454. Designing Impactful College Courses

Show Notes

• Bonem, E. M., Guberman, D., & Levesque-Bristol, C. (2026). Designing Impactful College Courses: Applying Self-Determination Theory to Unleash the Potential of Autonomy-Supportive Learning Environments. Taylor & Francis.
• Kuh, G. D., & Levesque-Bristol, C. (2023). Student-centered pedagogy and course transformation at scale: Facilitating faculty agency to IMPACT institutional change. Routledge.
• Purdue University’s Instruction Matters: Purdue Academic Course Transformation (IMPACT) program
• Lang, J. M. (2021). Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning. John Wiley & Sons.
• The Grading Conference
• Mentzer, N., Asad, A. M., Koehler, A. A., Mohandas, L., & Mammadova, E. (2025). Engaging Learners Everywhere: The Interactive Synchronous HyFlex Method. Purdue University Press.
• Student Pedagogy Advocate Program at Purdue
• Center for Self-Determination Theory

Transcript

John: Student motivation is enhanced when the framework of self-determination theory is used to design courses that support student autonomy. In this episode, we discuss a new resource designed to assist in the development of such courses.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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John: Our guests today are Daniel Guberman and Chantal Levesque-Bristol. Daniel and Chantal have leadership roles at the Center for Instructional Excellence at Purdue University. Chantal is the Executive Director and Daniel is the Assistant Director for Student-Centered Pedagogy. They are the authors, with Emily Bonem, of Designing Impactful College Courses: Applying Self-Determination Theory to Unleash the Potential of Autonomy Supportive Learning Environments, which was recently released by Routledge. Welcome, Daniel and Chantelle.

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

Chantal: Thank you. Thank you so much.

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

Daniel: Yes, I have a Bengal spice tea, which is basically like chai without the caffeine, as I understand it.

Rebecca: That sounds nice. How about you, Chantal?

Chantal: Yeah, I just made some tea. I have some green tea with some notes of apple spices and oranges.

Rebecca: That sounds nice.

John: Very nice.

Rebecca: How about you, John?

John: And the Bengal spice, I think, is the first time we had that on this podcast.

Rebecca: I think yeah, it might be a first time. It’s special. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I have an English breakfast tea today.

Rebecca: Okay, and I think I have a Scottish breakfast that’s mixed at this point. I think with an English afternoon, it’s all mixed together. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, as we approach late morning, it sounds like a good brunch time. So, we’ve invited you here today to discuss Designing Impactful College Courses. Can you tell us a bit about how this book project got started?

Chantal: Yeah, so really I’m going to go back to a first book that I wrote on the Impact program, was published in 2021 by Stylus, which is now Routledge as well, that was really talking more about the structure of the Impact program and a lot more for faculty developers, and this book is sort of the sequel to that, but really looking a lot more about how you would design specifically a course, and this one is a lot more for faculty themselves or instructors, people that are actually teaching that are really interested in understanding how to use the principles of self-determination theory to design courses that are autonomy supportive and self-determined.

Daniel: And maybe I’ll add a little bit about the Impact program, for those who don’t know, which is Purdue’s course design program, which has been going on for over 15 years now. I’m a few weeks away from my 10-year anniversary at Purdue, and Chantal is a few years longer than that. It predates both of us, and it’s a semester-long course design program based on a faculty learning community, and it’s done in coordination with our teaching center, libraries, and teaching technologies. So, we get groups of faculty, we break into groups of three to five, and they each work with members of those three teams, and it varies every year on what our capacity for support is, but we’ve worked with over 600 faculty across this time, and so we’ve had semesters where over 90% of students at Purdue are taking a course that went through this program, so it’s been a really impactful program, pardon the pun. It’s a good name to just like constantly have puns, although unfortunately, whenever I write the word impact out, I write it in all caps, so that I need to go back and edit all my documents. So it’s been this really long and successful program, and we presented on it, and we recognize that a lot of faculty, instructors, graduate students don’t have access to this type of program, and even instructors at Purdue, for various reasons, can’t commit a whole semester; their schedule doesn’t work. So, we’re really excited to bring a lot of these lessons and ideas to a broader audience.

Rebecca: It’s incredible to have such an impactful program, certainly reach so many people, and to build on that in your book. One of the things that we observed as we were just even skimming the table of contents is that the organization seems to have something in common with a philosophy or a strategy that instructional designers often recommend, which is backwards design. Can you talk a little bit about the organization of the book, what it does have in common with that strategy?

