434. TUnE Bio

Posted in engagement, equity, feedback, first-generation students, higher education, inclusion, learning, motivation, pedagogy, STEM education, teaching
February 25, 2026

Students planning to major in STEM fields, especially students from groups historically underrepresented in these fields, are often deterred by their experiences in introductory courses. In this episode, Sarah Rose Cavanagh joins us to discuss an NSF-funded initiative designed to enhance student success in introductory Biology classes.

Sarah is a psychologist and the author of four books related to teaching and learning. She is the senior associate director for teaching and learning and associate professor of practice at Simmons University and also is a regular contributor to The Chronicle and many other publications. Sarah often serves as a keynote speaker and we were very fortunate to have her join us for a keynote address at a recent Academic Affairs Retreat on our  campus.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Students planning to major in STEM fields, especially students from groups historically underrepresented in these fields, are often deterred by their experiences in introductory courses. In this episode, we explore an NSF-funded initiative designed to enhance student success in introductory Biology classes.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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John: Our guest today is Sarah Rose Cavanagh. Sarah is a psychologist and the author of four books related to teaching and learning. She is the senior associate director for teaching and learning and associate professor of practice at Simmons University and also is a regular contributor to The Chronicle and many other publications. Sarah often serves as a keynote speaker and we were very fortunate to have her join us for a keynote address at a recent Academic Affairs Retreat on our campus. We’re also looking forward to her upcoming keynote address at the SUNY Conference on Instruction and Technology later this year in May. Welcome back, Sarah.

Sarah: Thanks for having me.

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

Sarah: Ah… I never am. I actually have a confession. I’m actually drinking a Celsius energy drink. [LAUGHTER] I’ve graduated from even coffee, but I only do this. I’m like, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but Zoran Mamdani, he has a Red Bull once a week, and so, like Mamdani, I have a Celsius once a week. Gives me a real boost.

Rebecca: Right now is the time. We’re catching you at this moment this week?

Sarah: Well, yes, and we also ran out of coffee filters, so… [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: That’ll do it. How about you, John?

John: I am drinking an Irish Breakfast tea today.

Rebecca: Oh, seems to be like a new favorite, John.

John: Actually, it’s because we’re snowed in and most of my other teas are up at the office.

Rebecca: I have an English afternoon today.

Sarah: What time of day is it? This seems to be a conflict. One of you is doing breakfast? One of you is afternoon.

John: It is afternoon, isn’t it?

Rebecca: yeah, I don’t know. Yesterday we recorded at 5pm and we both had breakfast teas, so… [LAUGHTER]

John: We did.

Rebecca: It might just be an indicator of how much caffeine we needed at a given time. [LAUGHTER]

Sarah: Gotcha.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss the TUnE-Bio project, an NSF-funded academic initiative, for which you are a principal investigator and network leader. Can you give our listeners an overview of this project?

Sarah: Sure. So the focus of the project’s right in our title. So it’s Transforming Learning and Equity in Undergraduate Biology Education by Cultivating an Ecosystem of Feedback, which is a big mouthful, so we call it TUnE-Bio. So we’re tuning biology education. And the focus of the project is really on tackling the problem of high attrition and weed out in undergraduate biology education, and by extension, STEM fields in general, the fact that so many students come to the study of biology and the study of STEM fields in general and want to be doctors and surgeons and scientists, and then they encounter difficulties in their introductory courses and leave for other majors. There’s something that is known as the STEM grading penalty, which is when students get really low course grades in STEM courses, but then they get high grades in their other courses, then that in particular seems to kind of lure them out of the field. And we want to change that, in general, because we need more scientists and we need more nurses and surgeons, but we also want to change that, because there’s also a lot of inequities in terms of who is weeded out, and disproportionately women, students of various races and ethnicities, first-generation status. All these things tend to increase the chances that you will leave STEM fields, and we want a really educated, diverse STEM workforce, and so we’re really trying to do something about that by improving pedagogy.

Rebecca: Sounds like a good initiative… [LAUGHTER]

Sarah: We think so.

Rebecca: …right up our alley around here, right? [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: At the beginning of the project, you first gathered information on the current landscape of biology education using surveys and focus groups. Can you tell us a little bit about the process of data collection?

