Cherie, are you having tea?

Cherie: Yes, I am. I’m having an orange blossom oolong tea, and this one is similar to a jasmine tea in taste, with a hint of orange blossom.

Rebecca: Which sounds very, very nice. I’ll have to try some of that.

Cherie: It is. Yes, it is very nice.

John: Nicole?

Nicole: I’m actually drinking water right now. I’ve switched over from tea. This morning I was drinking tea, though. I had my usual chai tea.

Rebecca: Glad to hear that is part of your diet. It’s very important here. [LAUGHTER] And I’m drinking a golden monkey.

John: Which is one of your favorite teas.

Rebecca: Yeah.

John: She didn’t put a monkey in a blender.

Rebecca: It’s a Golden Monkey. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I am drinking a blueberry green tea. So we’ve invited you here to discuss the MOOC that you’ve been working on, the EmTech MOOC. And this evolved out of the Tools of Engagement Project, which started back in 2015 to 2016, in that academic year. Could you tell us a little bit about the original project and how it evolved?

Cherie: The original idea came from 23 Things which is an education and learning project out of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library in North Carolina. Then Robin Sullivan, who is at University at Buffalo, used it to create a actual college course for libraries. I believe it was Library Studies. From there, a group of SUNY institutions created the Tools of Engagement Project, which you’ll hear me refer to it as the TOEP project. And that was mainly for faculty to develop technology skills, and the MOOC was created based on that Tools of Engagement Project.

Rebecca: For those that aren’t familiar, can you describe what a MOOC is?

Cherie: A MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course. So it has a scale built into it, where it can have 50 people, it can have a couple thousand people taking the MOOC all at the same time. And this one happens to be on a MOOC platform called Coursera.

John: Going back to the original project, we should probably mention it was funded by a SUNY Innovative Instructional Technology Grant for both the original phase as well as for its conversion into a MOOC. But could you tell us just a little bit about how that original project worked in terms of the collaboration among campuses?

Cherie: The original project, the Tools of Engagement Project, was set up more like a website. So there would be a brief audio track that you would listen to about a particular topic. And then there would be resources and other tools that you could find about those. And there was also a community that was on Google Community. And that was a very robust community with a lot of good information going on with the people who were participating in the project.

John: And the participants would try some new software, and then write up a description about it and make recommendations about its use… Is that how it was structured?

Cherie: Yeah, so as they were using tools and reflecting on their experience, they would add comments to the community.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how that project evolved into the MOOC and what that construction process looked like?

Cherie: That TOEP project involved, I would say, at different points, probably half the SUNY campuses. And then what we would have was a pay structure. So you would pay money to participate in it and then anyone from your organization was allowed to participate in the project. So it limited who was able to participate. Then what we did was we moved it over to the idea of the MOOC. And by moving it over to the MOOC, we were able to open it up to everyone. Because that was part of the agreement with Coursera, was that anyone who had a SUNY email address and used a SUNY email address to create their MOOC log in, they were able to get a free certificate when they completed it.

Rebecca: But the MOOC itself is open to a much wider audience.

Cherie: Yes. The MOOC itself is operating in several countries. We do have our base in New York, but we also have a following in India and a few other places.

John: And the MOOC is free to everyone. It’s only if you want the Coursera certificate that you have to pay unless you’re in New York or a few other groups that have free certificates.

Cherie: Right.

John: So the MOOC consists of five different components. Could you give us an overview of those five modules in the MOOC?

Cherie: Sure. The first module talks about concepts that encourage people to take responsibility for their own learning, building lifelong learning toolkits. So this would be… Who do you need to surround yourself with as far as people who already know technology well or can help support you in your quest for more technology, and websites? …the mindset of being a lifelong learner and technology tools that will help you. Topics include the Seven and a Half Habits of Lifelong Learners, fixed versus growth mindset, the idea of Creative Commons, which is new to a lot of people, and that’s just a different way to copyright things so that they can be used in different ways. And then also accessibility so that your information is accessible to people from all backgrounds. The tools quickly change, and tools that you’re used to having for free might suddenly become tools that you need to pay for, or the tool that you absolutely love might go away. So, participants need to learn to adjust to these changes. And they need to learn how to do this on their own, because you’re not always able to take a course to quickly find out how to do something that you used to have a tool for.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about who the audience for the MOOC is?

Cherie: The audience for the MOOC is everybody. But we did start with a slant towards SUNY faculty. And some of those faculty members have actually used it in courses as well. So it has been used with some students and people have assigned it as actual parts of courses.

John: One thing I do have to ask is, I should know what seven and a half habits of lifelong learners are, but I’m particularly interested in the half habit. What is the half habit?

Cherie: The half habit is play. So it’s to have fun with your learning.

Rebecca: I don’t think that should be a half a habit.

Cherie: No, it should be a whole habit, I think.

John: It should be, yeah.

Rebecca: Let’s make that eight habits.

Nicole: Another module within the MOOC happens to be Creativity, where we’re giving learners of all levels—whether it’s K-12, whether it’s faculty, whether it’s students—we’re giving them the ability to really learn how to create. And you’re creating things that are within your discipline, or within your studies, or within your hobbies. You’re learning different technologies and how to really show a play side of how to use that technology. Or it could be just creativity, in as far as your delivery or your format, whether you’re creating it for your classes as a student, or if you’re creating it for your students as an educator. We want to really encourage the technology play component. And then another module happens to be Critical Thinking, being able to be a little bit more analytical, a little bit more intentional in what technology you choose. You don’t want to just choose a technology that is over and above the purpose of what you’re trying to convey. So we want to make sure that you take ownership of what you learn and how you use it appropriately. But more importantly, educating the user on what options they have and how they may want to apply it. And then there’s Communication and Collaboration, where you’re learning how to work together in a community, but also bring students into the active learning process, how to share out different resources. It’s not just about learning the technology tool and applying it, it’s also learning how to educate others and bring other people into that growth mindset of: What can I learn? How can I share? How can I encourage? And how can I support?

John: And as part of that people also develop an ePortfolio, which is actually the fifth activity in the MOOC, where there’s a peer review of that.

Nicole: Correct, it is optional right now. But we do highly encourage users to really embrace the idea of that ePortfolio. It can be for fun, which I’ve done several in the past that are great to be able to highlight some aspects of what you’re using and what you’re learning and share those deliverables out. Or it could be something a little bit more serious minded, whether it’s a student for a course or capstone of what they’re learning, or it could be for an educator of how they can use it for their courses. So it’s a nice flexibility. We have a variety of different ePortfolios you can use, and it’s to showcase what it is that you learned and a little bit of a summary of how you can apply it.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the format of the course and the interactions that occur between participants or how the content is delivered?

Nicole: Sure, once you enter the MOOC, you are introduced to the entire platform of Coursera, and more importantly, how and why you go about using the MOOC. It allows you to transition and move through each of the different modules where you’re learning a little bit about that module. You’re learning how to share and collaborate with others within that module. And you’re introduced to little tutorials and videos on how to learn a little bit more about the idea of the module itself. Whether it’s lifelong learning or collaboration, communication, or going through how you’re using it in your course, or how you’re using it with your students. So, you learn a little bit about the information, you’ve watched a few videos, and then you’re invited to go and play and discover the different technology tools. Whether you want to look at a more open-ended approach for the technology tools using the wiki, which I’ll get into in a minute, or if you want to drill down a little bit more intentional and specific on which technology tools you use. You take a quiz to show that you understood the proficiency behind it, you develop some type of summary on the technology tool you used. And if you’re actually doing the fifth module, where you’re bringing it into an ePortfolio, you’re actually creating that actual exemplar to use with the newer ePortfolio. And when you use the technology tools, you use the second part of the project, the EmTech wiki.

John: You mentioned the wiki. Can people take advantage of the EmTech wiki without participating in the MOOC?

Cherie: Yes, they can. And I know a lot of people who use the wiki for that reason, they keep it there to find tools and resources quickly.

John: And there are hundreds of resources that are reviewed there… at least hundreds, maybe in the thousands?

Cherie: I don’t think we’re up to thousands yet, but we are hundreds. A little bit more about the wiki is anyone can add to it, you just go and you get a login and you’re able to add a tool or a resource that you really love. Or maybe there’s a tool or resource that doesn’t have a description that really fits it anymore. Maybe something has changed, maybe it used to be free and now it’s a freemium product. So you can go in and make changes as well. And don’t worry about messing anything up because it’s all moderated. We get a notice that a change was made and then we’ll go ahead and look it over and change it, maybe reformat it a little to fit the style we use. And I probably should add that we also have tags for it. So once you’re in there, if you’re looking for certain things, like you want something that’s video or you want something that is to help you persuade people in an argument, you can use that to look for different tools that would fit those various needs.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about some of the impact the MOOC has had on participants or how faculty have reacted to their participation in the MOOC?

Nicole: It’s been very positive. I think pre-pandemic we had a little bit of a different mindset of how it was used versus over the past two years. But faculty have loved the idea, especially the cohort model, where they’re coming in, they’re learning about the MOOC, they’re learning the different aspects of the modules, they’re able to choose and customize, almost, what it is that they’re learning and how they’re using it in their courses or for their own personal learning. Throughout the pandemic, we found that a lot of educators really relied on using the MOOC because now they can learn a lot about the technology they need for their courses. And to get them through the last two years. A lot of them will also turn to the wiki because… “Okay, now I need to learn about collaboration skills. So I’ve learned about those skills, but I have a variety of different technology tools I can rely on. And which ones best suit the needs of my students?” We also found that over the past two years, we’ve had much higher numbers as far as users worldwide, both the wiki and, more importantly, through the MOOC. So it’s kind of shifted people’s mindsets on how and why they use the project.

John: You mentioned a cohort model, is this a self-paced MOOC? Or is this done with fixed starting and ending date?

Nicole: No, it is self paced. But we found that a lot of campuses and a lot of different educational groups, whether you’re using it in a course, or you’re just using it on your own, a lot of people have gone into a cohort model. I know my campus at Nassau, we use the cohort model where we offered it with a group of faculty so that they were able to actively participate and work with one another. It’s certainly self paced but we found also with students that have used the MOOC as part of their course, they like to have that cohort model so that they have that collaboration from day one.

John: And having that cohort can also create a bit of a commitment device where people are going to meet and discuss what they’ve done, it makes it more likely they’ll actually do it. Because one of the issues with MOOCs is they often have a low completion rate. But when you have a cohort of people going through, it seems to have a pretty significant effect in encouraging completion.

Cherie: Yes, it does.

John: And another advantage of it for a teaching center, say if they want to bring a group of people through, is that you can schedule around your holiday schedules and so forth. So you can come up with a schedule that works with your campus’ schedule so that you don’t have it running into holidays or spring breaks or other periods. So the self-paced nature can be really helpful.

Rebecca: I can imagine, too, that one nice thing about the cohort is that you actually know the participants are accountable to people that you know, but also you might feel more comfortable having conversations or asking questions because they’re not just like anonymous little bees in the course.

Cherie: And the other thing to keep in mind with MOOCs in general is a lot of people don’t complete them. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start them. Because you’ll get a lot of good information, take what you need from it, and maybe, eventually, you’ll have time to go through the whole thing. But I just think, don’t have the mindset where, “Oh, I started several MOOCs, and I never finished them.” You still started them, and you still got some knowledge from starting them, so give it a try.

Rebecca: Well, that’s good encouragement for sure.

Cherie: Yes, you can always refer back to them.

Rebecca: Now, I know that you use badges in this MOOC, can you talk a little bit about how that works?

Nicole: There’s always an incentive-ation component, where you really want to get leaders, you want people to learn and use the modules. So if you’re using the modules, and you complete not only going through the modules, but the quiz, and then providing a summary that you participated and completed that module, then you are eligible to receive a digital badge for that module. If you go ahead and complete all four of the modules and complete an ePortfolio, again you can earn a digital badge for that module. And what’s nice about it is it does encourage completion. But more importantly, it encourages you to really take a deeper dive. Why is it that you want to learn about a particular technology tool? Why is it you want to learn about a different module? And then really apply it. How do you plan on applying it to your learning? Again, whether it’s in a course, or just for your personal gain.

Cherie: And also, Robin wanted us to mention that it’s now an auto process through Coursera that the badging gets done. And we are like one of the first Coursera MOOCs to actually use this process. Before it used to be a manual process, which meant that it was a lot of time for us to try to figure out… “This person earned this badge, let’s do the little computer thing we need to do to get the badge out to the people.” So it’s gotten a lot easier now with that auto ability.

John: So what is the plan for keeping the MOOC current? Because with emerging technologies, they’re constantly changing. And you mentioned a little bit about that with the wiki and how that can be continually updated. But what about the MOOC itself?

Cherie: One of the things we’re going to do with the MOOC is we want to translate it in other languages. So it’s not just available in English.

Nicole: Yes, one of our big projects is being able to translate it, first starting off with Spanish and then to other languages, so that we can get and encourage more users worldwide. And it can also be used for COIL faculty, which is a SUNY initiative for Collaborative Online International Learning. So that not only can we point users to the MOOC, but more importantly, it can be used as part of a course or a COIL project. Another component is to constantly go in and update some of the videos or some of the processes that we’re learning within the different modules. We’re looking to add on, essentially it would be a sixth module, taking a look at AR and VR technology, and allowing users to go through a small component of how you can learn about adding that into your course or adding that into your own personal knowledge, and then sharing out more resources as we start building out that component of the wiki.

Cherie: And one of the things we did when we built the MOOC was we tried to not get in the minutiae, we tried to have a big picture overview so that it would last for a few years. Because technology changes all the time. So we need to make a conscious effort not to mention tech tools in our videos. So that’s when you go to the EmTech wiki for. So, when you’re in the MOOC, you’re not going to find mention of, and I’m not going to even mention any, so that this thing can live into the future. But if you mentioned certain tech tools, it’s going to date your video. So we’re keeping all that in the wiki and that can be updated.

John: Because issues of lifelong learning, your online presence and communication and collaboration, creative expression, and critical thinking are not going to go away. So I think focusing on that makes it a whole lot easier to keep the MOOC current. Very good. If anyone’s interested in learning more about the MOOC, there’s a nice website that has a wide variety of videos on it. So if you want to see more about what’s being covered in there, you could watch some of the videos and then join in the MOOC.

Rebecca: And we’ll have all those links in our show notes.

John: We will.

Cherie: One other thing that I would like to mention is the modules also go along with the NACE competencies, which is the National Association of Colleges and Employers. So a lot of these skills are what colleges and employers think you need to have to be ready for a career. So that’s another really great point of how we set this up.

Rebecca: Probably a nice way to underscore how it could be used with students.

Cherie: Yes, and it has been used, like Nicole had mentioned, it’s been used with students, and it’s been used at SUNY Fredonia with a group of students as well who were pre-professional teachers.

John: Did the pandemic have any effect on the demand for this MOOC?

Cherie: During the pandemic there was a time when the MOOC was free for everyone, because Coursera marked some MOOCs as being something that would help people with career readiness and get ready to find a job once the pandemic was over. And we did get some traction in a couple areas of the world. There was a big cohort in India, and also in South America… And, Nicole, do you remember which country in South America we were getting?

Nicole: We’re getting a big chunk, both from Brazil and Venezuela. And we actually encouraged faculty from Venezuela to use it for the COIL projects. So that was our latest big jump.

John: We always end with the question, What’s next? And that could be about you, it could be about the project, it could be anything you want to say, it could be, “I’m going to have lunch,” or, “I’m going to go shovel snow or whatever.”

Cherie: I’m going to go shovel horse manure, [LAUGHTER] because we have horses, and they were in last night. But, I think Nicole will be the best one to talk about the future because she’s going to be our new fearless leader.

John: Nicole?

Nicole: Bringing more VR and AR to both the module and to the wiki would be our next component.

Cherie: And I guess we should mention that we’re always looking for partnerships and grants for this project. So that’s another big part of what we do. And we also are looking for partners in K through 12. We’re actually working on something now for K through 12, to bring some workshops to people in the state of New York, I believe. Right, Nicole?

Nicole: Correct.

John: Well, thank you. The MOOC is a wonderful resource. And it’s nice to see that it’s still developing and growing. And I strongly encourage people to explore the MOOC and the wiki.

Rebecca: Thank you so much for joining us.

Cherie: Thank you so much for having me. This has always been one of my bucket lists to be on Tea for Teaching so I can cross that one off. I’ve been excited for it since the day it started.

John: Does that have anything to do with the horse manure? [LAUGHTER]

Cherie: No, It does not, I really sincerely mean that. I am not shoveling manure right now. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, thank you.

Nicole: 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.

John: Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle, Annalyn Smith, and Joshua Vega.

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231. Include Instructors in Inclusive Instruction

Educational developers often recommend teaching practices that assume instructors are in a position in which they can cede some of their authority to students in order to increase student agency and motivation. Not all instructors, though, are in this privileged position. In this episode, Chavella Pittman and Thomas J. Tobin examine strategies to adopt practices that are inclusive of our colleagues as well as our students.

Chavella is a Professor of Sociology at Dominican University, the founder of Effective and Efficient Faculty, and is the host of the Teaching in Color podcast. She has written extensively about issues of race and gender in higher education in scholarly and general interest publications. Tom is a founding member of the Center for Teaching, Learning, & Mentoring at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the author of Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education and several other works related to teaching and learning.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Educational developers often recommend teaching practices that assume instructors are in a position in which they can cede some of their authority to students in order to increase student agency and motivation. Not all instructors, though, are in this privileged position. In this episode, we examine strategies that are inclusive of our colleagues as well as our students.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are Chavella Pittman and Thomas J. Tobin. Chavella is a Professor of Sociology at Dominican University, the founder of Effective and Efficient Faculty, and is a host of the Teaching in Color podcast. She has written extensively about issues of race and gender in higher education in both scholarly and general interest publications. Tom is a founding member of the Center for Teaching and Learning and Mentoring at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and the author of Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education, and several other works related to teaching and learning. Welcome back, Chavella and Tom. It’s great to have you back on the podcast again.

Tom: Thank you much, John. Glad to be here.

Chavella: Yeah, thanks so much for having me again.

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

Tom: I am not a tea person. Although I did just restock my cabinet from black tea to green tea. So, we’ll see how that affects my ability to write and function throughout the day. I’m drinking distilled water today. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: A good choice for the body for sure. How about you Chavella?

Chavella: I am drinking water with electrolytes. I participated in a bottle share this weekend. And because I’ve been running a lot more this winter, I can get a little sensitive to dehydration. So, I’m drinking water with electrolytes. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I think a first on the podcast. [LAUGHTER] John, how about you?

John: I am drinking ginger peach black tea.

Rebecca: And I have Golden Monkey today.

John: Back to an old favorite.

Rebecca: It is, it is. I don’t always have it in stock.

John: Advocates of inclusive teaching often encourage faculty to share their power and authority with the students. But you both wrote a February 7, 2022 article in The Chronicle noting that this does not work as well for all faculty. Could you share this argument with our listeners and tell us a little bit about how this article came about?

Chavella: As many things, it came about as a result of my frustration, if I’m gonna be honest, which I always seem to be. On a fairly regular basis, I see folks putting forth ideas like you should do this, you should use that. But it’s often attached with some elements of, for example, during a pandemic, people saying… If you’re still having deadlines for students, then therefore basically you don’t care for students, or you’re like an evil person. And seeing people make these individual level attributes that ignore the structural context of teaching was getting really frustrating for me. And I was having a conversation about it with some folks and Tom was one of those folks. And I said, “I have to write about this, and who’s interested in writing with me about this?” But the general argument is, absolutely, that a lot of times, people perceive teaching as individual choices, and therefore they’re making individual level attributions, not realizing that these aren’t just individual level choices. What we can and can’t do, how students respond to the various things we do, are very much so in the context of our social statuses and identities.

Tom: Absolutely. And as Chavella has said, I stepped in to work on this with Chavella, because… two different sides of the same coin for me. I have been an advocate for universal design for learning for a very long time, trying to lower barriers for our students. At the same time, I was one of the people Chavella was a little mad at, in that my research was moving in the direction of how does Universal Design for Learning underpin all of our other diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice efforts on our higher education campuses? And I was at the same time also advocating for, “Hey, all instructors, please share your power with your students, please be vulnerable,” all that kind of thing. And I was doing that in a blanket way. So the conversation that we were all having when Chevella said, “You know, not everybody can do that.” That was a moment where I came up short. And I thought, I haven’t even really examined this aspect of inclusive teaching. So it turned out to be a really good platform and conversation. When Chavella and I were first having one-to-one conversations about what do we want to actually say, it struck me …and listeners, you might remember the old Highlights magazine for children. And there was always the Goofus and Gallant segment in that magazine. Goofus was the young man who could never do anything right. And Gallant was the one who always did things perfectly and had perfect manners and it was meant to teach children how to do and be in a socially acceptable way. This is kind of the ninja-level Goofus and Gallant article from me and Chavella. I’m playing the role of Goofus. I am the person over 50, white, cisgender, heterosexual male with gray hair. I tick a bunch of boxes for unexamined privilege. And we wanted to contrast that unthinking and unexamined exercise of privilege with the experiences of women instructors, instructors of color, people who are in other precarious places like part-time instructors, and talk about how what is simple and easy for me becomes dangerous, challenging, or a bridge too far for other instructors.

Chavella: I was gonna say thanks, Tom, for admitting that you were in the group of folks that I was frustrated with. I wasn’t gonna out you, but… [LAUGHTER] It’s that level of reflectivity and that level of honesty and the willingness to look at yourself that I’m super grateful for and that we’re trying to encourage people to do, is to actually pause and ask yourself these sorts of questions.

Rebecca: I think it’s really important that we stop and reflect about these sorts of ideas when we’re really in the business of trying to advocate for students. If we want student success, we need our whole community to be successful and included. One of the topics that you brought up in your article was about flexibility in the classroom, specifically around deadlines. But I was curious about whether or not other conversations around flexibility came up as, Tom and Chavella, as you were talking with each other about this article. A lot of things that we see around inclusive practices include things like giving students agency around the format of their projects, or assignments, and other things like this.

Tom: When we were drafting the article—of course, the article can be only so long for The Chronicle—the very first example that came to my mind was, Rebecca, you’re talking about being flexible with formats and giving people choices about how they show what they know and take in information. That’s Universal Design for Learning. That’s one of my areas of expertise. It was one of the first things that occurred to me. And I thought, “You know, we’re not really this kind of reflective with UDL.” It’s kind of ironic, too, because even teaching approaches that center and address learning variability tend also to frame instructors as a homogeneous bloc, who uniformly have status and power that they’re able to transfer to learners. For example, UDL began as a way for K-12 teachers to lower barriers for students with disabilities. Now, because UDL began in an environment in which adults are teaching children, that power, respect, and status dynamic, they’re simply assumed to be tilted heavily toward the teachers regardless of their other identity characteristics or intersectionality. So when UDL began to be adopted beyond the special education curriculum, and in higher education settings, those assumptions about instructor authority went largely unexamined. And so our colleague, Jay Dolmage, suggests that UDL should encompass both learner and instructor variability. And he calls this the intersectional theory of Universal Design for Learning. And so classroom and teaching authority means that students recognize you, the instructor, as having the right and duty to ask them to participate in learning activities and to manage a classroom that’s conducive for learning. The challenge there is that students can perceive, in higher education, that they have greater power than their instructors because of the instructors’ institutional and structural identities, things like age, race, gender, employment status, ability profile, and you name it. So that give and take, that being reflective about who has the authority and power to share and give up extends to lots of other types of flexibility.

Chavella: You’re right, Rebecca, that is absolutely something that we discussed. And the piece that he shared, we had lots of conversations about that. And even just beyond the statuses, or related to the statuses, even assumptions about what technology faculty have access to. I talk about this all the time, the fact that people assume that because I’m faculty, I have access to all sorts of technology, I have access to all sorts of wireless internet connectivity. But I happen to live in a community of people that look like me, which means that our infrastructure isn’t the same, right? So I’m supposed to be having all this variability for students that I may not even have myself. So lots of assumptions layered into what faculty have, even as it relates to UDL.

Tom: And that’s something that Derrick Bell calls “interest convergence.” We tend, if we’re in a dominant culture group, we tend not to say, “Oh, yeah, we should be concerned about our colleagues who are having a more challenging time of things,” unless and until it affects us, right? This is the, “not in my backyard,” or, “I’ll wait until it affects somebody in my family,” kind of thinking. And that interest convergence can really get in our way, because we just assume, “Oh, if it doesn’t affect me, it must not affect many folks.” When the reality of intersectional thinking is that it affects everybody. And it’s useful, not from just a social justice perspective, to take a step back and think about how all of the instructors at an institution are situated to be able to do the work that we’re asking them to do in a safe and effective way. But it’s also a bottom-line business continuation conversation. This has to do with… Are your instructors going to want to come back and teach another semester if they’re contingent? Are your instructors eyeing the door? as Lee Bessette said in another forum. Are they looking to skip to another institution or find another place that gives them a little bit more psychological safety or a little bit more explicit support. So it’s not just the social justice aspect of things, but it’s also the keeping the lights on and making sure that you have talented people working with your students, consideration here as well.

Chavella: It absolutely is a retention issue. Part of what makes this particular issue frustrating for me is because it’s not like faculty with marginalized statuses haven’t been saying this all along. We’ve been saying that all along, “I can do that thing in terms of ability, but it’s going to have different consequences for me, or it’s going to play out different, or it’s going to take more energy for me, or I’m going to get more pushback from it.” So we’ve been saying that consistently. It’s just that the mainstream communicating about the scholarship of teaching and learning hasn’t been echoing that, hearing that, reflecting that. So it very much so becomes a retention issue when you situate it such that you have to do these things or you’re not a good teacher. And then people are having all the push back and sort of emotional energy. And I got a lot of responses after this piece came out from faculty with diverse and marginalized statuses saying, “Thank you,” like, “Basically, I’ve been yelling into a vacuum about this, and no one has heard me.” So for sure, definitely a retention issue.

Rebecca: I know we often don’t hear about a lot of examples of how marginalized faculty are impacted, in part because they feel like they have to be silent about it because they are unsafe, maybe they won’t get tenure and promotion, maybe they won’t get renewed. Do you have any examples that you collected related to UDL that you might be able to share that weren’t included in the article? Because I know that’s the section that got cut.