Daniel: So, backwards design was at the core of the book, and the program, that program followed a backwards-design structure even before Chantal arrived and brought self-determination theory, and we’ve kept that. Probably the biggest change is that we brought this theory as the foundation, which in a lot of backwards design work does not have a sort of core theory that is structured to follow throughout everything that you’re doing. So we start with the theory, and then following traditional backwards design, for those who don’t know, we talk about the outcomes and objectives of a course, then the assessment, which we frame around grading specifically, because we found a lot of traditional course design approaches talk about assessment, but don’t tie it to grades, and then at the end they just sort of throw some numbers on all of it, and it feels like that can undermine the connection between the assessment process and what students are experiencing. And then we go to assessment types, which we have chapters on a variety of different assessment types, and also activities and core structures that are basically from a backwards-design perspective, going from what will students know or achieve by the end of the class, how will you know, which is the assessment part, and then how will you get students to the point where they can demonstrate that effectively. So that’s sort of our broad picture overview of the book, and we think it makes a lot of sense for someone who’s designing a course, which isn’t to say we view it as a linear progression, but rather we’ve tried to structure it in a way that you can skip around and you can go back, so you might get to thinking about, “Oh, I really want to bring experiential learning into my class, and that means a group project, which means I need to go back to assessment, “so we don’t think of backwards design as a linear process, but more sort of like a spiral that you move through.

John: And it may nudge people to think about it, because faculty don’t always think about course design using a backwards-design perspective. In fact, it’s often the opposite, but in addition to having this backwards- b design structure through the book, after going over the basic theory, you also have a consistent structure for each of the chapters. Can you describe this structure and talk a little bit about why you chose this particular organization?

Daniel: So each chapter we start with a vignette that comes from a student perspective, because it was really important to us to think about how students are really a central part of the learning environment, and they’re often omitted from the course- design process, and this has been something we’ve been doing throughout Impact for a number of years, is better integrating students into that process. The vignettes are based on true stories from students, but adapted a little, actually, a lot of the students, they came up with overly positive stories all the time [LAUGHTER], we’re like, “Tell us some of the negative ones too.” So then, after the vignette, we have an intro to what the topic is. So some people might not be familiar with what we mean by the experiential learning, or even when we say, like, this is a chapter on lecturing, like, what does it mean to write a chapter on lecturing or class discussion, then we get into the basic needs, and we talk about how the basic needs can be met or hindered in each of these contexts. Then we always follow the same order from competence, autonomy, and relatedness. So I’m sure I’ll talk more about what those mean in a bit. And then after that, we go into case studies. So one of the really fun parts about writing this book, is we got to go back to some of these 600 faculty members who have worked with this program, and we interviewed them and had really meaningful discussions to understand the ways that they’ve actually applied it, because as anyone who’s worked in a course- design program will know, there’s a lot of work that gets done in the design process, and then students come into the picture, and things change, and that’s important. We don’t want someone to design a course, and then students arrive, and they’re like, “Well, you are not viewing the course in the way I do.” So, we want courses to adapt. So, it was really cool to hear about how these courses adapted, and how approaching course design through a self-determination theory lens helped them make those adaptations. After the case studies, we have a series of guiding questions to help someone get started, and we have our short reflections about each of those, inspired by James Lang’s Small Teaching, which I feel like everyone knows by this point. We have a section called Starting Small, which are designed to be small things you can do, because while it’s a course design book, we realize not everyone is going to approach it thinking I’m going to redesign my entire course from the ground up, and again we have some sort of reflections and ideas about what that might look like, and then we just end with some short takeaway bullet points.

Rebecca: You’ve hinted at this already a little bit, but can you talk a bit about who your intended audience is for this book.

Chantal: This one is really for anyone who’s teaching a college course, or anyone who’s even interested in teaching. So we could be thinking about graduate students, for example, that may be asked to teach a part of a course or an entire course with little preparation. This book would really help them understand how it is that they can really approach teaching from a really a deep perspective in really understanding students, which I think is very important, as Dan mentioned, that we start with a vignette, which brings in the student voice first and foremost to really think about them as part of the learning and teaching endeavor. So also it could be for someone who is working at an institution where they don’t have their own faculty development program, or it could be for some faculty developers that do not have a very established structure at their institution. How can they talk about teaching and learning in a different way to their administration for example, and also I would say anyone who’s interested in self-determination theory and the teaching and learning principles of self-determination theory and autonomy-supportive environments, and how would that look like in a course-design environment?

John: So, you mentioned self-determination theory, and we talked about this a little bit on earlier podcasts, but it’s been a while, and many of our listeners may not have caught that, so could you talk a bit about what self-determination theory is? Because it does serve as an organizing framework throughout this book.