Sarah: Yeah, sure. So we started this grant with what’s called an incubator. So NSF has two versions of this particular mechanism, and the incubator is meant to, just like it sounds, to give you a little bit of money to start building a network, start showing the NSF that you can do what you are promising to do. And then we got a full version of the grant a few years later. So this really goes all the way back to, I think, 2020, and we were unsuccessful a few times before we were successful. [LAUGHTER] So it actually goes back to more like 2018, I think, but we got the incubator grant, and one of the things reviewers said to us is, all right, you’re saying you want to innovate in pedagogy in biology, but before you can innovate, don’t you need to know the current state of play, like, what are people doing in their classrooms currently, before you start asking them to do something different, like, maybe they’re already innovating. So we took that charge, and in the incubator year or two, we did a really large survey of people who were teaching introductory biology, all sorts of different institutions all over the country, about 300 of them, and then did qualitative interviews of 27, I think, of them… took a deeper dive. And we’re really asking people about their practices and philosophies in teaching intro bio. What were they doing in terms of assessment, in terms of feedback, in terms of grading? We asked about what they perceived as barriers to innovation. In the early phases, we’re a little more focused on alternative grading. And so we asked a lot of questions about: had they heard of it? had they tried it? Questions about that. And so that was our attempt to figure out the landscape before we started innovating with the full proposal.

John: And what did the data collection tell you about the landscape?

Sarah: Well, first, I have to say that I do think we got a bit of an unusual sample. It’s always the case in research, because we tried to keep the survey under 15 minutes. But still, who has 15 minutes to do something completely optional, and then the people who spoke with us in the qualitative interview study, that was a significant investment of time. And so I do think we got a sample of people who were really interested in pedagogy already, but, that said, we saw a lot of innovation already. So the old school model of two exams and a final in intro courses, we really didn’t see a lot of that. People were using a lot of quizzes, a lot of clickers. They were really thinking deeply, especially in the interviews. They had thought deeply about equity. A lot of the folks we talked to, they really felt the pull of doing more like differentiated instruction and really changing their pedagogy, student by student. And had a lot of frustrations with not being able to find the time to really do that better. And we also asked about barriers to innovation. And shockingly, the top three barriers were time, time, and time, I think the top was no time to implement. The second was the perception that some of these innovations would take more time. And then the third was no time to even like, figure it out, do the reading, restructure the course ahead of time, do those things. So we saw a lot of innovation, but a lot of desire for more, I think.

Rebecca: So that kind of sets the ground for the pedagogical side of the landscape. Can you go into a little bit more detail about attrition rates and the equity gaps that the project is meant to overcome?

Sarah: Yeah, sure. So a pretty significant number of students leave early STEM education for other majors, and it does seem like investigations that have probed the why of that and the motivation has really found it tying to these early low grades in these introductory courses, and I think, in particular, students who are drawn to health sciences, just the way everything set up in secondary education, tend to be students who are quite used to getting high grades, [LAUGHTER] and so having this experience of just getting As and As and As and then you hit college, and you take Intro bio, and then all of a sudden you have a C for the first time in your life. And that being very alarming. There’s also, and certainly we heard this in the survey and the interviews, in terms of the equity, something that people really thought a lot about and felt very deeply about, was the fact that, especially courses that are introductory courses, like intro bio, students would be coming to them with very different backgrounds. Some students had taken AP Bio with a tutor and all these extra meetings and already knew half the material that they were going to be taught. And other students from lower-resourced high schools did not have that experience, and faculty really struggled with that. Starting out from the gate, these students were on paths to differential outcomes, and then that would shape whether they stayed with the STEM study or not. And none of them had really easy solutions, and one of our goals in going forward is trying to give faculty tools to improve pedagogy in ways that equitize that landscape a little bit more. I mean, that basic problem is still always going to be there. It’s a societal structural problem. But if we can nudge faculty to improve how much feedback they’re giving, how motivational that feedback is, how timely it is, all of these things that maybe we can bring those students on those two paths a little closer together.

John: This issue of disparate gender outcomes in STEM fields is something we addressed a little bit on an earlier podcast with Peter Arcidiacono. This seems to be common in many disciplines, so addressing these issues, I think, could be really helpful. And one of the things that really impressed me was looking at the people in the network, or the people who are involved in this program. I’m not a biologist, but I recognize an awful lot of the names there. How was the TUnE-Bio network assembled?