Tom: And I’m actually looking at the draft where we have those selections here. And with regard to Universal Design for Learning, the challenge that we found was the classroom dynamic shift, where Universal Design for Learning is asking at its core for the instructor to create various paths for the students to be able to move through the instructional space. That’s not actually all that controversial, and it doesn’t open up a lot of risk for folks with marginalized statuses. Where we get into the challenge is at the more approaching-expert level of universal design for learning. We want to move our students from being expert students, the people who know how to cram and know how to study for a test and can tell me back the things that I told them in the classroom. And the risk becomes we’re trying to create expert learners. We want students who can create new information, encounter new situations and apply what they know, and be open and more vulnerable with us. And that requires that openness and vulnerability from us as instructors as well. Part of the challenge with that is, if there’s not a lot of implicit or unearned respect and trust, then you have to establish what that trust looks like. And for folks who have fewer trust resources to be able to build from, that becomes tricky. So I’d love to pick Chavella’s brain here, too. And we’ve got a couple more examples in the kit as well.

Chavella: Yeah, I was gonna say that that beginner part, I think there are challenges for faculty with marginalized statuses. The idea of sort of opening up different paths, the issue becomes… and again, when you think about the scholarship of teaching and learning in general, you’re going to have moments of like, “Oh, yeah, that makes perfect sense.” We know from the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, that when you do things that are innovative, or non-traditional, that you can get a bit of student resistance. So UDL requires you to do things that are innovative and non-traditional. So even if it’s just how students submit work, whether they’re doing in writing, or whether they’re doing an audio file, or doing some sort of visual presentation, those actually all open up paths to resistance for faculty with marginalized statuses, just by the virtue of the fact that they’re doing something different. Those things get rewarded for faculty that have dominant statuses, they’re seen as experts. Now we’re questioned, our expertise becomes questioned: “Why is she doing it? That’s strange. I don’t understand that. I’m confused by that.” So I would say that all sorts of teaching choices require students to actually view you as an expert. And if you have some statuses that are marginalized in society, those are all things that students will use to decide that you’re not credible. But we know that those are the practices that are supposed to be done. We know those are the ones that are good for learning. It’s just a matter of who’s doing it that makes it a little bit more challenging.

John: What are some ways in which we can make it safer for faculty to experiment with some new techniques? Or what are some ways that faculty who are in a marginalized position can address some of these challenges? Or might, in some cases, it be better to not try and to use teaching techniques that work best for them in their environments?

Chavella: I would say probably a little bit of mix and match. I’m always like, “There’s no silver bullet.” I wish there were. “There’s no magic wand,” I say that all the time. But it’s probably a little bit of mix and match. Like, if you have your energy, you’re trying to get your scholarship together, maybe not doing things you know students are going to resist, it doesn’t mean that traditional practices don’t work, you can do the traditional stuff. But that might not be the right timing for you. But at the end of the day… I was getting ready to say it doesn’t have anything to do with the marginalized faculty. And part of what I mean is, it’s not their responsibility. The institution should be making changes, the institution should have chances where you can try something innovative and your course evaluations don’t matter. The institution should have an understanding of the ways in which bias gets involved in your student rating, so whether it’s because it’s innovative or you have a marginalized status. I think that a lot of the folks that do this work and our own colleagues need to understand that the way you do things might be different from someone else, and then not to shame, or guilt, or assume that the other person’s way of doing it is less valid or less excellent when it comes to teaching. So all of the sort of, like, needing to be done parts are things that need to be done on the part of the powerful and of the institutions. But I absolutely tell diverse faculty to be intentional and be thoughtful about what they’re doing and what the consequences are going to be for them. And just be very aware that they might get a different outcome, and it might require different resources for them.

Tom: And the flip side of that is also true, that there’s a whole bunch of “don’t do” things that seem kind of intuitive to a department chair, or a dean, or a provost. Because when we hear, “Oh, well, we have to make safer spaces for people with intersectional identities, marginalized identities. And we have to empower them from an institutional perspective.” The first reaction from a lot of folks, especially if they are from dominant-culture backgrounds themselves, is to start looking for the people in their institution who fit the definition… “I’m going to go ask my black colleagues how to work with them.” And the chances are that most of your colleagues, your women colleagues, if you’re a man, your black colleagues, if you’re a white person, they don’t know any more than you do how to do this well. One of the things that I really benefited from is Chavella, this is her research area, she is a trained facilitator. Bring in people with expertise to help you and your institution to come up with policy, practice, and models that suit. Too often we just turn to one another and say, “Well, what should we do?” And that sort of uninformed guessing isn’t helpful and can actually perpetuate harmful situations.

Chavella: Absolutely. One of the other things we talked about as having some frustration is people identifying this as a gap. Like Tom said, this is my area of expertise: the intersection of structural oppression and the scholarship of teaching and learning. But some people will see this gap and be like, “Oh, all of a sudden I see my privilege now.” And then they rush to fill the gap. No, no. No, no, no, no, no. You don’t have the expertise for that, you don’t understand that. So the people with the dominant statuses, that rush to suck up all the air in the room because they see the new shiny thing that they want to pursue. First of all, a lot of times they’re sharing misinformation or things that are misguided, that are actually going to be more harmful for the group that they purport to help. But they’re also silencing the people who actually already have this expertise. So there are a lot of faculty developers and folks that do Scholarship of Teaching and Learning who have some expertise, who look like me, who are people of color, LGBTQ folks, but a lot of us are being drowned out. So that definitely falls in the category of “don’t,” which is, don’t center yourself by trying to fill the gap and sucking up all the air in the room. [LAUGHTER] Look around and actually identify who those folks are and work with them.

Tom: Yeah, am I allowed to say that most people doing land acknowledgments now aren’t actually working with their First Nations colleagues to make things better? That’s kind of what we wanted to do in the article, was to not call people out for doing things poorly or not doing things at all. What we wanted to do was to say, “Here are ways to think about and act that move you away from performative work into intentional allyship. What actions are you actually taking, so that you are using the privilege that you’ve got, even if you aren’t from a dominant perspective? What actions are you taking that help your colleagues? What actions are you actually taking?” And in the article we talk about how I started, when I first got my PhD I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m going to be the cool professor, and have my students call me Tom.’ And I didn’t realize at that point that me having them call me by my first name meant that some of my women colleagues who were insisting on being called “Dr. So-and-so,” then that was, “Well, why are you being so formal about it when Dr. Tobin says, ‘Call him Tom’?” And I came to realize pretty quickly that they didn’t have that assumed authority. And so if I said, “Please call me Dr. Tobin,” and we were all Dr. So-and-so in the department, that made for a more level playing field. And it also meant that I was showing respect for my colleagues, even in my own classroom, because I was explaining why I was asking for that formal, “please call me Dr.,” as well.

Chavella: And that’s such a good example. And in the research that I do, where I’m collecting stories and information from faculty with marginalized statuses, that happens to be one of the things that comes up all the time. And I know that people think that the titles are a small thing, but they’re not. And so in the article, one of the things that I’m always, when I’m trying to describe to other people, or make it clear to them that there is an intersection between structural oppression and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, is I’m always talking about this idea of a force field. So all those things make it clear that there is teaching authority, professional authority, that there’s some expertise involved. And a lot of times privileged faculty don’t realize, that force field just automatically exists for them, it doesn’t exist for other folks. So having your title is a marker that sort of provides a force field for faculty with marginalized statuses, so that they can do the work that they need to do. They don’t have to worry about people testing the fence, trying to get over the fence, trying to ignore the fence. So very much so, people think that that’s a small thing to be called by your professional title. But it is a reminder to students, and then they behave accordingly, if they’re referring to you by your title. And again, it just gives you the space to be able to do your work when you’re a faculty member with a marginalized status.

Rebecca: One of the things that has come to mind as we’ve been talking today is how often narratives around almost the same circumstance can be different at various tables. And that one way perhaps, to show some allyship is to make that visible in conversations when it occurs. So if there’s an evaluative conversation, for example, around promotion or tenure, and something comes up about teaching, and it’s maybe a different narrative around some of the same techniques, because maybe the teaching evaluations come back negative because they often do. That conversation is different, we can point out, “Hey, this is actually a good practice. And that the research says that these evaluations are often not accurate.” And to try to point to the fact that these narratives are inconsistent. It happens so often, and we observe this all the time. And often people don’t speak up.

Chavella: No, they don’t at all. [LAUGHTER] There are a couple things going on at once. One is people see teaching as this very private activity. So very few people talk about their teaching in general. And then a lot of the folks that are doing the evaluative pieces don’t really actually know anything about the scholarship of teaching and learning. [LAUGHTER] If we’re being honest. They just know what’s normative. So I work with campuses doing all this stuff. I train people how to do inclusive teaching, and how to do the reflective pieces around identifying your own privilege and making it clear about their teaching choices. But I also work with institutions about how they evaluate, and really making it plain to them, how what they’re doing are the most common practices, and then put them in conversation with the best practices. And those are usually opposite. So a lot of the people that are doing the evaluative pieces, absolutely. They don’t know anything about the scholarship of teaching and learning. So the more of us who know, engage in those conversations and have those narratives, I think it could make a huge difference. Absolutely.

Tom: And back to the idea that the changes we want to see are structural and institutional ones. When Jean Mandernach and Ann Taylor and I were doing the research for our book, Evaluating Online Teaching, from back in 2015, we couldn’t include a lot of the horror stories that we heard about how institutions would often hire adjuncts to come back the next term or move people forward on the promotion and tenure line, based only on student ratings of teaching. And so there was that one signal that, as Chavella has mentioned, we know is imperfect and riddled with student bias. And we also know that student ratings of teaching—you notice I never say evaluations, because our students are not qualified to evaluate us—they can share what their experiences were like. And we have to look at those experiences through the lens of what are the biases that they are expressing through that rating system. So when we have just the one signal that we’re making an employment-based decision on, that’s where that bias really creeps in. The other side of that is also true, that when we’re asking peers, or our department chairs, or our Deans to do observations of our teaching, unless there’s a structure in place that asks for very specific teaching behaviors to be observed and then evaluated, then we’re going to bring our own unexamined and unintentional biases, and some intentional ones too, into that process as well. So in the book on evaluating online teaching, we tried to be very clear that even someone who’s never taught online before, can still give a meaningful and legally defensible assessment of our teaching, so long as they understand what they’re looking for, and what we count as teaching behaviors, versus what’s just bias from the face-to-face classroom. And we talked about things like voice tone, pacing, eye contact, use of humor, all those kinds of things that even in the face-to-face classroom, we might be using as proxies for observable teaching behaviors, because we don’t know what those are, or we haven’t done the research or read the research about Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, like we’re coming back to over and over in this conversation. Move that into the conversation about all of your instructors coming from various types of backgrounds, level of preparation, and level of implicit authority that is granted to them by students, dnd you come up with a very similar argument. The challenge for us as administrators, is to be very clear about what we are assessing and measuring when we think about the assessment of teaching quality,

Chavella: Obviously, I cosign all of that. [LAUGHTER] I cosign all of that. I feel like I’m always sort of on a rooftop yelling all of those things over and over again.

John: One of the things we’ve observed at the teaching center is we have a wide variety of young faculty in many departments who are trying to do new things. But their pushback is coming from other people in the departments. Our administration is, in general, quite good at recognizing some of these challenges, but that doesn’t always translate down to the senior faculty in departments. And I think Rebecca and I, at various times, have both had to urge some caution to faculty in trying to get some support for the things they do and some buy-in. What are some ways we could address that issue at the departmental level?

Tom: One thing that we mentioned in the article, and it’s a shameless theft of mine from a colleague at Westmoreland County Community College in western Pennsylvania. He called it the get-out-of-jail free card after the card in Monopoly that allows you to pass through the game more quickly. What we recognized was that our contingent and adjunct instructors who are just coming back from semester to semester, as well as our people who are on the tenure line but not yet tenured, often felt that they had to be very conservative, not take very many risks. And they wanted to do innovative teaching practices, felt perhaps not comfortable doing them as much, or as soon as they wished to do so. So the get-out-of-jail free card, we call that a provost’s letter. We asked our provost to be willing to write a letter that went into somebody’s promotion and tenure packet, or went into somebody’s employment history packet for the adjunct folks, that allowed people to collect, but not have count, the student ratings, any peer observations, anything that was formatively or summatively evaluative of their teaching, for one particular semester, or one particular class where they wanted to do something experimental or take a risk. That provost’s letter, you could apply to do it once every… in our case it was three years when I was in Chicago. And that provost letter changed the academic tenor of the conversation, because people felt that they could take a risk every now and then. And we started to see more people, not only just the faculty members and instructors who were newer to the field, but also those who had been there for a while. It wasn’t so much a case of, “Oh, these new people that are showing me up or they’re taking risks that I would never take.” We saw some of our more seasoned faculty members start saying, “Oh, well, if they can do that, and it actually lowers barriers, not only for the students, but also for me, then I want in on that as well.” And so that was one concrete thing that we’d encourage your listeners, get with your faculty senate, get with your administration, and see if there are ways that you can provide little islands of safety or security for people to do things that might be risky for them in their current roles or in their current progression.

Chavella: I’m thinking about it because I deal with this all the time… the, “What can you do?” Because as we mentioned earlier, I see this ugly endpoint of this. So I see the faculty with marginalized statuses who are about to not be renewed, because they have taken a chance, regardless of whether or not what they did was effective or not, the colleagues are the ones that are gunning for them. Your teaching content is different than what they want. They take offense to that. You’re not lecturing the way that they might do it, like you’re doing something a little bit more active. So they’re gunning for you. And what I would say departments could do that would link back to what Tom was saying a second ago, is you have to have an ally in your department that’s gonna do what I refer to as these collaborative teaching observations, where the person is observing your effectiveness versus judging whether or not you teach exactly like them or not, because that’s a lot of what the review is. So any shift that you can do in a department to get them to realize the evaluation isn’t a matter of… Am I a clone of you or not? And are you actually achieving the things that you have set out to do? Would be an improvement. And honestly, I’m thinking if you even ask the department to ask that question in their evaluation processes, I feel like that might be the punch in the gut that would make them realize, “O-M-G, all we are doing is reproducing ourselves.” I think it would produce a movement that would benefit everybody, not just faculty of marginalized statuses, but any and everybody who’s trying to do great teaching and do a little innovating here and there.

Tom: And that circles us around to one other practical thing that you can do at the department or institutional level. And that is provide anonymity. Get an external group to your institution, bring in an outside consultant, bring in people from another university, and have them offer everybody at your institution, or everybody in your department, an anonymous way to provide feedback about their feelings of safety and their feelings of power in the classroom. You will get an earful. Especially if there’s no way that that information could possibly pass its way back to the department chair’s ear with a name attached to it, you’ll get a much better sense of the comfort and the privilege that people feel that they’re exercising, and the threats, we heard Chavella talk about the force field that many people experience and how it malfunctions a lot. You’ll get a better sense of what your baseline is. And you can start having open and honest conversations. We started this conversation by saying this is an issue that not a lot of people talk about because either A, they don’t feel like they have the power and standing to do so safely. Or conversely, if you’re from a dominant-culture identity, you don’t want to dive in on a conversation like this because you’re afraid that you’re going to say something wrong, you’re going to offend somebody. Here’s the newsflash: You’re going to get it wrong, you’re going to offend a couple of people. It’s still worth having the conversation. And as long as everybody is practicing from a space of goodwill, having that conversation and seeing it as a necessary step toward better diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice, that’s what we want people to be able to do.

Chavella: And actually, I’ll take what he just said a little bit further, in terms of asking the question of, Is it safe or not? I would say just assume it isn’t. I feel like as academics, we want to do all the climate surveys and the folks that are privileged sort of know in their heart, ‘Oh, nothing bad is going to come out of that.’ Nope, you’re going to find out stuff that you probably aren’t going to want to accept. So in a lot of ways, yes, that’s important to do to get the specific examples from your campus in your department. But in a lot of ways, I say skip that step altogether. Assume that folks do not feel safe. Read the literature, because they’re those of us who write these things. We’re on the margins, right? We’re on the margins in our institutions, we’re on the margins in terms of writing. Read what we’re writing and assume that is going on on your campus and start coming up with solutions for what you see in the literature. So don’t wait until you can identify validated results on whether or not you have that problem or not, just assume that problem is at play and get the solutions going.

Rebecca: Yes, yes, yes. Sign me up. [LAUGHTER]

Chavella: Yes. [LAUGHTER]

John: While I don’t think this would eliminate the problem of bias in student ratings, might it be useful if departments at least reconsidered the questions in their student ratings so that they actually focused on teaching techniques that are demonstrated to be successful? So that at least it would more closely proxy what we’d like. Students may not be able to evaluate how well an instructor is doing something, but perhaps questions such as… Does the instructor provide you with feedback on your work? Are you allowed opportunities for revision? Are you given opportunities to express yourself in multiple ways? To perhaps address some of these issues where we’d like to see faculty moving, and perhaps to overcome some of the resistance. Because if all faculty knew they might be evaluated in sending it relates to effective teaching practices, maybe that could move the needle a little bit.

Chavella: I’m always sort of a one foot in and one foot out on this. I’m like, “Ah, we kind of know they’re broken.” So I’m not sure if that’s really where I want people to expend their energy. I want people to expend their energy fleshing out that image of people’s effective teaching, so it’s not just the student perspective. I don’t know if I would encourage people to do that. And I’m not sure how much you can actually improve the questions. Because even the examples that you just gave, some basic psychology research shows that cross-racial interaction people misattribute. So you’re like, “Oh, did they give opportunities for feedback?” Well, the feedback that students might want from a woman will look very different than the feedback they want from a man. You see what I’m saying? So, like, a male faculty member could give two sentences of feedback. And the students are like, “Great! I got feedback from whoever.” But then when a woman does it, if it’s a woman of color, there’s two sentences, all of a sudden, they expected more so to them that’s not feedback. So even the questions that people come up with to avoid bias at the end of the day, we’re all human, we’re going to see each other through these gender, race, social class lens. So yes, so I agree, I think it should be much more about student learning. But I definitely think that we should expand whose voices are included, in addition to what we’re looking at when it comes to teaching effectiveness.

Tom: Indeed, and don’t even get me started on student ratings. We’ve been yelling at the top of our lungs for the past 42 years, that we know how to do psychometrically valid student writing instruments. And then every college and university says, “Oh, we’re going to do our own.” And so the challenge is we’ve had organizations like the Idea Center that’s now part of a larger corporate entity, they’ve been doing the research on what are questions that students can use for ratings that are as neutral, and single barreled, and psychometrically valid as possible. So I’ll second what Chavella is saying here, and let’s go beyond just the student ratings. We, ideally, would train all of our instructors, to understand psychology, to understand statistics, to understand the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, all those things. But what we hire people for is they’re good chemists, they’re good art historians. So we don’t have enough time, people, money, or effort to be able to bring everybody up to expertise in all of these areas. What I’d much rather see is I’d much rather have three or four big ideas that everybody gets behind, and then they figure out how they’re going to do so in their own circumstances. Rather than trying to make everybody feel like they missed the boat, and they didn’t get training, and therefore, they’re at a beginner level in something. We’ve got experts in our campuses and around us, who can help us with the framing of these kinds of conversations, especially when they’re difficult, perhaps especially because they’re difficult. We should not ourselves need to feel like we need to become miniature overnight experts in how to have conversations about intersectional identity, or race, or gender in the classroom, in order to be able to take some actions that help to support our colleagues, create community, and find good ways to enact policies and practices that enshrine those things in the life of our colleges and universities. Alright, I’ll get off my soapbox now. You get the idea.

John: It’s a good soapbox to be on, though.

Rebecca: I really appreciated thinking about the systemic issues that we need to address and thinking through the institutional and departmental level challenges that we need to get on board with and address. But I don’t want to lose sight of some of the really practical reflection points that were in the article.

Chavella: You know what, though? I was going to say, they’re not disconnected. But I think that people think that because it’s a structural thing, it means we can’t tackle it, it’s going to take like one year of faculty senate meetings and changes the handbook. It doesn’t require that at all. And so I think those structural things are very much still connected to really practical pieces… easy, actionable… you could do it tomorrow, or at least by the end of the week. [LAUGHTER] I know that’s true, because this is what I teach campuses how to do.

Rebecca: That’s a really good point. Chavella, for sure. As I was reading the article, I was reading the student incivility section and just starting to think about the kinds of practices we often recommend around establishing belonging and community and wondering “Hmm, what kind of privilege do I bring to that space?” And so that was a moment of deep self reflection for me that went beyond just the incivility piece, but the sense of belonging that we had been heavily advocating for, especially throughout the pandemic, but obviously before that as well.

Chavella: Honestly, even just hearing you say that means that the article did its work, because that’s the question we want people to ask all the time. I don’t think we want people to ask if or when does my privilege come into play? But assume that it does and figure out: “How does it come into play?” …and then make some adjustments. So what did you come up with? Like I want to know, when you think about the things that you do, like what did you come up with in terms of like how my privilege play into how you do sense of belonging? I don’t mean to put you on the spot, I’m sorry. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yeah, I’m not sure if I’ve come up with adjustments yet to be honest, I’ve started thinking about the kinds of activities that I do, the ways that I try to include multiple voices, but also the access to the technology I have to be able to do that. The fact that the institution has given me the ability to teach online synchronously during this time, because of my own disability status. I think about how that might change in person, and what kinds of things that I might do differently. And even the kinds of questions that I’m asking, and whether or not other folks would be able to ask the same kinds of questions. I have a lot of technical skill, I teach web design, I have a lot of technical skill. And there’s a lot of privilege just from that position [LAUGHTER] that I bring to my teaching space that many other faculty don’t have. So I’m often very aware that the kinds of things I do are not necessarily things that other people can replicate in other scenarios. They’re really based on the very specific contexts I’m teaching in, my own position in that context and my own expertise in particular areas. But I also know the kinds of things that I shy away from as a female instructor. [LAUGHTER]

Chavella: Right? Exactly. My brain got stuck at what you said at the beginning of it. So even if we think of this as an illustration, just talking about the pandemic, and sense of belonging, a lot of our faculty with marginalized statuses either structurally or institutionally, right, people who are contingent, or folks of color, women, that did not have options about whether or not they could be online or not. And could you imagine being from a community that’s disproportionately affected by the outcomes of COVID-19 in a classroom, with students where you don’t have a lot of power, and then trying to establish a sense of belonging… the actual physical distance that’s required to keep you, your family, and your folks safe. Imagine that being interpreted by students as you having distance, on top of the fact that you’re different from them, they’re already going to perceive distance, regardless of whether that’s there or not. That’s like basic psychology research. So I got stuck there. So I think you’re absolutely right. These are the questions we want people to be asking of themselves, and making adjustments to make sure that not only might your privilege be affecting how you make students belong, but also your colleagues who might be different from you, because then it becomes: “Well, professor so and so does XYZ.” So it’s about being really mindful of what you’re doing, and how that might make your colleagues be perceived as well.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely. There’s been so many situations where I have definitely acknowledged my privilege. During the pandemic I have stable internet, I have technology, but I’m able to use my camera, I’m not in a situation where it’s unsafe for me to use my camera and my microphone, and all of these sorts of things, and how many other faculty who might be more contingent than myself have had a much more difficult time across many institutions and trying to speak up to get them some of the support that is necessary so that they could function safely. But, also just recognizing that I can’t really imagine what it would be like not to have the privilege that I have. And that’s an important thing to, I think, acknowledge. It’s difficult to imagine that.

Chavella: Yeah, and another thing popped into my mind, this is what popped in my mind immediately before I asked you a question. So sorry about turning it back on you. The idea of a sense of belonging in the classroom, and one of the inclusive teaching practices I teach folks how to do is to have an inclusive teaching statement. But even if people don’t do that, let’s not even talk about that. Let’s just talk about regular scholarship of teaching and learning. And the whole idea that you’re supposed to have guidelines for how you interact in the classroom for the students. Even that… I think that a lot of our faculty with privileged statuses don’t do that, or my version of don’t do that. The way that people do that people say, “Oh, follow the golden rule, or in this classroom, we’re going to treat each other with respect and with civility.” They’re super vague and they’re vacuous. And when you’re a person with a privileged status it means something completely different for you. And when you’re having students who also have privileged statuses, that all means something very different for you. I think, all practices from the rooter to the tooter, essentially, people should be thinking about them in the context of their privileges, but a sense of belonging is absolutely one of them.

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

Tom: I’m thinking about what I’d love your listeners to do next… it is first to do a little listening. Find a way to ask your students, ask your colleagues, ask your administration, questions about how people are supported in the teaching that they do. And then a second action that follows along from that is to determine what kind of action you can take in order to either exercise your own privilege in concert with and communication with other folks, or to find allies who can help you to make an argument for making positive change. So those would be the two things I’d love people to take away from our conversation today.

Chavella: And I would cosign that again. [LAUGHTER] But the “listen” piece, in particular, I would say if by the end of the week, you could find an article or two to read, if you could check out a podcast episode or so… like my podcast is simple and easy to hear about some of these issues. But there are people that are writing about these items. Just learning a little bit about these things on your own and figuring out how you can make slight changes to your practices would make a huge difference. And obviously, I have a book that’s going to be coming out that’s all about all of this, sometime in the near future.

Rebecca: Well, we can’t wait to have you back to talk about it.

Chavella: Yes, I’m looking forward to it. Lots of laughing… that is serious topics sometimes, but I do lots of laughing. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, thank you. It’s great talking to both of you again, and I think this will cause a lot of people to reflect on their practices and think about how they can be a little bit more inclusive of their fellow faculty members.

Tom: I hope so. Thanks for having us on.

Chavella: Yeah. Thank you so much, y’all. Have a good one.

Rebecca: You too. 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.

John: Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle, Annalyn Smith, and Joshua Vega.

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208. Efficient Mentoring and Communication

Most successful academics have been influenced by mentors who provided support, encouragement, and guidance. Maintaining effective mentoring relationships can be difficult, though, for academics facing increasing demands on their time. In this episode, Adaira Landry and Resa Lewiss join us to examine strategies that we can adopt to use our time more efficiently when mentoring students and colleagues. We also discuss strategies that we can use to help foster a more compassionate email culture in our workplaces.