Chantal: It does stop me if I start talking about it too long. That’s definitely my passion. I say this is how I’ve been raised in terms of an academic, so my research area is also in motivation, and this is as Dan mentioned. When I came to Purdue University in really the impact program was just starting, it was really something that I brought in terms of thinking about how we design courses. So to summarize really quickly, the core principle of self-determination theory is the existence of three basic psychological needs, right, that all humans have. So, it’s a humanistic theory of motivation, and it’s about competence, autonomy, and relatedness, which is how we structured the book. And they’re really baked into every chapter. And competence is something that we understand very easily in higher education. It’s this idea of developing your skills, mastering, becoming proficient, but often we focus very much on competence to the exclusion of the other two needs, and they’re also very, very important. And when we talk about autonomy, which is probably one that is a little bit harder to understand, autonomy does not mean independence or doing whatever you want to do, right? That’s not what it is. It’s not about that independence, it’s about choice and volition, and really empowerment, and really feel like you are sort of the agent of your own development, and that applies for students and for instructors as well. And then relatedness, which is very important, which is the sense of connection with other human beings, with the instructor, with other students, it’s very relational, but also we think of it as relationship with the content that we’re covering as well, which also is highlighted in many of the chapters, and when we are creating environments where the satisfaction of the needs is met, where those basic needs are satisfied, then we see a progression toward more self-determined types of motivation, so from extrinsic type of motivation to more self-determined or intrinsic type of motivation, and this is really one of the very important contributions of self-determination theory, is to think about extrinsic motivation in four broad categories of extrinsic motivation. So, you may be familiar with extrinsic motivation as doing something for the rewards or to avoid the punishment, which is only one type of extrinsic motivation. So, extrinsic motivations are about means to an end, you’re doing something to achieve an outcome, but there’s different levels, so after external regulation, which is really doing something to attain a reward or to avoid punishment. So the typical understanding of grades would really fit within that type of extrinsic motivation. You’re trying to get an A because that’s how you get the rewards, and you go to class because you want to avoid losing points, that’s really the type of extrinsic motivation that we’re talking about in external regulation. We move towards still something that is not self-determined, but we think about introjection, which would be doing something because you feel guilt or shame, so you’re trying to avoid feeling those sorts of feelings, so it’s more internalized, but it’s still not self-determined, right? It’s an internal pressure, it’s perceived as an internal pressure. And then the next two types of extrinsic motivation are more self-determined. Identification, for us, and we talk a lot about this in the book, is sort of the sweet spot for us in academic endeavor. It’s really when you start to understand the value of your behavior and how it makes sense, how it’s meaningful, how it’s important to you, so that’s really how identification is formulated. And although you’re trying to do a behavior or you’re trying to still achieve an outcome, the outcome is perceived to be important and valuable, and then the last form is integration, which is about an alignment with the self, so it’s something that is so in line with yourself that you’re doing it because it’s part of who you are. So, I think this is important to keep in mind in terms of the different types of extrinsic motivation. I’ll stop here, see if Dan has anything to add.

Daniel: And what I’ll share is my background. Emily and Chantal are both psychologists by training. My background is as a music historian, so very different. But when I came to Purdue and was introduced to this theory, I just found it really compelling. So, I think this is what we’re hoping readers from a variety of disciplines will find, is that they read about the theory, they hear about the theory in places like this, and they find that same connection when you think about, “oh yeah, I can see examples of myself in each of these types of extrinsic motivation, and I can see how in environments where my basic needs are met, I feel more internally motivated to do something.” If you start to think about it, you really start to feel that, like,”oh, this resonates, it works, it’s not this abstract theory that, like, we hope will apply in our class, that we can feel it throughout our everyday lives,” and then it’s a matter of how can we apply this meaningfully in our classes as well.

Rebecca: I think many faculty experience moments in their classes where maybe particular material or concepts are not overly exciting or interesting, but maybe very foundational, or maybe students are in a general education class and it’s hard to get motivated around that. What are some strategies for helping students develop motivation to develop their knowledge and skills in these areas that maybe we deem as important, but maybe initially they don’t.

