189. Teaching with Zoom

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an explosion in the use of remote synchronous instruction, a modality that was rarely used until March 2020. In this episode, Dan Levy joins us to discuss the affordances and the challenges associated with this relatively new modality. Dan is an economist and a senior lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University where he teaches courses in quantitative methods, policy analysis, and program evaluation. He is the author of Teaching Effectively with Zoom, A Practical Guide to Engage Your Students and Help Them Learn, which is now in its second edition.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an explosion in the use of remote synchronous instruction, a modality that was rarely used until March 2020. In this episode, we discuss the affordances and the challenges associated with this relatively new modality.

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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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Rebecca: Our guest today is Dan Levy. Dan is an economist and a senior lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University where he teaches courses in quantitative methods, policy analysis, and program evaluation. He is the author of Teaching Effectively with Zoom, A Practical Guide to Engage Your Students and Help Them Learn, which is now in its second edition. Welcome, Dan.

Dan: Thank you very much, Rebecca and John.

John: We’re looking forward to talking to you.

Dan: Thank you.

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

Dan: I love Moroccan tea. My family’s originally from Morocco. And that’s the tea that I normally drink when I drink tea.

Rebecca: Today, I have Scottish afternoon, John… we’re coming back, coming back with the good stuff.

John: And I have two teas here, actually. I have ginger peach green tea and a Moroccan mint tea.

Dan: Oh, wow.

John: That worked nicely.

Dan: Yeah.

Rebecca: I don’t know if I’d drink them quite at the same time, but… [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, they’re sequential.

Rebecca: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss Teaching Effectively with Zoom. Could you talk a little bit about how you started this book project?

Dan: Sure. So in March of last year, when we all had to go quickly to remote teaching, I had spent the better part of 10 years trying things surrounding online learning at the Harvard Kennedy School. But I had never spent much time with synchronous online teaching. And so when we had to move to remote teaching, my first instinct was to go and observe as many instructors as possible to see what they were doing. And what I discovered then was an incredible wealth of people who were just doing incredible things, they’re being very resourceful in the way that they were trying to use the platform to accomplish our pedagogical goals. I didn’t set out to write a book at that time, but I was just learning a lot. And at the same time, I was observing my daughters, in high school, receiving online learning instruction. Around mid-May, I sort of had the feeling that in the fall, we would be teaching online still. And I felt that there was a lot being written online, in Twitter and blogs and all of that. But I felt, gosh, this is overwhelming. And so I felt the need to have in one single place, what I thought would be useful gui e for instructors who were saying, “I need to do this, I want to do it well.” And I thought that I had gotten a lot of ideas from the colleagues that I observed teach… which by the way, observing colleagues teach is one of the silver linings of the pandemic, because it’s now easier than ever, and it’s an incredibly powerful way of learning. So in any case, at that point, I said, “I want to write this book, I’ve never done anything like that. And I want the book to be ready by July 1, because that’s how it’s gonna be helpful to people in the world, given the academic calendars.” And on July 1, a book was ready. And then on July 2, we put it out there to the world. And then because so much happened in the fall, I released the second edition based on everything that I had learned since then, from my own teaching and that of colleagues. And it was very rewarding to see people from all over the world who had engaged with the book, also contribute with some of their examples.

Rebecca: I think I need to get one of those magic wands you must have to turn around stuff that quickly.

Dan: Well, no. Thank you. I think there’s nothing like a deadline… [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: True

Dan: …and a deadline that I really felt it was important to meet. And I have a good friend who I sent the book, he is not in the education world. And I said, “Here it is.” And then he told me, “Then you lied to me. You told me that you wrote the book in a month and a half. But I know from previous conversations with you that you have been writing this book in your mind for the last 10 years.” And I thought that was an interesting way of putting it because I’ve been thinking about a lot of these issues, but I never sat down to write any of them.

John: It was extremely timely, and I know many people adopted the book last summer or picked up the second edition in January when that came out. There weren’t a lot of resources other than lots of Twitter posts and lots of blog posts on specific aspects. But the book blends together a nice discussion of the technical details of how you do things with effective pedagogy, which is a resource that was very much needed and is still very much needed for many people as we move forward. Because this is an area that people had not really done very much with until this sudden transition.

Dan: Yes, thank you so much John.

John: What are some of the most effective ways that you’ve seen faculty using Zoom in their classes or that you’ve used Zoom in your classes yourself?

Dan: One observation that I had throughout this year… and the book is a little bit organized in this way, but it didn’t crystallize to me until later in the last year… which is that if you conceptualize the way students can engage in your course and think about the different channels… in the book, I describe five main channels, they can speak, they can vote, they can write, they can work in groups, and they can show their work. One of the things that becomes very obvious, at least to me, is that for default, in in-person teaching, tends to be verbal, we speak to each other. And what I realize in live online learning is that of those five channels, the one that most degrades when you go from in person to online is precisely the verbal one. And I think, my sense is that of recognition that that’s the case for many, many reasons, is what I think has made some instructors particularly successful at doing this because they are not wedded to verbal as the main or default channel of communication. So that’s kind of like an overall message that if you think about in which ways can your students engage in your class, and in which of these ways do I want for this particular pedagogic purpose my students to engage with, my sense is that that tends to be a winning combination.