Adaira is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, Harvard Medical School student advisor, and an emergency physician, and co-chair of the Diversity Inclusion Committee within the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Resa is a professor of emergency medicine and radiology at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. She is also the creator and host of the Visible Voices podcast which covers topics on healthcare equity and a variety of interesting topics.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: Most successful academics have been influenced by mentors who provided support, encouragement, and guidance. Maintaining effective mentoring relationships can be difficult, though, for academics facing increasing demands on their time. In this episode, we examine strategies that we can adopt to use our time more efficiently when mentoring and communicating with students and colleagues.

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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 Adaira Landry and Resa Lewiss. Adaira is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, Harvard Medical School student advisor, and an emergency physician, and co-chair of the Diversity Inclusion Committee within the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Resa is a professor of emergency medicine and radiology at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. She is also the creator and host of the Visible Voices podcast which covers topics on healthcare equity and a variety of interesting topics. Welcome Adaira and Resa.

Adaira: Thank you!

Resa: So great to be here.

John: Our teas today are…

Adaira: Black cherry by Jenwey Tea.

Rebecca: That sounds good.

Adaira: It’s really good.

Resa: I’m drinking herbal black licorice by Stash.

Rebecca: Wow, we got fancy-time teas today.

Adaira: These are fancy teas. [LAUGHTER]

Resa: We’re very serious people, including regarding our tea.

Rebecca: That’s very important. So you are in welcome company here. I have a HarSha, which is a black blend from a local privately owned Tea Company in the Finger Lakes in New
York.

John: And I’m drinking a commercial blend of ginger peach black tea from the Republic of Tea.

Rebecca: A favorite.

John: It is one of my favorites.

Adaira: Yeah, I like their teas. I just bought their white peach, actually, and it’s really good.

John: The white ginger peach?

Adaira: White ginger peach. Yeah, I just bought the white one, it’s so good. Those are some really good teas.

John: We’ve invited you here to discuss what you referred to as “fuel-efficient mentoring” in an article you co-authored in the Harvard Business Review last year. Pretty much all faculty members can look back and think about mentors who are really influential on their path to higher ed. And we all play important roles as mentors to our students and to our colleagues. But that role can be challenging given all the other pressures we face, especially during the pandemic, which has been going on for a while now. So could you tell us a little bit about the origin of fuel-efficient mentoring?

Adaira: So fuel-efficient mentoring, that article came about probably during the height of the pandemic when Resa and I, we’re emergency medicine physicians, we’re busy, we’re in academia, so we have students and residents we’re training, we’re educators, so we’re teaching all the time, and we felt that we had to pick and choose our priorities in a different way than we were used to. We’re putting forward the shifts, we’re putting forward the protection of our health, and probably de-prioritizing the way we used to support and train others. And we came together to discuss, basically, this concept of: How do we efficiently mentor and support people during this pandemic? Because we felt that it was being pushed to the backseat. And I will say I was a little bit inspired by something that I was doing via Twitter, which was bringing together students who were asking me to mentor them individually and putting them all together onto one Zoom. Just because I was stretched thin, and I was stressed out from the pandemic, I thought, well, wouldn’t it be more efficient to mentor eight or nine students within one hour, than each of them as one-hour meetings separately? And that was probably the start of it. Resa branded the idea as fuel efficient, that’s one of her many talents, because, really, the idea is to preserve ourselves. I think all of us love to educate, all of us love to mentor. But we only have so much time in the day, and we only have so much energy. And so, by being protective of ourselves, we’re able to really mentor people and spread our knowledge in a much more efficient way.

Rebecca: It also seems like then you’re also modeling good ways of finding balance and protecting yourself and things to your mentees as well.

Adaira: Yeah, I mean, I think what I would say about mentorship is that it’s historically been undervalued, under-recognized, but something that is really, really expected of a lot of educators to do. And we wanted to write about it, we wanted to make this a scholarly mission for ourselves to help normalize like, hey, this is something that we can be strategic with, this is something that we can be recognized for, this is something that we can scale. And really bring it up to the standards of, let’s say, someone who does research or gets large grants. Mentorship is a really important part of career development but we have found, personally, that it’s not necessarily recognized in the same way as others.

Resa: And I’ll add that I think people think mentoring is almost binary, this or that. Whereas one of the aspects of mentoring that we worked on is redefining and broadening the definition. Mentoring can take all different shapes and forms, all different styles, all different ages and stages. I think one of the biggest mistakes regarding mentoring is that you’re trying to mentor people like you or look for someone as a mentor who’s like yourself. And, I mean, we think that that’s very limiting, and it may not work out well for you or the mentee. And in fact, those people who seek to do that are usually looking for solely self-fulfilling prophecy. And I’ll say that’s what I saw. When I was finishing my residency training, I had attendings, teachers, pull me aside, and their advice to me was very much self-fulfilling prophecies: follow their path, do what I’ve done. And it almost seemed more to serve them than it did to serve me. And Adaira and I, when we start riffing on mentoring, she knows I really love the concept of peer mentoring. And some of my first peer mentors were my college classmates. They’re not physicians, they’re not in academics, but, wow, can they provide me some of the most useful pearls and pieces of guidance. And one of the highlights of the mentoring process that Adaira just described is those students, those mentees, get to know each other. And so, a psychological safety is created, they get comfortable asking questions in front of each other. And then when Adaira leaves the Zoom room, they have now developed a relationship with each other, and can take some of their own skills, their own questions, their own processes, and their own paths, they can walk on those together.

Rebecca: Such a great point. I know from my own experience that some of my best mentors have been people who are incredibly different from me, and are even in different fields that I am. [LAUGHTER]

Resa: Yep, 100%.

Adaira: Totally, mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s really important to think about who can offer you a different perspective that you hadn’t yet considered. And so I definitely think stretching yourself beyond the field you practice and beyond the institution in which you work is a great start.

John: On our campus we have a formal mentoring program for faculty where everyone is assigned a mentor. And often that will evolve and people will develop their own mentoring networks. But during the pandemic, a lot of those mentoring relationships were perhaps a little bit less strong than they might normally have been, and there was a lack of those hallway conversations in the drop-in to chat about problems. So we put together a group mentoring process where we had a mix of relatively recent younger faculty and some older faculty who met with all the new faculty in a group. And that peer mentoring component of that worked really well because people are going through the same experience and sharing their experiences among themselves can be really helpful. And doing that with students as well strikes me as being a really good idea that, probably, is underused.

Resa: If I could dovetail off of what you just shared, the concept of the structured mentoring programs. I think sometimes those work, and sometimes they don’t work, and we’ve all had those experiences. And when people ask us, “How do you create these relationships and what works, what doesn’t work?” What we found is a few things. So, number one, you try it out, if it’s not working, you don’t have to stay in that mentor-mentee relationship, it’s okay. And in fact, by clearing out a relationship that isn’t really organically growing and going, you’re opening yourself to other new relationships. Adaira has a really good recipe and formula. It’s not 100% foolproof, but it’s a really good recipe for a mentor- mentee relationship to work.

Adaira: Yes, I like it when a pairing has three different things that synergize nicely. And the first is that there are similar energies between the two people, meaning their personalities are complementary of each other. And there’s a similarity, there’s a familiarity that allows people to feel comfortable, naturally, around that other person. The second is when their schedules align, meaning if someone is very, very busy, and the other person is super open and wide, and expects their mentor, for instance, to be just as available, that can sometimes cause a collision. The third is that there’s an overlap or a nice complement to the knowledge gap that one person has and the knowledge that the other person can provide. And so, to me, I think a successful relationship can align along the energies between the parties, the schedule, and the knowledge. And it’s nice when you have all three there. I don’t think it’s absolutely critical, but that’s the ideal.

John: And you also suggest when there’s a formal mentoring relationship, that you share a document in which you talk about the expectations. Could you talk a little bit about that, and why that might be important?

Adaira: I think it’s important to just be clear and direct upfront. And the document doesn’t have to be a formal document that gets notarized, we’re not sort of saying those sorts of things. [LAUGHTER] But we’re saying to write it out, to say it, to make it concrete, as far as what are your expectations. And when I talked a little bit earlier about the three things that are there—energy, scheduling, and knowledge—honestly, the scheduling part, the time, is probably one of the biggest reasons why a relationship could fall apart. Is that someone’s expecting, perhaps, to extract more time from the other or less, or there could be some sort of a malalignment there. And so it’s really important to express upfront, “These are things I can help you with, so I can help you with finance, but only about maybe a few hours over the course of the year, I’m happy to contribute that.” And it seems uncomfortable to express that, but we’re used to, sort of, doing this in other relationships in the world. Let’s say I’m working with a real estate agent. I know offhand how much time he’s willing to devote to that relationship because he’s expressed that from the beginning. And I think in the world of mentorship we feel uncomfortable making it feel like a transaction or giving it that formal nature. But I will tell you, it feels good to just set that expectation up because it feels really bad saying no to someone, it feels really bad saying no. And so if you tell someone, “I’m happy to meet with you once a quarter,” and you say that from the beginning, then it’s out there, it’s out there. And they know that that’s the rules of the relationship. But it’s really tough when you’re expecting that once-a-quarter meeting, and then they start emailing you every month, or every other week, and now you have to say no, now you have to add them into your calendar. And now you start to resent, maybe not the person, but you might resent signing up for the relationship or signing up for the opportunity, or resent the fact that you didn’t say something earlier. You just start to have these negative feelings, and I think that’s not great. So, to me, expressing things upfront: How you’re going to meet, how often you’re going to meet, what are you meeting about? Who’s setting up the emails? All these sorts of things, I think it’s really important to say that upfront.

Rebecca: Are there other strategies or other key pieces of information that we should make sure are in documents or agreements in these relationships to help make sure that they’re nice and healthy?

Resa: One of the points that we emphasize, that I think is an “aha” for mentees, is that they have to play a role in this relationship. It’s not one sided, it’s a back and forth. And, in general, once you state roles, responsibilities, and expectations, people can either deliver and rise or they don’t. What I’ve seen when people have spoken with Adaira, spoken with myself, and read this article, they’re like, “Oh!” like there’s a light bulb that goes off on the mentee side that, “I have a role in this.” And I’ve been surprised, gladly so, that I have mentees say, “You know, I know I’m responsible for reaching out to you, I will follow up with you, I will offer dates.” I’ve recently been reading a book about habits of highly successful people, the classic, and proactivity is rule number one. And so this proactivity, that people need to be the ones to play the role, to outreach to the mentor, it’s been nice to see and it works.

Adaira: And the other thing is really normalizing that not every meeting has to be an hour long or even 30 minutes long. Some meetings can be 20, 10 minutes, 40 minutes long, I mean, you can change it and you can sort of titrate to their needs and what the topic is. But this idea of just because you’re going to meet with the person, you have to block off an hour of your calendar, I think can cause people who are already very, very, very busy to say, “I don’t have time, I don’t have time to do this.” And so what helps us to figure out the purpose of the meeting, the content that will be discussed, and think about: What are the venues? Or what are the media that I can use to meet with this person? And what is the necessary timeframe for us to meet? Every once in a while someone will send me a calendar invite, and that’s speaking to what Resa said earlier, the mentee, I have them send me the calendar invite with the Zoom link or the location in which we’re going to meet. And they’ll put it for an hour and I’ll say, “I don’t think we actually need an hour to discuss your schedule for the next two weeks and how to prioritize your schedule for two weeks. We can do that much faster.” And so, it might require you to sort of train them to be efficient with how they present themselves for a meeting and come up with an agenda. But the goal is to really try to titrate the length of the meetings so that it’s appropriate for the content to be discussed.

Rebecca: Seems like a good rule in many contexts, not just mentorship. [LAUGHTER]

Adaira: Correct, that’s true.

John: Does all the mentoring have to take place in meetings, either in person or remotely?

Resa: Absolutely not, and I really am glad you posed that question. I was thinking as Adaira was sharing, that we have fallen into this virtual Zoom world. A lot can get accomplished back and forth via email, and what I was thinking as you’re setting up the meeting and saying, “Hey, we probably can meet in 20 minutes rather than 60 minutes,” there are a few items that you can actually clarify. And I have a meeting upcoming today and it’s with four people, we’re talking about authoring a paper. And the goal of the meeting is for it to be a working meeting on the document, but we were able to clarify ahead of time, by email, authorship and sort of goal publication location. So there’s certain things that you can do quick, the quick back and forth, or the quick items that you can accomplish in one email, then allows you to clear it off, so when you actually have the meeting, you can focus on what you need to focus on. And one of the things that we like a lot is walking meetings, like, everybody reads about walking meetings, but not a lot of people actually do them. And the beauty of a walking meeting is you’re walking side by side, and there’s a comfort and a psychological safety that develops. And what I found after having a walking meeting is there’s almost a connection with a colleague, a connection with a mentee that wasn’t there before. Because you’re in nature, you’re walking, you’re breathing, and you’re sort of bringing in good energy and allowing yourself and your mind to open in creative ways.

Adaira: Even if you’re not side by side, like, sometimes I just have my meetings while I’m walking by myself outside. And it’s just good to be out there breathing clean air and outside of the computer region of my life and just separating myself. I will do that even if I’m meeting with someone over the phone.

John: You also suggest in that article that it may be useful sometimes to invite the people you’re mentoring to professional development activities or professional activities that you would have been attending anyway so that you can use the time a little bit more efficiently for the purpose of mentoring, as well as for whatever purposes you were using that time for anyway.

Resa: I really like that one. So it’s so much fun, as we’re slowly returning to in-person or other professional events, and even virtual professional events, to invite someone in. Number one, yes, you’re accomplishing the mentor-mentee meeting. Number two, you’re modeling, you’re modeling conversations, you’re modeling behaviors, you’re also networking and helping your mentee network and meet other potential mentors, sponsors, coaches. So it’s very efficient, very effective, and I think I’ve been on the receiving end of such invitations when I’m the mentee. It opens up your world, and it allows you to sort of watch how someone else is doing it, someone who you admire and respect. And you can pick up a lot of information in those ways.

John: And one other thing you discussed in that article is using email when possible, which actually ties into another article you wrote in March 2021, on what a compassionate email culture looks like. Could you tell us a little bit about how a compassionate email culture works and how it can play a useful role in mentoring?

Resa: So the concept of compassionate email, I think, is really important now. Bob Walker, who’s the Chair of Internal Medicine at UCSF, has been placing messages on Twitter about burnout and physician burnout, and actually how much email and the email culture is contributing to that. So we all know we’ve been home, we’ve been virtual, and people are much more in front of their computers or laptops. So you could argue that the inbox has exploded. And Adaira is the one that came up with this idea of writing an article about compassionate email. And the concept is, we don’t have to email as often and as much as we have been, and in fact, we can be pretty efficient about it. And the emphasis in the articles we read were always about protecting yourself, protecting your own inbox. And in this article, we flipped the switch. We said, “No, we want to protect other people’s inboxes.” And I’ll let Adaira start elaborating a bit.

Adaira: You know, I think it comes from our perspective as physicians. So physicians love to care for patients, that’s what we do for a living, but we’re really bad at caring for ourselves. And so, I think for many of us, that’s where we fail when it comes to our in-basket, our inbox, is that it’s hard for us to protect our own inbox, because we would write things and get all sorts of newsletters and emails that just come in, you just feel so overwhelmed. We thought, well, maybe we should think about how we can protect other people. So that was sort of the impetus for that article, was thinking more about creating a culture and being responsible for creating a culture or helping to create that culture, where email isn’t something that you just do whenever you want, you’re thinking about the other person. And so there are different ways in which you can do that, we discuss many of those in the article. I will say one thing that I think is really the secret sauce, is considering the BCC. The BCC has a bad rap, it’s a “blind carbon copy,” it has a bad rap of being something that can be used maliciously, and if you read a lot of articles about it, you will see that. But the BCC is actually a really nice strategy, especially when you’re sending out an email to 100 people, or 200 people, or even, honestly, anything greater than, like, 15, 10 people, you can BCC them. And, in your subject line you write, “Attention: teachers,” “Attention: principals,” whoever it is that you’re addressing, you make it very clear in that subject line who’s all included into that email. But everyone’s BCC’d so that you can avoid that reply all and I’m sure you’ve all been on those threads where everyone’s replying to the potluck, “Oh, I’m bringing macaroni and cheese. Oh, I’m bringing…” Not everyone needs to know that. And so, it’s important to sort of minimize the back and forth, and by having a BCC, if someone needs to reply, they reply directly to you. If you need to send out a summary statement, you can send out a summary statement of all of the replies you got. And that’s it, now you have two emails that were sent out to the large group, the initial one, and maybe the follow up, but that’s it. And so, that’s a small step of considering someone. The other thing is the time of the email. I would say even a year ago, I wasn’t great at this. This is something I’m working on myself where I would reply to someone at, like, midnight, because I was awake, I would send an email at midnight, I would send an email on Saturday that would have a task for that person to do, such as, “Oh, I’m sending you this. Do you mind just when you get a chance editing this?” And someone will say, “Oh, I have a chance. I mean, I can do it now instead of spending time with my kids, I’ll just quickly do this.” And so, by protecting other people by being conscientious of the time of the day, the time of the week, you can, again, just sort of respect the fact that everyone deserves to distance themselves from work. And if we think about how every time we send an email, we bring them back into work, we bring them back into the workplace and all the tasks that they have to do. Then again, we can start to move more towards being compassionate and respecting others’ time. And the goal of that article is really to try to encourage a better culture. And obviously this needs to be a conversation that occurs between some of the key stakeholders, but to really try to understand that we can all contribute to the problem by sending out a ton of emails, by emailing people at any hour, but it’s important to think about ways to mitigate someone else’s burden.

John: And you also suggest that if you’re going to send out those emails, you could use either features of your email program or some type of a plug-in in email, so that you schedule it to arrive during work hours. Could you just suggest some tools that might work for that?

Resa: Thanks so much for that highlight. That’s one of my faves, is the schedule option. Sometimes you don’t even know where these plug-ins and where these preferences are in your email software, but they’re there. And our hospital uses Outlook. And I found in Microsoft Outlook, that I can send my email, I can schedule them to be sent. So we’re not arguing that you need to put off things so that then it’s going to weigh on you and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I need to add that to my to-do list”, you can write the response or you can write the content of the email. However, you don’t have to press send, and in fact, you can schedule that send. And one of the things I also have been working on is my send days and times. Many messages can wait till after the weekend or they can certainly wait until eight o’clock the next morning. And it not only is thoughtful and intentional for the receivers, it also actually has helped me structure when I’m doing my emails, and when I even seek to receive emails. And there are formulas, and there are ways of decreasing your email inbox. As section leader for my group, what I’ve seen is, as I’ve decreased the quantity and increased the quality of my emails, I think it’s been brought back to me. In other words, I’m not receiving any quick, superfluous emails, what I’m receiving is much more intentional and much more quality and much more necessary. Because we’re not saying don’t communicate, in fact, we’re all about communication. Moreover, in the article we talk about speaking with your group, speaking with your sections, speaking with your team, how do they want to structure communication surrounding email? Because, actually, not everybody wants this type of communication. So it’s important to get your group to agree upon the kind of culture they want surrounding email.

Rebecca: Really appreciate that a lot of the work that both of you have been doing is really about protecting self and others through communication, relationships, etc. And I know that you have another article that came out too, about requesting compensation when you’ve been asked to speak. So I was wondering if you could give us a little glimpse of that article as well? I know that often people in academia are asked to give talks, but often just as a favor. [LAUGHTER] So can you provide some tips on how to protect yourself in that space as well?

Resa: I want to start by just saying that, Rebecca, you totally called us out. Adaira and I have felt that there is a playbook. There’s a playbook about how to navigate the workplace. And no one gave us a copy of that book to read. So one of our intentions, one of our missions, is to write articles and to share information that is going to help people. Help people take care of themselves, take care of their team, take care of their work, and take care of their overall culture. So Adaira and I talk about a lot of things in academic medicine. And a lot of what we talk about is not pure academics, and certainly not pure medicine, which is why we found an audience at Harvard Business Review. And the concept of moving from speaking for free, to speaking for a fee, which of course is very catchy, it’s a coming of age, and it’s a rite of passage. And part of how we came to this, what to do, when to do it, is by having a lot of conversations, actually, with mentors and with sponsors. And quite honestly, going back to the playbook and the sports reference, sometimes men seem to get some of the tips and tricks that we didn’t get. So, a lot of my mentors and a lot of people with whom I speak are men. Men friends, men colleagues, men that can tell me how they did it, or how they do it. So in terms of if there are 10 specific things that we recommend, when you’re in a situation that you’re asked to speak and there’s no monetary compensation, there’s no honorarium. And Adaira, do you want to start with some of them?

Adaira: Yeah, and it gets more comfortable asking over time. In the beginning you feel like you might be putting yourself at risk by asking, like, maybe they’ll take back the opportunity or maybe you’ll be judged. But to just be clear, many other people are doing this in various arenas of the professional world. It’s commonplace to get compensated for your time, it’s common to get compensated for your expertise. So as a teacher, or as an educator, or a mentor who’s speaking about your perspective, about your area of expertise, why wouldn’t that apply to you? And so you do have to gain that confidence. And in the beginning, it can be a little bit uncomfortable, so asking upfront is very key. So you wouldn’t want to ask for any sort of compensation at the end of your presentation or after it’s done. This is something, like the terms and conditions, that you’d ask upfront. And it can be very polite, like, “Is there any way that you would be able to provide a professional photograph of me as I’m speaking, that can go onto my website, that can go into a flyer for my next talk?” But that’s a form of compensation, because a nice high-quality photo or a headshot can be used by you later. Or even reduced or completely covered membership fees if you’re speaking for large national organizations, and they can’t offer you money, but perhaps they can reduce your membership fee for the next year, or give you a free trial, right? You can negotiate with them, and this is all in the practice of negotiation and developing comfort with negotiation. So in the article, we go through all 10 of these topics, and some of them, I feel like, I have used very, very, very successfully and now they’re just sort of standard practice. And some of them have taken some time to get used to. And it’s just a personal choice that you would make, but I don’t think you should feel obligated to walk away from any talk without any form of compensation.

Resa: I can add a few more. So a good one is a letter, a letter to your boss, a letter to your supervisor, a letter to your CEO, where the intention is that you get a positive letter, but either with, perhaps, quotes from audience members about how your talk was received, what it did for the group. Another is, say it’s an invitation to speak at a local group, you can ask that if it’s a positive reception, and it’s well received, and they liked you and the content you provided, could they recommend you for a national conference or an international conference? It could be the stepping stone for something that’s larger, that’s more impactful. A final one I’ll share, and this one I thought was obvious, but I think it only becomes obvious once you’ve done a lot of these, is sometimes there’s just no money and they cannot pay you an honorarium. However, they can pay your travel, your airline flight, your hotel, meals, and transfers. And, if it’s a place you’ve never visited, if it happens to be where your college best friend lives, like, why not? There are many ways to think about this, and it should not be an absolute yes-no.

Rebecca: Lots of great tips today. All kinds of ways to be better communicators, advocate for ourselves, and advocate for others. We always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Adaira: For me, as we write, we start to realize what else we can learn about the craft. And so, for me, I’m going to be taking more writing classes, reading more writing books, trying to just learn how to become a better communicator on paper. And that will be my goal for the next six months to a year. I mean, it’s a lifelong goal, but, like, I really want to dive into it.

Resa: And for me, I would characterize it as working on my storytelling. Writing and a lot of what we write comes from personal and professional stories. So working on storytelling through the podcast. I launched the podcast during COVID for the reasons of sharing and amplifying people that are doing things that are subject matter experts, perhaps they’re not being heard, perhaps they’re not being seen. So working on the creativity and the growth of the podcast.

Rebecca: Sounds like some really exciting adventures.

John: We really appreciate you sharing your time with us and we’re very much looking forward to sharing this with our listeners. Thank you.

Adaira: Thank you for having us.

Resa: Thank you so much.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle.

[MUSIC]

199. Revisiting Diverse Classrooms

As diversity and inclusion initiatives mature, evaluation and improvement are prioritized. In this episode, Melina Ivanchikova and Matt Ouelett join us to discuss how one such program has evolved. Matt is the Founding Executive Director at Cornell University’s Center for Teaching Innovation. Melina is the Associate Director for inclusive Teaching in the Center. They developed Cornell’s EdX MOOC on Teaching and Learning in the Diverse Classroom.

Shownotes

Transcript

John:
As diversity and inclusion initiatives mature, evaluation and improvement are prioritized. In this episode, we discuss how one such program 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:
Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca:
Our guests today are Melina Ivanchikova and Matt Ouelett. Matt is the Founding Executive Director at Cornell University’s Center for Teaching Innovation. Melina is the Associate Director for inclusive Teaching in the center. Welcome back.

Mathew:
Thank you. Delighted to join you again.

Melina:
It’s great to be here.

John:
It’s good to talk to you again. This is overdue. We had planned to talk to you after we had taken a group of people through the Inclusive Teaching MOOC that we’ll be talking about, and then this pandemic intervened, and we didn’t quite get to that. So I’m glad we’re finally able to schedule this. Our teas today are:

Mathew:
I’m personally not drinking anything right now. But if I was, I’d be drinking something in the family of Earl Grey. I like a black tea.

Melina:
It’s definitely the Earl Grey time of day,.I’m just drinking water, because of the heat.

Rebecca:
90 degree weather.

Melina:
I want to hold up a tea that Matt occasionally brings for us at staff meetings, which is a gift. You put this little bulb into hot water and it opens up slowly into a flower and has this beautiful aroma to it, and everybody delights in it. So it just causes this moment of group joy. But Matt will know what the name of that tea is.

Mathew:
It’s a green tea, I think it’s sometimes referred to as a lotus bloom. So, thank you, Melina, that’s really kind of you to mention that.

Rebecca:
And I have sa easonally inappropriate Christmas tea. [LAUGHTER]

Melina:
That sounds good.

Rebecca:
I was looking for a little spice.

Melina:
Spices are cooling.

John:
I also have a seasonally inappropriate spring cherry green tea.

Mathew:
They both sound delicious.

MELIN: I wish we could be in the same room together.

Rebecca:
and tea testing. [LAUGHTER]

Melina:
Exactly.