Daniel: Yeah, I think that’s such a great question that gets at the core of the book, and one thing that I think is really important, and one of the key misunderstandings or like the threshold concepts, if I may, when it comes to self-determination theory is the recognition that when we talk about these basic needs for autonomy, confidence, and relatedness, it’s about the individual’s perception of those needs for themselves. I think a lot of people come and we do an introduction the first week about, like, what are the basic needs, and they’re like, “Oh, that’s great, I’m giving my students choice, so I do unessays, so I give them choice that they can choose what format their project is going to be, and therefore I’m meeting their need for autonomy,” but and I’ve experienced this myself, is that that doesn’t necessarily work for all of my students, that some students will see, like, “oh, I can do anything,” and they’re like, “well, that’s scary, I don’t know, I guess I’ll just write a paper, and it’s not because I really want to write a paper, it’s because that’s the thing I’m used to doing, and I know that’s a safe thing to do.” So that student has not perceived that they’ve had autonomy in this assignment, even though I’ve told them, like, “oh, you can do a poem, you can make a video, you can bake a cake,” but at the same time they haven’t seen paths for them to do that, and I haven’t necessarily provided… at least when I started doing this, I really did not provide guidance to make a meaningful choice, and that’s the key when we think about autonomy, is how do I create a structure where a student is going to see this choice in my class and feel like that choice is meaningful to them, so when I give them the unessay and say you can write a poem, I need to then say, like, well, what does it look like to write a poem for this, and what resources, because I am not someone who could help them write a poem, but what resources are available on campus if this is something they want to explore that can help them do that in a meaningful way, and then I can also provide the feedback that I’m capable of providing, in thinking about how to tie the content of the class with the poem, and really help them then also feel that sense of confidence that all these needs get intertwined all the time, because that’s also then about the relationship I’m able to have with students to help them see that, like, oh, when I give you a choice, I mean it, and I’m also here to help you make a meaningful decision for you. So, I think the key is always to try to think about the students’ perception and experience. When we start doing that, we start to help overcome these motivational boundaries. And I say this, coming from a background in music history, where even when I taught music majors, a lot of my colleagues on the performance side of that school would, like, tell them, “Well, the music history and theory classes aren’t that important, you should spend your time practicing.” So at that time, I felt like it was always the struggle of, like, I need to motivate students for this class in their major, and I didn’t know about self-determination theory at the time, but now, like, oh, I missed all these opportunities to help them really understand why these things were important, and to connect with them in doing so.

Chantal: Yeah, and I want to add that it’s really important to think, like, it’s not a recipe, it’s not a recipe book. You’re not going to find in this book that, like, this is exactly how you need to do it, and here’s step one, two, and three, and that’s why the student voice is very important, that student perspective and the perception, as Dan mentioned, because it takes getting to know your students to really understand what meeting the basic psychological needs is going to mean in your context, and also what you’re able and willing to do as an instructor, so you could implement a technique that would be very effective at meeting the basic psychological needs, but if you do it poorly, you’re going to have the opposite effects. So, if team-based learning is not your thing, and you don’t think you can implement it well, that is not why it works, if that makes sense. It’s really important to understand that it’s not the what that is as important as the how you implement that pedagogical strategy.

John: One of the things you note in this book is that grading is one of the things that faculty tend to really not enjoy particularly much, and it’s also something which can be somewhat demotivating for students. What suggestions do you have on trying to shift the focus on grading, so that it can be a bit more motivating, and perhaps not quite as unpleasant for faculty too.

Chantal: That is so Dan’s question. [LAUGHTER]

Daniel: Yeah, [LAUGHTER] and I’ll say, as we’re recording this, just before the Grading Conference begins this summer, and I’m a co-organizer of the Grading Conference. If you’re familiar with the Grading Conference, you might understand where my perspective on grades is coming from, but with that said, I don’t think that means we need to, like, do away with all grades, which is some answers, but I think the key is getting away from the view of grades as a mechanism to control students’ behavior, because ultimately, what self-determination theory is, in contrast to more traditional theories of motivation, and self-determination theory is like 50 years old now, so I guess it’s also traditional, but theories before that were really about mechanisms of control. I’ve just got a new dog a few weeks ago, so like how you train the dog is like, dog does good thing, I give treats, dog does bad thing, I don’t give treats, [LAUGHTER] and I think a lot of early motivational theories were rooted in that, of like, “oh, student does good thing, I give grade, student does bad thing, they lose points towards grade,” and that still happens all over our campuses. So, I said, my background is in music, so, like, one of the things we do in music departments is we want students to go to our concert, so what do we do? We give them extra credit for going to a concert, and what we don’t do in doing that is explain to them the value of going to that concert and give them opportunities to engage with that concert in ways that they might not otherwise, and that connect that concert to the experience of what they’re learning in our class, and I think that’s what we really would advocate for in self-determination theory, is to really think critically about grades and what grades mean, because ultimately grades, at their best, are a form of information, they’re a communication form between instructors and students, that is unlike basically any other form of communication, and that can be used effectively, [LAUGHTER] or it can be used for harm. And I think too often we view grades as a mechanism to control. So students after COVID, my class attendance has dropped, so I’m going to give more points for students coming to class, or more penalties for not coming to class, and instead we can think, well, what is it that’s happening in class that we can make more valuable for students, and then that doesn’t mean you can’t have grades tied to it, but like, how do we then make the grade tied to the learning that they’re doing in class that’s tied to the learning outcomes and objectives that will help them in their long-term career personal goals, whatever those may be, and trying to really build that connection, so students don’t see their grade as well. This instructor liked me or disliked me, and therefore they gave me this grade at the end, but really that this grade reflects what I’ve been able to achieve, and my growth, and then I can go talk about that, and like what it meant to earn an A or a B in this class, and what I gained from it, and that grade is one piece of information that is sort of a tightly packaged representation of that.