Rebecca: When I was looking at that organization of your book, Dan, it really struck me and was really helpful way of thinking about it. And, in your description right now, made it really clear to me why it was actually very easy for me to switch to synchronous online learning [LAUGHTER] because I don’t really prefer the verbal. [LAUGHTER] So it was nice to engage in these other spaces as an introvert, like I could use chat in other places that I’m actually much more comfortable. [LAUGHTER]

Dan: It’s interesting you say this, Rebecca, because the same thing that you said, is true for students. So introverted students now have different ways of engaging with us that we might not have even heard from them before. And I think if we leverage those ways, we’re going to end up being in a better place. And most importantly, they’re going to end up being in a better place.

John: One of the nice things about written communication and chat is you’ve got that delete key, which, when people are feeling a little more introverted, perhaps, they’re less confident about saying something where they can’t take something back, rephrase it on the fly. And having that delete option, lets them be a little more thoughtful in their participation, and can lead to a much more inclusive environment in many ways.

Dan: Absolutely. The other thing that it does is that you can take your time to compose a message that you write, whereas, when you’re called to speak, you might have perhaps practiced this message in your mind, but you feel like on the spot, you have to now deliver it at that point. And then the introverts tend to have more difficulty with that. And I say that as an introvert. I don’t want to be too binary in the definition. But I say that as an introvert.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about why the verbal channel degrades a bit in a Zoom situation? Because I think that might actually be really helpful for people to think about.

Dan: Sure. So one way in which it does, and I wish the podcast was a video podcast, but one way in which it does is right now we are with this software, and the three of us can see each other. But right now, I’m looking at you, Rebecca, and you think I’m looking down somewhere and not at you. Like you have no idea that I’m looking at you. And you’re like, “Why is this person looking down? I’m speaking with him.” And John right now also thinks I’m looking down. So he doesn’t even know that I’m looking at you and not at him. And if I wanted to give you, Rebecca, the impression that I’m looking at you, I would have to point my eyes to a camera, and I no longer have any nonverbal feedback from you, I have no idea of what’s going on with you. And not only that, now John thinks I’m also looking at him, and I’m not looking at either of you. [LAUGHTER] So, that’s kind of one simple level and I’m optimistic that maybe we’ll have technology that solves this. The other day, I saw a Kickstarter campaign that a friend of mine forwarded to me for this idea that I kind of have been having for a while but it seems like someone actually created a product for a video camera that is in the middle of your screen, rather than at the top or at the bottom. So, in any case, that’s one aspect of it, but another, I think, important aspect… and people have written about it… is that the communication is just not as effective. You cannot signal in the same way non-verbally as you can signal in a classroom. In a classroom, you have your whole body to express, you can use physical distance with the students, to approach, you can move, there are so many other things at your disposal. And the one to me that still becomes the most important one is that you cannot hear the classroom. People have to unmute… if you have a big enough classroom they have to unmute, and that is just much less natural. There’s no “click this” reaction item to sort of say how you’re feeling. No, you just see it automatically. So in any case, those are some of the ones that I have felt myself, I’m sure that you as educators have also other ones. But of all the channels it’s the clearest one in which in-person seems to me better than online.

John: Are there any other ways in which remote synchronous instruction offers some advantages that we don’t have in the classroom?

Dan: Yeah, for example, writing… we were talking about writing. We can use writing in the classroom. I think many of us have shied away, we’re nervous about having our students with their laptops in the classroom and so on. But writing feels to me such a powerful tool, not only for doing the kinds of things that Rebecca was saying before, that you can bring introverts, or the things that you were saying more generally, John, that you can have more inclusive teaching, but you can do what some people might describe parallel processing instead of serial processing. So if you ask students in the classroom, can you give me an example of X, please write it in the chat, within 30 seconds you have 20 examples if you have 20 students, whereas if you had to do it verbally, you would take one at a time. And that, I think, is much less efficient in that sense. So I think there are many, many reasons why chat, even though it’s controversial, can be powerful. And I know one of the favorite ones that I’m sure you’ve all used is this one-minute paper, where you tend to distribute this piece of paper where they write it and they give it to you. And I’ve always had the intention of using this in my physical classrooms. But many times, it seems like the last minute of class there’s something more urgent that I need to do and then there are logistics there. But with online live teaching, it’s very easy. You can do something as simple as “One minute left in class, please everyone write down what was your main key takeaway from today.” And within a minute, you have a lot of information of what happened in that class.

Rebecca: So a lot of faculty also seem to be under the impression that by being physically in the same space, somehow community is automatically formed. Can you talk a little bit about how community does build in an online synchronous space?