Rebecca:
We have all the teas. [LAUGHTER]

John:
In our conference room, we have hundreds of teas. If you’re ever up on campus, we’re happy to share some with you. In an earlier podcast, we talked to you about the Teaching and Learning in the Diverse Classroom MOOC that you were developing at Cornell and were to release shortly. We had agreed to discuss this after we had a cohort of our faculty go through it. But we had a few other things intervene, including a global pandemic, and we’ve actually had three cohorts go through it. And we’d like to talk to you about the MOOC, and, in general, how it’s gone and where it’s going. But because it’s been a while since we’ve talked about this, could you provide a little bit of background on the origin of this MOOC?

Mathew:
in 2017, when the Center for Teaching innovation was first formed, we were trying to discern strategic projects that were of interest to our selves, but also serve the common good sort of attach themselves to initiatives that were campus wide. And Melina and I gained the support of senior academic leaders to do a course for faculty on campus related to teaching inclusively. So initially, the genesis of this idea was a professional faculty development experience on campus. And then the more that we got sort of embedded in the project, it became really clear to us that it could also answer another strong desire that we had, which was to contribute something broader, something that other institutions could take advantage of, as well. So that’s where the genesis of the idea have moved from an on campus resource to something on a platform like EdX. They’ve been great colleagues, and really wonderful to work with. But it galvanized us, I think, to think both more broadly, but also more specifically, and by more broadly, I mean, we were trying to think about what in the US context stands up to an international conversation around social justice, equity and diversity, and what is uniquely American, and also, for u,s what was uniquely Cornell’s context versus what might have resonance more broadly. So the process of putting it together was really driven locally. But our eye was always on trying to deliver something that might be of use to our colleagues more broadly. Melina, does that resonate for you?

Melina:
Yes, I think we were doing our best at the beginning, floating ideas, and pleasantly surprised when we got the confirmation from our senior leadership. They really thought it would be a good way, and a different way to provide an opportunity for people to engage with this kind of a course, either in groups together or asynchronously by oneself to have a private learning experience. But what appealed was an online asynchronous experience, that wasn’t going to be hours and hours. Early on, we had a lot of conversations about how to keep this to four or five weeks, something reasonable, for professional busy people.

Rebecca:
That length was one of the things I really appreciated about it in that it was a really nice concise, but very specific and detailed, all at the same time. So it really felt manageable. I know we had like three cohorts go through on our campus and I was unable to follow along during the first ones but I was following along right when the pandemic hit and found taking the course at that particular moment really poignant.

Mathew:
This was our experience on our campus too. I’ll be just very honest with you and say I felt honor would be served if Melina and I offered the course one time on campus and we had anybody take at it. It’s sort of like we delivered and after that it’s sort of up to the universe to find footing. But we have consistently had really excellent participation on campus. And I’ll let Melina speak more to the facts and figures. But even this spring, we’re literally just now completing a spring version of it on campus. And we’ve had a really lovely distribution between faculty, graduate students and staff… almost a third, a third, a third, again, and the interest doesn’t seem to be diminishing. And so, Rebecca, I can’t wait to hear more from you and John about what your experiences were with your cohorts. Because part of the joy of doing this is hearing back from campuses. Did it help? Did it galvanize and help facilitate some conversations that were context specific? And we really hope that we could provide the general introductory sort of framework, provide some useful resources in terms of exercises, but then really trust the process would unfold at a campus level in the way that it needed to. So that’s not a rhetorical question, I would love to hear more.

Melina:
To be honest, I was really hoping we could turn the conversation there, too. I really wanted to hear how your local learning communities went three is a significant number.

Mathew:
It’s fantastic. Yeah, that’s serious dedication, and a sign of positive response. So we’d love to hear more.

John:
Each time, I think, we had between 30 and 45 people attending, somewhere in that range. They were mostly faculty, but we did have a few administrators. And one thing that was really effective is one of the faculty members, in the third iteration of that, brought in a couple of her students. And that made it much more powerful. Because while the stories that are provided in the MOOC, in the videos from Cornell students and Cornell faculty are very well done and very moving, when a student gets up and talks about their own experiences and the challenges they face, as a local example of that it’s even more powerful. A number of people signed up for it on their own. But most of the people actually met every week, where we provided three or four times to let people come in at times that were convenient. We’d watch most or all of the videos, and then we discuss each of them. Sometimes we didn’t get through all of them, because the discussions went for a long time. Other times, we were able to get through most of them, and then people did the rest of the work on their own outside. But the discussions were really effective. And having people talk about it in person worked really well. And I think it helped ensure that everyone finished the MOOC, or that nearly everyone finished the MOOC. I know we had some people who didn’t do all the written work, but they at least attended most or all the sessions. And for us, at least, I think having the weekly meeting served as a nice commitment device, which tended to help maintain persistence. And it worked really well. And people have been asking about when we’re going to take another cohort through. And we’ll be planning to do that this fall. I think overall it was a tremendous success on campus. And we did have a few administrators attend, but not quite as many as you received. And we did have some staff members too. But it was mostly faculty.

Rebecca:
I think it was a really nice complement to some of the other work that we had already started doing, but just didn’t have the capacity to roll out the equivalent of that course on our own. And so it was really, really helpful to us. We had done a couple of reading groups related to racism previous to that. We have a really robust accessibility program on our campus and have been doing a lot of professional development around disability and accessibility. And so leveling up to inclusive pedagogy is really where we wanted to be going. [LAUGHTER] And this was a really nice structured way for us to get there. So we’ve been really thrilled with how many people have participated. And I think it really informed a lot of the work that folks did over the past year during the pandemic as well, people became really aware of some of the inequities that weren’t as visible previously.

Melina:
Thank you so much for sharing some details. It’s delightful, even just to picture briefly how you chose to facilitate those and the responses. I love the searching for authentic stories from your own campus, with having students present. That seems really exciting. This might be a good time to mention a couple of things. One is that we made the decision in January to move from a instructor-paced model to having it be a self-paced model, which means now that the course is open all year round. And the reason for that was to give campuses and facilitators more flexibility to run the course on the schedule that worked for them, because we kept trying to guess and get it right, but sometimes we’d get right in the middle of the busiest part of the semester, which some people loved but other people… it didn’t work so well for them. So I think that’s a good decision. We started to wonder more about how are people facilitating the course we’re doing and trying to reach out to them and have conversations or looking for a little bit of feedback, even informally, just like this, to see how things were going. So, we heard similar things from a few others like they got inspired to look for the stories that were from their own community, in their own students. And there’s many places to look for stories like that: the student newspapers, conversations with faculty, as you’ve described,

Mathew:
I love your strategy of a faculty member bringing their own students and that there’s no substitute for that. So I love that…that’s a great idea. Can I say too, Melina, this is a little bit of the inside part. But it was a big moment for us to let go of the instructor-led version of the MOOC and partially, we just needed to have a reassurance that we had done a good job, that the quality of the work was substantial enough that it could just sort of go forth. And we were always confident that our colleagues could facilitate it well. I think, John and Rebecca, it’s such a compliment to your on campus facilitation, because we know the number one thing here is not the advertising, it’s word of mouth. And if colleagues are saying to their friends and associates, “Oh, yeah, it wasn’t a terrible thing, you know, it was an okay use of my time” …then we know that’s so much more persuasive than any kind of blitz you could do through email or anything else. And if you’re continuing to get this large group, and that’s a significant proportion of your faculty continuing to find this a good use of their time, then Melina, we can take a deep breath now. We can sort of say, “It’s okay, we let our baby go out into the world, and it’s gonna be okay.”

Melina:
But last year was a very unique year. So we had a giant boost. As soon as the pandemic started, people enrolled in the course. We decided to run the course again, earlier than we had planned in response to the street movement and fighting for racial justice. And we had a giant leap in attendance here at Cornell as a result of that. And then we run another learning community series in October. And then Matt mentioned, we ran one in the spring too. We do have some fun things to report out on in terms of patterns of what people are saying about what they’re learning. We have a pre-post survey that gives us a sense of how people feel at the beginning, and then matches to their experience of how they feel at the end. And so I was surprised by the things that floated to the top. So I can share what the top four things were. The number one thing that they moved the most on… so this was things that they’ve collectively they move the most on… So the first one was, “I’m aware of campus resources to support colleagues and students in sustaining inclusive learning environments.” I don’t know why that one’s surprised me. But I think even though our course is sort of the Cornell example, most college campuses in the US have all sorts of support and offices in place. And so this might have been the place where they finally got to hear the list of all the different offices that support student learning and accessibility. The second one was “I feel prepared to address controversial comments that may arise in class.” But that was one worry that we had initially, was that an asynchronous online course would never take the place of a face-to-face learning experience. This shows me and Matt’s bias also, because we’ve been strongly face-to-face instructors for most of our teaching careers. So we had to learn, ourselves, how to be online instructors, and what that meant… how to have a stronger presence in the course itself. So between our pilot version of the course and the second iteration, we added more videos of ourselves. And so we were very gratified by seeing this number of people feel more competent around this. The other one is “I’m informed about specific strategies for creating more inclusive classrooms.” And the fourth one is “I feel confident I can evaluate my course structure and materials for inclusivity.” So that’s where things are trending very strongly. We’re hoping to publish some findings pretty soon about that. And then the other response that we hear over and over again, is how moving the videos were, which to me is personally gratifying, because from the moment when I was a little girl, my father used to read to me every night before bed and, tried and true, I do the same with my kids. Stories were just my way into learning about the world and continue to be so. So it’s just the thing that moves us, our emotions, it’s the thing that makes us open to caring about systemic change, because the door opens to us through individuals… the stories and experiences of discrimination. When we share in community about our own experiences of discrimination and bias, and even our own mistakes that we’ve made with others. I think that kind of learning is so powerful. And so I think that we were able, through the videos, to lift that experience of storytelling,

John:
The narratives in there are extremely powerful, and people reacted really positively to them.

Rebecca:
…especially because there were such a wide variety of disciplines reflected, which I think is really important and sometimes can be challenging for an individual campus to do a small workshop series or something and get that broad of representation at each little event. You might have representation throughout a whole semester or a whole academic year, but maybe difficult to have that much representation in a single sitting of something

Mathew:
Absolutely. Even like the tried and true method of a panel, It doesn’t really necessarily lend itself for people to really do a deep dive or really share. The other thing that I’ve come to appreciate even more deeply is the power of getting out ahead of a crisis and providing an opportunity for folks to just talk, to grapple with ideas, provide them some frameworks. They may not like Melina and I had this very interesting conversation with one of our colleagues who was going through the reading list saying, “too aggressive,” “not deep enough,” and was just sort of a typical faculty critique of the reading list. I was like, “Super engaged, I love it.” Absolutely. Bring it on. I’m not changing any of the readings, but I loved having that conversation, because I thought, that’s someone who’s really gotten engaged and is trying to figure out how to apply this in the context of her work and her discipline and her students. And for me, that’s the best that it gets. But it is this capacity building or resilience building. So all of your cohorts, all those folks who sat together, that’s a transformative human experience. It sort of harkens back to the sitting around the campfire. They’ve had this moment together that… I don’t know when or how, but I’m positive it will do good. It will do good for the campus. And it will do good for students. And nothing else, like Melina was suggesting, it gives you a small cohort of colleagues to rely on and to say, “I’m not really sure about this, what do you think? What would you do in this situation?” And the other thing that we came to learn, which I have to say, Melina and I were both very slow to want to do anything online. But we also were very suspicious of lurkers. And we were sort of like, “Well, where are these people? They’ve signed up, but they’re here, but they’re not posting anything in the discussion board. But I’ve now come to really embrace lurking as a form of learning. I’m not dismissive of it at all. I think some people want to be in the conversation. They’re taking it in, they’re absorbing it, but they just don’t feel like they have a lot they want to say yet. Or someone else has already said it, or they’re waiting to see what other people have to say. So Melina and I have, a number of times, come back around to this conversation about what does it mean to really be engaged. And I think our growth edge, our learning, has been to really expand that definition of what it means to be engaged. So if you sign up for the course, but you never log in, that’s not engaged, that’s wishful thinking. But if you sign in and you tap through any of the videos, or even look at the resources, like I had to smile when you said your colleague maybe didn’t do all of the writing. Not a problem. What we’re finding is that people will circle back around. Like we’ve had a number of people who’ve taken the course twice. I think that’s a phenomenal commitment on a faculty member’s part, I mean, just given how stretched everybody is for time.

Melina:
Yeah, I have a faculty member who emailed me today saying I can’t wait for next spring, when will offer learning community opportunities again, so that I can take it for the third time. [LAUGHTER] And she was trying to remember where she could find the references to active learning strategies. So I’m like, “those are in Module Three.” “Oh, great.” That’s what she was really looking for. There was a new faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh who contacted me what seems like ages ago, it turns out, it was only last December, but it feels like three years ago, and she wanted to talk about how we made the videos because she wanted to make videos on her own campus. And so that was really inspiring. And she recently reached out again, and I met with her this morning, and she’s gotten all her academic leadership on board, they’re going to make their own asynchronous class, they have a video team in place to make it. This is inspiring, because our action plans are always inspiring. And sometimes a person’s action plan is this is a draft of my syllabus diversity statement, or this is my plan for TAs or graduate students. Sometimes they’re thinking of a plan that will be years down the road, or they’re thinking how to bring in diversified speakers. All of those are strategies that we took all of the action plans that people had submitted locally and made word clouds with them, and the word student is the thing. It just stood out as the most giant thing. And so I thought, wow, this is telling me that student centered learning strategies are the thing that people are walking away with. It was a litmus test, but this person took it over and above. And so I just thought, it’s a ripple effect. It’s her project. And she’ll go on to inspire others. We’ve had people come back and say, “Can you do one for librarians? Can you do one for teaching graduate students? Can you do one for the law profession or medical profession?” She’s making one that’s anchored in the medical profession. So I just celebrated her and said, “I hope you can make it a MOOC and not just for your own campus.” Maybe the same thing will happen to them that happened to us, which is they’ll start small and then dive out.

Rebecca:
It’s amazing how projects sometimes balloon like that.[LAUGHTER] Like, wow, that’s not quite what I had in mind and now I have this giant thing that I’m doing. We’re glad that it happened. I wanted to comment a little bit, Matt, on lurking. As a lurker, I thought I might just confess, like what lurkers do. So I followed along twice, the first time I was an active lurker, in part because I was doing a lot of self reflection, and I didn’t want to communicate with other people while I was processing. I had to have some of that time and space to process for myself and how that related to other diversity, equity and inclusion things that I was engaged in, and so that I could then articulate to other people how that fit in with what I was doing, because I needed that time and space to process. And then the second time, I was an active, engaged participant, but I definitely lurked the first time and it was really to have that self-reflection time.

Mathew:
I’m so glad you did. You have to do that. Otherwise, the tension between making ourselves vulnerable and protecting ourselves can be immobilizing. I’m delighted to hear that. I actually think, Milena, that might be something interesting. We figured out early on that people needed us to normalize posting to a discussion list is not academic writing, just post your thought and let things evolve. And we sort of struggled with that and figured out some language on that. But now I’m wondering… Rebecca, do you think it would be helpful if we posted a little something about the benefit of being a lurker, to just sort of normalize that and say, “This is really emotional, and it’s deep And maybe you just want to slide through and focus on yourself, and that’s perfectly fine.”

Rebecca:
Yeah, maybe we don’t call it lurking. But really, it’s more like a journaling

MATTHEW: Yes.

Rebecca:
Like a self reflection kind of activity. Like I did a lot of the activities a first time just kind of in my notebook and was thinking through things.

Mathew:
See, I think you’ve put your finger on one of the attributes of life in academia and higher ed that stymies this kind of work, which is we leap to action, and we don’t provide enough opportunity for ourselves to just do the kind of internal work we need to to feel some sense of groundedness. What do I think? What have my experiences been? What has worked for me and what am I still working on? …kind of things. And to be quite honest, you would have been my favorite student. If that was what you got in round one, I would have been totally happy, but moving it into the campus or into a discussion with your colleagues. That for me is icing on the cake, because you as a teacher will be transformed by that, where you’ll never approach any of this stuff the same way again.

Melina:
I have a friend who’s an internet scholar, so she actually researches lurking. I read a draft of an article that she wrote where she actually talked about the importance of lurking for learning about different others… like basically, it was making an argument that lurking is a really good way to learn how to be an ally, to learn about groups that you’re not a member of, to learn what new vocabulary is out there, in terms of how to talk about certain topics. I know, there’s a lot of anxiety about offending people and getting the terms right. And I’m at the point now where I’m likely to make mistakes, because things have changed enough within my own lifetime that the vocabulary is constantly really being updated. I think that anything we can do to reduce anxiety and help people feel more connected to each other, to the course, to have opportunities to just reflect on their own experiences. And you’re not the only one who engaged with the course that way, Rebecca. The woman I talked to this morning did the same. She posted, but she would only post at the end of reading every other person’s reflections. And I’ll say, just in case somebody goes to the course and says, “Well, where are the discussion boards?” …that was one of the things that we ended up giving up in moving to the self-paced modality. And that’s because we couldn’t staff moderators 24/7. Before we were able to have a robust and temporary staff in place that would help us moderate the discussion boards. We just know that sometimes there are bad actors who aren’t there for learning. We never had trouble in our discussion boards, they were lovely, so that was such a difficult decision to make. But we revised the guide that we wrote for facilitators to just encourage thinking about and talking about alternative means to supplement those, whether it’s a closed Facebook group or a discussion board in Canvas, or leaving extra time during the face-to-face opportunities. But it sounds like, in your structure, your face-to-face opportunities are giving people plenty of opportunity for discussion.

Rebecca:
Can you talk a little bit about how you facilitated at Cornell?

Melina:
Sure, I’d be delighted to. It’s complicated because it’s not the same every time. So just to give you a sense, I co-facilitated with another staff member from our center, we did a faculty interdisciplinary learning community, same person with addition two other staff, one person from the graduate school. We did the one for graduate students and postdocs together with a slightly different curriculum. I partnered with a faculty member from the school for integrative Plant Sciences and we anchored that one in the department this last time. This is like the story of my life. I used to team teach as a community college professor, but I was the one that had to be the team teacher with everybody. So every year I had two or three new teaching partners for the same course. So I’d be basically begging them to use my course syllabus so that we could have a little bit of sanity for me. So I love this because people have different facilitation styles, they bring different skills to the table. So it’s very inspiring, and they’re very different. So the interdisciplinary faculty cohort is one kind of experience. The faculty there basically love hearing about similarities and differences, like they’re so relieved to find colleagues who care just as much as they do about inclusion. And they’re delighted to hear about strategies that maybe they can try and they’re also relieved to share the knotty points of difficulty that others may not be facing that are discipline specific to them. And then, in the cohorts that we’ve led that are anchored in the department, those conversations are just as rich because you can focus on things that are important to that group. So in the School For Integrative Plant Sciences, we asked the chair to provide a scenario for a difficult conversation so that we could have a little practice around that. And they’re remodeling their entranceway. So they’re having these discussions about how to portray their discipline. And so the argument is about the history of the discipline and all the white male people versus wanting to diversify the discipline nowadays and what they want to do. So we had a pretty amazing sort of hot topics dialogue that I think left them feeling more empowered and more ready. And the person who’s actually truly leading that initiative was also relieved to hear all the different opinions. And it was really important to hear the different perspectives. I don’t know if that completely answers your question. I’m just right, fresh out of doing those. So I kept a journal where I just kept writing down little ideas. Matt and I keep talking about writing a book about this. Like, I want to make sure I write about this and write about that and write about this. So it was a deeply reflective process for me. I keep learning a tremendous amount. And sometimes, to go back to Matt’s earlier comment, we’re not going to change the readings, but sometimes we do go and make updates or add references. we weren’t able to touch on every single identity category. And sometimes people don’t find themselves and they say, “Why didn’t you talk about this or that?” And so then we make an effort to do that. And I have a running list of edits that are ready to be worked on for the next version of the course that gets posted.

Mathew:
If I could tailgate, Melina, there are two points that you made that I just think are so evocative of our approach to this. One is we really wait to see who’s registered and how they fall out. Are there cohorts? Are there natural cohorts that emerge from that, and that was your point, Melina, about it being complicated, and sort of last minute, because we sort of wait to see who’s on board. And then your second point that I just want to reiterate is, it’s organic. And I think we’re both learning both about the DEI issues, but also about teaching and teaching in an online environment. And what does it mean to have a global perspective in a MOOC? This is new to both of us still. And so it’s always really interesting. And we’re trying to still… like Melina has revised the handbook for facilitators every single semester, because we keep getting really good ideas from folks across the spectrum who have tried some things out and said, “This really worked, and this didn’t.” And our goal always is to make it as useful as possible. So it also keeps it really interesting. So it’s the same course. But it’s never the same course, you know that, you’re both deeply embedded in teaching as well.

John:
Yeah, the discussions vary dramatically depending on the specific composition. And when we were meeting three times a week, or four times a week one time, each discussion with a little different depending on who happened to show up that day. And it worked well, though. I appreciated the fact that I got to participate in many of those discussions.

Mathew:
In the ideal world, that’s exactly what it would be, you would sort of have a flipped classroom, you would do the online course. But you would always have a cohort of people to talk through your ideas with and I think that’s, for me, the ideal scenario. And I have to ask, are you assessing this? Obviously, people being there is one key assessment, that’s a huge vote of confidence. So clearly, you’re doing really well. The fact that they come back, that’s even better evidence.

John:
We have not done any formal assessments. We’d like to, but we’re somewhat understaffed. We’d like to assess many more of the things that we’re doing at the teaching center, and certainly the effectiveness of this would be useful. I wish we had a good answer for you on that.

Mathew:
Actually, that’s a really good answer, John, because it’s sort of provoking me to think, together with Melina. We’ve got the protocol that we use, the pre-post, and Melina and our other colleague, Amy Cardace Ardays are working on publishing that protocol. But that might be something that if we can move that process along, that would give you something at the campus level, easy to administer, and really, really interesting. So it’s all self report, of course, but it at least gives you a sense of over time, in general, and an aggregated level, what our faculty finding useful about the experience in terms of their own learning and development. I hadn’t thought of that. Yeah,

Melina:
I did a presentation at the IUPUI conference, and, as a result of that, I have started collaborating with a couple of other institutions who are in particular interested in how to assess their inclusive teaching interventions. And so, in one case, they started by wanting to use our protocol, but embed the protocol in the other part of their plan that they had in place. So we’ll be presenting together as a team this year at IUPUI, which I’m excited about. And I also think that assessing the learning communities is its own sticky wicket. The learning goals are both the same ones that are in the course and you also want to know whether the learning community itself went as well as it could have or what you might do differently because I still have a goal here locally at Cornell to have more of these department level immersions because those are the ones that have been pretty exciting because colleagues suddenly see each other with new eyes, like they see their colleagues as co-agents for change and social justice work instead of having the experience in the interdisciplinary group that I mentioned where they’re like, “Thank goodness, there’s someone over across campus who cares as much as I do.” So part of assessment is being able to tell your story persuasively about what you’re doing and why people should participate.

Mathew:
I think also, part of what assessment can do is reflect on what’s next. What’s the growth edge here? What would help people in the next step and so as Melina said, departments are our big go-to next step. We’re really interested in working with a coherent subset of people we’ll never get an entire department. And we don’t need that. We don’t need unanimity. We just need a core of consensus that this is a worthwhile use of their time. And what Melina hasn’t mentioned, is this other project she’s working on with another colleague of ours that I think is super interesting, which is curriculum mapping through a DEI lens. And so really, when we think about systemic change, in building more multicultural, inclusive institutions, the department is really the unit of analysis. That’s where the work happens. And it’s also where the chief stakeholders stay the longest. And so, Provosts rollover, Chancellors rollover, presidents come and go, but departments mostly stay intact. And so, if they choose to invest in this sort of critical analyses of DEI issues, there’s great possibility for really changing long term the experiences of undergrads and grads and also the people who are part of the department. It goes to recruitment and retention at every level, from undergrads,to grad students to new and junior faculty. So we’ve been sort of building, socializing the course on campus, building a sense that this is a good use of your time globally. And then Melina has… how many departments have you’ve worked with now? Four? Three?

Melina:
We have three on deck for the fall, and had those initial conversations about getting things started and meeting them specifically where they are at in their process. People have expressed different beginning points or interests for where they want to get started. But this is what my colleague Kathleen Landy, who is really helping us to visualize difficult concepts in a very simple way. She’s basically created some tools that we can use to lead people through this process. And we’re socializing… it might not be the right word… but we’re basically getting the word out that this is a program and a service that we offer, and having some initial conversations with folks to just let them know what this is and how the resource works. And, so far, the reception has been really positive. And I think there’s just a different set of needs. We sometimes just talk about different entry points, maybe people want to think about curriculum, maybe they really want to think about pedagogy. I met with a group today that really wanted to help getting a discussion started about social identities and implicit bias. And so that’s really about instructor self reflection, and what our lived experiences have been, and then how we translate those into our teaching practices. So, one fantasy that I have is that our portfolio basically runs the gamut around that framework, so that people who want to work on curriculum have a rich tool for curriculum mapping, and then they also get the benefit of the facilitated dialogue and deeper conversations.

Mathew:
Yeah, I’m a big follower of the sort of John Dewey approach, start where the learner wants to start. And in many cases, all roads lead to Rome. It doesn’t really matter where we start if we have a holistic systems perspective.

Rebecca:
… and the desire to start.

Mathew:
Absolutely. [LAUGHTER] That’s the critical piece. Exactly.

Melina:
Which is an important threshold to cross over… the desire to start. People come to us because they want to, as opposed to this is now a university requirement or something like that, because that threshold is so important and meaningful.

John:
I think a lot of campuses have reached that threshold now because the pandemic, as Rebecca had mentioned earlier, has revealed a lot of the inequities and challenges that our students face in ways that were always there, but that faculty may not have been as fully aware of. It’s much harder to ignore some of the challenges our students face when you had to deal with them in class every day, when you can see them struggling with things that would be hidden when they were on campus. Many people are ready for addressing these issues and these challenges.

Mathew:
I couldn’t agree more. I think timing is everything. And our hope is to build a port of entry. That, like Melina mentioned very early on, we do everything we can to bring people’s anxiety down so they can relax and be in a mode that allows the learning to take place. If it’s okay, I’d love to hear from the two of you about what would you like to see in Teaching and Learning in the Diverse Classroom? What would you see as a next step?

Melina:
We were thinking of maybe starting a podcast. [LAUGHTER] Just kidding, just kidding.

John:
We’d be happy to help.