Rebecca: This conversation’s making me think a little bit about self-determination theory related to instructors, too. We have needs, especially around grading, and some of these other things, too. I’m wondering if you have any thoughts about that side of the coin in thinking about some of the basic needs of instructors and how some of the techniques that you’re recommending actually [LAUGHTER] serve in both directions.

Chantal: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll just kind of get started, and then Dan can jump in, but when we go through our Impact program, which Dan described, our 13-session semester long program, we really emphasize that to faculty, and that’s the beauty of self-determination theory. As you mentioned, it’s a theory of human motivation, so it’s about humans, so it’s really the humans that are doing the teaching and learning endeavor, and that’s really the most important thing, and what we really need to focus on. So, we tell faculty, you also need to think about the satisfaction of your basic psychological needs, and that will revitalize your teaching, how you approach your teaching, how you think of your teaching. So, again, if you encounter a technique that you think is the next sexy, flashy thing, but you don’t think it’s going to work for your class, or it’s not going to be something that you can do that you can implement effectively, you’re not going to be in a position to satisfy your basic psychological needs, so that will translate into something that will hinder the needs of your students, because you’ll feel forced, controlled, and not self-determined in applying those techniques. So we really engage in conversations with faculty around that, and to find, through asking questions of the faculty, to really find the thing that’s going to create the best possible autonomy-supportive environment for them and their students.

Daniel: Yeah, and I’ll just add this is what, to me, is really fun about being on the I mpact team and working with faculty every semester in this way because I might be a person who thinks ungrading is the greatest thing for my classes, but I’m not there to convince them of that, I’m there to try to understand what they’re doing and what they’re achieving and what will be meaningful to them, and to me that’s a really fun thing because it makes every semester unique and different, and our hope is in having all these different case studies, readers will be able to see how people have gone through this same program, but come out with very different classes, but all classes that are at their core achieving the same basic goals of creating a learning environment that’s going to support students to internalize their motivation and to succeed and to value the things that they’re learning.

John: We talked a little bit about the structure of the book, but we should note that you have chapters on pretty much all aspects of teaching that should apply to pretty much any faculty member out there. You have chapters associated with creating tests, writing assignments, group projects, lectures, labs, and experiential education, and in each of those cases, you provide some really nice suggestions on creating an autonomy-supportive environment. Could you each highlight one or two ways in which the approaches that you advocate in either one of these chapters, or generally across the chapters, might differ from what we see in many classrooms today?

Chantal: I love how you set up that question, and I want to kind of not push back on it a little bit, but “different” is not how I would really think about it. It’s not like many of the techniques that we have in there, or suggestions are necessarily different. There’s a lot of the things that are the same things, but sometimes it’s just to think about them in a context that is really based into self-determination theory. So I would say not necessarily different in kind, but it’s really about using the self-determination theory lens and the lens of the satisfaction of the basic needs to make meaningful choices and decisions about your class and your content, and maybe how you’re delivering it, so that’s I think is important to understand that you’re not going to read this book and say, “Oh, I’ve never heard about this before, this is amazing.” That’s not really at all what it is, and again, the suggestions are suggestions, we don’t intend them to be recipes. But if I give a couple of examples that are in the case studies that I really find appealing is that Nathan Mentzer, for example, is a faculty who we talk about in our technology chapter, and really he used HyFlex during the pandemic as a way to really survive as we were re-engaging and Purdue came back to in-person instruction very quickly, and he needed to really continue to use his HyFlex model. He actually wrote a book about it, so that’s also another very interesting piece of it. But he says he will never go back. The HyFlex and what he learned about it, and actually he did research on it using self-determination theory as a framework, allowed him to provide choices and options to students and build connection and relationships with the students and amongst the students that he was not able to do before, so he will never go back. He will always do HyFlex and he talks about how he really talked to his students about how important it was to attend in person if they could, but he was not forcing it. He was not taking attendance in person. He was not making the students feel guilty if they could not attend in person. And then the virtual option was something that everybody could connect to, everybody, even in person. Every student could log in with their teammates and be in this in-person and virtual environment all at the same time. It allowed students to have flexibility to have choices of whether they could show up in person that day. If they were sick, they didn’t have to explain why they were joining in virtually, and they didn’t miss anything. They had all of the content, they could continue to be engaged with their group. He really also focused on the autonomy piece by providing a rationale. He would say, I think it’s important and valuable if you can come in in person, but if you can’t, that’s okay. And here is the content. He also talked a lot about whether you should have your cameras on or off, but again, he wouldn’t force the students to behave or do certain things in a certain way, but he would really spend time explaining the rationale. This one is a great example. I’ll let Dan jump in with a few, and we can go back.