Dan: To me, this was one of the biggest positive surprises I thought of all the aspects of online teaching, this would be the one where it would perform the worst. And I do think that there’s something special that happens when human beings are together in the same space. There’s no question for me about it. But I observed many instructors doing things that I think helped create community in the classroom in ways that I was very surprised. And if I had one general guidance to give is that you just have to be a lot more deliberate about creating community than you are when you are in the same physical space together. And people do it in all sorts of ways. But I think just being deliberate and being intentional about it goes a long way. And just to name three very practical things. One is, if you can open your classroom before class starts, in some way that simulates what you would do in a regular class anyway. Second, if you can stay in your online class for a few minutes after to speak with students. It’s another way of doing it. And then there are of course, things you can do that in a physical and in an online classroom that I think are good for creating communities. If you can learn about your students, so that they know that you know them, that you’ve taken a personal interest in them and that you can bring that to the classroom, that I think is just as true or nine as it is in person. Then there are many other things, there like music lists, and many, many things that people have been very creative about. But those are three that come to mind as fairly easy to do.

John: One of the things I really like about your book is you start by emphasizing the use of a backwards design approach in classes. And you suggest that that be done at the level of individual class sessions or individual activities. Could you give us an example of how you might apply that in a synchronous online session in Zoom?

Dan: Many, many people that listen to your show, I’m sure have heard of backward design and subscribe to it in their own teaching. I think in some way, it’s not that different online in the sense that you think about what are two or three things that I want to make sure that students are able to do at the end of this learning experience. And when you plan your class, you organize it around those things. And one of my biggest challenges as an instructor is time management, it’s like, “Oh my god, can I manage time to do this?”… but what has been very helpful to me is I might have a class plan that says part 1 – 15 minutes part 2 – 23 minutes, and so on. And as I look at the clock, I know where I am in the class plan relative to the time, and knowing what are those two or three things that you want to make sure that everyone gets at the end, allows you to make choices in the class that I think become more likely to succeed. So for example, if you feel like you’re running behind, and there is a particular topic that you think is useful, but not crucial to those two or three things, you might decide to skip it, or you might decide to go a little bit faster, or you might decide not to pause for the discussion that you were planning to have. So, having a concrete set of what you are trying to achieve. I know it sounds obvious, but it wasn’t to me when I first started teaching. I conceived of teaching like, “Well, we need to cover this, and this is what we’re gonna do.” And I still remember attending a one-hour session when I was a PhD student at Northwestern University, from the Director of Teaching and Learning Center at the time, Ken Bain. And I remember him introducing this idea. And that was totally revolutionary to me. Again, I know for many of us, it’s not anymore. But that was more than 20 years ago, and has guided my teaching ever since.

Rebecca: You know, Dan, I certainly subscribe to backwards design, both as a designer and also as a teacher.

Dan: Yeah.

Rebecca: … but I did find myself doing synchronous online being really specific about time chunks, because it’s like, “We need to mix this up, otherwise, we’re just staring at a screen.” And being even more intentional about that. I’d have an agenda and the students can see me going in there like, “No, we’re changing this agenda. [LAUGHTER] on the fly is like “No, this conversation’s good, we need to do this instead.” [LAUGHTER]

Dan: Yes, I guess they’re seeing your design as you are executing it.John, you were asking about some of the advantages of online. I hate to mention this as an advantage. But the reality is, we now have screens, and we can put to the side of the screen things that we want to remember in a way that’s harder to do in a class. So this is like a super tactical tip, but you’re interested in teaching inclusively in the classroom, and you’re worried about voices that haven’t participated that much, you can do something as low tech as: before your class, you write the name of say, three to five students that you want to call on in a piece of paper. And you tape that piece of paper to the right of your screen, right where the participant, the Zoom participant list normally is, or Zoom or whichever other software. And when you see the participant list and you see a few hands up, you look at your paper list and sort of see is one of the hands up belonging to one of the students that I want to call on. And that seems like a simple thing. But it is helpful. I don’t know if you know, but I co-created this application called Teachly, which allows you to track participation and help people teach more inclusively and effectively. And this makes the use of this app even easier, because once you have that participant list, you just put it next to the participant list in Zoom, either electronically or physically. And you have that as a way to do it.

John: And if I remember correctly, on your companion website, you have a picture of a list of names taped to the side of the screen.

Dan: Yes.

John: And we should also mention that there is a really great list of resources associated with the book. We’ll include a link to that in the show notes.

Dan: Thank you. Yeah, the website. Victoria Barnum, I work with her, she put it together. And it was again, a very quick way to try to put resources out there that would be helpful for people. And there’s one page for each chapter of the book.

John: You mentioned rearranging things to make sure you get to the end result. And that’s something I’ve noticed I have to do a lot more with synchronous remote sessions than I did in the classroom. I think partly because I was so used to doing it in a classroom, I had routines where I could get the things more or less quickly with a whole set of activities. But maybe I’ve been over-preparing, but I have a big list of things I want to do. I do polling in the classroom, I have some group work where they’re working in breakout rooms, and I never can get all them done. So I’m constantly, as I’m going through each day’s session trying, “Well, which of these is most important to getting them to that goal,” which is a way I never really had to think about quite as extensively as I do now.