Melina:
We love your podcast.

Mathew:
Yeah.

Rebecca:
That was one of those projects that started small that blew up big as well. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca:
I do have an answer. One of the things that I think that we struggle with… limited resources… and also, the complexity of timing is always a challenge being able to bring people together at a specific time, so we offer things at multiple times. One of the things that we always have trouble measuring or reporting out Is what do people do with this information? And so some of the pre- and post-testing that you were mentioning before, I think, gets at that a little bit. But what’s the reflection that happens a specific period of time afterward, is something that we haven’t done yet. We haven’t engaged. I think we both have this inclination to want to do some of that stuff, but like, not always the capacity to do it. And then also, we’ve tried a couple of things like badges if you want to tell your story. And sometimes it’s hard to collect that information in a way that’s useful, that doesn’t take ages for someone to produce to submit it to us. And then also to like, analyze it. [LAUGHTER]

Mathew:
That’s a great point, we’ve bandied about this idea of sort of a retrospective survey, like a semester out, a year out, two years out, what remains important or salient? or what have you done differently? And we’re still, I think, in discussion. Is that a way to say it, Melina? We haven’t really resolved yet how to do that. And for us, it’s the same issue. It’s bandwidth.

Melina:
I appreciated the fact that Matt was writing down your idea, Rebecca, [LAUGHTER] because sometimes it’s a matter of timing, getting us at the right flow of the creative curve, and also the amount of times that we get the same ask. So if somebody else had asked for more videos that had faculty talking about successful strategies and how to implement them. So we might be able to talk to your point and meet that person’s invitation. And the other requests that we’ve had, which we haven’t had bandwidth for, was to present a wider variety of different types of institutions, especially in module five when we’re talking about institutional change efforts. So that was one idea. We would love to explore these if we had the capacity.

John:
On that issue, though, I do have to say that the people you chose to speak, I think, speak to all institutions. I think some people may have been concerned that this was coming out of Cornell, and we’re four-year public institution. But no one really left with any concerns about that. I think the issues that are addressed are pretty universal. I think that part works really well. One thing though, that I know a number of faculty were looking for is more specific guidance on what techniques could work to make their discussions a little more inclusive in class and what other techniques could be used to help improve the success of students who are struggling. And there’s so many things there that the issue gets really wide. And I think the topics you chose are really good and universal and apply to everyone. But I know a lot of people would like some things specifically, that could help narrow some of the challenges in STEM classes, where the success rates vary very dramatically. And a lot of faculty were raising questions about that, particularly in math and in the sciences, and so forth. There’s a lot that’s already there. There’s just so much you can do in a five-week class. And I think what you have there is wonderful.

Rebecca:
What you’re saying, John, actually makes me think about a need to send a reminder to people that have participated in a cohort about all the resources that were available there, because now you’ve had time and space to reflect, maybe have tried some things in classes, and it might be worth revisiting some of the material again.

Melina:
One thing that I wished we could do, which we just couldn’t quite figure out a way to do this, but in the MOOC, we had people post what their action plans were on the discussion board. So now we’ve lost access to being able to see those, but the ones that we get through our Cornell cohorts are pretty incredible. And the quality of those jumps up significantly when we have a learning community, like the learning community action plans. I think John said this earlier, like it just helps people finish the course and actually get through it just to be part of a learning community. But then also the quality of the action plans, I think because they’re presenting them to each other… our last session in our learning community is them presenting their plan… and then hearing their colleagues questions and feedback. And those have been really impressive. And I like, John, what you’re saying. I think people want to see some examples of this in action. Like sometimes I wish we could get sort of live footage of a classroom where someone’s doing a really great job and have the camera be… people know it’s there, but they can forget about it.

Mathew:
Melina and I’ve talked at length about sort of what’s missing in this experience is the experiential aspect. And there’s a certain component in the dialogue, the discussion that you host or facilitate that helps with that, that’s super helpful. Because even though you may not be having people do psychodrama, or acting out role plays or stuff like that, but just the act of talking through these moments can be enormously helpful. But we’ve been really trying to think about how the next step might be something that’s more experiential, because oftentimes, people just need literally the physicality of a practice, of a walk through. He says this, she says that, what do I do? Then something else gets said, then what do I do to that? And that sort of is part and parcel to building a sense of efficacy, like you don’t need to have all the answers but you do need to have some strategies that you feel are useful in the moment and don’t dig you into a deeper hole. So that’s one of the other things… I don’t have an answer for that yet, but we’ve been thinking.

Rebecca:
Our DEI officer, Rodman King, has ran sessions on our campus that are like that,like little scenarios, and did small groups where people were talking through it and those are some really popular sessions, they always needed more time. People got really engaged and really wanted to talk through the details and really process. So we often didn’t get through more than one or two examples in a session, but it was a incredibly popular sessions when we’ve offered those.

Mathew:
Yeah, I love that idea. And people feel like there’s an expert in the room who can help them. And it’s theoretical, it’s a scenario, so they can risk making a mistake, but the practice is real, that level of physicalities It’s a wonderful idea.

Melina:
Can I circle back to something John said earlier about the people being worried about the Cornelll voices being like too Cornell or something like that? I think that the reason that that doesn’t happen is because people were willing to make themselves vulnerable during the interview process. So they really come across as three dimensional complicated human beings who are willing to tell their stories of struggle and the background. And I actually think that we have a situation at Cornell, where the name of the institution itself basically has almost everybody suffering under some kind of horrible imposter [LAUGHTER] syndrome, which makes us maybe nicer people, I don’t know. But my experience here has been that my colleagues are incredibly kind and welcoming and eager to support their students’ learning… that always is shared among faculty everywhere, but they’re also eager to support each other’s learning in adult spaces. And that has continued to be a delightful point of engagement. I used to teach undergraduates and now all of my work is through our teaching center. And I really far prefer working with adults thinking about social identity in a different way, like maybe they arrived already. Oh, no, wait, there’s new things to learn.

Rebecca:
I think that authenticity really comes through, which is really powerful. And I think you’re right. On camera, everyone feels really authentic. It doesn’t feel scripted. And I think that’s what’s important about it.

Mathew:
I totally agree, Rebecca, I’m really happy to hear that that’s your perception. Obviously, we picked the people. And part of it also was people relish the invitation to be honest, and to tell what their stories are as they are unfolding. And so I think, Melina, this is where you started, the power of the story, but it’s also the power of inviting people to share their story, that indication that “Yeah, we really want to hear it.” And I do want to do a little bit of a shout out for Melina, she was our… I don’t even know what to call her… executive producer. She was our talent manager. And so she did a lovely job of engaging everybody and getting them centered and made sure they had coffee or water, just sort of genuinely set the stage for a real dialogue, much like you and John do in this podcast. You just make it really easy to be present and say what’s on your mind.

Rebecca:
Thanks. Speaking of invitations, we always invite people to tell us what’s going to happen next. So what’s next? [LAUGHTER]

Mathew:
Next is action plans, Melina and I still have to wrap up the class so… which is actually, even though it’s July, it’s our favorite part of the class. We love reading and responding. So we’ve chosen to do the responses to the action plans by brief recorded videos, mostly because it warms up the classroom. And also we start talking about it, and I think our feedback is far more robust. And we read for different things. So it’s always so interesting to me to hear what resonated for Melina and why. And so I’m really looking forward to that. And then, Melina…

Melina:
What’s next… I want to do a deeper dive on the importance of storytelling. So this isn’t next on our MOOC, but just on what we’re thinking of offering next year through our center to support inclusive teaching, but just really enlivening and bringing to bear this idea that storytelling is an inclusive pedagogy, how to do it, when to do it, when it’s appropriate. It goes back to John’s question about how do you facilitate lively discussions? How do you bring in the personal and the individual when you’re wrestling with difficult scholarly ideas? Sometimes we get folks from STEM saying, “Oh, this is Social Sciences, like the humanities and social sciences should deal with this. So making it relevant, making a case for why who we are as people really matters to the way we learn, how we learn, how we feel in the classroom about affect. So we have a few projects related to that new avenue.

John:
And there was also a brief mention of the possibility of a book. Is that something planned in the near term? Or is this a longer time horizon project?

Mathew:
Well, we have an outline. I think…

Rebecca:
…that’s a start.

Mathew:
Yes, it’s a big start. We have the will, and we have the way, we just now need to do the work. But I think we could help people. I think we have some things to say about how campuses can galvanize around teaching and learning inclusively, as a modality for systemic change. People want to, like you were saying earlier, John, there’s a great interest in these issues now. The salience is higher than it’s ever been before. People I think are just not really sure how to get started. And I think that the Teaching and Learning in the Diverse Classroom course tries to break it down and say there are multiple points of entry, any one of which is useful. We could sort of do that at the department level. Teaching in a course is one point of entry but also curriculum mapping and sort of the other things that we do with folks could work as well.

Rebecca:
I love the idea of the ports of entry.

John:
Thank you. It’s great talking to you again. And next time I do hope we can get together and have some tea in person, either on our campus or on yours or at some conference somewhere.

Mathew:
I would love that. And good luck to everybody who’s still teaching. Thank you all so much. It’s a pleasure.

Rebecca:
Thank you.

Melina:
Thank you.

[MUSIC]

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

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

[MUSIC]

196. The Coffee Shop

Faculty development is often done in isolation on a single campus, school, or institution. In this episode Jodi Robson, Brandon McIntire, and Margaret Shippey join us to discuss The Coffee Shop, an initiative that has brought  multiple campuses together to share, reflect and learn together and from each other.

Jodi is the Director of the Institute for Academic Excellence at Indian River State College, Brandon is the Director of eLearning at Florida Gateway College, and Margaret is the Director of Faculty Development and Classroom Engagement at Miami Dade College. They have all participated in the professional development programs offered by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE) and have worked with colleagues at other regional institutions to create The Coffee Shop network for professional development.

Shownotes

Transcripts

John: Faculty development is often done in isolation on a single campus, school, or institution. In this episode we discuss one initiative that has brought multiple campuses together to share, reflect and learn together and from each other.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are Jodi Robson, Brandon McIntire, and Margaret Shippey. Jodi most recently served in the role of the Director of the Institute for Academic Excellence at Indian River State College, and has now joined the Association of College and University Educators (or ACUE) as an Academic Strategy Consultant. Brandon is the Director of E-Learning at Florida Gateway College and Margaret is the Director of Faculty Development and Classroom Engagement at Miami Dade College. They have all participated in the professional development programs offered by ACUE and have partnered with their colleagues, Michelle Levine at Broward College and Steve Grossteffon at Santa Fe College to create the Coffee Shop network for professional development. Welcome Jodi, Brandon, and Margaret.

Margaret: : Thank you.

Jodi: Thank you. We’re happy to be here.

John: We’re glad to talk to you. We’ve been talking about this for a while. I’m glad we could finally arrange this.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are…

John: Are any of you drinking tea?

Jodi: I’m drinking tea and I drink tea every day. It is my beverage of choice. And I drink wild sweet orange.

Rebecca: Well, that sounds good.

Jodi: It’s very good… with a little bit of lemon.

BRANDON: My tea comes in the form of soda. And I am getting my daily caffeine fix because it is almost five o’clock. And I am drinking a Pepsi zero sugar.

Margaret: I’m with Brandon on the soda bandwagon, drinking a Diet Coke.

Rebecca: At least you didn’t come in with a coffee, that’s all I’m gonna say.

Jodi: Really? I could’ve…. [LAUGHTER]

John: Oh, do you have coffee shop mugs. Is that what you just helpd up?

Margaret: Yes. [LAUGHTER]

Jodi: Yes, it is. We all have our own coffee shop mug. And it’s funny because we discovered probably about four or five months after we created the coffee shop that there was only one of us who actually drank coffee, which is Margaret, the rest of us do drink tea.

Margaret: They let me stay on.

John: But as long as you clean the cups really, really well. You can still use the Coffee Shop mugs for tea.

Jodi: Absolutely.

Margaret: We’ve tested them with a lot of different content, [LAUGHTER]

John: ..and that could help clean them too. My tea is a ginger peach green tea today.

Rebecca: Back on your regular wagon, huh? And I am too. I have my English afternoon tea today.

Margaret: Nice.

Jodi: Those both sound tasty.

BRANDON: They do sound delicious.

John: It’s one of my favorites. I have it very often here. Could you tell us a little bit about how your participation in ACUE helped lead to the creation of the Coffee Shop?

Jodi: I had this vision of faculty working together across disciplines and getting out of their silos at my college. The first two years I was facilitating classes. And I brought faculty together in these live sessions and thyn love to hear each other. I had a vision of faculty working together across disciplines and getting out of their silos at my college. And the first two years with ACUE, I facilitated courses. And I offer live sessions for faculty to come together and to hear different perspectives and they loved it, and they were clamoring for more. And I kept trying to think how can I get more of this opportunity for faculty to come together and hear their colleagues? And I really wanted to go ahead and get beyond IRSC [Indian River State College] and the different disciplines here. During the pandemic, I was asked to facilitate some courses in North Carolina, and as I was reading the profiles of the courses I was covering in North Carolina, I saw a lot of similar interests in a desire to hear the perspective from different faculty across the college and to hear from faculty at other institutions. And when I started thinking about that, I reached out to Dr. Barbara Rodriguez with ACUE who was my contact and who worked with the other four individuals with the Coffee Shop. And I shared my crazy idea. And she went ahead and loved it, and she sent out a message on a Friday evening to four people that I had no clue who they were. And then on Saturday morning I sent this random email about my idea and how I wanted to come together and that I thought that when we come together, we are even better. I think we do amazing work independently, but I felt strongly that if we could come together and unite, we could really go ahead and come up with something amazing. And I sent out an email and they all responded to me by Monday morning and here we are almost a year later with our Coffee Shop team. But Brandon and Margaret, do you have anything that you wanted to add?

BRANDON: It was a really unique dynamic. As Jodi said, none of us knew each other, or really anything about our institutions when we were assembled. I always say it’s kind of like going on a blind date. And Barbara at ACUE was our matchmaker. We were strangers in the night who met each other and we connected. And this connection has been really good. It feels like we’ve worked together for a really long time. The meetings always have very detailed and robust discussion. We always laugh a lot and we support each other. A lot of times in our meetings, we actually present problems that we are currently having, and we help each other professionally in solving those problems. I always look forward to our weekly meetings, because we get a lot accomplished and we enjoy each other’s company.

Margaret: I would just add that one thing that we remark about on occasion is that we bring a diverse set of strengths. And that’s just been serendipitous. We have a mix of tech skills and event planning and logistics, and everybody has their contribution. And we have a core set of skills that we overlap in, in the sense that we do faculty development, but then we all have our own sort of angle on it, too. So that’s just a stroke of luck.

Jodi: Yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and add in that Brandon nicknamed us midway through the year, the Dream Team.

BRANDON: We’re not quite like the ‘92 basketball team, but we’re pretty good. [LAUGHTER]

Jodi: I’m Michael Jordan, what are you talking about?

Rebecca: Before we get too far, can you describe what the Coffee Shop is?

Jodi: We have a variety of offerings. But I’m going to go ahead and ask Margaret and Brandon each to talk about the different things that we offer with our sessions.

Margaret: We started off with webinars, and we’ve offered eight webinars over the last academic year. And the webinars bring together faculty presenters that are ACUE credentialed, or maybe they’re in the middle of taking their ACUE training. And they share their own take on some of the strategies that they have picked up from ACUE. And then the participants come into the webinar experience, hear the presentations, and we have a discussion around that. We grab themes from the ACUE content. Helping students persist was one of our topics, effectively engaging underprepared students. So this is ACUE language, and its higher ed language too, but it definitely comes from ACUE. And we send out a call for proposals at our institutions, that’s where we find our presenters, Jodi named baristas. [LAUGHTER] So, that’s where our baristas come from. And in the webinars we’ve had two each time and they share their own take on this same theme. And after their presentations, we take Q&A through a chat, and then we move into breakout rooms. That’s where that cross-discipline, cross-institution dialogue can really take place. And then we come back out and do a closing with some coffee bean takeaways.

BRANDON: So we decided that we wanted to have a different approach as well, because these webinars are an hour and a half to an hour and 45 minutes long by the time you get done with the Q&A and the breakout sessions. So I came up with the idea of doing something in addition called the espresso shot. So these webinars are like getting a big urn of coffee, and then this espresso shot would be a shorter jolt. So we’re looking at these espresso shots as a one-hour event. And the way it’s set up is we’ll have four to five speakers who present information that people have already gotten beforehand. And I’ll explain that in a second. So after we get the short little demos from each person, we break out and discuss the topic and then get back together and talk out as a group and then we dismiss. So we actually have done one espresso shot so far, and it was on welcome videos. So we send out a flyer to try to get people to join our presentation. And in the flyer we had the four baristas with their welcome video link. And we asked the attendees to watch the video before going to the presentation. So each of the four baristas essentially spoke for three to four minutes each about what their thought process was in creating the video, what type of technology they used, etc. Then in the great breakout groups, we talked about those videos as well as what we do in our own classes. So we attempted to do this espresso shot as a quick hitting, engaging conversation. We felt that it’s a success, and it’s something that we want to do more often. In fact, we’re going to do another espresso shot on Wednesday, July 28. And it’s also going to be about welcome videos.

Margaret: I would just add to that, and Brandon described it. but it’s a flipped model approach. So it’s modeling for the participants a different way of learning.

Jodi: What they’re talking about and suggesting in ACUE, we really try to incorporate those practices in what it is that we’re doing as a group, and that is definitely being presented by our baristas.

Rebecca: Speaking of which, can you talk a little bit about how your breakout rooms are structured?

Jodi: We go ahead and split into breakout rooms with probably anywhere from three to five individuals in each one of the breakout rooms. And then we have guided questions that when you go into the breakout room, you are designated as a specific box. So if your box five, it’s in a Google Doc form, and everybody in your group is responding and adding information in this box, talking about what it is that they heard and learned and how they’re going to use it or a different twist that they have related to whatever the subject was for that session, whatever our theme is for that, whether it was a webinar or the espresso shot. And they’re about 15 to 20 minutes long, and I will tell you, most of the time, we get faculty saying it wasn’t enough time to talk.

BRANDON: So one of our webinars was actually on engaging synchronous sessions. And one of the professors actually did what Jodi said, which was he gives his lecture, and he creates a Google Doc, in which students can write notes. And so everyone is collaborating on the same document at the same time. We thought, “Oh, my God, that’s a brilliant idea.” And we actually added that component, as she said, to our breakout groups. So instead of having different groups talk about something then come back, you’re spending a lot of time spinning your wheels, and talking about the same sort of topic. Each group then writes notes on what they’ve learned, how they can apply it, and then we can give all of the attendees all of the notes that they’ve taken, which are great ideas from every group. So the breakout groups are effective in dialogue, but they’re also effective in the document that we send people afterward.

John: We’ve done a number of collaborations with other campuses, we’ve been running reading groups on our campus for several years now. And I think on at least three occasions, we brought in some other campuses. And one of the things that faculty who’ve participated have really appreciated is the diversity of opinions that come from people in different departments at different institutions, where they bring very different perspectives. For example, we had a reading group a couple years back on Small Teaching, and one of the participants was in a nursing program, which is a program we don’t have on our campus. But some of the things he brought to the discussion were very useful that were picked up by people in disciplines who would not have considered those techniques if they hadn’t heard it from that perspective. Has the collaboration among the institutions done something similar with the Coffee Shop discussions?

Margaret: Definitely, we do see that in the chat. The questions that come in, the comments that come in, and sometimes they reflect the discipline or the institution of the person who’s making the comment or asking the question, and we see it a lot in the breakout rooms. they are formed randomly. I’ll let Brandon talk about the breakout rooms. But I think that that’s an important part about it. Because like you said, you could have a criminal justice faculty member in there with an English or in math and nursing. So that does lead to that rich discussion.

BRANDON: Just to further go with what I just talked about what the breakout rooms is that they’re about 20 minutes long. They’re randomized, as Margaret said. individuals from different backgrounds, from different disciplines, with different institutions come together, and they talk about those topics. The best part about the breakout groups, though, is many times these individuals get each other’s contact information during these breakout sessions, because they either want to further discuss this outside of the Coffee Shop, or perhaps they want to connect someone with a colleague of theirs. So that’s been a very valuable component of them as well.

Jodi: It really has opened a lot of doors. We have this connection in the chats and the breakout rooms. And then we have these additional emails that we get afterwards where we actually have individuals from different institutions reaching out and saying, “Can you go ahead and connect me with somebody?” And when I get that I reach out to my Coffee Mate, and I let them know, I’m going to go ahead and reach out to your presenter and do a virtual introduction and then set them on their way. So that’s happened a good half dozen times, maybe. now.

John: I’ve also seen a lot of people who, when they hear someone present, follow the presenter on Twitter, and that’s led to some other connections where people have formed a web of connections that go far beyond just the institutional networks that people are used to interacting with. So I think we’ve seen something similar in terms of the benefits of collaborating.

Rebecca: Currently, it sounds like you have the Coffee Shop set up so that it’s five campuses that are collaborating. And is that who’s invited to each of the Coffee Shops… that it’s limited to those five institutions, and it’s a closed network?

Margaret: It’s not closed. We started with the five but through Jodi’s connections and relationships with other institutions, and I’ll let her speak about it, we were able to reach into other states. Jodi, you want to talk about that?

Jodi: I believe we’ve had representation from around 13 different states. But as Margaret indicated, we wanted to start small. We came together, we didn’t know each other, but we meshed really well. And for our first session, we did invite the faculty from our institution. But after the first session, we started throwing it out there and inviting other individuals. I’ve been fortunate to sit on several SAC assignments, Southern Association of College Accreditations, and I’ve met a number of administrators over the years, so I shared it with them. And I’m friends with a couple other presidents and I also have attended some Frontier Set meetings and shared it with colleagues I’ve met on the Frontier Set calls. So we were able to go ahead and get representation from California, Texas, Delaware, Illinois, Jersey, up and down the East Coast and West. So we’ve grown and we’re hoping to continue to grow.

BRANDON:Yeah, like Margaret said, we knew that we had a good idea. But having a good idea and executing it are two entirely different concepts. So when we first started this, it was fairly scripted. And we knew that we didn’t want to take it interstate until we had what we felt was a decent product. And that took us several different sessions, a lot of brainstorming. And sometimes we restructured what we did. But it took four, six months for us to get to the point where we felt like we were ready to get out of that pilot stage. And the first time we did that Jodi had brought up saying, “Should we invite an additional institution from the state of Florida?” And we actually had a good debate saying, “Oh, are we ready to do that? We’re not sure.” And now we’re in over a dozen states. So it’s been a really organic growth. And we’re excited about where this can take us.

John: And you also share recordings of the webinars in a YouTube channel. So we will share a link to that in the show notes so that the reach goes beyond the schools that are actively participating.

Rebecca: One of the things that we’ve seen generally, but even more so during the pandemic, is the need for professional development, but the limitation of resources, time, staffing, and just the opportunity, etc. How has this and ACUE helped fill in some gaps or support the work of professional development on your campuses.

BRANDON: We, as an institution, are actually capitalizing on all the amazing work that’s being done across the country and trying to bring it to our institution, whether we’re using this information to train our faculty directly, or to come up with ideas for internal professional development opportunities, referencing ideas that we’ve seen in these workshops, in conversations with faculty, or simply sending links to the Coffee Shop presentation videos on YouTube, our faculty are getting different and unique opportunities to engage directly with the Coffee Shop, which then engages them with content from ACUE.

Margaret: I’ll add to that to say that, for Miami Dade, ACUE has become a standard offering. It’s always available on a regular basis, faculty know to expect it. And we’ve been using this course offering probably for about five years now, pre-pandemic. We used to remark about the hallway conversations that would come out of these sessions, even though they’re digital and ACUE is a virtual delivery mode. And all interaction happens over the web, which helps us as an institution, because we’re a multi-campus institution, and it’s asynchronous as well. So you can connect on your own schedule from your own location. And because of that, it gives you the chance, going back to the cross-disciplinary conversations, it allows you to meet people that you would probably never have… they just don’t have the same schedule as you… to get into the training with them. And so now you’re in the training and now you’re learning some common knowledge base. And there’s a common language now around pedagogy at the college. And it’s exciting to see that grow even more in the Coffee Shop.

Jodi: Yeah, and I would say ACUE, at our institution, has been huge with our faculty at Indian River State College, in my previous position, and they really took a hold of this and commented about how it was the most amazing professional development they have had and transformative in what they’re doing in the classroom, most importantly for supporting them but also to support their students as well to be successful. ACUE has been huge at Indian River State College. The ability to go ahead and tap into faculty and to support the Coffee Shop has really provided our faculty, at each one of our institutions, an opportunity to go ahead and hear from these experts, or as I say, a twist on something that they learned in ACUE, a unique twist. And I personally get a lot of contact from our faculty or from the faculty at Indian River State College. They shared how much they appreciated keeping the finger on the pulse of what was going on and supporting them in the classroom. So great opportunities for discussion and to build from there.

Rebecca: Do you see the Coffee Shop model as being something that other institutions should think about collaborating on a similar kind of structure as a way to support faculty? Or do you see the Coffee Shop itself as being a way to support additional campuses?

Jodi: I think we are a way to go ahead and support additional campuses. And I think my colleagues would agree with me on that. But I also think that this pandemic has provided this opportunity for us to go ahead and reach out to other institutions. So I will tell you that while I’ve shared in talks about the Coffee Shop and what we’re doing in other settings, I just randomly reached out to an individual, Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson at San Jacinto Community College and I said, “Hey, would you like to get together and do a book club, collaborate on a book club?” I would encourage people to go ahead and do more of that. I’d encourage them to get involved in what we’re doing here. The five of us have talked about doing different things. I think that we are a form for other individuals across the country, we certainly hope to grow.

Margaret: I would agree. And I would just say that we, as institutions, have learned so much about how to connect virtually.

Jodi: Yeah.

Margaret: I think there’s a lot more confidence in what we can do leveraging what we’ve learned over the last year and the tools that we have now.

