Category: active learning

238. Engaged Teaching

Posted in active learning, classroom community, collaborative learning, engagement, equity, evidence-based teaching, higher education, learning, online learning, pedagogy, reflective practice, teaching
May 4, 2022

The past two years have been challenging for teachers to navigate and be excited about. In this episode, Claire Howell Major joins us to discuss what it means to be an engaged teacher as well as practical resources to support teachers on their journey. Claire is a Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Educational Leadership Policy and Technology Studies at the University of Alabama. She is the author or co-author of several superb books and resources on teaching and learning.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: The past two years have been challenging for teachers to navigate and be excited about. In this episode, we discuss what it means to be an engaged teacher as well as practical resources to support teachers on their journey.

[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]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Claire Howell Major. Claire is a Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Educational Leadership Policy and Technology Studies at the University of Alabama. She is the author or co-author of several superb books on teaching and learning. Welcome back, Claire.

Claire: Thanks, I’m delighted to be here, John and Rebecca. Thanks for having me again. My second time, so yay.

Rebecca: Love it!

John: We’re really happy to have you back again. And our teas today are… Claire, are you drinking tea?

Claire: I am not. I’m drinking water.

Rebecca: John. I have a supreme English breakfast today.

Claire: Nice. Good choice.

John: Supreme as in?

Rebecca: It’s supreme.

John: Okay, we’ll leave it at that, and I have an Irish breakfast today. So part of the same empire there.

Rebecca: Yeah… [LAUGHTER]

John: That supreme empire.

Rebecca: I was going to say, is it very supreme? [LAUGHTER]

John: It is just Twinings Irish breakfast.

Rebecca: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss Engaged Teaching: A Handbook for College Faculty, your newest book, co-authored with Elizabeth Barkley, and its relationship with the K. Patricia Cross Academy. Could you first tell us a little bit about the creation of the K. Patricia Cross Academy?

Claire: Sure Rebecca, I would be delighted to. The Cross Academy is a resource that Elizabeth and I developed, in part, to honor Pat Cross, and her many, many contributions to higher education. Pat had just an amazing career in higher education that started really in about the mid 50s. And she finished her work in the mid 90s. And she served in a ton of high level administrative positions: at Cornell, at Berkeley, and at Harvard. And these were really high level positions at a time where it was pretty difficult for women to get high level positions. And she just did an amazing job and was really respected for her work as an administrator, but also for her work as a researcher. And you probably know her Classroom Assessment Techniques with Tom Angelo. It’s a fabulous book that shares formative classroom assessment techniques, and it has been used far and wide. I use it myself on a regular basis, and it’s been around for a long time and is still just a great tool. In that book, Pat and Tom developed a format for the assessment techniques that Elizabeth, Pat, and I used when we co-authored our first book together, Collaborative Learning Techniques. And it also served as the model for several of our later books, including Student Engagement Techniques, Interactive Lecturing, and Learning Assessment Techniques. And those techniques became the basis and the foundation for the Cross Academy. So that’s where it came from, but in addition to honoring Pat for her work, we also wanted to share information with faculty. We wanted to make some of these techniques a lot more accessible, so people didn’t have to necessarily go buy a book. That they could go to an online resource and pull that information anytime, anywhere, and also for free. We just wanted an open resource that could help faculty, and help faculty in short chunks. Each of our videos is about two to three minutes, and so it’s not a huge investment of time to go watch two or three minutes of video to get a great technique that faculty can try out in their own courses, and hopefully find a good use for. So our purpose there was twofold, to honor Pat and her work and also to widely share information that her work was foundational for, and we developed it from there and wanted to share that information with others.

John: At the teaching center here, we shared many resources with our faculty during the course of the pandemic. But the one that was most appreciated by faculty, based on the number of responses, was the K. Patricia Cross Academy resources. People wrote back saying how very useful it was, and how they wished they had seen it earlier and it’s gotten a lot of really positive responses here on campus, and I’m sure everywhere.

Claire: Well, thank you for that, John. I’m just delighted to hear it. It just warms my heart to hear that your faculty have enjoyed it. We have had a lot of visitors to the site, over 200,000 at this point. So I do think we are accomplishing that goal of sharing information with faculty. And we’re always just delighted, and so pleased to hear that people are finding it useful. That they are using the techniques in their own classes… so, just great news.

John: There’s so many other resources out there that describe some of the techniques that you have there, but they’re usually text based with maybe some images, or there may be a YouTube video or there may be some handouts attached to the text and so forth. But what people seem to really appreciate with this, and what we really appreciate with this is… you’ve got all those resources together in a really nice efficient arrangement. And you’ve devised a site where it’s really easy to find this material. You have a number of ways of indexing it. Could you talk a little bit about the ways in which people can access the information on the site?

Claire: Sure, sure. The site currently consists of 50 main videos, and each video is focused on a single teaching technique. For example, quick writes, or digital stories, or case studies and so on, and all of these techniques can be sorted in several different ways. You can search by the activity type, is it an assessment technique? Or is it a group learning technique? You can sort by the problem that it solves, for example, are you having trouble with student engagement? Are you having trouble with student attention? You can sort that way, and you can sort by Dee Finks’ learning taxonomy. So is it for foundational knowledge you’re trying to use the technique for? Are you trying to help students develop higher-order thinking skills? Are you trying to help students learn how to learn? And so the site is sortable in all those different ways, but it’s not just those 50 techniques. Each of those 50 techniques also has an online version. So we developed 50 additional videos, where we say, “Okay, here’s what a jigsaw is,” in the main video. And then in the accompanying video for how to do it online, we would say, “Here’s how you do a jigsaw in an online course.” So we have 100 videos really, because each of the 50 has the online version. And in addition to the videos, because you know, I’m pretty much a text-based person. I love to read, I love to see things in writing, I love books, all of those things. But we also have the techniques in downloadable templates. So in addition to watching the video, you can download a written version that gives you the quick and dirty of: here’s how you do it… provides the rationale for it. It gives an example of how it’s done in practice, a lot of times those examples come from my courses or Elizabeth’s courses. But there’s also worksheets space for faculty to record their own answers. And we also have a blog on the Cross Academy site, which we call CrossCurrents. And the blog publishes monthly, and we have different write ups each month of things that are timely and topical for teaching. And so we might discuss blended learning, for example, in a video or a blog, or another blog might be: “here’s how you can get students to read for class.” So we have all those different features in the Academy.

