366. Connecting to Core Values

Posted in authentic learning, classroom community, diversity, engagement, equity, evidence-based practices, first-generation, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, income inequality, learning, motivation, pedagogy, racism, social justice, STEM education, teaching
November 6, 2024

Engaging and motivating students starts but doesn’t end with inclusion. In this episode, Bryan Dewsbury joins us to discuss ways of connecting class content to students’ core values to prepare students to productively engage with their communities as we work with our students to make our disciplines more equitable.

Bryan is an Associate Professor of Biology at Florida International University. He is the Principal Investigator of the Science Education and Society research program, an Associate Director of the STEM Transformational Institute where he directs the Division of Transformative Education, and a Fellow in the John N. Gardner Institute. Bryan is also one of the co-authors of The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching. He is the developer of a free MOOC on Inclusive Teaching, offered through the HHMI Biointeractive and Science and Education Society. Bryan is a highly regarded keynote speaker and workshop leader.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Engaging and motivating students starts but doesn’t end with inclusion. In this episode, we discuss ways to connect class content to students’ core values to prepare students to productively engage with their communities as we work with our students to make our disciplines more equitable.

[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 guest today is Bryan Dewsbury. Bryan is an Associate Professor of Biology at Florida International University. He is the Principal Investigator of the Science Education and Society research program, an Associate Director of the STEM Transformational Institute where he directs the Division of Transformative Education, and a Fellow in the John N. Gardner Institute. Bryan is also one of the co-authors of The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching. He is the developer of a free MOOC on Inclusive Teaching, offered through the Hhmi Biointeractive and Science and Education Society. Bryan is a highly regarded keynote speaker and workshop leader and he recently provided the keynote address at the Academic Affairs Retreat here at SUNY-Oswego at the start of the current semester. Welcome back, Bryan. It’s good to see you.

Bryan: Thanks for having me back. I hope that the welcome back means that I was good the first time. [LAUGHTER]

John: People are still talking about your keynote. They were really impressed.

Bryan: Well, I’m glad you all enjoyed it. How are you all doing?

Rebecca: We’re doing great. Today’s teas are:… Bryan, are you drinking some tea?

Bryan: I’m not right now because I actually did have some for lunch. So I’m on campus right now at FIU, Florida International University, and I had lunch with a colleague, and we did have some tea. So, does earlier count?

Rebecca: Sure. Do you want to tell us what you had earlier?

Bryan: I don’t know if I said this in the last episode I was here, but I grew up in Trinidad. I know I said that part, but when I was growing up, the main tea that at least my mother would buy is Lipton. Like it’s almost to the point where most of us didn’t know there were other types. [LAUGHTER] So you come to America and you see, like 19 labels in the grocery, but of course, because of that, that’s kind of the tea I like the most, because that’s just what I was used to. So when I do see it, I like to have it. I’m not a big tea drinker. Oh, that sounds like sacrilege to the podcast, but when I do drink tea, that’s sort of my preference, and it’s just maybe kind of a nostalgia thing. So that’s what I had.

Rebecca: That makes sense.

John: I have a tea which is new to me. It is a black tea with cherry from one of Rebecca’s local tea shops, and I forgot the name. I had to rush here from a meeting, so I didn’t get a chance to jot down the name. But it’s delicious.

Rebecca: Oh, I’m glad you enjoyed it. I’ve mentioned it before. I think the smell of the cherry teas are really good, which enticed me to buy them. And then I discovered I like, absolutely hate the flavor of cherry teas.[LAUGHTER] And so I gifted them all to John because he likes them. I have just a Scottish afternoon tea today. John.

John: Very good.

Rebecca: Nice and plain, without any cherries. [LAUGHTER]

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss your work on inclusive teaching. Could you tell us a bit about how inclusive teaching has become a substantial focus of your work?