Dan: Yes, though I will say that I was having those same struggles before online teaching, but I also share your experience that they have become more prevalent, and to the extent that it has forced that conversation on all of us. And “Okay, what is the essence of what I want to make sure that students are able to learn in this class?” I think that’s a positive development. One of the things that I discovered very early on in the process of writing a book is that many instructors, and maybe John, this applies to your experience, were saying that compared to their in-person class, when they try to execute that plan, they generally were only able to do about 80% of what they were doing before. Now I don’t know how much of that is still true today. Maybe as we get better with teaching online, we can get that number closer to the 100%. And I don’t know the extent to which it has to do with Rebecca’s questions about verbal communication degrading and making it harder to communicate. But to the extent that that number is even in the ballpark of being true, it does explain why most of us are feeling that need to interrogate more our class trends.

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Rebecca: Maybe it’ll also make us a little more empathetic to students who have time management issues, we’re sure. Zoom has really evolved quite a bit since March, there’s new features and new capabilities and things. Can you talk a little bit about how your own teaching using zoom has evolved over the past year,

Dan: I think as all of us practice has allowed me to become better at it, I remember the first few times, I couldn’t even imagine being able to check the chat at the same time, then I was teaching, I was like, there’s just too much going on here. Now, I won’t say that I can handle any number of comments in the chat. But now I can do it in a way that I couldn’t do it before. And so in some way, teaching online live sessions is an exercise in multitasking, you have to pay attention to a lot of things that are happening in your students in your screen, and so on. And frankly, with as much practice you get better. And I think that’s one thing that’s useful in terms of zoom specific things. I think one feature that has come out relatively recently, which to me opens a whole set of possibilities is the fact that now in breakout rooms, you can set it up so that children’s can choose the breakout rooms. And I think that opens up many interesting possibilities in that perhaps students can choose according to a particular interest that they have, perhaps they can choose relative to position that they might have in a debate relative to a vote they have had in a poll. And that I think, in some way, is incredibly powerful. So that’s one way in which I’ve just began to explore. And I hope by the way, there are other ways of setting up the rooms in the future, that might be good. The second thing, which we haven’t talked too much about the breakout rooms. But I think breakout rooms combined with collaborative documents, such as Google Slides, or jam board or mural, whatever other tools we have, can be incredibly powerful for group work. And that has been an area of constant experimentation for me and many of my colleagues. And that is one area where I think we can make even more progress. And my sense is that we’re going to bring some of that into our physical classrooms, when hopefully someday we come back to our physical classrooms.

Rebecca: I’ve experimented a lot with those new breakout rooms more recently, as well. And even with some mastery learning activities, where we’re doing exercises, and as they complete one, they can move to the next one and moving to different breakout rooms depending on what they’re working on. So they can help each other out and collaborate. And that’s been working really well. And I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback from students about how that’s actually really helpful to like community of people who are actually at the same moment of their learning. So there’s a lot of possibilities there.

Dan: Many, many you can have different themes. There’s one thing we experimented recently, I don’t know if any of you co teach a class, but we were doing this in a program in executive education, we to try to create a more intimate environment, we divided the class into two groups, and each of the group was with one faculty member. And we had asked each of these faculty members to be available for an hour. So for the first half hour, Group A with with the first instructor group, he was with the second instructor, and then at the half hour marked, we swapped them and we thought about Okay, how can we do this easily without people getting lost? And all we did was to swap the instructors from one room to another and all of a sudden you basically had students who are staying with one hour in a breakout room, were able to have a more intimate experience with two instructors. With that, I think would have been hard to do in the physical world.

Rebecca: Nice that we’re getting to the point where we’re appreciating some of the digital rather than scrambling all the time.

Dan: Yes, I think there’s some things that actually worked better.

John: And certainly that ability to mix up groups easily and quickly in different ways. Either having persistent rooms where you have persistent groups working in the same room regularly or mixing it up for different topics or again, doing the self selection gives you a lot more variety and how you mix and match activities.

Dan: It does. My colleague Terry serranos was experimenting with this and I thought that was an interesting use. If you have a teaching assistant and you have your students work on an activity during class, they three or four minutes in silence work on this you can open a couple of breakout rooms and one of them has a teaching assistant and if you would like help from the teaching assistant go to breakout room one if you would like to work alone in a virtual room go to this other room. So I think we’re experimenting in ways that I think are conducive to good learning experiences.

John:
One of the other in recent addition, cism is the ability to let co hosts set up and establish the breakout room. So if you do have a teaching assistant or multiple instructors, if you’re presenting on something, or if you’re working with a group, you don’t have to do the back end arrangement while you’re also trying to do other things. So if that makes it a whole lot easier,

Dan: I totally agree. And sometimes you can multitask. But if you can have one less task to do, that’s probably helpful.