John: We had been offering online attendance at all of our workshops for about a decade or so now, the tools have certainly gotten a lot more powerful and much more stable and reliable (mostly), but one of the things we’re wondering is, with a pandemic, faculty got used to attending virtually and I think we’ve all seen a lot more attendance because there’s been more demand for professional development. And people have just gotten more used to the tools and more comfort with the tools. Do you think that’s going to continue as we move back into what we hope to be a post-pandemic fall semester,

BRANDON: So, I would be under the opinion that most people who worked remotely for the last year got pretty comfortable doing it. There’s no commute, you don’t have to worry about traffic, and it’s very easy to attend. To me, it’s all about the travel part. You don’t have to worry about the difficulties of getting from one place to another. So from my perspective, as Margaret and Jodi said, people in the last year became less technophobic, because they were forced to use these systems, these programs. And as a result, I think everyone is more open to using technology effectively to meet.

Jodi: I know that I’m in transition between these two positions. But Indian River State College hires faculty from outside of the local area. So where’s this professional development opportunity for them? And this forum, again, is just as Brandon said, they don’t have to commute. So we have people that are joining us from Texas and from other states. I think there’s maybe times where people will want that live offering. But I think this is something new and something people have taken advantage of. And I think I finally felt comfortable with this new approach.

Rebecca: I also really appreciate that it feels very collaborative and supportive across institutions, rather than always so competitive. I think maybe prior to the pandemic, we might be more in our silos because we want to keep to our institution or support that momentum. But what we’ve seen during the pandemic is a strong desire to support all learners across all institutions and to work together to do that, rather than thinking necessarily in our individual institutional silos.

John: Absolutely.

BRANDON: 100%

John: Could you tell us a little bit about what the Coffee Shop has meant to each of you at your own institutions?

BRANDON: Well, since we’ve started these meetings about a year ago, every faculty member at all of our institutions is invited to attend. And faculty members, both full- time and adjunct from every one of our institutions are attending these events. And we think that’s especially important for adjuncts, because adjuncts generally aren’t given the same opportunities for professional development. And we actually see that there’s a high attendance for adjunct instructors because they appreciate the opportunity to have an opinion and to be involved in these development opportunities. So at Florida Gateway College, we have anywhere from four to 10 faculty members out of 70, So it’s a pretty decent percentage of our overall full-time faculty, who attend these events and get the knowledge directly. But then they are able to share that knowledge with other members within their disciplines. And we are also sending emails out to faculty with some of the tidbits that we learn from these meetings in case they can’t attend. Because that’s a hard part for us to schedule these meetings, because it’s impossible to find a time of day where everybody is available. It’s not like we work nine to five. So we want to be able to make this information as accessible as possible to those who could not attend. And those individuals are having a chance to be impacted as well through the YouTube channel, and through the knowledge that I’m learning from the presenters, as well as those fellow faculty members.

Margaret: I would add to that, that through the Coffee Shop, we are broadening development and supporting good teaching, which is in turn supporting the student experience, and the students are what we’re all about. So if we can open up that conversation, not all faculty can commit to the full, even the micro credential or the full credential, but they can commit to an hour, an hour and a half, conversation on good teaching and get some ideas from their colleagues, whether they’re internal or from other institutions. And our goal is that that, in turn, turns around and becomes good teaching and ultimately a good experience for the students in terms of learning and moving along on their path.

Jodi: It’s definitely the vision of where I wanted it to go for Indian River State College and providing faculty at that institution an opportunity to engage in these robust conversations and to hear from colleagues across the country. And I think it’s doing just that. So, really excited about the opportunity for Indian River State college.

John: One of the nice things about having each of your institutions participate in ACUE, I think, is that all the participants or all the presenters have this common base of core concepts and knowledge of effective teaching practices that might not have been the same knowledge base if each institution was doing their own professional development. Has that helped provide a more uniform language or more uniform framework to make it easier to share these professional development activities?

Margaret: I think it has. The presenters come in, and we also are careful to poll our audience to make sure that we know who’s with us, because you don’t have to be an ACUE alum to join the conversation. So we want to make sure that we’re not using too many words like “exit ticket” and “fishbowl.” We need to explain it. And we prep our baristas to be able to explain it knowing that some of our participants may not have gone through the ACUE learning experience. But I’ve definitely felt that having that common language is powerful at an institution.

BRANDON: And everyone in the Coffee Shop is either an ACUE facilitator or has gone through the ACUE program. So we, as a group, we have that experience to know what specific topic or area of ACUE that we want other faculty members to know.

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

Margaret: For us, as a Coffee Shop team, we’ll be using this summer to look back and look forward. We’re gonna hit a pause after our next espresso lunch and learn and reflect and look at the data and our feedback. We moved very quickly over the year with eight webinars and teo lunch and learns in an academic year. And we met in September. [LAUGHTER] It was ambitious, and it was fun, and we pivoted and grew quickly from one webinar to the next. We would make changes and we got better. We know that we got better. But it’s time to take a breath, take a good look at what we’ve accomplished and do some planning for the next year. So it’s a little bit more strategic. And we’re more proactive in our approach.

BRANDON: So, as I had mentioned, we started off in this pilot phase. And now we’re starting to branch out because we realize that we have a really good product. So now that we have a really good product, we need to have a good digital presence. So part of that is to, as we continue to grow as a unit, we need to have a place where people who want to learn more about us or want to know information about prior sessions, that they have a specific landing spot. So we’re kicking around the idea of a website, perhaps a Facebook group, a Twitter page. So we’re looking at these options to figure out how we can expand that presence. As John said earlier, all we have right now is our YouTube channel. But we’re wanting to figure out what other means of communication can we take advantage of to really expand our footprint. For those who are interested in the Coffee Shop itself, if you go to our YouTube channel, you can find the contact information for each of us. So you can send a note to us if you’re interested in learning more about the Coffee Shop since we don’t have that digital presence established… perhaps if they’re interested in being attendees or participants, if they’re ACUE trained, we’re gonna welcome you with our arms open.

Jodi: The “what next” for me, I think my colleagues nailed it here with the what next for the Coffee Shop, we really poured our hearts into this this past year. We all added this on top of the jobs that we were already doing. And this takes a lot of work to do what we’re doing and there’s five of us. But we’re no different than any other organization that needs to be thinking about a continuous improvement plan. So we’re at that spot where “What is next? What do we need to do? What do we need to reflect on? Where do we need to build?” …and Margaret and Brandon very clearly articulated some areas that we need to look at and to think about moving forward. We want to make sure that we’re not missing anything, any opportunities for faculty, and supporting them. And I will say, I’m pivoting into a new position and working with ACUE. So I’m gonna have a little bit of a different role. But what is next for me, something else that I had just started to get involved with was a national teaching and learning consortium that I had mentioned earlier with Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson at San Jacinto Community College in Texas. And I’d like to go ahead and get our group merged with her group and to continue these conversations. And while the Coffee Shop’s more about supporting faculty, the TLC, the teaching and learning consortium, would be more about supporting us and what we can do to help each other. So my what’s next is in three different phases here, the what next as it relates to the Coffee Shop, the what’s next for me with ACUE and the what’s next for me with the TLC, but I think we’ve got a lot of great things going on and excited about moving forward.

Rebecca: We look forward to sharing what you have coming up and make sure we have the link to the YouTube page in the show notes. Thank you guys for having us. This has been wonderful. Thank you.

John: It’s great talking to you. We’ve really loved the ACUE program on our campus, and it’s nice to see some of the benefits of that being shared more broadly through the Coffee Shop.

Jodi: Well, we will make certain that you guys get the invite to our Coffee Shops and our espresso shots.

Rebecca: We look forward to it.

Margaret: Thank you for having us.

BRANDON: Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.

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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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185. Model Online Teaching

The Society for the Teaching of Psychology has identified 6 evidence-based criteria for model teaching. In this episode, Aaron Richmond, Regan Gurung, and Guy Boysen join us to discuss how those principles translate into effective practices in both physical and virtual environments.

Aaron is a Professor of Educational Psychology and Human Development at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Regan is the Interim Executive Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning and Professor of Psychological Science at Oregon State University. Guy is a Professor of Psychology at McKendree University. They are the authors of A Pocket Guide to Online Teaching: Translating the Evidence-Based Model Teaching Criteria (2021) and An Evidence-Based Guide to College and University Teaching: Developing the Model Teacher (2016).

Show Notes

Transcript

John: The Society for the Teaching of Psychology has identified 6 evidence-based criteria for model teaching. In this episode we discuss how those principles translate into effective practices in both physical and virtual 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: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

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John: Our guests today are Aaron Richmond, Regan Gurung and Guy Boysen. Aaron is a Professor of Educational Psychology and Human Development at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Regan is the Interim Executive Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning and Professor of Psychological Science at Oregon State University. Guy is a Professor of Psychology at McKendree University. Welcome, Aaron and Guy, and welcome back, Regan.

Regan: Thank you, John.

Guy: Thank you.

Aaron: Thank you.

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

Guy: I’m drinking coffee black tea. I guess that’s coffee. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So I heard.

Aaron: My coffee is Dunkin Donuts coffee, kind of a guilty pleasure every morning. Currently on water. It’s a little bit late for me to be drinking caffeine.

Regan: Still pretty early here in the Pacific Northwest in Oregon. So, coffee it is.

John: And I’m drinking chocolate mint oolong tea

Rebecca: I was ready for you to say chocolate milk or something. I was like, “Alright, there’s no tea here.” [LAUGHTER] I have Irish breakfast today, heavily caffeinated.

Regan: Timely this week with St. Patrick’s Day and all that. So, yeah.

Rebecca: I try. It just happened to be the one open.

John: We’ve invited you here to discuss your new book together, A Pocket Guide to Online Teaching: Translating the Evidence-Based Model Teaching Criteria. A few years ago, you had written an Evidence-Based Guide to College and University Teaching to help faculty apply the model teaching characteristics that were developed by the Society for the Teaching of Psychology. In the new book, you shift your focus to online instruction. Could you tell us a little bit about the origin of this new book?

Regan: Aaron, you can do the whole origin story since really Aaron, being Chair of the task force that first kicked this off, can give us the whole etiology. So give us the origin story, Aaron.

Aaron: Well, of course, the origin story starts with Regan, [LAUGHTER] as almost every story starts with. And so Regan was coming on as the Society of Teaching of Psychology President which is a division of the American Psychological Association Division Two. And he had like 105 taskforce that he created for us to do. And I was in charge of somehow more than one, it wasn’t just the model teaching competencies. But in terms of this project, he really wanted us to create a committee or a task force to really kind of get at what is it that the model teachers are doing. They originally started in psychology, but then branched out into other disciplines for sure. But really, the call was, what are people doing? What’s the evidence behind what they’re doing that is going well and is doing great work, and all facets of education and Guy was instrumental in that it actually ended up spanning two presidencies, almost three, because it was such a colossal task and ask where that committee was a really good working group. We met twice a month, I think, there for a while. And then we were meeting once a month for two to three years, basically. And so after much, much research, much of it spearheaded by Guy, the task force came up with the model teacher competencies, and we published a couple of articles on it, a kind of a white paper for Division II STP. And then that was the catalyst for Guy, Regan, and I jumping into the first book, the model teaching competency book.

Rebecca: For those that aren’t familiar, can you just talk about what the model teaching competencies is?

Guy: I will say that my memory of how this came about is a little bit different. I kind of envisioned it as almost like a survivor Island type of deal where we were initially this huge task force, and then it turned into an article and a few people dropped off, and then it turned into a book and it was just the three of us. So it’s kind of like we were the people with the endurance to keep trying to push these model teaching competencies down people’s throats until they would sort of accept them. But we think we’ve got good stuff here. And that’s why we stuck with it as we really do believe in these competencies. Basically what we did on that task force is we tried to say, if you’re going to be a good teacher, what are the key things you need to be able to do and so we said, part of that is just being trained. You have to have a little bit of training behind and know some pedagogy. You have to have some basic instructional methods that you use. You have to be teaching content that’s relevant to what you’re doing. And you have to assess learning related to that content, put together a syllabus that’s reasonable. And then also just be asking students how you’re doing, so using teaching evaluations, both formative and summative. And those are the areas we agreed on. And then we defined it by breaking it down a bunch of different ways. And so, I think, to get back to the original question, I think we realized that these things work in the online format, but in our first book, we didn’t really talk about that context very much. I think if you pull out any sentence from our first book, it applies to online teaching, but we certainly didn’t talk about online teaching or LMSs or some of those specific things that would specifically speak to online teachers. So that’s part of the origin for the new book, I think.

Regan: To add to that, not only did it apply, but we didn’t make the connection. I think on the other side of the coin, there’s just so much that goes on in online teaching that is in addition to what normally goes on as well. So, there was a clear cut need for “What does this look like in an online context?” So even though we have six, there’s a nice number to wrap your heads around, there are six model teaching criteria. And you look at all six of those, and yes, they can apply to the online, but it’s a whole different thing when you say, “Okay, let’s actually start from online teaching.” And that final pragmatic piece as to how this came about is we were actually approached by the publishers to do a revision of model teaching, of the original. And this happened to just, if I remember correctly, when the pandemic was kicking off. And I think that’s important, too, because we were all thinking a lot about what does it mean to teach remotely? What does it mean to teach online? And we quickly convinced them or they convinced us and I think it’s more the latter, they quickly convinced us that, before a second edition, maybe if we could address online teaching explicitly, that would be better. And hence, the Pocket Guide. It’s not the full blown, it’s the “let’s explicitly look at online teaching and see what we can say.”

John: At the beginning of this book, you talk about how, at one point, each of you was somewhat skeptical of online instruction until you actually worked with it. I think that’s true of many people who went through the transition to remote or online instruction in the spring of 2020. Could you tell us a little bit about your own transition to online teaching, as well as how your courses were modified as we move to remote instruction in the spring of 2020.

Aaron: I had been teaching online for a very long time. And so I think the pivot for both Guy and Reagan was a little bit different than mine. I had other stressors associated with the pandemic, namely, having five people in my household full time, and kids learning on, and my wife learning online. But for me, I’ll let Reagan and Guy answer the question, mostly because I started teaching online in graduate school as a way to build my curriculum vitae and built my teaching experience. And so it wasn’t as big of a quote, quote, pivot for me, as it is for a lot of my colleagues.

Regan: Yeah, I think I will go in reverse order this way, because I think I’m sort of next up with somebody who had done some online teaching. I had taught online before the pandemic, but hadn’t taught it recently. And I think to fine tune your question, John, personally, it was just more of a question of not having done it as much. In fact, I think I’ll go on record as saying that if you asked me 15 years ago, what I thought about online teaching, before I actually looked into the literature, I had a very different take on it then after I looked into the literature, and then after I really did it. So, it was much more of a question of had done it, but hadn’t done it to the extent and hadn’t looked at the research on it to the extent that I’d wanted to, but that changed very quickly.

Guy: And that’s totally accurate to say that I was the least experienced, I’m fully capable of admitting that. And we have a fully online psychology program at McKendree, and I had designed courses, and I had been trained in the basics of online instruction, but I’d never done sort of a deep dive into the literature like I did when we were preparing to write this book. It was interesting, since in the last year, I’ve taught literally face to face, I’ve taught online, and I’ve taught various versions of hybrid. And then I taught whatever the heck last spring was, as well. So, I’ve gotten a taste of everything in this last year. And so I’ve learned a lot, both writing the book and having to teach in ways that I hadn’t taught before. So I had done the design component of it, and been trained a little bit, but had never actually pulled the trigger and taught a fully online course as an instructor before the pandemic,

Aaron: What I loved about the three of us, and I always love working with these two other folks. But we had this strata of experience with online education. And poor Guy even had the wonderful opportunity to learn a brand new learning management system like two weeks before the start of the fall semester. And when we talk about online education, chalk is chalk, right? But learning how to do certain grade things in an LMS, Guy was really kind of a little bit of a guinea pig, and it was nice to have those three levels of experience because I think we could get fresh perspectives for the book. I’m Quality Matters certified, which is one of the national certifications for online education, and then Reagan and then Guy with not as much experience, and so I think it was a really serendipitous opportunity for us because of that.

Regan: And just along those lines of serendipity, I think one of the things that the pandemic did was had many of us have more conversations with the experts on online teaching on our campuses. Here at Oregon State or e-campus program is one of the top five in the nation with our psych program being number two in online psych majors, which was great, which meant I could go in… actually, I was gonna say go in but during the pandemic, there was no going in anywhere but I I had all these conversations with wonderful people and shout out to Shannon Riggs and Kate Linder, wonderful people who’ve done a lot of work already on online teaching. And we have these conversations, great email exchanges back and forth that really informed, I think, what we then went and talked about.

Guy: I would be interested in hearing, we’ve never had this conversation, whattyou all think, Aaron and Regan, about whether people during the pandemic are actually doing the type of online teaching we’re talking about in our book, or if they’re doing something that’s more of like an emergency remote teaching, because I’ve noticed in my institution, there’s a lot of people who are basically teaching the same class, it’s just that it’s over a Zoom meeting.

Regan: [LAUGHTER] We could probably do a whole podcast on remote teaching versus online teaching. I’ll just say, in brief, Guy, you are absolutely right. What I have seen is the entire spectrum of instructors who are, somewhat alluding to what Aaron said, trying to make sure they can keep teaching. And I think everybody’s circumstances vary. And I think that resulted in a lot of variance in what those courses look like. Some of the courses would look like, I think, what we’d call online teaching, and what we talked about, and then there are others that are very, very quite clearly remote, emergency, doing the best “giving it all I’ve got, Captain” kind of stuff that are working towards it. And of course, now, literally one year later, I can actually see courses that have made that transition that were here spring term, that were here fall term, that were here the next winter term, and so on and so forth. But you’re absolutely right, Guy, it’s not. When you talk about online teaching, and in these conversations, I try very hard to keep remote teaching separate from online teaching.

Rebecca: The visual description of Regan’s hand was moving up, as he was saying here, here, and here. [LAUGHTER]

Aaron: Thank you. Guy’s trying to get us in trouble with our colleagues. I think that the short answer from my department, and we’re a large department, we have over 25 tenure track faculty, and then a whole army platoon of affiliates. Luckily, within our department, because we had a program that was Quality Matters (QM) certified, we had had a lot of core courses that were already certified. And then they were shells given to faculty members. And so in those scenarios, you had what we are talking about in this book, we had a really good pedagogy, a really good online teaching situation. But there was also other classes where, frankly, some of those instructors didn’t know what LMS stood for, had never used an LMS, a Learning Management System, didn’t even use PowerPoint, didn’t use a computer, like literally still wrote on the whiteboard. And so they had to rise to the occasion. And I think it’s more along with what Regan is saying, some of those folks were really just remote teaching, or doing some sort of synchronous teaching, and then some sort of asynchronous teaching that probably wasn’t the best practices. But that’s why we wrote the book.

Guy: Yeah, and don’t get me wrong. I’m not necessarily trying to criticize anyone in what they’re doing. But I do think it’s important to distinguish between what we ended up talking about in the book and what has emerged from some people who don’t have as much training in online teaching and what they’re doing, and are basically just trying to recreate their classroom in a synchronous video session.

Aaron: What we did in our department as well is we buddied up, in a sense, if there was somebody that had a lot of experience online, they would help build the course with the other instructor who had less experience or who needed more assistance, for sure.

Rebecca: I think one thing that you’re alluding to Guy that I wanted to ask about is the literature historically talks a lot about asynchronous online, and when we’re thinking about online education, that’s generally what we’re talking about, but there’s been a lot of experimentation over the last year with synchronous online, and it may or may not be trying to recreate the classroom, there’s a mix of people trying to actively use that environment to do active learning and these sorts of things, and then others that are perhaps resorting to lecturing at in a meeting kind of setting. Can you address that a little bit in terms of whether or not your book addresses the synchronous component, or if it really is focused more on this more traditional asynchronous aspect of online education?

Aaron: We do address that. Our book is organized by really three kind of different types of interactions: one is the student-to-student interaction, one is interaction with content, and then the other is interaction student to the instructor. And I was largely responsible for that section. And it’s a great debate. The whole synchronous versus asynchronous learning’s been debated for as long as we’ve had distance education. And so I think it really comes down to context and situation. For instance, students at Metropolitan State, typically 51% of them are first-generation college students. We’re a Hispanic serving institution, we have the largest military population in the state at our institution and over 60% work full time. And so we try to steer away from a lot of synchronous learning because they’re working full time… just restricting them to a schedule just doesn’t really work. But I think that really depends on the class, it depends on the institution, it depends on the department. And so it’s really contextually driven. And it’s really dependent on the situation. There’s pros and cons to both synchronous and asynchronous learning. There’s definitely engagement with synchronous learning. You could see this face to face, I just saw this meme, it was actually aTik Tok, and I’m not onTik Tok, but I saw a Tik Tok. [LAUGHTER] And it was basically the student walks into the college classroom, and they’re all wearing masks, and it’s like “Hey, professor.” And the professor kind of looks at him like, “Mmmm, I’m not making a connection.” And he’s like, “No, it’s John.” “…not making a connection.” And then he holds up a J in front of his face, [LAUGHTER] and he goes “Oh, John!” …and so there is this idea about synchronous learning and engagement that is really, really important, for sure. And having that one-to-one rapport and connection, but there are asynchronous things that you can do to also increase that rapport as well.

Regan: Well, I think that’s why this debate, not only is it a really interesting question, but like the three of us our motto is, “Well, what does the evidence say?” And I think we’re going to be taking a lot closer look at the evidence in the year ahead. Speaking of evidence, Fox and colleagues, there’s a 2021 report that just came out in January, that actually maps how the percentage of courses that were synchronous versus asynchronous, changed over last year from spring before and then to the next winter. And what you see is a lot of courses. And this is, of course, descriptive data, it’s not causal in any way, but what you see is a lot of courses that started off primarily synchronous, or exclusively synchronous, even remotely, started adding asynchronous components. So even though I think many institutions said, “Look, we were on campus, we’re going remote,we just do everything that we did remotely,” the context changes and you can’t just do everything that you did in a face-to-face class synchronously, remotely synchronously all the time. Now, how much of the time? Which classes? What can you do? Those are all the really cool questions that I think we are now taking a much closer look at.

John: Last March, a lot of people suddenly transitioned to either a remote or online format. But then many people, as we just heard, have been shifting to more and more asynchronous work. In your book, you talk a little bit about some of the challenges that people may face when they’re not experienced teaching online, could you talk a little bit about some of the adjustments people have to make to an asynchronous online environment, as well as perhaps some of the affordances, some of the advantages, that people have come to see, once they start teaching online?

Guy: Well, as the newest recruit to online, I guess I’ll start off here. And I would say my biggest challenge has been just the differences in immediacy between a face-to-face classroom and an online classroom. It’s just a completely different game to say something and make eye contact with students in different rows… front row, back row… and be able to tell whether they’re staring at you or ready to move on versus being online and you have to be reading a discussion board or looking at a quiz score. So it just doesn’t have that immediate feedback. And if you’re talking about the synchronous Zoom meeting type things, then really, it’s kind of soul crushing. I don’t lecture that much, but when I do lecture, and I’m lecturing to the empty space of blank Zoom tiles, it is truly crushing. It is just not an enjoyable experience. It’s just like talking to yourself. There’s some of that spark of immediacy that really energizes the classroom, I have found it difficult to recreate. But the engagement is just different, right? So the engagement might happen in a breakout room, rather than me talking at them in a full classroom. The engagement might happen on a discussion board or on a group project that they’re collaborating on using chats outside of things that I witness. So it’s different. But that’s the thing that was the most challenging for me, is the immediacy.

Aaron: I think I would add a couple things, too. I would definitely agree with what Guy said, I would think also, too, one of the difficulties in that transition is you have to be a little bit more cognizant about your time, and especially if you’re talking about asynchronous learning is like I grade a lot in the evening and at night, because that’s kind of my schedule, but my students, generally speaking, that’s when they’re doing most of their work, because they’re working during the day. So that’s one issue, I think. For a lot of new concepts, too, it’s really understanding time management. I think another thing is, and this is one of the things that Guy alluded to was, I have been teaching online for a very long time, and when I would have a student who had me as an online instructor first, and then took a face-to-face class with me, almost invariably, on the first day, they would come up to me after class and they’d be like, “Man, Dr. Richmond, you are not who I thought you were.” And I would say “What do you mean? They’re like, “Well, I kind of thought you were like this stick in the mud, but you’re kind of a short funny Hobbit.” And after that happened the first couple semesters, I became really aware of it. And really what Guy was kind of alluding to is how do we establish this rapport with our students? How do we establish immediacy which is actually nonverbal immediacy? That’s my hand gestulating, you know, all that kind of stuff, the visual things of teaching? How do we establish those things in an online environment. I think that’s one of the biggest adjustments that most teachers, when they pivot to online having never done it, struggle with, because they take all these face-to-face interactions for granted. They’re not cognitively thinking of how their body posture or the jokes they might use, or the eye contact as G uy was saying. And I still struggle with one of the most difficult things with online engagement rapport, and that learning alliance, as Rogers would call it.

Regan: Lets also add to that, in a face-to-face class, there’s that time before class starts, there’s that time after class ends, where you’re chatting, and you’re talking about stuff. But there are two very significant components to add, both in terms of teaching online, but also teaching remotely, it applies to both. I think the first thing is judging how much work is enough work or not enough work. And I think that’s a huge problem that we’ve seen, is the switch to teaching online or putting something into an online class. If you are not watching how much work you’re giving students, it’s very, very easy to have the tendency to say, “Hey, we’re not meeting for all this face-to-face time or synchronous time. Therefore, let’s have you do more assignments. Let’s have you do more of this and more of that.” And there are some really great time calculators out there right now that I think are important. Related to that, it comes back to there is such a great body of research and training done by instructional designers to help individuals with the management of how much to assign, but also, to get to what Aaron and Guy were saying, how to use all those different tools of a learning management system to try and do those things that you’re used to doing in a face-to-face online class. And there’s a wealth of tools out there in a learning management system. Yes, discussion boards, but even how you use discussion boards and all of that, and how you use chat, that you can do that. One additional thing, and this truly relates to synchronous versus asynchronous, not necessarily face-to-face versus online. But I think one of the things I personally discovered is how to leverage, you use the word affordances, how to leverage things such as the chat, and at first, I was extremely wary of the chat because I’m thinking, “Hey, I have 295 people in this class, is the chat gonna go wild and crazy?” And it went pretty wild, it didn’t actually get crazy. But on top of that, I can tell you what I relied on to look at and see in faces, I was now getting from comments typed into the chat. And I still want face to face. But I can tell you that having that chat open and monitored with rules of conduct, but students were responding in chat, the stuff I was talking about, that I normally wouldn’t see in a face-to-face class.