Bryan: Yeah, so it’s a good question to answer, because, how do I put this? I actually don’t think it has. It has, but it hasn’t. Let me explain why. I do talk about inclusive teaching a lot, but the real focus of my work is education that is designed in a way that everyone can access it, and when they access it, they can be their best selves in that experience. And when they are their best selves, then they become this really engaged, loving, thriving participants in an evolving democracy. That in three sentences, if that was three sentences, that’s the thing we are trying to unpack as a group, not just through research, but through communication, through professional development. And so the inclusive part is a step towards that big a goal, because for the thriving to happen, for the access to happen, we have to sort of figure out, what are the barriers that are currently present that don’t allow people to be their best selves when they’re in a classroom, that don’t allow students to access certain institutions, that don’t allow them, even when they do access them, to graduate with the kind of credentials and the kind of mindsets and ways of knowing, ways of being, that allow them to understand how crucial it is for them to be engaged participants in a democracy. So inclusion is part of the riddles that we are trying to solve, but it’s not the end point, and to that extent, we have written a lot about it, I’ve talked a lot about it, but I think it’s important for people to know that our goals are bigger than that, without diminishing inclusive work, our goals are much bigger than that.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about your work in the STEM Transformational Institute in particular? I think it’s interesting in that role, how the role of democracy in your work, in moving democracy forward, fits into STEM because we don’t always hear those in the same sentence,

Bryan: Yeah. Well, yeah, or never, right? So I think that there’s two questions you’re actually answering. So I’ll talk about the institute first. It’s a pretty remarkable group. I’m one of several fascinating individuals who work here on the faculty side. Many of us, like myself, have a departmental appointment, whether it’s biology, engineering, physics, math, chemistry, and some other percentage of our appointment is with the Institute. What that allows is most… all of us, actually… were trained in some STEM discipline at the undergrad and PhD level. And so we can teach the classes. We can teach basic science classes. We can think about that ecosystem and that culture, right? Biology culture, physics culture, but discipline-based education research compared to other fields of research in biology, physics, or any of the above is relatively recent. And I think there is an understandable challenge of traditional STEM scientists in understanding and evaluating the kind of work that people like myself do. And so having a place like the STEM Transformation Institute creates several things. Number one, a community, for those of us who are thinking about education research in STEM to collaborate, to be in community, to ask questions, to write grants together. But also, there’s a mechanism for us when we kind of go through the ladder process for the STEM transformation Institute, to contribute some kind of understanding, to put all packages in perspective. Obviously, when you have this amount of faculty, and I think it’s maybe 20 of us, I can’t remember the exact number, some economies of scale benefits come with that. And so you can write bigger grants, because you have the intellectual capital there, you can have much more collaboration across the different STEM disciplines and with non-STEM disciplines. And then the Institute also has a unit called FIUTeach, which mainly focuses on training pre-service STEM teachers, a pretty robust, maybe the nation’s largest learning assistant program, undergraduate learning assistant program. And there might be some other pieces to it, but those are kind of the three things we tend to be known for on campus. So now, pivoting to your question about STEM and democracy, without taking up your whole podcast [LAUGHTER] giving a history lesson on Enlightenment thinking, the STEM instruction that we are seeing in classrooms today is really a product of maybe, I would say, a mix of the post-World War Two US higher ed-government alliance that kind of proliferated at that time, and the Humboldtian model of graduate education that became popular in the early 1900s. I think John Hopkins may have been the first place that some of that started and then some of the Sputnik-era stuff. And so the way too superficial summary of it is, if you were trained as a subject matter expert in STEM, your role in class was basically to tell people stuff. It wasn’t, perhaps said explicitly, but you were a big gatekeeper to that information. Because, remember, there was no World Wide Web, there was no Google search. In some cases, there wasn’t even really a lot of textbooks, right? And if there were, prohibitively expensive. So the only way you got to find out how big the glaciers were in in the Arctic was to hear the person who got on the boat to go there to talk about it. And there’s some other pieces to it. And I would encourage listeners to read the book Amateur Hour by Robert Zimmerman, because it’s discussed way more specifically and way better than I’m describing it, but there was some gender dynamics to this, because remember the normal schools that existed in the 60s and 70s, and who were the faculty there, and then, because of that association, how college faculty felt about teaching as a skill in and of itself. So there’s a brief period where there was some discussions about college professors getting trained. That died. [LAUGHTER] That didn’t last very long. So okay, I’m saying all of that to perhaps take us even further back to the role that Enlightenment thinking played in the Declaration of Independence, and more specifically, the influence that Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, in particular, who wrote Treatises of Government played an influence in Thomas Jefferson and some of the language that you see in the Declaration of Independence, and I’m thinking of one line in particular: “We submit these truths” to “a candid world…” Book recommendation: Jill Leporie These Truths, some of this is me interpreting her writing. It’s basically kind of saying, Look, man, we have these 13 colonies, we’re gonna try this out. We’re not gonna get everything right. We’ll see what happens and we’re gonna have to keep working at this. And in the same way, the scientific method and Enlightenment thinking comes with some expectations of critique, self critique, public critique, falsification, seeing new evidence and changing your mind on things and all of the above moving towards the sense of whatever you’re trying to understand. It improves over time because you are willing to keep refining and refining and refining. So in so doing, STEM, or specifically, science, has so much to teach us as citizens of a nation that is constantly trying to improve and what an improvement process looks like from a social perspective. And this is what I tell students: same when you collect data and okay, right now, it seems like you can’t disprove your knowledge, however you want to put that, but somebody’s going to come across and collect different data and critique those assumptions and improve on your methods. And that’s how we have vaccines that could be made in like two hours now, right? I mean, I’m exaggerating. So that same humility you have to display when you approach your intellectual pursuit is the same humility that I’m asking you to think about when you are in the public domain, when you are at church, when you are listening to news, when you are making consumer purchases, when you are listening to information come across your television. When you have to absorb all of the endless data that exists out there, that same critical mindset, but also mindset of humility that we ask of you in this culture of science and the culture of STEM, that has transferable lessons to other parts of how you live your life. And I think it’s a very under discussed component of STEM teaching, of how just STEM itself and science itself, the practice of science, is discussed with students. And I guess, Rebecca, what I’m basically said to you in five minutes is that we lean heavily into it, right? We talk about these things openly.