John: You also talk quite a bit about the use of Paul, and could you talk about some of the ways in which people might do Pauling and how polling might be used effectively in instruction,

Dan: I want to first say that I started using polling many, many years ago in my physical classrooms inspired by one of my mentors, Eric, Missouri in the physics department, at our end, I do you have a bias towards using them. But I would say a first approximation, polling allows you to learn what your students are thinking in a very efficient manner. And I’m struck by the number of times where what I think my students are thinking is not what my students are thinking. And so for me, it has been very, very useful tool to center me in the reality of what actually is happening in the classroom. There’s this wonderful book by Derek Braff, he wrote it years ago before the pandemic head, but I still think it’s very applicable. In that book, he describes many, many uses of it. But just in the interest of time here, one way in which I use it is to check for understanding Another way is when I, particularly when there are questions in which I think students might not be so willing to express verbally how they think about something, I want to be able to allow them an opportunity to do that. And then the nice thing about polling is that it can be combined with other things like think pair share peer instruction, or other things that depending on where the poll results, you can take in one direction or the other. So I’m a super, super big fan of it. And if you have listeners who haven’t tried, no matter what your field, I actually highly recommend that you try it. And the best way to do it, it’s just try one or two polls in one of your next classes and see what you learn from it.

John: And it not only helps you understand what students understand or where students are, it also helps students understand what they know, and they don’t know. And it gives them that immediate feedback that would take longer to do in pretty much any other way.

Dan: Absolutely. It also allows them to commit to an answer. So that allows them to more actively participate. The other thing that I find is that I think it emboldened some students to participate. If they my response has 30% of people who voted for the same response, then there’s something here that I’m not going to be the only one defending this use. So I’m going to go out and defend it. So I’m a big fan of it.

John: And once they commit to that, and you tell them they’re wrong, they want to know why. And that’s not something we always say that committing to that answer is really effective. It is it is Dan Ariely. And one of his books talks about a similar experience where he said he presented these results that he did not find very intuitive. And he gave a talk at some firm. And people would say, Well, yeah, that’s exactly what we’d expect would happen. And then he started pulling them, because then you actually got to see what happened rather than them saying, Oh, yeah, that makes sense. That’s what I would have said anyway. But once you got them to commit to it, all of a sudden, they were objecting they were discussing, and they were engaging with material. And I know Eric Mazhar gave a talk at our campus. I mentioned this on past podcast, but he basically asked people to make a commitment deciding what happens to the hall and a plate of metal when you heat it up. And he went through that whole process where students voted, then they discussed it. And then they voted again, he started to go on to the next topic. And people were angry because they wanted to know the answer at he’s used this example at many places. But one of the things he said is, if I was to give a lecture on what happens, the whole and a plate of metal when I heat it up, it would be about the most boring lecture that you could imagine. But now you all want to know the answer. And so motivating curiosity through these types of things and having that engagement and discussion is a really powerful technique.

Dan: There are several components there, right one is questioning for teaching. The other one is, as you said, the commitment that comes from the poll in the other one is the wanting to know aspect that the whole experience created. The other thing about using poll through technology and about paper that we published some time ago with a student Josh Yardley, and one of my mentors at the Kennedy School Richard Zack Houser, where we compare voting outcomes when students voted by raising their hand versus with at the time, we use this clicker devices, and we discovered big differences in the raise of hands versus the polling devices. So I think another advantage of polling electronically is that they tend to reveal more truthful and it sounds like your story from Dan Ariely reveals that more truthfully how tos actually think

Rebecca: it’s probably that anonymity behind the technology, you have to raise your hand. Now everybody knows whether or not you’re right or wrong. Exactly.

Dan: And also, you are seeing other hands being risen. So you might want to side with the majority in a way that you wouldn’t have if you had to do it electronically. I think

John: this is one of the areas where it seems to take me longer when I’m using zoom. Here, we have a campus adoption by clicker, but this works with any type of boring software, students vote on it, then I send them to breakout rooms. And it takes just a bit longer to do that, just because of the time it takes them to go in and out, then it would in the classroom. So I’m not able to get quite as many clicker questions. And so I have to choose them perhaps a little more carefully than I do. And I’m not using the think pair share quite as actively as I would in a classroom, because it’s really easy to say find someone nearby who has a different answer and debate it for a few minutes. And you can pretty easily see when it’s done in breakout rooms, it’s a little harder to do that. So I generally will, depending on the type of question, I’ll pick the time, which should be enough for everybody, but just the time it takes to get them there and back just adds a little more overhead. But on the other hand, I think it’s still working really well. And maybe by being more judicious in which questions I’m asking that might compensate for the additional overhead costs? And