Guy: And just building off of that in terms of moving to strengths a little bit more. As someone who really loves assessment and appreciates data from students, my, there is a lot of stuff you can assess using the LMS. And I really appreciated being able to log in and see if my students had logged in and see what they had clicked on, and all of this granular information. I had a very small class, so I did not have to explore that too much. But in a larger class, being able to do that and set up agents to monitor them and email them if they’re not logging in, and all these different things you can do. It’s just a wonderful way to increase the engagement in a different way. So in some ways, it almost seems mysterious, now seeing a student every other day, in a face-to-face class, and not knowing whether they had to open their book or not. But if I was teaching a online course, [LAUGHTER] I would know exactly what they have done in between. And I could still have more LMS stuff in my face-to-face class, but it’s different than when it’s all based on the LMS.

Rebecca: So we talked earlier about the model teaching principles. Do they apply in online? Or how are they different in an online environment?

Guy: I said this earlier, but I would definitely say that you could pull out any one of our criteria, the individual ones from our original book, and not tell someone which format it’s in, and they would pretty much all apply. There’s gonna be a few things about teaching very specific teaching skills that might be kind of written in a face-to-face format. So I really do think, almost surprisingly to me, they really do generalize. Training is important in both. Intentional design is important in both. Intentional assessment of learning is important to both. Student feedback is important in both. And, if anything, one of the things I maybe found surprising was that actually what we were saying, however many years ago, eight years ago, nine years ago, when we first started this, is very similar to the stuff that the online quality matters and the instructional designers have always been saying about how courses should be designed before you jump into them. So I was actually a little bit surprised, I think, when I got into the online teaching literature, just how much overlap there was.

Regan: Absolutely. I mean a few words different. I look at a figure that I know normally use when I’m talking about model teaching criteria, and it says “classroom” in there, but apart from little words like that, everything holds. And actually one of the first things that three of us did was we took a look at our self-guided measure that we had created that was in the back of the first book. And we went through it and asked ourselves, which of these don’t apply? And most of them were in there.

Aaron: Yeah, principally, I think that it just holds water. And that’s the beauty of the model. I think you just tweak certain ways in which you accomplish those tasks or accomplish those competencies to the online space.

Rebecca: Aaron, can you give an example of one way that one of those needs to be adapted in an online space?

Aaron: I think the syllabus is a really good example. The online syllabus has changed dramatically in the last 18 months, it used to be a standard format, is you upload a PDF, and don’t get me wrong, I’m not speaking flippantly about syllabi, because that’s my bread and butter, I do a lot of research on it. But you might just load it up into the LMS. And “Hey, go check it out.” But now, I think we’re kind of deconstructing the syllabus a little bit. And really, a lot of people are doing it, where they’re really putting it to the “Start Here” module, and they’re deconstructing the syllabus to where it’s all these different components to it. You can still have a standard syllabus that somebody links on, and if they want to print something out, old school, and they can have, but you really are kind of reincorporating, that syllabus into a startup module, a “startup week one,” however, you want to organize your course. And you’re really kind of diving into it. So structurally, it’s the same, but functionally, how it’s delivered, changes. And I think that’s just one example of the principles there. It’s just how is it surfaced? How is it realized to the learner, it might take on a different form.

Guy: That’s really interesting, because even in I’m teaching in person this semester, and I found myself essentially designing courses, like online courses, where my syllabus is deconstructed to an extent. And I just put the pieces into various modules, so that students don’t have to necessarily go back and read the whole syllabus. So there is a sort of a weird transition, now, and this could be a positive of all this extra work that people are putting into transitioning remote and online is that people will take advantage of some of the things that are in LMSs is a little bit more. So if you wanted to make some money, you could probably start a company right now, or add something to Brightspace or Blackboard where you build the course in the LMS, and then it automatically builds the syllabus for you or something like that. That would be a great feature that I think teachers would love, you wouldn’t have to deconstruct one to make the other, essentially.

Regan: I wanted to go back to something that Guy said earlier that I think is really important in this context, and what Guy said was the overlap between what we all experienced when we read more of the other literature’s in online teaching. And I think far too often, many of us who only have taught in the classroom. And there are still many faculty out there who only teach face-to-face who haven’t taught online. They have missed out on a world of pedagogical practices that instructional designers have been really well aware of for a very, very long time. And so that overlap that Guy alluded to that we all saw, when we looked at that literature, I think, is just a great testament to the fact that there still needs to be some better coordination and communication between those people who talk about and train folks on what the better practices are. And right there when I say that, many individuals who teach online at most universities have to go through some kind of training, but few universities make people teaching face to face go through some sort of training. As somebody who works at a Center for Teaching and Learning, I wish there were more prescriptions to come in and take some guidance on pedagogical practices. So I think that’s a big deal there. Instructional designers have these things down that we could have used. And Guy, I had exactly the same experience about maybe 8, 8, 10 years ago, when I took a Quality Matters course and then immediately used all those practices for my face-to-face LMS. What a great world out there and we need to do some more cross fertilization.

Rebecca: Regan, I think one of the things that’s really interesting that you’re pointing out is we often think about the silos of higher ed as being disciplinary, but it’s also in terms of modality and between staff and faculty. So there might be research done by instructional designers, but somehow that lives in staff world, and it doesn’t live in faculty world. And there’s not a lot of integrations or conversations across those lines. And the pandemic has forced us all to talk to each other in these ways and troubleshoot more because we’re trying to solve some immediate problems. Being more aware of these treasures that are available in different silos that we don’t usually dip into can be helpful.

Regan: Absolutely.

John: And I know a lot of faculty at our campus have been attending workshops at rates they never had before, because they started learning about all these new techniques and tools, and many of them have said that when they go back to a purely face-to-face environment, they’re not going to teach their class in any way, like they were doing before, that they’re going to port this over. And I know I had the same experience several decades ago when I first started teaching online. All of the tools I picked up and some of the techniques have been used in my face-to-face classes as well. Going back, though, to that discussion of the syllabus, one of the things you note in your book is that it’s really important to provide people with more detailed instruction in an asynchronous environment than it would be if you’re meeting with students synchronously, because students are working on their own and they need more information. And I think that’s part of the issue that you’re referring to with a syllabus, perhaps, by building more information into it. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Aaron: Yeah, I think there are several strategies. We’re always going to compare face-to-face to an online or even a flipped or hybrid course, you have these side conversations in a face-to-face course, like you might have this little 30 second “Hey, don’t forget to do this” and “I want you to really pay attention,” “Work on your APA style,” whatever the case may be. You don’t have that at all in the online setting. So you have to create opportunities for that. And so one strategy that I’ve seen pretty successful is making mini short tutorial videos. Just like a six-line email, students are not going to watch a video that’s more than six minutes. I haven’t quite seen the research on this, but I can almost guarantee you, to a certain degree, there’s this Sesame Street effect, their attention spans not gonna be that strong. Because it’s in a video format. It’s asynchronous. So there’s not a lot of interaction. So I’ve seen a lot of people do assignment tutorials, just generally how to take a quiz, how to do an assignment, how to actually have a discussion, not “Well, I met the minimum rubric criteria and I responded to two people and I cited in reference my work, which is actually to have engaged into a asynchronous conversation. And so you see a lot of video tutorials. And here’s another thing about how principally it works within the model teaching competencies face to face, it just looks a little different in online format. The beauty about all those too is they can be the transcript, they can do a video and if you do it through YouTube or whatnot, you can get closed caption, you can get a written version of it. And so that’s one example I think of having to, what I call, make implicit procedural knowledge. So somehow, you’re supposed to know how to do it, but nobody tells you. And so making it explicit. And so those types of tutorials I’m pretty big on. I was slow to come onto that train a little bit, because there is a lot of upfront work. But once you get good at say Loom (that’s the program I use) or Camtasia, or whatever the program is, you can get pretty quick at doing a three-minute video, posting it, and you can also monitor if they’re watching it, and that kind of stuff.

Regan: And I just wanted to add something else that adds on to Rebecca, to the question you asked, that’s relating to this, which is, what are the things that are different and varied? And I think when we teach face to face, we take just the power of presence for granted. And I think we more implicitly think about what can we do for a student to student interactions. And I know that was something when we were writing this book and thinking about the online nature, if you’ve never taught online before… and really, that’s where we geared this book towards, it’s people who’ve taught a lot of face to face, perhaps, but kinda need to start thinking about what’s different in online. And I think that’s one of those big things that’s different with online, is thinking about, you don’t have people sitting in the same room physically, what do you need to do to explicitly build that student-to-student interaction, so that it’s not just student-to-content and student-to-instructor? But, what are those things we can do to make it an engaging student-to-student environment? And that’s a really big challenge

Rebecca: Regan, you’re making a really good point. And also maybe assuming that students feel that connection with students in a physical face-to-face class that they may not actually feel. But just because they’re in the same space, we make these assumptions. I think that being explicit, maybe we’re learning it for online, but it certainly applies to going back into the classroom as well. [LAUGHTER]

Guy: Yeah, and just to connect a couple different lines here, just with the explicitness of it, the engagements, you even have to be explicit in how you engage what the rules are, what the minimal standards are. It’s something that in a classroom that’s face to face, you say, “Okay, turn to your partner and talk and you can watch and see and they have whatever, two minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes, whatever it is, but online, you literally have to tell them, “Okay, your first comment is due by X, and then you respond by Y, whatever day it actually is.” And so there’s a little bit more of you have to be intentional about setting expectations and, I don’t want to use “moderating,” but really controlling… that’s not a better word is it?… [LAUGHTER]… facilitating the exact behaviors that you want. And I definitely learned that in the spring with the pandemic teaching and even a little bit with the online courses. If you allow students to post online when they want to it will be near the deadline and that’s not a great way to foster engagements. So, you have to design engagement. It’s really about intentional design. You can’t just walk into the classroom and wing it, like a lot of us who were experience teachers can do face to face.

Regan: And great use of the word design, Guy. And I think, really, that’s something that’s so important. Even when you’re teaching face to face, there is design. Teaching should not be an impromptu act, it needs thought, it needs forethought, it needs intentionality. Every once in a while I run into folks who go, “Hey, I really know my stuff well. What’s there to teaching? I step into the class and voila, there you have it.” No. Design, people. Intentionality.

Guy: Out of all the stuff that I picked up in the last year learning about online, the thing that has been most gratifying is this idea that your whole course is in the bag and ready to go before the first day. I’ve been doing that since day one of my teaching, and it’s so nice to hear reinforcement for that’s the way it should be done. And so I think that’s a message that, if we’re talking about learning from the experience of doing online in the last year, that’s definitely one that I hope gets generalized outside of the online environment, because it’s just so important for students and for the instructor.

Rebecca: As an interaction designer, I have to say, Yes, we should design experiences. [LAUGHTER]

Guy: Yeah.

Regan: I also want to be respectful of individuals who are in situations where, due to courseload, they cannot be as intentional as they would like, because of lack of training that they don’t know how to be intentional, I think it’s very easy to say that’s a good thing. But it’s really up to colleges and universities to help their faculty, to help their instructors be able to do those things.

Rebecca: It’s a heavy lift to be intentional.

Aaron: And I think I would add to that, as well is two things: one is that and maybe this is opening a different line of thought and questions, but the diversity, equity, and inclusion issue in online is real. And this is kind of related to it. I just read a couple different studies where they’re measuring, essentially in online learning, essentially what modality or what tools students are using, and it varies widely, but it’s somewhere between 40 and 80% of students are only using their phone to do an online course. I accept late work for partial credit and I do that because I don’t want to judge people’s excuses. That’s just not something I want to do. And I just got an email from one of my students that just said, “Hey, I’m going to be late, I understand the consequence, I’m sharing a computer with my roommate. I just got a positive COVID test, so I don’t think I should use this person’s computer…” which is like, of course, right? But I think we need to understand access, we need to understand bandwidth. When we pivoted in March of last year… our university uses Teams and to be honest, sorry, Microsoft, it sucked at the beginning, it was horrible. It took a massive amount of bandwidth. And if you didn’t have really high speed internet, you couldn’t engage in teams at all. So I purchased Zoom, ‘cause Zoom’s bandwidth was like I think a 10th of what Teams… and teams has cleared that up since then… but you have to think of things like those equity issues in what students have access to. And so I think that, in line with what we were talking about, in terms of intentional engagement, you have to realize that not all students can do those things. They just don’t have the opportunity or the access or the virtual bandwidth, the metaphoric bandwidth to do it.

Guy: I’m curious if anyone has read, if there is research on that, with online instruction, that students who maybe are coming in with some access issues if they’re as successful or less successful than students who don’t have those, because I think we’ve seen basically the same sort of stratification in terms of the health effects of COVID, the educational effects of COVID, I have friends who are therapists, and it’s the exact same thing for them, they have patients who are doing just fine, and they have patients who are doing really bad because of all kinds of other issues. But has anyone read research on that?

Aaron: I’ve seen a little bit on internet accessibility, but most of that stuff is in the K-12. My wife is a third grade teacher and teaches online remotely right now, and has the whole time during the pandemic. And she will literally spend hours with one student just getting them to upload a document. But I think that, going back to the original discussion about intentionality, you can build into your online courses, flexibility, and something that transfers from the MTC to the online setting, and whether that means “Okay, I have 12 quizzes, but I’m only going to take your best nine scores,” or “I have 10 discussions, I’m only going to take your best seven…” T here are ways in which you can build in DEI issues, if that’s related to it, where you’re flexible. You still have great standards and high standards, but there’s flexibility and autonomy within your course as well.

Regan: And I see a lot more sensitivity to the kinds of issues you brought, Guy, in online teaching that I see in face-to-face courses. Many online and e-campus programs do such a wonderful job of preparing students for the class. They acknowledge that the online course is different, and they do very different things. And I think, boy, just like faculty training, I think the more we can do to prepare students for face-to-face classes, the better. A long-term gripe has been: in college, we assume that those students know how to study. And one of my pet areas is study techniques and study skills, and all of the skills that we build. And I take a lot of time in my first few days of class to talk explicitly about how best to study for my course. And I think that a lot of folks who make the assumption that people know how to study, and I think together with the “how to study,” I think we need to be more aware of “Do you have access to the material?” Gosh, “Do you have access to food?” …is a big thing. Something that I think a theme that you’ve seen us mention many times that I want to underline is don’t take teaching for granted and don’t take online teaching for granted just because you’ve taught face to face.

John: We always end with the question, what’s next? And we’ve all been wondering that for at least a year now.

Rebecca: So please, please enlighten us. [LAUGHTER]

Regan: So I’ll tell you the writing that’s on the wall here, and I think what I can see in higher education. I think we’re looking at a new modality, remote teaching, and not just what can we take from remote teaching that can stay when we get back, but looking at that modality in and of itself, especially to get at issues that we’ve talked about, access and reaching people who may or may not be able to come in to some of our schools. I see the sweet spot in remote teaching that it unearthed new ways for us to connect to our students, new ways to share content, new ways to get engagement, that I think we need to capitalize on and fine tune and study so we can better use it. I think that’s what’s coming down the pike as far as I can tell.

Guy: Almost the same comment but maybe a little bit different terminology is, I posed the question is everything hyflex now? And so hyflex meaning that basically, you’re delivering all modalities at once to all students online, face to face, video, and the students can basically choose which of those modalities they interact with. And just to use an example is, for students who are in quarantine or what have you, this semester, we’ve been encouraged at my institution to zoom our classes. Well, that has expanded a bit in what students are expecting even in face-to-face classes to have accessibility to classroom videos. And so is that now happening for everything? Is that just something that students are going to expect from here on out? And is that necessarily a good thing? Because in small institutions, there’s not hundreds of students, it can be difficult to plan for a class, if you’ve got 15 students, and you don’t know how many are going to be there, and how many are not going to be there. And you maybe don’t have a classroom that’s set up to do both types of teaching. So it definitely is, I think, been useful for students who have to step away from the classroom for health reasons or for safety reasons. But I’m curious to see what happens if the student culture is going to change in terms of what they expect and if the teacher culture will change in what they’re willing to offer students who desire that type of flexibility.

Aaron: Yeah, one of the reasons that Guy and Regan and I work together a lot, it’s because we think very similarly. And we also have our unique perspectives on things. I think that higher education is gearing up for a paradigm shift. I think that there’s going to be massive differences in models in how we approach classroom instruction, brick and mortar versus a virtual environment. I think what the pandemic has done is, for some students, conditioned a new way of approaching their education. And I think you see this at the K-12 level, I think you see at this higher education level as well. And so I think that the schools and institutions that jump on this opportunity… we haven’t had a situation in which institutions can reinvent themselves in modern times, and I think this is definitely one of them. I think a lot of programs can reinvent themselves. And enrollment is up and down across the country. There are certain schools that are really getting hit. Community colleges are really taking a massive hit in the pandemic. And they’re having to reinvent themselves and figure out how can we do online instruction? How can we do this flex instruction? And so I think that, as a scientist, we are in a reinvigoration of scholarship of teaching and learning… how to do these different things. It’s going to be an exciting next five to ten years, I think, in higher education, from a teaching perspective, from the learner perspective, and from a scientist perspective about studying what’s going on. there’s going to be a lot of opportunities to basically treat the pandemic as a catalyst for change.

Regan: Absolutely.

Guy: In terms of opportunities, I think my response came off as pretty somber, but I would say there are some things I’m very excited about. So I’m the type of teacher who hates snow days. So I’m excited by the fact that we’re never going to have another snow day ever again. You never have to cancel a class ever again. Every single teacher knows what to do to replace a class that’s canceled for a snow day. And I’m really excited that more people who maybe would not have used an LMS in the past now are realizing the benefits of it. So, we’re going to have more people using those, which is, I think, only beneficial for students. And I’m hoping that more people are realizing that they can move a lot of the stuff that they used to just talk at students in the classroom, that they can move that online. So those are some of the things, as someone who’s still primarily a face-to-face teacher, that I’m excited about how online teaching will have a bigger influence as we move forward.

Regan: Guy said the word face-to-face teaching, and let me say something I’m excited by is that I don’t think there’s ever been as much scrutiny to teaching and learning as we’ve seen in the last year. And I love that. May that continue.

Aaron: I’ll second that.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us and sharing some insights from your book and getting us all excited about picking up a copy of your book and also really thinking forward to what is next for us as teachers.

Aaron: Thank you.

Guy: Thank you for inviting us.

Regan: Thank you, Rebecca and John.

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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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179. It’s Been a Year

A year ago, our campus announced that it was shutting down for a two-week pause so that the COVID-19 pandemic could be brought under control. To help faculty prepare for remote instruction, we released our first episode of many on March 19, 2020, with Flower Darby. We thought this would be a good moment to pause and reflect on this journey.

Show Notes

  • Flower Darby (2020). “Pandemic Related Remote Learning.” Tea for Teaching Podcast. Episode 126. March 19.
  • Todd, E. M., Watts, L. L., Mulhearn, T. J., Torrence, B. S., Turner, M. R., Connelly, S., & Mumford, M. D. (2017). A meta-analytic comparison of face-to-face and online delivery in ethics instruction: the case for a hybrid approach. Science and Engineering Ethics, 23(6), 1719-1754.
  • Means, B., Toyama, Y., Murphy, R., Bakia, M., & Jones, K. (2009). Evaluation of evidence-based practices in online learning: A meta-analysis and review of online learning studies.
  • Lang, J. M. (2020). Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do about It. Basic Books.
  • Linda Nilson (2019). “Specifications Grading.” Tea for Teaching Podcast. Episode 86. August 21.
  • Susan Blum (2020). “Peagogies of Care: Upgrading.” Tea for Teaching Podcast. Episode 145.  July 22.

Transcript

Rebecca: A year ago, our campus announced that it was shutting down for a two-week pause so that the COVID-19 pandemic could be brought under control. To help faculty prepare for remote instruction, we released our first episode of many on March 19, 2020, with Flower Darby We thought this would be a good moment to pause and reflect on this journey.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

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John: Our teas today are:

Rebecca: I’m drinking English Afternoon for the first time in about a year. Because I’ve been home, and working from home, I’ve been drinking pots of loose leaf tea instead of bag teas. And so I’m bringing back the comfort of a year ago.

John: And we still have in the office several boxes of English A fternoon tea, but they are wrapped in plastic. So I’m hoping they’ll still be in good shape when we finally get back there …once this two week pause that we started about a year ago, ends.

Rebecca: Yeah, when we recorded that Flower Darby episode was the last time we saw each other in person.

John: Well, there was one other time…

Rebecca: Oh, when you dropped off equipment.

John: I dropped off a microphone and a mixer for you so that we could continue with this podcast. Actually, I think we saw each other from a distance because I left it on the porch because I had just come back from Long Island where infection rates were very high.

Rebecca: Are you drinking tea, John?

John: …and I am drinking Tea Forte black currant tea today.

Rebecca: A good favorite. So John, can you talk a little bit about where you were at mentally and just even conceptually, in terms of online teaching and things,when the pandemic started a year ago,

John: We were starting to hear about some school closings in other countries and in some cities in the US where COVID infection rates were starting to pick up and it started to look more and more likely that we’d be moving into a shutdown, in the week before we were to go to spring break. I was teaching at the time one fully asynchronous online class and two face-to-face classes. When it was looking more and more like we’d shut down I talked to my face-to-face classes about what options we’d have should we go online for some period of time. And I shared with them how we could use Zoom for this. And we had already used Zoom a few times for student presentations when students were out sick or had car trouble and couldn’t make it into class. Because they were actively using computers or mobile devices every day in class, anyway, they all had either computers or smartphones with them. And I had them download Zoom and test it out, asking them to mute their mics. And very quickly, they learned why I asked them to do that. I wasn’t very concerned because we’ve been doing workshops at our teaching center for many years now with remote participants. And we’ve been using Zoom for at least five years or so now. So I wasn’t really that concerned about the possibilities for this. And I thought the online class would go very much like it had and the face-to-face classes would work in a very similar way… for the short period that we were expecting to be shut down. I think even at the time, many of us thought that this would be somewhat longer, but I wasn’t terribly concerned at the time, because infection rates were still pretty low. And I think we were all hopeful that this would be a short-run experience.

Rebecca: And also maybe the fact that you’ve taught online before didn’t hurt.

John: Yeah, I’ve been teaching online since 1997, I believe. And so I was pretty comfortable with that and I wasn’t concerned at all about the fully online class, I was a little more concerned about the students who were used to the face-to-face experience adapting to a Zoom environment.

Rebecca: I had a really different experience because I was on sabbatical in the spring working on some research projects related to accessibility. Because of that, I was able to quickly adapt and be able to help some communities that I’m a part of, related to professional development. So I stepped in and helped a little bit with our center and did a couple workshops and helped on a couple of days with that. And I also helped with our SUNY-wide training too, and offered some workshops related to accessibility and inclusive teaching at that time. And the professional association for design locally, we had a couple of little support groups for design faculty.

John: I wasn’t too concerned about my classes, but I was a little bit more concerned about all the faculty that we had who had never taught online. And so, as you just said, we put together a series of workshops for about a week and a half over our spring break helping faculty to get ready for the transition to what we’re now calling remote instruction.

Rebecca: At that time, too. I had no experience teaching online, I’d used Blackboard and things like that before, but not to fully teach online. So for me, it was a really different experience. And I was helping and coaching faculty through some of those transitions too, not really having had much experience myself. So I had the benefit, perhaps, of seeing where people stumbled before I had to teach in the fall. But I also didn’t get any practice prior to fall like some people did with some forgiveness factors built into the emergency nature of the spring.

John: I think for most faculty, it was a very rapid learning process in the spring and instruction wasn’t quite at the level I think anyone was used to, but I think institutions throughout the country were encouraging faculty to do the best that they could, knowing that this was an emergency situation, and I’m amazed at how quickly faculty adapted to this environment overall.

Rebecca: One of the things that I thought was gonna be really interesting to ask you about today, John, was about online instruction, because you have such a rich history teaching online, and there are so many new faculty teaching online, although in a different format than perhaps online education research talks about. Many people taught asynchronously for the first time, but there’s also a lot of faculty teaching online in a synchronous fashion. There’s a lot less research around that. How do you see this experience impacting online education long term.

John: I don’t think this is going to have much of a dramatic impact on asynchronous online instruction in the long term. Online instruction is not new, it’s been going on for several decades now. There’s a very large body of literature on what works effectively in online instruction. And under normal circumstances, when students are online and faculty are online because they choose to be, online instruction works really well. And there’s a lot of research that suggests that when asynchronous courses are well designed, building on what we know about effective online teaching strategies, they’re just as effective as well designed face-to-face classes. However, a lot of people are trying to draw lessons from what we’re observing today. And what we’re observing today, for the most part, does not resemble what online education normally is, primarily because the students who are there, and many faculty who are there, are there not by choice, but by necessity. And one of the things that has come up in some recent Twitter conversations, as well as conversations that we’ve had earlier, is that many online students in asynchronous classes have been asking for synchronous meetings. In several decades of teaching online, I’ve never seen that happen before, and now it’s very routine. And I think a lot of the issue there is that, in the past, most online students were there for very specific reasons. So they may have had work schedules that would not allow them to sign up for synchronous classes. Some of them are in shift work, some of them were on rotating shifts where they couldn’t have fixed times of availability. Some of them would have large distances to commute and it just wasn’t feasible, or they were taking care of family members who were ill, or as part of their job, they were required to travel. In most of the online classes I’ve had in the past, there were some students who were out of state or out of the country. I had students during the Gulf War who were on a ship, the only time they missed a deadline was when their ship went on radio silence before some of the attacks down there. They simply would not have been able to participate in synchronous instruction in any way. And I think a lot of the people who are now taking asynchronous classes, strongly prefer a synchronous modality and are disappointed that they’re not in that. And I think a lot of what we’re seeing is a response to that and I think we shouldn’t ignore all the research that has come out about effective online techniques in light of the current pandemic, because this is not how online instruction normally has occurred. And people are in very different circumstances now in terms of their physical wellbeing in terms of their emotional well being and just general stress.