Rebecca: That’s great.

John: And we’re living in a world where we do need an informed citizenry, because there’s so many sources of information out there that are not so reliable, and the development of those critical thinking skills are incredibly important right now, given all the various sources of misinformation.

Bryan: And part of it too is I’m only… I don’t know if I should say only… but I’m 44, so I’m old enough to have grown up in a time when you had to go to an internet cafe to check your email for $20 an hour. We lived through this just remarkable transition of information ubiquity. I mean, I had a Encyclopedia Britannica set from A to Z like my mom used to joke with me, I would read it like a book. That’s how nerdy I was, right? And I remember looking at those 18 books or whatever, and thinking like, how much information is in here. You have that times infinity at the click of a button. I would just wonder, if we don’t pause long enough to reflect on what a sea change that is in terms of having easy and quick access to information. Now, that’s not the same thing as having knowledge. [LAUGHTER] So now the challenge has shifted. So if maybe initially it was being able to access that information and knowing all of the beautiful things that is happening around the world, now it’s how do you sift from all of this to pick out the information that’s useful, that’s credible, that’s reliable, that’s truthful. And I think our teaching and the way we think about teaching needs to shift with that. I don’t know, man, sometimes John, Rebecca, I have all due respect for online classes, this is not like a for or against, but I’ve always taught in person throughout my career, and I just absolutely love it. But as a commodity, and using the class that I teach a lot, intro bio, all of the learning outcomes I have in my syllabus, all of them, you can find a very good lecture on YouTube for free. You’re not gonna find maybe the test bank and all that. I get it, all of that, right? So in terms of accessing the information that we talk about in the class, the tuition and the three credits, and Bryan Dewsbury, I’m not a buyer. You just need a laptop and good working internet. So what is the added value I provide? What’s the added value that the institution provides by asking you to fork over a tuition check and housing and gas money to get to campus and all of that stuff, to physically be here. And I’m really curious, just as a thought experiment, if you were to put that question to all instructors, what will we say? What can we honestly say? Maybe 10,15, 20 years ago, you would say, “Well, how else would they know how DNA replicates? [LAUGHTER] I got a PhD in DNA, so therefore I have the right to tell you, right?” But I don’t think that argument holds as much water anymore, any water. And that, to me, is not perhaps the challenge, is the opportunity of the new information landscape.

Rebecca: It’s interesting that you bring up the encyclopedia in that kind of curated experience, but there’s also curated experiences online. Sometimes it’s hard to find those curated experiences to know that something’s of good quality, but even if it’s a curated experience, and even if it’s an inexpensive or free experience, you still have to have the motivation and the determination and the context, maybe, to put the pieces together to kind of figure it out on your own. [LAUGHTER] If you have something on the side, like you’re trying to do. How many of us have tried to sit and learn and do something on your own? I’ve been sitting and trying to crochet in the round in the evening, and I sometimes get frustrated using a video. [LAUGHTER] I want someone to show me how to do it, like, sit there and I can ask questions, and I want it to be interactive. This is just one example of just a thing that you want to learn from a person and have a dialog and be able to troubleshoot and have someone’s expertise to work through. And you think about the opportunity that you have as a faculty member to curate experience with readings and activities and classroom experiences, and then faculty maybe complain that students don’t engage in that full experience, and sometimes it’s because students can’t quite figure out what’s relevant to the next step or whatever. Can you talk a little bit about some of the ways that you might connect those assignments or other things that you’re doing in your classes to give students that relevance, or to actually answer your own question, like, what is it that we’re doing in our classes that give the students the reason why to come to class or why to do this experience, as opposed to do it on the side?