Dan: I’m not sure yes, and it’s interesting you say this, John, because I have had the same experience. And I wonder if one of the drivers of this is that in a physical classroom, the students tend to know the students who are nearby. So by the third or fourth time you do this, they don’t have this awkward bore you. And my sense is that while the default, and probably a good default that we use in zoom to assign students is random. My sense is that part of what’s driving students taking more time is that they’re often put in this breakout room with someone they’ve never met. And the degree to which they can collaborate quickly on your question about the minimum wage, or whatever you’re asking them to collaborate on probably is not as good as if they had already interacted a lot with each other. So wonder, it does have some disadvantages. But I wonder if you might gain some advantages for those quick questions to always assign students to maybe not the same other person, because then if they all have the same answer, we won’t work but maybe a group of three, this is something that I’ve been surprised by as well. In writing the book, one of the things that became clear is that students tended to like break out rooms by enlarge. But the two main problems they saw with them, his instructions, were not always very clear. And that I think is on us as instructors. And then the second one is, we didn’t give them enough time. And I think you’re right that in a classroom, you can sort of see when the sound is dwindling down. But in the virtual world is a little bit more difficult. I think if you use a collaborative tool, like a Google slide, or something like that, you would be able to sort of see where each group is. But that’s for longer breakout rooms,

Rebecca: That’s definitely my feature request is being able to have more information about what’s going on in a breakout room, even working on little activities or projects, I teach longer extended classes. So they might be working on a project for a period of time. It’s like if I was walking around the classroom, I would just know what they’re doing. Sometimes I can see their files and depends what they’re doing. But sometimes we’re doing code projects or things where it’s not quite as easy to do that.

Dan: I think if you had a Google slide that you can see, but sometimes the word doesn’t lend itself to Google Slides. But you’re right, I think it would be great if they could signal that we’re about 80% down. Here’s prejudice. But I don’t know maybe there’s a future version which we can pull students when they’re in breakout rooms. That might be one way of see Yeah, even

Rebecca: being able to chat with the breakout room would do that. In my class, we ended up setting up slack. So we had that kind of better chat experience while they were in breakouts.

John: That’s certainly been an issue. I know my students are getting much more adept when they’re working in breakout rooms for a longer period and summoning me for help. But it’s really common to get called to one of the breakout rooms I’m talking to them. And then they got another call from another group. And it looks like I’m not being responsive, but I’m really just trying to finish a topic in one group. And it can be a bit of a challenge hopping from group to group because the communication ability to break out rooms, as you both said is limited at this stage.

Rebecca: I’ve had people jumping back into the main window for help. And that works better because then if another group or something jumps back into the main window, they can see that there’s a queue.

John: At least then it’s visible. One of the concerns that many faculty have expressed is that they’re interacting with students who they will see typing in chat and they will hear their voices but they never actually seen the students because most of the time, they have to keep their cameras off because there’s other family members around them. Or they’re connecting to Wi Fi in a parking lot next to a fast food restaurant, or they’re working on a mobile device with limited data plans. So that’s perhaps more of a challenge for faculty than it is for the students themselves. But a lot of faculty suffered Warzone fatigue, when they don’t actually get to see their students. Do you have any suggestions on how people can perhaps get past that?

Dan: So when I wrote the book, initially, I was well aware that I was trying to be helpful to as wide of an array of instructors as I could, but I was well aware that different international contexts might make some of the recommendations harder than others. I think, for the reasons that you suggested, it is hard, in some context, to be able to sort of say to students, please use your camera. So even in my environment, I tried to note them to using their camera, but there are legitimate reasons why they might not use the camera. But what I have discovered, I think you might have discovered in your own faculty meetings, and so on, is that sometimes the issue is not the kind of issue that you pointed out for bandwidth connection or anything like that, is that sometimes you just want to be listening without your video showing off. And what I understand that I think that what we do in our teaching at the end of the day can be profoundly human. And I find it to be very hard to create a human learning experience. If most cameras are off my standpoint, it feels like no one is there. But it’s not only from our standpoint, right? It’s even from the standpoint of the other students in the class. I’m the first one who understands about zoom fatigue. And so I’m not above sometimes having a camera of so I can take a break. But I do feel like to the extent that we can motivate that, and perhaps try if we can to reduce the stigma, use a virtual background, do whatever you can, I think it’s better. But again, I’m not at a place to say everyone should do it, I just be like, the experience can be more human and more effective. If we had most of our students on video,

Rebecca: there seems to be a peer pressure component to that classes have personalities. And if there’s a lot of people who tend to have their cameras on all the sudden there’s more cameras on and if it’s a class that just shuts down, everybody’s in shutdown mode, and breakout rooms, where they’re talking to each other tend to make more cameras appear on from my experience.

Dan: Yeah, I suppose there’s a tipping point, I once gave a I think it was kind of like a webinar where it was on zoom. And you know how on zoom, you have 49 little squares, and then you can go to the other 49 and go on in the videos tend to go on the first. So I think they were like 400 people. And they were like 12 with a video on. And to me that just was very, very challenging. And then I’m not expecting people to put their video on because it’s challenging for me, but I’m expecting that it’d be better experience for everyone. If we can look at each other.