Daniel: So, I’ll share one. It’s actually not the story in the book about this person, but by Lindsay Hamm, who is in the book, I think also in the technology chapter about what’s called Charlie, which is her AI writing feedback tool, and she teaches 500 students sociology class, so it’s like functionally impossible without something like this to give feedback to students, which is very important to her. But what I want to share is actually she is someone who is very interested in the development of AI from the very beginning, and she’s become a campus leader on this, not just in her use of this AI-based tool for feedback, but she took her writing assignment, and in the middle of one semester she was confident that AI at the time was not like providing results that had to make her concerned about students using it, and then in the middle of one semester, an update came out, and she was like, “Oh no, [LAUGHTER] it’s time, it crossed the threshold,” and the question then was, “Well, what do I do now?” And this is where I think self-determination theory is so useful, because it really gives you a framework to think, “Well, now I’m in a situation I didn’t expect, and what do I do?” So, what she did was she first met with some students, because this is 500 students in this class, so she didn’t want to just go in front of all of them first. So, she met with some students, because she trusted students who had taken the class already, and she talked to them and said, “This is what’s going on, and I want you to talk through some options with me.” So then she came to the class and had three different options for like what we could do going forward, which some were just like rebalancing other assignments, some were creating something new, but all with the idea that okay, there are different paths forward, I’ve vetted these and now we’re going to give students in the class, different options, and I think students could actually pick which they wanted, so it wasn’t like, okay, 51% voted for this thing, and it stinks for the rest of you. So she was able to make it so that every student could have a meaningful choice, and she could progress the class in a way that she still felt good about meeting the learning outcomes and objectives for the class, and then over the summer, she could do [LAUGHTER] a much bigger, like, “okay, what does this mean now, and how can I adjust and adapt in a more meaningful way, that’s not just like throwing a brand new syllabus at this 500 student class mid semester.” So to me that’s like a really fascinating example of how you can take these principles and respond to the unexpected, which it feels like now every semester we’re always responding to the unexpected in a way that at least I didn’t feel 15 years ago [LAUGHTER] when I started teaching in higher education. So to me that’s one of the real appeals of this kind of framework for thinking about course design.

Rebecca: Stories for responding are always very valuable. [LAUGHTER] One of the things that you’re just hinting at in this instructor’s approach is kind of checking in with multiple students to develop some choices, and kind of at the start of our conversation, you mentioned the importance of bringing students into the conversation of course design, but of course, students have competing interests and values in what motivates them? Can you talk a little bit about kind of balancing the very different needs or perceptions of needs of different students in a class?

Daniel: I’ll start. So, part of what has enabled this is we have a Students as Partners program at Purdue called the Student Pedagogy Advocate, so that has provided a structure with students who are not like heavily trained but are introduced to self-determination theory and are really interested in working with faculty to make meaning of their classes and really centered around achieving the instructor goal, so we have some students who are prepared to do this, which certainly helps when we bring them in, but I think that’s to me part of the exciting part of teaching is when you are teaching the same class sometimes for decades, for some of us, what makes it exciting is that the students are different. And to me that’s at the core of what it means to teach, is to really think about the connection with the students that you can make and the students who are in the room, and how you can be responsive to them, and I think again thinking through self-determination theory gives us a way to integrate students into that thought, because it gives us a way to understand students and a set of goals for what does it mean for a student to feel a sense of competence, and whether that’s that they aced the test, but maybe guessed on half of it, but we might not know that, or they might have struggled on the test, but they felt good going into that, so then what does that mean for our discussion, or they struggled on the test, but they say, “well, I know I didn’t have time to study, so it’ll be fine next time,” but like what does that mean to help us, for us to help them think about what strategies they’ll take. So yeah, I think to me it really helps us think about how we engage with students, both to build a sense of relationship, but also to really understand what will be meaningful to them.

Chantal: Yeah, and I would add to that, that in some of those classes it’s not like instructors all have to do this, but some have used this very effectively, is to really work with students as co-creator of this class and this content, and even how it’s delivered, and sometimes it’s not possible; in certain situations or certain courses it’s not possible. But to the extent that you can think about students as partners, as Dan mentioned, not just the program that we have at Purdue, but also in terms of its philosophy of how can you really engage with students as guides and partners, as opposed to in a hierarchical sort of relationship, that’s really helpful when we’re thinking about our students as coming to this learning endeavor as co-creator of their pathway, and that’s really the essence of what we mean by autonomy and supporting autonomy. It’s not doing whatever we want and letting the students do whatever they want, but it’s providing a structure and then guiding within that structure. One word, one sentence that I really like to use to think about this is choices within a structure, so structure is also very important within that, so it’s not like there’s no boundaries, there’s no structure, there’s the course objectives, but the alignment, as Dan talked about, and we talk about in the book, the alignment between your learning outcomes, your objectives for the course, and how you assess the kinds of activities that you engage your students in, it’s very important to think about.