Bryan: Yeah, great question. Rebecca. So I’ll give you three examples that address your question, perhaps in slightly different ways. To me, another way of asking your question is when we do something in a class or when we have things in our syllabus or curriculum, why is it worth doing? That is a fair question for somebody, especially at the prices college is asking students to pay. That is a fair question to ask. And there are perhaps too many situations, maybe not intentionally, where there is an implicit eat your vegetables approach in that, “because I said it’s worth doing,” right? Like I have the great book, and I’m the PhD, and it’s worth doing, and so therefore you should believe. And I think my first part of my answer to you is to make that “why” more explicit. So we start the class not even talking about bio. First assignment is a reflection assignment that I shamelessly stole from National Public Radio called “This I Believe,” it’s on, it’s a public website, it’s: thisIbelieve.org/guidelines and the prompt asks… I’m summarizing here: “Describe the values that shape your deepest passion.” Before we get into anything technical. I want us to start this community by reflecting on what your why is, because your why, if you understand that clearly, or if you at least begin the mental process of exploring that, that is a big of why you’ll be motivated to be your best self, pursuing the technical piece. This could have easily been, you show up and I give you a bunch of materials, you show me if you know it or you don’t know it, and move on. But forcing you to really ask: “Well, why pre med? Why medicine? There’s so many things you could be doing in biology. There’s so many other great things you can be doing with all the other majors in this school. Why that choice?” So that sort of begins a very particular kind of conversation, because I expressed them my why and why I chose to be a professor, and why that was exciting to me, and why I love this class and love them. The second thing is, when we’re doing certain activities, regardless of what the subject matter is, they are implicit behaviors in how you do a technical task and get a solution that I think in a lot of times in a lot of teaching approaches, it happens as a function of the class, but it’s not made explicit that those behaviors are very important skills that you should be developing as you go forth as a technical expert. So when you put students in groups, for example, it might make things easier to grade, because now you’re just doing x divided by four or whatever assignment, there’s that piece. And I understand, like, you know, what the active learning literature says about group work and things like that, but what you’re really doing, my friends, is you’re teaching people how to work with difference. If you set those groups up right, If you talk about what positive group behaviors look like, what implicit biases look like, you are preparing them for a world of work, a world of engagement, where they will be in one type of group or the other. I can’t think of a profession… well, I could think of one, but not that many… where you will essentially be solo and so some of those group behaviors that really makes group work effective, like active listening, respecting silence, by hearing different opinions, being willing to accept critique, being able to give respectful critique. We have whole discussions about what that’s like and why it’s important. So it’s not just going to groups, and we hope everything works out. It’s going to groups, and this is a thing, and in order for this thing to go, well, let’s actually have a discussion about why that thing matters. The third part of my answer is, at selected points in the semester we try to make, or not try, we make very clear the ways in which scientific practice intersects with society. And this is where I think people get a little confused, perhaps, about what we mean by inclusive or equity-minded teaching. I remember once I saw on Twitter, and I know Twitter is what it is, right? But somebody put a statement that said, what is so inclusive about the mass of boron? [LAUGHTER] And I get where they’re coming from. I get why they would say that, but it, of course, betrays a misunderstanding of what we mean when we talk about inclusion in a classroom, there’s a lot of technical things that we discuss in an intro bio class, and not everything we talk about, we sort of bend over backwards to then relate it back to some social context. But there are things that do allow themselves to make that connection very, very clear. And the connection basically comes down to: science doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Science is done by people, and the people is human beings who ask those questions. Human beings ask those questions, and human beings decide which questions to ask. They decide which questions are the important questions to ask. They decide when they ask those questions, and they carry out studies, they decide how those studies are conducted. And they don’t only decide how those studies are conducted, they interpret what data they collect from those studies, and they write the narrative that comes out of that analysis, that comes out of that interpretation. This is not to demonize any particular individual who does anything on any one of those steps, but it is to point out the reality that since the bridge between the existence of nature and life and life science and our understanding of how this works, if the bridge is the human being or human beings plural, who help us to understand that, then by definition, the social positioning of that individual, of those individuals, may sometimes color how we come to understand the world as a collective. And we have slight examples of this: that they took, what 10, 15, years to ask what female chimpanzees did, because only men were in the field, right? And then we have very, very dark examples of this when we thought eugenics was a real thing and we were sterilizing disabled people in North Carolina. So throughout history and even today, we are saying to students that you will go forth to be some wonderful whatever you plan to be, whether it’s medical doctors, whether it’s health professionals, public health, whether it’s research scientists, whatever it is. And there will come a time when you will be a decision maker. You will be the one they come to to try to understand, how do we reduce COVID rates? How do we keep people safe? And when you get this, it’s important for you to understand that COVID doesn’t care who it infects, the differential rates of deaths and the differential rates of infection is not because the virus itself made that differentiation. It is simply following a pathway that was already constructed along social lines. And so if you really want to get at the root of the problem, you have to understand how those social lines were constructed. I’m not saying you have to get a PhD in Sociology, but I’m saying I have to know enough to be dangerous. And so that’s the argument that’s made to talk about Flint, Michigan when we talk about the effect of lead on the nervous system. That’s the argument we make to talk about Tuskegee when we talk about the study that took place there. And it’s not to say, and this differentiation is important, This is not to just say that “Hey man, America is a terrible place. We’ve done some really terrible things.” I mean, we have done some terrible things in history, but what the goal of that discussion is to say “but we can learn. We can do better.” We have examples of looking back and saying “That was a mistake.” As a social science researcher, every study I do, I apply for Institutional Review Board approval because those things happened. It’s unfortunate that those things had to happen, but now we know better. So it’s important that that piece is there because sometimes, unfortunately, the narrative or the interpretation of having these discussions is you’re just trying to make people feel bad. You’re just trying to make America to be this terrible place. And no, no, it’s a great place, because of the capacity to learn. So anyway, I hope that answers. Those are the three parts all woven together, Rebecca. I hope that’s fine.