Sarah: Dialing it back to those incubator years, and before our unsuccessful to successful outcomes, originally, Jim Lang and I were co-PIs, so we were both still at Assumption, and were both in the same center, and so we were working together on this, and I was actually really new to the field of teaching and learning, and didn’t know a lot of people. I started out as a psychology, emotion science, person, and only in the last 8 to 10 years moved into teaching and learning. So a lot of them Jim recommended, and then it was like a snowball. So we recommended them and some of those people said, “No, but have you thought about asking this person?” And so we kind of snowballed out, and we had our steering committee, we asked them for recommendations, and they went out from that. And then Jim retired. Then that’s when Michele Lemons my co PI who is a neuroscientist, biologist at Assumption, that’s when she joined. Jim’s still on our steering committee, but now Michele and I are co-PIs on the full proposal, and then we did a big webinar, we did a big launch meeting, and we just actively recruited. So it’s really kind of a snowball method. Also, Bryan Dewsbury is on our steering committee, and he has a beautiful essay, I think, called the soul of my pedagogy in Scientific American, and I had read that, and I was like, “Let’s invite that guy,” [LAUGHTER] and Jim was like, “Great suggestion.”

Rebecca: It’s always fun to see all of those folks assembled in the same place, virtually or otherwise. [LAUGHTER] How does this project connect to the concept of compassionate challenge that you focused on in Mind over Monsters?

Sarah: Well, since we’re focused on feedback, and I think we’ll talk about that in a little bit more, I see feedback at the heart of compassionate challenge. So my framing of compassionate challenge is that students, to be motivated and to learn effectively, they need both compassion and challenge, kind of that false dichotomy that we get into and dueling Chronicle op eds between like, “oh academic rigor” and “oh student focusedness.” Like we need all of it. And I think that we respond best and are motivated when we both are in a place where we feel psychological safety and where we feel understood and seen as people, but then where we also are challenged to rise to expectations. And feedback, I think, is just so critical for student learning, because what feedback is, is you’re giving students information about “okay, where are you at in your current learning journey, and where could you go, and how can you get there?” In that way, it’s stretching them saying, like, “Great job at the learning so far, but here’s all the other places we could go.” [LAUGHTER] But then we’re really focused in the project, on how can we give better feedback, and better feedback being compassionate, growth mindset, motivational, offered in time that they can use it, including more revisions of work, so that there’s a reason for them to read the feedback. If they assess them on a learning outcome, you give them feedback on how they did, and then they’re never assessed on that learning outcome again, I wouldn’t read that feedback. [LAUGHTER] And so I think feedback is really at the heart of compassionate challenge.

John: So right now, it sounds like much of the work of the group is done in working groups, and you have five working groups which are focused around different ways of providing that feedback. Could you talk a little bit about some of the work of these working groups?

Sarah: Absolutely, in the grant, what we’re doing currently is we’re developing tool kits, so we want to give faculty really practical ways that they could improve their feedback. And one of the other aspects of the grant is that it intentionally puts in the same room, often the same Zoom room, that we are gathering in person this May, educational developers and people from the scholarship of teaching and learning, and then biologists. And so we’re putting these minds together so that the biologists can provide the context of teaching biology, and then educational developers can provide the scholarship on teaching and learning. And we want to put them all together in a room, develop these toolkits that will help biology faculty teach in ways that improve feedback. And so one of the first things we did is we assembled these toolkit working groups, as you’re referencing John, and we just today decided to call them twigs. We keep saying T, W, G, and that’s very difficult to say out loud. And then we were on a meeting with one of our steering committee members, Linda Fergusson-Kolmes, and she was like, I keep wanting to call it twig. And I was like, “Let’s do it. Let’s do it.” So these twigs, [LAUGHTER] these each have co-leaders, and then they have members who are also amazing folks, and they’re focused on five different themes. So those themes are, first, how do we get students motivated to actually use feedback and actually read it? Because there’s some data that suggests that, especially when feedback is paired with a poor grade, students won’t even read it. So one group is developing tools to help faculty motivate students to uptake and use that feedback. Another is focused on peer feedback. Some of the tools in that toolkit will relate to LAs, learning assistants and teaching assistants, but then also ways that you can provide peer feedback in class. So motivation, peer feedback. One group’s all focused on classroom assessment techniques like clicker questions and other ways to quickly assess and get feedback on student learning. One of the groups is developing a toolkit on the seven principles of good feedback, asset-based feedback. And then finally, my favorite topic in the world, but we have some lovely volunteers who are willing to go there, AI. [LAUGHTER] if we’re doing something on feedback, they have a challenge ahead of them.

John: I don’t think we’ve had a podcast in the last couple of years that have not at least mentioned AI in some way.

Rebecca: This was yours, Sarah. [LAUGHTER] Now you can move on. [LAUGHTER]

Sarah: Yes, we’re done. Check the box. Check the box.