Daniel: And one other thing that I’ll add, we’ve been collecting student data on this program through a self-determination theory lens for over a decade, and one of the great things about self-determination theory being a theory that’s been put into practice around the world for 50 plus years is there’s a lot of great existing survey tools, and we can probably, in the show notes, have a link to these, but you go to the Self-Determination Theory Center website, and you click on metrics, you can download all sorts of them. One we really like is called the Learning Climate Questionnaire, and there’s a short version that’s, I think, eight questions. Chantal can correct me, but it’s eight questions. [LAUGHTER]

Chantal: That one is actually published in the first book, so the student-centered impact book that I talked about earlier, and we have some of those scales published in there.

Daniel: To me having eight questions that I can give to my students and get a clear sense of how are they perceiving the learning climate, and we tried to get these into the end-of-semester surveys with some luck, [LAUGHTER] but not as much luck as we’d want, and also you can ask these earlier, you can ask these in the middle of the semester and get really valuable information to understand how students’ basic needs are being met or not being met, and then you can take action from there to address those gaps. So I think that’s one of the other benefits we don’t talk about enough is that having these set surveys, because making class surveys is really, at least for those of us who are not psychologists by training, really hard, and also then we make them, and we’re like, well, did students interpret this question how I thought, [LAUGHTER] and the general answer is probably not, so having these set surveys that have been tested in hundreds, if not 1000s, of classes can be really valuable to collect some quick feedback and understand, like, okay, is this achieving what I wanted when I designed the class in this way.

John: We’ll include a link to the survey site in the show notes. Now, we wouldn’t be having a podcast in the last three years without some mention of [LAUGHTER] artificial intelligence, we keep trying, but… [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I keep trying to run away but it’s not helping. [LAUGHTER]

John: However, that is certainly an issue that does relate to educational technology, and you do address this in your book a bit. Can you talk a little bit about ways more generally in which educational technology can support student learning and autonomy, and also perhaps some ways in which we can redirect efforts, so that we don’t see students engaging in excessive cognitive offloading that can be harmful to student learning and skill development.

Chantal: I’ll start with a general comment, and then I’ll let Dan answer the tough part of that question [LAUGHTER] …so I’ll run and avoid it. To me, the general message that I really want the listeners to think about is that technology, including AI and others that will come in the future, are simply tools, and I don’t mean this in a sort of dismissive way, but tools are there to help us create environments that will foster learning, just the same way that our computer and typewriters and smartphones were tools, and some when those came out, were really afraid of those particular tools, but the challenge is to really think about how to integrate them effectively into your teaching, into the learning of the students, and what does it mean to support the basic needs with those tools? So, again, they’re tools. Your voice is a tool, like we’re doing a podcast now. So, your voice is a tool. How do you use those tools to support the learning is important. So, I’ll just put AI in that same category. We just need to think a lot about it. So, now Dan is going to answer the hard part of the question. [LAUGHTER]

Daniel: So I guess in thinking about, like, how do we prevent students from using this as not just a tool, basically to avoid the class or the learning process, because ultimately meaningful learning is hard. That if we haven’t challenged ourselves and haven’t struggled, we probably haven’t learned that much, and our society, our human nature is we try to make things easier. So it’s human nature to look for ways to skip hard things and make them easier, but what that means is we really need to think about motivation, and we need to think about how we internalize motivation, and this goes back to when Chantal described the different types of extrinsic motivation, is we need to really think about how can we help students identify the value of what they’re learning and the skills they’re developing, or ideally even integrated, and feel like it’s a sense of who they are. And often this means really focusing on the basic skills that get before the stuff in their major, especially like the stuff that they perceive as fun. So when I taught the intro music theory class, not many students were very excited to do like the basic lessons and learning how to read music in multiple clefs that they didn’t necessarily deem apply to them, but you need to have those skills really solid before you can do much else, so how do we help students either internalize the importance of developing those skills at a really high level, or to integrate it and feel like, well, I’m a musician, a musician, this is who we are, and we need to have these skills. And this is where the idea that when we create environments that meet those basic needs, students are more likely to have that sense of internalization, and we’ve talked about lots of ways to do that. But really I think that at the core for us is to think about that relationship element, because ultimately students need to trust us when we say this skill is important, and we also need to believe it, and I think this is something we sometimes forget, because most of us now use AI for some of these things, and there’s a difference. I would say using AI for something that I can do and it will save me time, but then I also know if the output is good or not, because I’ve done this enough times, and doing something where, like, I really don’t know if this is good, it will save me time, but it’s not something I could do otherwise and I think those are two very different places, and a lot of students are in the “it’s not something they could do otherwise,” and we really need to get them to the point of recognizing the value of those basic skills and not skipping them, because when they skip them now, they’ll run into challenges later, and we can say that all the time, but unless we really develop a sense of trust and meaning, and have students really buy into the core elements of the class, they’re not going to believe us, when we say it. So that’s where we need to create this environment that’s internally motivating, and an environment where students trust that we have their best interests at heart, and I think most of us do, but I think also there’s, at least when I started teaching, I felt like I wasn’t supposed to say that, I wasn’t supposed to tell students I cared, and I think we’ve turned a corner on that. I think now it’s more acceptable for students to believe we care and us to articulate that we care, and I think now it’s more a matter of like really creating an environment where students internalize that we care, we want them to succeed, and what we’re sharing with them are strategies that we know will help them succeed in the long run.