Rebecca: Thank you.

John: So. much of what you’re discussing there is just finding ways of helping students connect what you’re teaching in classes to their own lived experiences, rather than just seeing it as this isolated material separate from the societal context in which it exists?

Bryan: Yes. Yes would be the short answer to that. And just to get into the specifics, right? I mean, I think sometimes a listener might hear like, “Okay, now do I have to go and find out every single student’s life specifics and find something that connects to that? And again, I’m not saying that that’s what you have to do. I think it’s good, and I appreciate that some people have very large class sizes, so sometimes some of these strategies can become overwhelming, depending on what your load is. But there are low-lift ways to get a sense of who your students are, where they’re coming from, what was the class they took before yours? If you’re at an institution where there’s sort of a very set matriculation pathway. If most of them are coming from local high schools, there are ways for you to get at least a summarized sense of the students that you teach. The other piece to it, though, is not just like, what’s your community, let me make it relevant. The classroom is also a place where you hopefully get introduced to an understanding of the world that you may not have encountered had you not come to that classroom. Part of the beauty of teaching is the ways in which we open students up to new experiences, new ways of thinking, including ways that may challenge the ideologies and ways that they had before they walked in the door. I’m not saying that this is what you were doing, John, but sometimes people think about culturally relevant teaching, and it gets trapped in a “if you’re from this neighborhood, let me talk about this neighborhood.” It’s like, well, no, it’s way more than that. It’s way more than that. One of the blessings of a country like this is the amount of diversity there is across so many lines, and you need to have to physically live next to the diversity, to know and learn and appreciate and just see its beauty. This is another place that college does it just through the classes, through texts, through learning, through studying, through inquiry, you learn more and more about the world and yourself. So it’s a little bit of both.

Rebecca: Along the same lines, one of the great things about being a faculty member is that same thing, that the students bring some really great experiences that we haven’t had either, and allowing them to bring their stories and experiences into the classroom allows us to continue to grow and learn on a constant basis too. It’s great when they can bring those things too.

Bryan: I mean, especially when you grew up going to internet cafes to use the internet. At this point, they’re coming in with high-speed computers in their pockets, right? [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yeah.

Bryan: They grew up in a completely different environment. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So you started off explaining how you get to know your students a little bit at the beginning, you start not even talking about biology in a bio class. Can you talk a little bit, maybe further down the line in the same class, and how civic engagement may enter into that same course later down the line?