Rebecca: One of the things that we often hear is like feedback and grading are intermingled or tangled up together. Can you talk a little bit about decoupling of the two?

Sarah: Yeah, sure. We definitely saw this, especially in the qualitative interview. We tried to ask faculty separately about assessment, feedback, and grading, and we defined those for them ahead of time and in the process of the interview. And we defined feedback as information that’s given to students about the current state of learning or their performance on the assessment, other than grading. And then we wanted grading to be grading. Faculty found that very difficult to respond to those three things separately, because they’re all so integrated, and grading is one form of feedback, of course. We really tried to get them to focus more on things like written feedback on short-answer questions, and we have a subcommittee working on the qualitative interview coding. That’s Brian Dewsbury and Lindsay Wheeler and Michele and I, and we have a conceptual model of feedback that we’re building, and we really are thinking of feedback even as things like body language in response to students’ questions, like really expansively about feedback. And I think that the more we can decouple feedback from grading the better. And there’s actually studies showing that if you give feedback before you give the grade, if you like, kind of withhold the grade and you give the feedback, students are more likely to use it and implement it, because I think that the emotional power of the grade just blows everything else out.

Rebecca: As in, like the grade feels too final?

Sarah: Yeah, and if the grade is lower than you expected or desired, especially if it’s significantly lower, I think a lot of students get very anxious, and it can be very difficult to think really logically when your body’s all kind of in a disarray.

John: For many years, when I gave back exams, the students who did well would sit there and they’d be really happy and really not focused that much on going over it and answering questions, and the students that did badly just look kind of unhappy and just kind of set their scowling, which is one of the reasons why I switched to two-stage exams, where they took it first individually, and then it was such a different experience. I remember the time I took a short video clip of the students in the second stage, and I shared it with Rebecca, because it was just so impressive to see them actively discussing things and working through it, because it was so different than earlier experiences going over exams in class.

Sarah: Yeah, I love two stage exams.

John: And I’m reinstituting them after moving away during COVID [LAUGHTER] in one of the classes that I’m teaching. I’m looking forward to that again. You mentioned before that one of the main barriers that faculty face in trying to implement things was time, and certainly that’s a major factor. But are those the only barriers that faculty face when they try to change their teaching techniques, especially if they’re younger faculty, junior faculty in departments which may not all be using these types of techniques.

Sarah: Right off the bat, you identified one of the major ones that we heard is, does your department support innovation, and is there that support? And another thing that came up a lot, and I see this a lot across all my work in different institutions, is students [LAUGHTER] often resist innovations. And I think health science students tend to be disproportionately this type of student who is used to a certain level of grades and a certain level of positive feedback from their secondary education, and then they hit college and they want to do that same thing. And this has always worked for them, you know, these big exams, memorizing stuff, putting out the answer, like that’s worked for them in the past. And so I find when I’m working with faculty who are innovating, especially in the arena of grading, they get the most resistance from the students, who probably are going to get an A at the end of the day, because of that resistance. But those two things can combine, and I saw this at my previous institution, in the biology department actually, and there were some faculty who were really doing innovative stuff, both with grading, but also with active learning and kind of flipped classroom sorts of things. But then most of the department was not doing that, and they experienced more student resistance, I think, because they were in this setting where students would have that reassuring kind of traditional experience in other faculty at that institution, and then they would hit this one course with all this innovation and dislike it more than if more the department were innovating. So that’s another big one. There’s also, and I think this was in your question as well, but precarity of position, and that was one thing that we asked about on the survey so that we could contextualize the responses. Contract faculty and pre-tenure faculty, sometimes they innovate somehow, and it goes not so well, and then they really get burned on their course evaluations at the end of the semester, that that could put their livelihood at risk or their tenure trajectory. So that’s another big barrier, time, time, time, departments, really large classes, that it being difficult to increase the amount of feedback you’re giving students, especially things like written feedback or in person, audio feedback. If you have 500 students, that’s very difficult. So large class sizes.

Rebecca: One of the innovations you mentioned at the top was about alternative grading practices. And given that low grades are discouraging, and certainly one of the barriers for students succeeding in STEM fields, how does alternative grading sit with some of the recommendations coming out of your network?