John: I agree, it provides more of a sense of humanity, when you can actually see people, it’s not just that array of black boxes. I know in my own classes, and I think many people on campus have suggested that there’s been that sort of peer pressure to have fewer and fewer cameras all the time. And I think that’s made it a little more challenging for everyone perhaps to have that same sense of engagement, encouraging it is certainly valuable. I think,

Dan: I wonder if this is just speculation on my part. But I wonder if in those contexts to the extent that one of the reasons driving it is I just need a little bit of time off the screen. I wonder if maybe there will be periods in the class where you don’t think that video being on is this critical, and you designate them as camera off period. And the default is camera on. I’m not sure whether that would work. But that’s one idea that just occurring to me.

Rebecca: I’ve experimented with things like that a little bit, Dan, in my longer classes, because he wants to be on camera for three hours. I certainly don’t. That’s right. So like between a mix of breakout rooms, and then little activities that they might do on their own. We do have periods where it’s Hey, we’re gonna have a conversation now it’d be really great to like see, you win an invitation to turn them back on but then also for doing something that’s an independent activity, like we’ve established what behavior of the default this camera off so that people aren’t staring at you while you’re writing something down or whatever. And I also turn my camera off and signal that now’s a good time to turn your camera off and then turn it back on.

Dan: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Sometimes we will just need a break in some days, not even a video break. Last semester. I remember there was a class where I can I mean, I cannot feel it in the same way that I feel it in a physical classroom, but I could feel that the students were tired. And so one of our teaching assistants I knew that she thought yoga. And I was like, Alright, I know that this is not going to be the end all. But we’re going to do one minute yoga poses for just one minute to just reset. And even that can bring a little bit of energy to the class. And so my short answer to your question, john, is that I don’t know how we solve that problem. But I do think that it is a better experience if we can to have more students most of the time by video, and I like Rebecca’s gentle now it’s a good time to have the video on as a way of signaling when it’s important.

John: Earlier, you mentioned teacherly as a tool to help track engagement. Could you talk a little bit about teaching?

Dan: Sure. So digital is an application, we created that Harvard University group of us to help faculty teach more effectively and inclusively. When you’re in a class you call on different students. And what you see happening very quickly during the semester is that some voices start dominating the classroom and you don’t even realize it. And then you don’t even realize which voices you’re not hearing from. So the way that teacherly works is very simple. You basically have someone record every time that a student participates. And then the students, all they need to do is to fill in a student profile that information about themselves. And as an instructor, then you get access to the student profiles, which allows you to know more about your students, which allows you to search their profiles to see if there are things that you want to incorporate into your next class. And the other thing that it does is it gives you dashboards, about your participation patterns. And so you can see which students have tended to participate the most which students haven’t participated. And most importantly, you can take action to redress any participation patterns that you want to redress. It’s a tool that’s freely available to anyone who wants to use it, the website, it’s teacherly.me. And you adopt the version, there are two versions, the main version is the one that allows you to have student profiles and so on. And it’s been used at Harvard for the last four years, we have over 100 faculty members using it. And last year, we launched an open version so that anyone anywhere in the world can use it. And we’re very happy to see people from other universities started adopting even people from high schools have people at UC Irvine, we have people ideal, we have people in Chi in Costa Rica, and we have people at different places using it. So if you’re interested, go ahead and try it out. I hope it can be helpful in your efforts. I always cite as an example, the fact that before I started using it, I had 46% of students in my classroom one year identify themselves or female students, and only 36% of the comments in the class were coming from female students. And that was a total shock for me, because I didn’t think that that pattern had emerged in my classroom, but it had and this allowed me to take corrective action, where easy to see where you need to take action. And now I’m proud to say I’m not the only digital user who would say that, but I have at least a gender equitable classroom, I no longer have that pattern that I didn’t even know I have, until I started using it.

Rebecca: We’ll make sure that that link to teach Lee’s in the show notes. And that’s a really powerful way to remind us how much data can actually help us that technology can help us in a lot of different ways,

Dan: knowledge and data can help us my colleague studies, we’re owners and Victoria Barnum are also behind this effort. And many of us will be happy to hear from anyone who’s using it,

Rebecca: That leads nicely into what are some of the things that we can take away from this year of technology exploration, as we hopefully start moving back into physical classrooms?