Bryan: Yeah, so and this, you can perhaps consider this more social context than civic engagement, but I just so love this assignment and love the kind of discussions that come from it. We talk a lot in bio class about DNA as a molecule and all of that stuff, and it’s chemical structure. But we also spent some time talking about what led to the discovery of DNA. It’s a fascinating story. It’s a story about a time when there were not that many high-resourced labs in science. And so you can look up the book Double Helix, if you want to get a fairly brief version of it. But there’s also a story where if you were a woman in science, how the community responded to you, was very different to how they do now, although they’re pretty well documented cases where, not in all cases, that have changed, right? And so it does open up a conversation. First, we talk about the lack of credit that Rosalind Franklin initially did not get, but then we also talk about where we are now. There’s a really good documentary called Picture a Scientist solely focused on that issue, and we have discussions about why those things matter, and the role that power and hierarchies and power dynamics play in the experiences that people have. And I really want to emphasize, this is not to say I’m preparing you for a doom and gloom world and everything will be terrible. I’m preparing you for reality. And the reality is, I certainly wish for you a lot of great experiences, and I think you will mostly have that. But the reality is there’s still a lot of work to be done for us to get to the place of equity that we claim we have, [LAUGHTER] and the discussion of the gap between what we think we have and where we need to be is really my invitation to you to help work on that problem, but also to be aware of what may come when you get there. And I hope listeners take my comments in that spirit. So to the extent, Rebecca, that’s sort of an example of what you might encounter when you get out there in society. That’s one example of a conversation that takes place.

John: In addition to the issue of trying to make STEM classes more engaging for students, one of the problems that we see is that there’s some pretty significant differences between the DFW rates for first-gen students, for Pell eligible students, and students from historically minoritized groups, which is tied to differences, in large part, in the quality of education that they receive, and that serves as a barrier where many students enter into college planning to go into a STEM field, but end up not being as successful and then either transferring into other disciplines or leaving college altogether. What are some ways in which we can overcome the opportunity gaps that students face if they haven’t come in with as strong of a preparation for success in STEM?

Bryan: So a couple years ago, I published a paper about inclusive teaching methods and active learning methods, and a big crux of that paper, we talked a lot in the paper about what we did in the class and how much we cut content to really focus in on this sort of very social relationship-driven model of teaching. And in that paper, we not only reduced the DFW rates that you just described, John, but also when that group went on to future classes, they did fine, not just fine, they actually did better comparatively to peers from other sections. And some people, perhaps who hadn’t read the paper yet, kind of assumed that when we said everybody did fine, it meant everybody got As. And that is not the truth. We have a pretty high pass rate, but the class size average over the years that I taught it was in the 150s, it was a large class, and then maybe 10 or 15 years, there wasn’t a ton of students who… we had a very diffuse assessment model, a lot of quizzes, a lot of case studies and other stuff like that. And so what I’m saying that to say is that I don’t want people to feel that, for students who may come into your institution, who had 18 years of a social structure that wasn’t set up to engineer the best out of them. It is very difficult to right all those wrongs with one semester of an intro class. Now, at the same time, I can hold multiple truths in the same conversation, it is all well and good. In fact, this is just my personal belief, I don’t know if everybody shares it. I do believe, no matter what your circumstances are, even if they were really terrible, that within you there’s your potential to be great at science. There’s a potential to be great at biology. The question then becomes, given all of that history, what is needed to get you to a place where you can see that and take the reins of the chariot and go be your best self. And sometimes that may mean half of that first semester. Sometimes that may mean two semesters of Cs or failing a class and coming back. But the important thing is, I start from a place of the potential is there. I don’t know when the light will start to shine, but I’ve been doing this job for now almost 11 years, and I’ve been with students It took years for that light to switch. So what would happen, I can just tell you, on the ground with that intro bio class, for some of them that turn around point came like nine weeks in, and it’s one of the most satisfying and gratifying experiences as a teacher. When you see that student is like, “Ah, it’s not that bad.” And of course, by that time, there isn’t enough assessment for them to magically get an A between mid-October and December, but they might get to C plus, might get to B minus. They have to really nail a bunch of stuff. But here’s the difference, when they start the second semester, not with me, when they start the second semester of the institution, your now a different person. You’re not the same person who came in first year not sure of yourself, not confident, didn’t think you belonged in science, had a fixed mindset about math and all of that stuff. No, no, no. Now you know, yes, if I have the right strategies, I have proven to myself, and some of this is coming straight from motivation theory. I have evidence that if I take the right approach, good things will happen. And that’s why I brought up this paper. That’s why those C pluses in first semester turn into As in their second semester, because you’re not dealing with the same student. So that in a nutshell, is my lesson, in that there’s a whole discussion to be had about primary and secondary education. There are brilliant people having those discussions, read everything. Diane Ravitch writes, that’s a whole discussion we need to have in this country. There is also a role that institutions of higher education can play in that discussion, but specific to people who are privileged to teach classes, especially at the introductory level, that to me is a mindset I would like to have, assume the best, assume that it’s there, and know that the work that to teach, if I had to define teaching, to teach, is a degree to which you can walk a student from their current state of readiness to that place where they see what their potential can really be. That, to me, is the act of teaching, the content is part of the mechanism of the vehicle that drives that process. But teaching is a process, and that’s the process,