Sarah: Interestingly, we were more focused on alternative grading in the early stages of the grant, we actually thought that was going to be a major focus of the grant, so the incubator was not honed in on feedback. It was more broadly assessment, feedback, and grading, and we asked all those questions about alternative grading. We moved toward feedback for a couple of different reasons, one being our sense that there was already amazing work being done on alternative grading by other networks and other authors, an entire ungrading conference, and feeling like that need was already being filled a little bit in the world of teaching and learning. But then also, we observed two things in the surveys and the interviews. One of the questions we asked is, How aware of these alternative grading methods? And then we asked about a bunch of critiques of traditional grading, and the extent to which people agreed or disagreed with them, and whether they had tried them, if they hadn’t tried them, why? And there were a lot of folks kind of innovating at the margins. So they weren’t going full ungrading, but they were including pieces of that, and there was some resistance to it. We heard from some people that they were not interested in it because of a variety of reasons, and so we didn’t see as high interest as we might have expected on alternative grading. But then we also saw that people were most dissatisfied with their feedback practices. So when we asked people to rate how satisfied they were with their current assessment feedback and grading practices, we saw overall, a fair degree of satisfaction, but much lower for feedback, significantly lower than for assessment or grading. And this came up on the interviews as well, that we heard a lot of dissatisfaction. People would often wince, [LAUGHTER] when we’re like, “What about your feedback? How satisfied are you with how often and the types of feedback you give?” And they would be like, “Oh, I should do better.” [LAUGHTER] So we saw that, both on the survey and the interviews, with such a high degree of interest in improving feedback compared to assessment and grading. And then also, we felt like all the alternative grading folks were already doing a great job working on that, and we thought we could maybe contribute more and have more of a novel contribution if we honed in on feedback instead.

John: So this project has been going on for quite a while now. What are the next stages?

Sarah: The next stage is very exciting. So the twigs, the toolkit working groups with the five focuses, have been working really hard, and we’re so grateful to them developing a draft of their toolkits. And then in May, we’re going to gather at Simmons University in Boston, although it’s going to be a hybrid meeting. So some folks will be joining virtually, but a lot of us will be in person, and the toolkit working groups are going to present their toolkits to the rest of the network, so not just people on twigs and the steering committee, but also people involved in the network more generally, and we’re going to give them, wait for it, feedback, [LAUGHTER] feedback on their toolkits, and then they will have a whole another year to refine the toolkits based on the network’s feedback on the toolkits, what people would see is useful to include or ways they could shape or tune the toolkits. And then there’s a last stage of the grant. The last two years of the grant is actually, and this is one of the reasons why I’m really happy to be talking with you today, maybe it can spark some interest out there. We also are going to offer some money from the grant to form regional hubs to apply for some funding to use the toolkits in local events. And so we imagine maybe there’d be like New England, Midwest, West Coast, and a couple different institutions can gather together. There’s a few stipulations. There has to be at least one community college or minority-serving institution involved from a non-deficit framework. There has to be multiple institutions interested, someone willing to host, but they can apply for these kind of vouchers to use, to bring in a speaker, or pay for some food or something in these regional events, to use some part of the toolkit in an event regionally.

Rebecca: It’s an exciting new development.

Sarah: Yeah. I like the idea of it. You just give people money to improve pedagogy and gather together. It’s like rare. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: It’s a nice luxury. [LAUGHTER]

Sarah: Yeah.

Rebecca: Weeding out is not just a biology thing. [LAUGHTER] It’s common in a lot of different STEM departments. Do you see that the recommendations from the TUnE-Bio project to be applied and expand maybe to these other disciplines as well?

Sarah: Absolutely, and we know it’s not just STEM but certainly feedbacks everybody. And we’re focused on undergraduate biology because that’s what the money’s for, [LAUGHTER] but a lot of us have at the heart, we just want to improve pedagogy across the board, and a lot of the toolkits, as they’re being developed, because we’ve been meeting with the twig co-chairs regularly… I think the classroom assessment technique twig is a little more biology focused. I think they’re developing actual biology modules that people can use in intro bio, but a lot of the other ones, certainly the seven principles of asset-based feedback and how to get students be motivated to implement feedback are not going to be biology specific, and are going to be useful to anyone teaching anything, I think. And the toolkits will be distributed through the regional hubs, but they’re also going to be just downloadable. We’re going to put them on our Qubes site. Qubes is a open website run by the NSF, and we have a membership. So all of these toolkits, people and teaching centers can download a workshop in a box. People who are teaching in their individual class can download the peer feedback, how to train students to give better peer feedback, so they’ll be widely open to everyone, and a lot of them are not going to be biology specific or stem specific.

John: When we were talking about the AI groups, you didn’t seem quite as enthused about the AI twig. Could you talk a little bit about some of your concerns about the increasing reliance on AI in higher ed?