Rebecca: Yeah, during the pandemic, many more people are in isolation, and might really be craving some of that social interaction that they might not expect out of an online class traditionally, especially if it’s an asynchronous class. But if you’re just alone, and you’re not going out of your house, there might be more of a desire during this one moment of time …this one really long moment of time. [LAUGHTER]

John: During this two-week pause? [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yeah. One other thing, I guess, is important to note as we’re talking about research and what evidence shows is that hybrid can be really effective with the combination of in-person instruction complementing some asynchronous online instruction. And of course, in that traditional research, hybrid really means this in- person and then asynchronous online, this synchronous online thing wasn’t really a thing prior to the pandemic. [LAUGHTER]

John: Right. And we can’t really draw too many conclusions about this giant worldwide experiment that’s being done in less than optimal conditions without really having a control of normal instruction to compare it to. And yeah, several meta-analyses have found that while face-to-face and asynchronous online instruction are equally effective, hybrid instruction often has come out ahead in terms of the learning gains that students have experienced. Certainly, we know a lot about hybrid instruction, face-to-face instruction, and asynchronous online, but not the modality that larger of our students are in. One other factor is that when people signed up for online classes before, they did it knowing that they had solid internet connections, they knew they had computers that were capable of supporting online instructional environments. They had good bandwidth and so forth. That’s not the situation In which many of our students and faculty are working right now, because faculty and students often do not have any of those things. And they’re often working in suboptimal environments that are crowded, where there’s other people in the household sharing the same space. And it makes it really difficult to engage in remote asynchronous or synchronous work as they might have when they chose to be in that modality.

Rebecca: I do think that, during this time, though, into kind of forced online instruction, although there are certainly people who don’t like that they’ve been forced to be online, and they prefer to be synchronous or in person, I think there’s a cohort of people who thought online education wasn’t for them, both faculty and students, who have discovered that it actually really does work for them. And even me, although I teach web design and do things online, you’d think online education would seem obvious to me. But in the past, it hadn’t really occurred to me. Our education tends to be in person, and you tend to replicate what you’ve experienced. [LAUGHTER] And although I have taken some online courses related to design and technology and coding in the past, it hadn’t really occurred to me to consider some options. And I think what we’ve discovered is some of our courses work well in this modality and some don’t. Some of our courses are better positioned to be potentially online or work well in that format, and could help with some collaboration pieces, or some other things that we might be doing. It might support the work that we were already trying to do in person.

John: And I think now, all faculty have gotten much more comfortable with a wider variety of teaching techniques and teaching tools than they would have experienced before. For many faculty, just having dropboxes in the learning management system was something new, moving away from paper assignments was something very new. And suddenly, faculty were asked to use a wide variety of instructional tools that they had been very careful to avoid doing in the past. And one of the things that struck me is how many of the people in our workshops who’ve said that they were perfectly comfortable teaching in a face-to-face environment, and they just didn’t see the need for, or they didn’t think that online instruction could work for them. And now that they’ve tried all these new tools and these new approaches, they’re never going to go back to the traditional way in which they were teaching. So I think there are going to be a lot of things that people have learned during this that they’ll take back into their future instruction, even if it is primarily in a face-to-face environment.

Rebecca: It may also be some changes in technology policies in the classroom as well related to just seeing how helpful technology can be for learning, but also where it can be distracting. So I think there’s some reconsideration of what that might mean.

John: While there haven’t been so many things that I’ve enjoyed during the pandemic, one of them is that this whole issue of technology bans have pretty much fallen to the wayside. I’m not hearing faculty complaining about students using computers during their class time now. And that’s a nice feature, and perhaps faculty can appreciate how mobile devices can be an effective learning tool. And yes, there will have to be more discussions such as one we’re having in our reading group this semester, where we’re reading Jim Lang’s Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What We Can Do About It. There’s a lot of discussion about when technology is appropriate, and when it’s not in those meetings. But I think faculty have come to recognize how ed tech can be useful in some ways, at least in their instruction, whether it’s in person or whether it’s remote.

Rebecca: I think it’s also important to note that how some of the synchronous technology, video conferencing technology like Zoom, has some advantages, even if our class is not synchronous online. It could just be an in person class in the future. We’ve seen the power of being able to bring guests in easily without having to deal with logistics of traveling and the scheduling considerations that are often involved with that. We don’t have the disruptions and education related to snow days and illness, both on the faculty and student side. Obviously, that depends on how severe the illness is, right? [LAUGHTER] Professional development has worked out really well online, although we’ve done online or had a Zoom component where you can kind of Zoom and being all on the same platform at the same time has been really great, being able to take advantage of breakout rooms and things like that. We’ve seen record numbers attend, and then also with advisement and office hours. It can be really intimidating to have to find an advisor’s or a faculty member’s office and you have to physically go there. And then it’s kind of intimidating. What if the door’s shut? What if they’re look like they’re busy? [LAUGHTER] There’s all these things that can get in the way that online or Zoom calls can just remove some of those barriers and also allow for more flexibility because now you don’t have to plan for walking across campus which might take some time. Or you might be able to squeeze in something at a time you wouldn’t be able to otherwise.

John: And a lot of our commuting students are commuting from 30 to 60 miles away, and it was not terribly convenient for them to have to drive up to campus at a time that was convenient for their professors just for the chance of sitting there and talking to them for a few minutes. So, the access is much easier using Zoom or other remote tools.

Rebecca: We should also get real. Zoom fatigue is a real, real, thing. It’s about 4:30 right now that we’re recording. We’ve both been on Zoom calls since early this morning. And kind of constant. Our students have been as well. There’s no let up, there’s no breaks. We don’t get the little stroll across campus to the next meeting. [LAUGHTER] There’s none of that. One of the things that I am experiencing, as someone who’s definitely introverted, is this performative nature of being on camera all the time. And I know our students are too. And John and I were talking about this a little earlier today, that, in the fall, I had tons of students participating with their cameras on and their microphones on, and even in the beginning of the spring, but there’s something about the dead of winter in Oswego, that kind of Doomsday nature of it, it’s gray here. And then the black boxes just kind of emphasize it further. And they’re not as visible as they had been before. And I think it’s partly because it’s so performative, and you’re being watched all the time. And it’s not necessarily not wanting to participate or feel like you’re present. But really, it’s just a little much.

John: And neither of us pressure our students to turn their cameras on. We welcome that, we invite them to do that, but we know there are some really sound reasons not to, because people are often working in environments that they don’t want to share with their classmates or with their faculty members. And they may have bandwidth issues and so forth. But it is really tedious to be talking to those black boxes. And as Rebecca and I talked about earlier, both of us are also creating videos. So, we get to talk to our web cameras a lot, and then we go to class, and we talk to our students. Most of our students, I think, turn their microphones on. So we get to hear them one at a time. But it’s challenging to be talking to people you can’t see all day long.

Rebecca: I think it’s particularly challenging for faculty, because there’s more of an expectation for faculty to have their cameras on both in class and in meetings than students. So I think there’s an extra level of fatigue that’s happening with faculty and staff, because it’s more performance more of the time. Some days, I really feel like I wish I could be a student and I could just turn my camera off.

John: I have a night class that meets for about three hours. And typically when we met face-to-face, we’d take a 7 to 10 minute break in the middle of that. I asked the students if they wanted to do that the first two weeks, and each time they said “No.” I said, “Well, if you need to get up, use a restroom, or walk around, please do it. But what I wasn’t considering is the fact that, while they were doing that, I was still here interacting with them the whole time. And that three-hour session can be a bit challenging by the end of it, particularly if you’ve been drinking a lot of tea.

Rebecca: That’s actually important to note that, kind of unusually, John and I are both teaching three-hour classes, that’s probably not the norm for most faculty. I’m teaching studio classes. So for one class, it’s three hours of time, two times a week, and you’re teaching a seminar class, right, John, that’s three hours?

John: Yes, that meets once a week.

Rebecca: These longer sessions, we can break up by physically moving around the classroom and things when we’re in person, it becomes more of a challenge online. And I know that I’ve been thinking more about the orchestra of it all and changing it up in my classes. So we might do something in small groups then may do something as a big group, we participate in a whiteboard activity, then we might do something else, then we take a break, then we try to do something that’s off screen for a little bit and then come back. And so I’ve tried to build in some opportunities for myself as well to be able to turn my camera off at least for a few minutes during that three-hour time or take a little bit of that time during breakout sessions or whatever, because I need a break too. Our good friend Jessamyn Neuhaus has mentioned this to us many times before, that we’re not superheroes, and we should stop trying to be superheroes. And this seems like a good moment to remind ourselves of this as well. I know for me, it’s like I need a snack, I need to go to the bathroom, I need a drink. I would do that in a physical class. I take breaks then. So I’ve been making sure we build it in, and actually even padding it a little bit and giving people longer breaks than I would in person.

John: And our campus, recognizing the challenges that faculty faced with this last fall, put in two wellness days where no classes were held, and people were encouraged to engage in activities to give them that sort of break. I’m not sure about you, but I ended up spending about seven and a half hours of that day in meetings that were scheduled by various people on campus.

Rebecca: Yeah, and students also said that they ended up really needing that time to just catch up, because the workload in terms of student work hasn’t reduced, but being on screen has increased for most people, and you just need some time away. So, it ends up taking more hours of the day, just in terms of logistics, if you actually going to give your eyes a break and things. I did a little survey of my classes and they said they spent a lot of that time kind of catching up, although maybe the pace of the day was a little slower.

John: Going back to the issue of cameras being on, one of our colleagues on campus did a survey of the students in her class asking why they chose not to have their cameras on. And the response seemed to indicate that a lot of it was peer pressure, that as more and more students turn the cameras off, they became odd to leave them on. So I think many of us have experienced the gradual darkening of our screens from the fall to the spring,

Rebecca: I found that there’s some strategies to help with that as well. One of the things I did last week was invite students to participate in a whiteboard activity online indicating what they expected their peers to do so that they felt like they were engaged or part of a community. What should they do in a breakout? And what does participation look like in an online synchronous class? And they want all the things we wanted them too. They said, like, “Oh, I want people to engage.” And we talked about what that means, that it might mean participating in chat, it might mean having the cameras on, and things like that. And that day, right after that conversation, so many people during that conversation turn their cameras on. So in part, it’s about reminding, or just pointing out that it’s not very welcoming to have not even a picture up.

John: And this is something you’ve suggested in previous podcasts to that, while we’re not going to ask students to leave their cameras on to create a more inclusive environment, you could encourage students to put pictures up.

Rebecca: Yeah, we feel as humans more connected when we see human faces. So we feel much more connected than looking at black boxes. [LAUGHTER] So I’ve definitely encouraged my students. On the first day, I gave instructions to all the students about how to do that. And then when we had our conversation the other day, when I was starting to feel the darkening of the classroom and more cameras came on, I also just invited and encouraged everyone else. If you can’t have your camera on, or you have a tendency not to be able to put your camera on, that’s not a problem, but we would really welcome seeing your face or some representation of you as an image.

John: What are some of the positive takeaways faculty will take from this into the future?

Rebecca: It’s been interesting, because we’ve had far more faculty participating in professional development opportunities, initially out of complete necessity, like “I don’t know how to use Blackboard” and starting with digital tools and technologies, and then asking bigger and more complicated questions about quality instruction online as they gained some confidence in the technical skills. So there’s some competency there that I think is really great. And that’s leading to faculty wanting to use some of these tools in classes, it might mean just using Blackboard so that the assignments are there, and the due dates are more present, and just kind of some logistical things to help students keep organized. But also, there’s a lot of really great tools that, as we mentioned earlier, that faculty have discovered that they want to use in their classes. So maybe it’s polling and doing low-stakes testing in their classes during the class. I’ve discovered using these virtual whiteboards, which actually logistically work better than physical whiteboards in a lot of cases in the things that we’re doing, because everyone can see what their collaborators are doing better. So there’s a lot of tools that I think faculty are going to incorporate throughout the work that they’re doing. But also they’ve learned a lot more evidence-based practices. And maybe you want to talk a little bit about that, John,

John: At the start of the pandemic, the initial workshops, were mostly “How do I use Zoom?” But very quickly, even back in March, we also talked a little bit about how we can use evidence-based practices that build on what we know about teaching and learning. In the spring, there wasn’t much faculty could do in the last couple of months to change their courses. But we did encourage them to move from high-stakes exams to lower-stakes assessments to encourage students to engage more regularly with material, to space out their practice, and so forth. And at the start of the summer, we put together a mini workshop for faculty on how to redesign their courses for whatever was going to happen in the fall. And it was basically a course redevelopment workshop, where we focused primarily on what research shows about how we learn and how we can build our courses in ways that would foster an environment where students might learn more effectively. Our morning sessions were based primarily on pedagogy and then in the afternoon, we’d go over some sessions on how you can implement that in a remote or an asynchronous environment, giving people a choice of different ways of implementing it. By the start of the summer, people were starting to think about doing things like polling, about doing low-stakes testing, or mastery learning quizzing, and so forth. And people started to implement that in the fall. And then we had another series of workshops in January. We normally have really good participation, but we had, I believe, over 2000 attendees at sessions during our January sessions. And during those sessions, we had faculty presenting on all the things that they’d learned and how they were able to implement new teaching techniques. And it was one of the most productive set of workshops we’ve ever had here, I believe. And what really struck me is how smoothly faculty had transitioned to a remote environment. At the start of the pandemic and during spring break, we were encouraging people to attend remotely and yet faculty mostly wanted to sit in the classroom with us, and we wanted to stay as far away from those people as we could. But about half the people attended virtually. Butwhat’s been happening as people were getting more and more comfortable attending remotely and we’ve been offering the option of people attending virtually since I took over as the Director of the teaching center back in 2008, I believe. However, we rarely had more than a few people attending remotely. And it was always a challenge for people to be participating fully when they were remote while other people were in the same room, which gave us some concerns about how this was going to work in the reduced capacity classrooms that many colleges, including ours, were going to implement in the fall. And we knew we didn’t really have the microphones in the rooms that would allow remote participants to hear everyone in the room and vice versa. Once we switched entirely online, where all the participants in the workshops were in Zoom, it’s been much more effective to have everyone attending in the same way, so that we didn’t have some people participating in the classroom and others attending remotely. And I think that, combined with faculty becoming more comfortable with using Zoom, has allowed us to reach more faculty more effectively.

Rebecca: One of the things that I saw so powerful this January, in our experience on our campus, was all of the faculty who volunteered to do sessions and talk about their experiences and support other faculty experimenting with things. And I think it was just this jolt that caused us all to have to try something new, that was really, really powerful. We all get stuck. Even those of us that know evidence-based techniques, we get stuck in our routines, and sometimes just allow inertia to move us forward and replicate what we’ve done before because it’s easier, it saves time, and we have a lot on our plates. And it’s really about being efficient, because we just have too much to do. So it was nice, in a weird way, to have that jolt to try some new things. I heard some great things from faculty that I’ve never heard from before I learned some things from some other faculty. And it was really exciting. And the personal place in my heart that I get most excited about, of course, is how many faculty got really excited about things related to inclusive pedagogy, and equity, and accessibility. We offered, on our campus a 10-day accessibility challenge that we opened up to faculty, staff, and students as part of our winter conference sessions. And we had record accessibility attendance… never seen so many people interested in accessibility before. But that came out of the experience of the spring and the fall, and people really seeing equity issues and experiencing it with their students. They witnessed it in a way that it was easy to ignore previously. And so I think that faculty, throughout this whole time, have cared about the experience that students have and want students to have equity. They just didn’t realize the disparity that existed amongst our students. And the students saw the disparity that existed amongst students, which was a really powerful moment, really disturbing for some students who had to share that moment with other people, but also a really useful experience for faculty to really buy into some of these practices about building community, about making sure their materials were accessible. And all of that has resulted in a much higher quality education for our students.

John: It was really easy for faculty to ignore a lot of these inequities before, because the computer labs, the Wi Fi, the food services, and library services, and lending of equipment provided by institutions, compensated for a lot of those issues, so that disparities in income and wealth were somewhat hidden in the classroom. But once people moved home, many of those supports disappeared, despite the best efforts of campuses in providing students with WiFi access with hotspots or providing them with loaner computers. And those issues just became so much more visible. It’s going to be very hard for faculty to ignore those issues, I think, in the future, because it has impacted our ability to reach a lot of our students. And it has affected the ability of many of our students to fully participate in a remote environment. But going back to that point about people sharing, I also was really amazed by how willing people were to volunteer and share what they’ve learned in their experiences. Typically, when we put our January workshop schedule together, we call for workshop proposals from people. And we typically get 5 to 12 of those, and they’re often from our technical support people on campus. And it’s rare that we get faculty to volunteer. And normally we have to spend a few months getting faculty to volunteer so that we get maybe 20 or 30 faculty to talk about their experiences. We had about 50 people just volunteer without anything other than an initial request, and then a few more with a little nudging, so that we ended up with 107 workshops that were all very well attended. And there were some really great discussions there because, as you said, people were put in an environment where the old ways of doing things just didn’t work anymore, and it opened people up to change. We’ve been encouraging active learning and we’ve been encouraging changes in teaching practices. But this pretty much has reached just about everybody this time in ways that it would have been really difficult to reach all of our faculty before.

Rebecca: It’s easy during a time like a pandemic to just feel like the world’s tumbling down. And there’s no doubt about that. But it’s a time where I’ve also been really grateful to have such great colleagues. Because not only have we seen faculty supporting each other and using new technology, the advocacy that they’ve demonstrated on behalf of students who really had needs has been incredible. Likewise, for faculty, we’ve witnessed some really interesting conversations amongst faculty about ways to reduce their own repetitive stress injuries and other accessibility issues that faculty are also experiencing, equity issues that faculty are experiencing, caregiving responsibilities that are making things really challenging for faculty. But there’s a really strong network of support amongst each other to help everyone through and there’s no word to describe what that means other than being grateful for it, because people have been so supportive of each other. And that, to me, is pretty amazing.

John: Faculty have often existed in the silos of their departments. But this transition has broken down those silos. It’s built a sense of community in a lot of ways that we generally didn’t see extending as far beyond the department borders. There were always a lot of people who supported each other, but the extent to that is so much greater.

Rebecca: So we’ve been talking a lot about this faculty support. John, can you give a couple of examples of things that faculty have shared that have worked really well in their classes that they weren’t doing before?

John: One of the things that more and more faculty have been doing is introducing active learning activities and more group activities within their classes in either a synchronous or asynchronous environment. And that’s something that’s really helpful. And as we’ve encouraged faculty to move away from high-stakes assessment, and many faculty have worked much more carefully about scaffolding their assignments, so that large projects are broken up into smaller chunks that are more manageable, and students are getting more feedback regularly. Faculty, in general, I think, have been providing students with more support, because when in a classroom, you were just expecting students to ask any questions about something they didn’t understand. And sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t. But I think faculty realize that in a remote environment, all those instructions have to be there for students. So in general, I think faculty are providing students with more support, more detailed instructions, and often creating videos to help explain some of the more challenging parts that they might normally have expected students to ask about during a face-to-face class meeting.

Rebecca: I think previously, although faculty want to be supportive, they may not have been aware of some of the mental and emotional health challenges that students face generally, but have been amplified during the pandemic. Students who might experience anxiety or depression and how that impacts their ability to focus, their ability to organize themselves and organize their time, all of those things have become much more visible, just like those equity issues. And so I think that faculty are becoming more aware of that emotional piece of education and making sure that people feel supported so that they can be successful. And even just that kind of warm language piece of it, and being welcoming, and just indicating, like, “Hey, how are you doing? I really do care about what’s going on with you.” And having those chit chat moments sometimes even in a synchronous online class, open up that discussion and help students feel like they’re part of the community and really help address some of those issues that students are facing.

John: And I think a lot of the discussion is how can we build this class community when we move away from a physical classroom. So there have been many discussions, and many productive discussions, on ways of building this class community and helping to maintain instructor presence in asynchronous classes, as well as helping to maintain human connections when we’re all distanced, somehow.

Rebecca: I think that also points out the nature of some of our in-person classes and the assumptions that we made, that there were human connections being made in class when maybe they weren’t, or maybe there wasn’t really a community being built, because students may also not know each other there. So I think some of the lessons of feeling isolated maybe themselves, or seeing their students feel isolated, has led faculty to develop and take the time to do more community-building activities. So that there is that support network in place sp that students are able to learn, the more supported they feel, the more confident they feel, the more willing or open they’re going to be to learning and having that growth mindset.

John: And we’re hoping that all these new skills that faculty have acquired, will transition very nicely when we move to a more traditional face-to-face environment in the fall.

Rebecca: …or sometime ever… [LAUGHTER]

John: At some point, yes. [LAUGHTER] But one thing we probably should talk about is something I know we both have experienced is the impact on faculty workloads.

Rebecca: It’s maybe grown just a little, John, I don’t know about you, but there’s some of it that has to do with just working in a different modality than you’re used to. So there’s some startup costs of just learning new techniques. Then there’s also the implementation of using certain kinds of technology that are a little more time consuming to set up than in person. So, the example I was giving to someone the other day was, I might do a whiteboard activity in person that requires me to grab some markers and some sticky notes. That’s my setup. But in an online environment, I need to have that organized and have designated areas for small groups. And I need to have prompts put up. And there’s a lot of structural things that need to be in place for that same activity to happen online, it can happen very seamlessly online, but there’s some time required to set it up. So there’s that. We’ve also all learned how low-stakes is so great, and how scaffolding is so great, but now there’s more grading. And somehow, I think there’s more meetings.

John: Yes, but in terms of that scaffolding, we’re assessing student work more regularly, we’re providing them with more feedback. And also going back to the issue of support materials, many of us are creating new videos. And when I first started teaching, it was very much the norm for people to lecture. And basically, my preparation was going into the cabinet and grabbing a couple of pieces of chalk and going down to the classroom and just discussing the topic, trying to keep it interactive by asking students questions, giving them problems on the board, having them work on them in groups. But I didn’t have to spend a lot of time creating graphs with all the images on my computer. I didn’t have to create these detailed videos and these transcripts and so forth, that I’d share with all my students now. And there’s a lot of fixed costs of moving to this environment, however, we’re doing it. That has taken its toll, I think, on all of us, as well as the emotional stress that we’re all going through during a pandemic.

Rebecca: I know one of the things that I’m concerned about is the ongoing expectation of time commitments that are not sustainable… period.

John: It’s one thing to deal with this during an emergency crisis. But this has been a really long emergency crisis.

Rebecca: And I think we’ve all seen the gains that students have had or felt like it’s worth the time and effort to support students. But it’s also time to think about how to support faculty and staff who have been doing all of that supporting and we need a reprieve… like, winter break wasn’t a break, summer break wasn’t a break, there isn’t a spring break, wellness days weren’t a break. Everybody just needs a vacation.

John: Yeah, I feel like I haven’t had a day off now since the middle of March of 2020.

Rebecca: I think one of the next things we need to be thinking about is: we created a lot of things that we could probably recycle and reuse in our classes, and so there were some costs over the course of the year. But perhaps they’re not costs in the future because we’ve learned some things. There may also be some strategizing that we need to do about when we give feedback or how detailed that feedback is with these scaffolded and smaller assignments so that we can be more efficient with grading. We’ve talked in the past on the podcast about specifications grading and some other strategies and ungrading. So maybe it’s time to think a little more or more deeply about some of these things now that we have them in place. How can we be more efficient with our time and work together to brainstorm ways to save ourselves time and effort and energy and still provide a really good learning environment?

John: Specifications grading is one way of doing it. But having students provide more peer feedback to each other is another really effective way of doing that. We’ve talked about that in several past podcasts, but that is one way of helping to leverage some of that feedback in a way that also enhances student learning. So it’s not just shifting the burden of assessing work to students, it’s actually providing them with really rich learning opportunities that tend to deepen their learning.

Rebecca: I know one strategy that I’ve implemented this semester, that definitely has saved time, although I just need to get more comfortable with my setup, but just I need to practice it, is doing light grading and the idea of having a shortlist of criteria. And then that criteria is either met, its approached or it doesn’t meet. And it’s a simple check box. And essentially, the basic rubric is what it looks like to meet it. And either you’ve met it or you haven’t. And that’s a much more efficient way of…

John:…either you’ve met it, you’ve almost met it, or you haven’t…

Rebecca: Yeah. And so that’s worked pretty well for me this semester. And I think it’s helping me be a little more efficient. And then I say like, “Okay, and ‘A’ is if you have met all of the criteria, ‘B’ is if you’ve met a certain percentage of the criteria, and approach the rest,” that kind of thing. The biggest thing for me is just getting used to my new rubrics and not having to like “Wait, what was that again?” when you go to grade it. But, I think, with practice, next time I go to use them, it’s gonna be a lot faster.

John: Going back to the point you made before, a lot of people have developed a whole series of videos that can be used to support their classes. Those can be used to support a flipped face-to-face class just as nicely as they do in a synchronous course, or a remote synchronous course. So a lot of the materials that faculty have developed, I think, while it won’t lighten the workload of faculty, can provide more support for students in the future without increasing f aculty workload as much as it has, during the sudden transition when people are switching all their classes at once to this new environment we’re facing. I know in the past, when I’ve normally done a major revision of my class, it’s normally one class that I’m doing a major revision on. And then the others will get major revisions at a later semester or a year. But when you try to dramatically change your instruction in all of your classes at once, it’s a tremendous amount of work.

Rebecca: I think another place where we’ve seen a lot of workload increase is also an advisement. There’s a lot of students that are struggling, many more students have questions about what to do if they’re close to failing, whether or not they could withdraw. what it means to leave school or come back to school, we’ve had the pass/fail option. So that raises a lot of questions. There’s a lot of those conversations that certainly we have, but they’re just more of them right now. And I would hope that as the pandemic eventually goes away, then some of that additional advisement will also start to fade away as well. We’re just drained. We imagine that you’re all drained too.

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

Rebecca: God, I hope there’s a vacation involved. Our household is dreaming about places we can go, even if it’s just to a different town nearby, as things start to lighten up, just to feel like we’re doing something… anything.

John: The vaccines look promising, and the rollout is accelerating. And we’re hoping that continues. And let’s hope that a year from now we can talk about all the things we’ve learned that has improved our instruction in a more traditional face-to-face environment.

Rebecca: The last thing I want to say is I hope everyone has, at some point, a restful moment in the summer, and we find the next academic year a little more revitalizing.

John: I think we could all use a restful and revitalizing summer to come back refreshed and energized for the fall semester.

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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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