John: So encouraging a growth mindset is really critical to this process, it would seem. But the other thing is, you’d have to design your course in a way where you can’t use too many high-stakes assessments, especially early on where students could get deterred. You need to provide some mechanism so that students can, by the end of the class, get those Bs or C pluses and so forth, right?

Bryan: So, yeah, I mentioned earlier in this conversation a diffuse assessment model, right? And that’s done on purpose. So the psychology behind the high-stakes assessment, especially ones that are early. If it’s super high stakes and very early and they don’t do well a couple issues: One, mathematically, it makes recovery very difficult, you’re already down to a B minus after exam 1, you don’t have much wiggle room to even pass the class; the second thing is, and this is why I like to talk about teaching as a process and a relationship, because there’s a psychology to it… there’s a psychology that you need to understand, especially with first-year students, and what it means to transition into this environment. We don’t have enough time on this podcast today to summarize all the literature on emerging adulthood, on sense of belonging, on John Henryism, that all these things that are invisible, that are in the air and that even the students themselves may not be able to articulate, but it’s happening. And so what it means to be a teacher and be able to read the subtitles and see how certain behaviors are indicative of some of those processes happening, that’s the challenge. So your high-stakes exam, especially that first one, could be simply measuring the presence of those psychologies, not actual ability, not actual learning. You can just be capturing the fact that somebody is scared to death. You could be capturing the fact that somebody is carrying the weight of a generation at home and you must be a doctor, you must be this, you must be that. And that’s high stakes. This is playing out on that exam. They’re never going to say it to you that way, but it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. [LAUGHTER] And so part of the diffuse assessment model is to say, “Look, I am going to do my best to design assessments that accurately reflect learning, and the stakes are going to be high enough that I think you will take this seriously. But the goal of these assessments is to provide both of us, myself and you, the student, information that gives us some sense of where you are in this learning journey. And when we get that information, depending on what it says, we can have a discussion. We can have a specific discussion.” And I can say things like you do really well on recall questions, but you seem to struggle when I say explain. You have all of the language of this process in there, but it’s actually not coming together as a story. I can give you feedback that’s very, very specific, because with the sort of fixed/growth mindset dichotomy, giving you things that are changeable is what gives you an opportunity, it gives you an avenue to change your behavior. If I just said you need to try hard, what does that even mean? So I hope I’ve been underscoring the deliberateness of everything, everything, even from the way feedback is given, to how and why we set up exams in certain ways and how much we do. It’s all based on, again, this philosophy of teaching is a process.

Rebecca: I think we often use the word specific and say specific all the time, but you’ve just illustrated what you mean by specific, which is really helpful. So it’s really fun to talk, and we could talk forever and ever and ever, because there’s lots of fun things to talk about, and you’re teaching such interesting classes in interesting ways. But one thing we want to make sure we get to before we wrap up today is the asynchronous class that you’ve developed on inclusive teaching. Can you talk a little bit about this course and who the target audience is?