Sarah: Yeah, we could have a whole thing about AI. I don’t want to have a whole [LAUGHTER] conversation about AI, but Pooja Agarwal, I don’t know if you know her, she does retrieval practice, is a widely known speaker in higher ed, but we had a bunch of meetings. We were going to do an edited collection called F-A-I, and it was all going to be just critical AI. So I’m not a fan of AI. I do think there are roles for AI in feedback, in particular, and I’m not completely resistant to that. And I think that if a student were studying alone in their dorm anyway, but there was some kind of responsive tutoring type of program that instead of doing flash cards or just underlining their notes again, they had this experience that was differentiated to them and where they were at in their learning journey, that could be very effective. My concern is that we’re going to instead replace not the studying alone in the dorm with AI, but a student coming to office hours and sitting across from an instructor and having this one-on-one conversation and developing a relationship and, oh, you just happen to also talk about an internship that the student could apply to, or students working together in small groups and giving each other feedback. So if AI is like, on top of all the other stuff we’re doing, like, I think it could be powerful and interesting.

John: Those are really good points. On the other hand, just to bring up one counter argument, we do know that first-generation students and students from historically minoritized groups are less likely to go to office hours and ask questions, and also maybe less likely to ask questions in class because of imposter syndrome or some concern that they don’t want to reveal that they don’t understand something. If they have a Socratic tutor, which is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, they can ask it anything without fear of embarrassment, which may help them build up more confidence, so that they can then approach the instructor with questions, without being as concerned about not being able to phrase things well or revealing that they don’t understand things.

Sarah: That is a good counter argument. I would still go with the additive one, though, like, okay, let’s make that available to them, but let’s not stop all of the efforts that we do to try to draw them into office hours and into the work, into the relationships in the class, as long as we don’t, then be like, “Oh, it’s fine. I don’t have to do any of that inclusive teaching stuff anymore, because we have this chatbot,” additive, not subtractive, um hmm. [LAUGHTER]

John: And a great reference on some ways of creating a safer environment for students, a more comfortable environment where they feel more comfortable talking to their instructors is this book, I think, Mind Over Monsters is the title. [LAUGHTER]

Sarah: I may have heard of that one.

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

Sarah: For the grant, the May meeting. This is definitely for me and my co-PI, Michele Lemons, and a lot of my steering committee and the twig co-leaders. This is going to be an intense four months I guess, now. So that’s the big thing, meeting together. I’m hoping it’s also gonna be really fun. I think that the network’s supposed to be a network, and I want everyone to feel like they belong to this, like community. But so far, you know, the twigs have been working kind of on their own, and the subcommittees of the steering committee. And I’m really looking forward to having everyone working together and playing together a little bit in the evenings, probably. So that’s what’s next for the grant. In terms of what’s next for me, I just signed a new book contract.

Rebecca: That’s exciting.

Sarah: So it’s called Where are all the Happy People? So it’s a psychology book, not a teaching book, and it’s about the fact that no one is happy, and how can we be happier? And so I go to different spots to try to find happy people and then build a model of happiness. So some of those spots are the nunnery. So I interviewed some nuns. Nude beaches is another. The college classroom, actually is one, and I interview Bryan Dewsbury for that. Burning Man is another. So I’m Lithuanian in part and there’s a burgeoning pagan revival there. So I’m hoping to get over to Lithuania with my sib kid who has been learning Lithuanian.

John: A somewhat different sort of research. That sounds like it could be a lot of fun.

Sarah: I’m hoping so. I just wanted to spend the next three years thinking about happiness.

John: Happiness has been a little sparse for academics, especially for the last year.

Rebecca: Well, I hope we find out where all the happy people are, and we can join them.

Sarah: Meet at a nude beach. [LAUGHTER]

John: It is 15 degrees right here today…

Sarah: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] maybe not. [LAUGHTER]

John: …or that’s the projected high later today. It would have to be one of those polar bear ones.

Sarah: Mmm, doesn’t sound safe.

Rebecca: …or happy. [LAUGHTER]

Sarah: No. Safe or happy. Shall be tucked in around a fireplace about now, I think.

John: Well, thank you. This is a wonderful project, and we’re looking forward to seeing those final toolkits. And I’m wondering if maybe there might be some TUnE math and some TUnE chemistry and TUnE economics and other projects in the future coming out of this.

Rebecca: Perhaps we’ll just tune the academy.

John: That would be much better.

Sarah: Oh, thank you both so much.

Rebecca: It’s always a pleasure.

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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.

John: Editing Assistance provided by Fred Llerena.

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