Chantal: I’d just like to add something, because Dan, you made me think about this, is that with regard to the offloading, yes, humans will tend to find things that they can do that tend to be easier, but humans are not lazy by design. If you really think about self-determination theory, and you really go to the origin of the theory, it’s really about humans are really wanting to grow and develop and become self-determined… self-actualized is another word that’s been used in psychology. It’s like one place in the right environment where the needs are supported, humans will do a lot, and if you think about humans that are alive and vital, they’re doing things, they’re just finding ways to write, to read, to consume, like students read and consume a lot of information, maybe not the textbook, but that’s a question that we can think about, like why not, why is it, but humans are not inactive or lazy, like we really engage in things that we care about, that we value, and that we want to be intentional about. I think that’s kind of the way to think about this in a broader perspective.

Rebecca: So, Chantal, you mentioned the last question is a little challenging, but some folks find our last question the most challenging, which is [LAUGHTER] we always end by asking what’s next.

Chantal: I’ll answer with something that’s kind of on my mind right now, and in things that we’re really thinking about at Purdue is, and you mentioned technology, so it has to do with AI, but really thinking about how critical thinking gets developed and is fostered, including how we think of AI using critical thinking, and this is a program that actually Dan is part of. We’ve been sort of pioneering this, piloting this for the past couple semesters, but in our conversations with faculty, we’re really thinking about how do we develop this sense of problem solving and critical thinking, because when you talk to faculty, right, it’s often something that they’ll say, “Oh yeah, I want my students to become better critical thinkers, but it’s just going to happen, it’s not something that I’m going to build into my class,” and we disagree with that, we say no, we really need to build in how you define critical thinking, how you think about it, how it evolves throughout the curriculum, and how is it that students progress from an emerging skill in critical thinking to really proficiency, and what does that mean, and what does that even look like. So that to me is what I’m rethinking about right now, and what is sort of our next steps in terms of applications.

Daniel: And I’ll just add, because I’m also involved, I’ve really loved this program, that one thing that’s been interesting is we’ve approached this through the same Impact framework, so it’s still based on self-determination theory, but the idea that you need to create a self-determined environment to get students to engage critically with material, but we’ve changed it, as we mentioned earlier. Traditionally, the program we’ve explicitly brought together faculty from different departments, and that was one of the core aspects, was this is a time to go outside your discipline and to realize that teaching has significant differences, but also commonalities, and for this program we started bringing together groups from the same department, and this has been like really interesting in different ways, and part of that is the recognition that a lot of faculty don’t actually talk about their teaching with their colleagues in their department, so this has been one of those opportunities for them to get together and think about what does critical thinking look like in our context, and how can we actually connect our classes in meaningful ways that help a student, whether it’s the 100 level class, start to develop certain skills that will be applicable in that context, and then how can those be reinforced, and how can we use similar language and structures, or one department we’ve been working with that I’m really excited they built a whole curricular long rubric with like here are key critical thinking skills and here are where we think students will develop and actually the department is Speech Language and Hearing Sciences, so the vast majority of students go on to get a master’s degree because you need that to be a practicing professional. So they actually said, well, at the top level we don’t even expect you to be here until you’re in graduate school, and the idea is to share this with students from the beginning, and obviously figuring out how you share it with students at your 100- level class and say we expect you to end this class at level one, maybe two, right, [LAUGHTER] but then show that that progression, and then when they’re applying to graduate school, give them the structure and language to talk about how they’ve developed and what they still plan to learn, because ultimately you go to grad school to continue your learning and development to become a professional in this field, so that to me is also really exciting, and like a twist on this program, but our early success shows how this basis in self-determination theory can really apply in lots of different contexts.

Rebecca: Sounds like a really great initiative. Well, thanks so much for joining us.

Chantal: Thank you for having us. This was a lot of fun.

John: Thank you. It’s a really good book, and it’s one I’d recommend to anyone who is beginning to develop or redesign an existing course.

Daniel: Yeah, thank you so much.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts 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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