Bryan: Yeah, so this course was a collaboration between my program and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Biointeractive Program. It is based on a paper I wrote back in 2019 called “Deep Teaching in STEM.” The secret is that, yes, it says STEM because it went to a STEM journal, but the things we talk about in that paper really applies to all teaching. The other secret is that there’s nothing in that paper that’s particularly new. It’s just that we in STEM had ignored it for so long, and so perhaps that’s why we felt a need to re-center some of those ideas that, oh, by the way, it might be good to build relationships with your students and know who they are as people, and not just treat them as student ID numbers that need a grade. So that paper talked about five components that goes into what we call deep teaching, and those components then came to represent a module on that massive open online course. One of the key features of that course we wanted to really model was the very sort of introspective, spiritual, even soulful, way we think about teaching and we are asking listeners and participants in that course to be reflective. We wanted to model that in how the course itself was delivered. So we were very selective in who we asked to guest lecture, and the nine lectures are very, very long. We’ve infused at the end of each module. So there’s a main module, and there’s sort of four sub-modules that represent each component. Every main module, one of the sub-modules is an artistic piece. So we commissioned a painting. We had poetry, spoken word, even a Negro spiritual, and it was not random. They all thematically connected to what the module is talking about. And it was built in a Canvas shell, which is, as a MOOC, it’s free for anybody to access. But also what we’ve done is we’ve been working with a lot of universities who uploaded it onto their own Canvas shells and running faculty learning communities with a local facilitator going through the LMS. And the course has many practical, specific things. You want to think of a reflection in your course, here are some examples of prompts. So you want to have more transparency in your assignment, consider Mary-Ann Winkelmes’s framework. But what it also has, especially because of the nature of the way the course was set up, just a lot of moments for reflection. We didn’t want it to feel like a worksheet. You just go through this, do that. Go through this, do that. Like, when you hear somebody talk about motivation, like, think about when you were motivated, what made you motivated, and sit with that reflection, because that sort of empathetic approach is what really is going to make the course impactful for you. There are many 1000s of people who’ve just done it by themselves and have found a lot of meaning for it, but we’re really having a lot of fun seeing universities do it as a FLC on their campus. So that’s a nutshell. I think the web name is a little long for me to remember, but I know if you just Google inclusive teaching biointeractive, it should be the first thing that pops up.

John: And we’ll include a link to it in the show notes as well. I see that you have two books coming out in a little over the next year. Could you talk a little bit about those?

Bryan: Yeah, so it’s actually three, but one is not in the next year, right? So the two that I’m working on, one I’ve been collaborating with just a wonderful group, Peter Felton, Isis Artze-Vega, Dan Bergen, and Leo Lambert. Leo nd Peter wrote a book a few years ago called Relationship-Rich Education, which is just phenomenal, and that has led to a few follow ups. So we’re working on one of the follow ups to that project, so more details on that soon when that’s a bit further along. The other book, I’ve been collaborating with a colleague on campus. We’ve been interviewing people about telling personal stories, about times when they either felt a sense of belonging or have not felt a sense of belonging in STEM, and as somebody who comes from a storytelling background, from a literature background, the use of this discipline and this art form and this communication style, I think, is an underused approach in science in general, especially when you’re trying to convey something like that. And so I’m just very grateful for those people who’ve been willing to share their stories with us. So that will come on as an anthology, and, I guess dates TBD, but pretty excited about it.

Rebecca: Those both sound like really exciting projects. So we always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”

Bryan: Well, I would say what’s next, like my most sort of next next, so I’ve been part of a group, a Gates Foundation funded group that has worked pretty hard over the last couple of years doing a landscape analysis that trying to identify what are some of the things that institutions around the country are doing to do equity-minded practices, especially in the intro classes. And that landscape analysis incorporated a lot of things like document analysis, interviews, data mining, and things like that, and we are launching the findings of our analysis as a report on October 25 in Washington, DC, at FIU, in DC’s campus there. It’ll be a free report. Obviously, there’ll be a Zoom link for anybody who wants to attend, and the report will be made available on our website. And we’re pretty excited about it, because there just is a lot of institutions doing great things out there. And to this point, we hadn’t seen a place where those great things were just collated in one place. And the obvious next step from this project is to take those great practices and say, “Okay, now that we know what’s good and who’s doing it, and how it’s worked, where they were, can these things all simultaneously exist in one institution? Can we learn from all of these best practices and say, if we have a goal of success for all on our campus, this is a place where we can look to to get some real both like comprehensive but specific ideas on how to make that happen. So that’s October 25 and pretty excited for that launch.

Rebecca: That sounds really exciting.

John: And we’re looking forward to hearing more about these books once they are ready to come out. Well, thank you. It’s great talking to you again, and we look forward to more conversations in the future.

Bryan: John, it’s always a pleasure. Hopefully next time in Oswego.

John: That would be great. [LAUGHTER]

Bryan: Alright, man, thank you.

John: Thank you.

Rebecca: Thank you.

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

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

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