Dan: So this is a question I’ve tried to give a lot of thought, because there’s an aspect that I think is very natural for most of us, we just want to go back to our classrooms, and all of this stuff of assigning race and all of that, but we just want to be with our students in the space. I think for many of us, there’s so much lost that we felt when that environment was in some way taken away. And there’s so much longing for that environment. Again, having said that, I would say that there is so much that we learned about eating during this time that it would be a pity, if we just go back and only adopt nominal change to what we’re doing. My sense is that most of us will now explore using Office Hours through zoom or a similar technology. My sense is that a lot of us created videos for students to engage before class and we might reuse those videos. And I think that’s all great, and maybe the biggest change is that I think Because of this crisis, a lot of instructors were questioning what they were doing in the classroom much more than they did before. I’m sure you see that in your teaching and learning center. And perhaps that questioning and that rethinking about what they did, will translate back into the classroom. But old habits are hard to die. So I think there’s one risk. My sense is that the risk is that we want leverage enough of what we learn in the online environment. And so here are just a couple of things that I’m thinking would be great to think about. One is that I would love for us to try to reimagine or physical classroom in light of what we learn, what is it that frankly, you’re now saying, Wow, this was better in zoom than in person? And how can you go back to your physical classroom and see if there’s a way to leverage that in your physical room? For me, the things that I’ve discovered in breakout rooms have been incredibly powerful. And I don’t mean, just as zoom breakout room, I mean, how can we make the work of groups visible? And how can I be able to see that and leverage that in the discussion? So there’s no reason why when we’re in a physical classroom, we couldn’t use some of the things that we did with Google Slides or jam board or whatever technology we use collaboratively, and try to leverage them in the same way that we did before. That is one concrete example where it’d be a pity to think oh, no, I did that in zoom because of X or Y. No, I think we can do some of that. I know it’s probably for most institutions is too early to think about it. But I do wonder if there are changes we should do in the infrastructure, both technology and otherwise, of our classrooms that might help us teach more effectively. I don’t know about you, but the fact that in so more teams, so whichever technology use, you had the name of each student in front of you in such a clear manner was super helpful to learn their names. And at the Kennedy School, we use name tents. But those name tents are physical. And I wonder if in the classroom of the future, we could imagine digital ones that had more information than just a student name. By the way, I think a lot of changes should also happen in the online technology. Like why is it that the only thing we see is the student name? Why can we hover and see something about their background or their whatever, it should be overlaying so much information that we currently don’t have very case, those are just some ideas, I’m sure that you have many, many more, and that your listeners have many, many more. But if I could leave with one note of encouragement to all of us is to think about what we learned and what lessons were helpful in the online experience and bring it to the in person classroom, perhaps in the different manifestations, but I still think could be helpful.

John: Those sound like excellent ideas. And it does remind me a while back, one of our first podcast was with someone who is developing an augmented reality app to do facial identification for students in her class. So that way, she would be able to get that sort of information popping up in a physical classroom, certainly, I will miss having all the names visible for each student, particularly when I’m dealing with a class of three to 400. Students, it’s so nice to see the name when they participate right on the box, where you see them speaking in a classroom, it would be a lot harder to remember all those names.

Dan: We’ve been discussing everything about what will we do when we go back to the physical classroom, but certainly one thing that I hope we’re going to do is embrace online learning as part of four ways of being able to teach. And I’ve always been a big believer in the power of blended learning of using each medium to its comparative advantage. And I hope that this puts us in a better position to do better blended learning than we were a year and a half ago, when most of us had not done much of this.

Rebecca: Yeah, many faculty up until this point really hadn’t experienced online learning as a student or a teacher. And so now there’s just a lot more exposure. So those conversations can be more concrete. So we always wrap up by asking, despite the fact that we already kind of asked you this question in a different way. We always wind up by asking what’s next?

Dan: Before I respond to this question, and I should have done this at the beginning. But I just want to thank both of you, john and Rebecca for what you do. I discovered your podcast not too long ago, and I’ve gotten tremendous value out of it just to name a few episodes not to name favorite children or any of that. The episode on using Google Apps was incredibly eye opening and helpful to Even though I have been using Google Apps in my teaching, I still learned it on the episode on statistical simulations was super helpful to me it statistics. And that was a wealth of great ideas. And the episode where you took on the workload issue and how students were perceiving that the workload was greater. I had heard other things on this topic. And this was the best of everything that I’ve heard. So I just want to first just say thank you for what you do, and for the service you provide to the people like me, who are trying to teach more effectively everyday. Thanks, Dan. Thank you, in terms of what’s next, I don’t know. At a more personal level, I want to say that writing this book was a totally unexpected thing. For me, I’d never thought about writing a book about teaching. And this in some way has opened my eyes to sort of another world out there that I wasn’t that much in touch with, and has allowed me to feel a great deal of satisfaction when I hear from someone who said, Oh, I use this in the book. And it was very helpful in my learning. So even though I’m super passionate, and educator, and every time that I see a light in the eye of my student, that’s like the most rewarding thing that I can drive for. I think writing the book gave me a different venue with which to see some, I think positive effect of some of what I was doing. And that was interesting surprise. It’s not like I have three books that are in my queue or anything like that. But I discovered that as an interesting thing. And I’m right now writing another book. Again, I haven’t written anyone before, then this one is not about teaching. And that process has been very, very helpful to me, in terms of teaching what’s next, I would really like to see how we can leverage what we learned during the pandemic to do the best we can to help our students learn. That’s my hope. We’re all of us.

Rebecca: Thanks, Dan. This has been a fun conversation. I feel like we need to follow up in a year and see what happened.

John: I would love to do that thing. And also how many new books come out.

Rebecca: Your turnaround time is really, really good. So between the magic wand and the crystal ball, you have I think your setup well.

Dan: I think that deadline helps quite a bit I have to say but thank you.

John: Well, thank you. We really enjoyed talking to you and we’re looking forward to hearing more

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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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