Rebecca: I love that everything is so bite sized, so that you can curate your own kind of collection of things to share as well so easily because the examples aren’t embedded in other examples. Which is sometimes you know, you might have a video or a workshop on good techniques, but then they’re all in the same thing. You can kind of separate them out, which is really nice. [LAUGHTER]

Claire: Yes, thanks Rebecca. We think so too, and part of that is, we know how busy we are. I mean, gosh, right now especially, faculty are just overwhelmed with teaching, with research, with service, with whatever we’re doing. And it feels like now it’s even more so than, say, pre-pandemic, because there’s so much more emotional labor to engage in. And it’s just a lot of work. So how do you find time to work on your teaching, and that’s one of the things we wanted to do is make everything easily accessible, like I said, where you could learn something new in two to three minutes, or a five- or ten-minute read of a blog post or something like that. So the goal is to make it manageable, and very, very useful and very practical.

Rebecca: And such a great model for what we should be doing for our students.

John: One thing I do have to wonder, though, given what you just said about all the challenges that faculty are facing is… how you’ve been able to stay so incredibly productive with all of these books. I think you’ve written more really good books on teaching and learning than most faculty have ever read.

Claire: Well, thank you. I think that’s a compliment, [LAUGHTER] I’m gonna take it as one.

John: It is. I’m really amazed. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Please teach us the ways. [LAUGHTER]

Claire: I think there are maybe a couple of reasons for that. One, I have a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in English. So my background is in English, and in English you learn to write a lot and you learn to write quickly, right? [LAUGHTER] Or at least in my degree programs that was one of the features, but the other thing is that, maybe because of that degree is, I process by writing. I learn things by writing. It’s how I take in information and understand the world. So a lot of the books I’ve written and co-authored with Elizabeth and other people. You’ve met Todd, and Michael and some of the other folks that I’ve worked with, just wonderful, fabulous folks, but one of the things that I think I try to do is learn something. And when I’m learning something, I’m usually writing stuff down about it, and by the time I’ve written all the stuff down that I’ve learned, then I think, “Well, I can just share this with other people,” right? I’ve done all this work to try to understand something myself, to think through it. That’s something I can share with others, and that’s certainly how the first book that Elizabeth, Pat, and I developed together, the Collaborative Learning Techniques, came about. I was really struggling with collaborative learning. It is hard to do that well. But the benefits are worth it because the research is really clear on that. It helps students learn, it helps develop their learning outcomes, it helps them get along with each other, it helps increase understanding and awareness, it really benefits marginalized students, it benefits not marginalized students. I mean, the research is really clear that it is a fabulous technique. And so I just wanted to learn how to do it and learn how to do it well, and so I started digging into everything I could get my hands on, and trying to pull it together, and synthesizing it. And I talked with Pat Cross about it, and Pat said, “You know, we should use that classroom assessment technique format for this book. And by the way, Elizabeth Barkley is going to be writing this book with us,” and that’s how that got started. Anyway, I think that’s mainly it. It’s me trying to learn and I’m on a constant quest for trying to learn new things, and I just try to share that information when I can.

John: And we all benefit from that . Thank you.

Claire: Thank you.

Rebecca: So glad you’re so curious. [LAUGHTER]

Claire: Yeah, I guess so. I guess I’m curious or motivated by challenges that I’m facing. So either way, either way.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how Engaged Teaching, your new book, relates to the Academy?

Claire: Yes. So I think there are a lot of different ways it relates, but I’ll say this, we wanted to write a foundational, or introductory book for college teaching. So one of the things I try to do in my work is, I’ve mentioned how busy faculty are, I want to put theory and research into the faculty’s hands in ways they can use it to improve their own teaching and learning. And those have been narrow slices, like collaborative learning, like learning assessment techniques, like interactive lecturing, some of those things are pretty focused. And so Elizabeth and I were talking about it, and we decided that it would be really useful to have a foundational text that does basically that. That draws together the theory and the research, but we’re both very, very practical people. We want things that help faculty in their day-to-day practices, that they can take away immediately and use something from. So we had the Cross Academy that have those takeaways. You can use this in your class tomorrow, watch this video, take it to your class tomorrow, or take it to your class in an hour. But we wanted to provide the theory and the research that supports that and some of the broader practical tips. So that’s kind of how it came into being. That we wanted this broader foundational book to give the techniques some context, and to give it some foundation and some grounding in the work. So they do talk to each other. Like I said, the book is the foundation, and the techniques are the very practical: “Here’s how you carry it out.” Although the book has that too, the practice parts, but it’s bigger practice, it’s more like a general tip. Whereas one of the tips might be, “Use small groups in your teaching,” and then the techniques are, “Hey, use a jigsaw,” or “Hey, try a think, pair, share.” So they are connected that way.

John: And you describe those linkages in the book and have a table of how those techniques tie back into the chapters to make it easier to do that cross referencing.

Claire: Yes, that’s right. And we mention the techniques within the chapters where we find them particularly relevant. Many of them can cut across a lot of different chapters. But if you’re reading the chapter on collaborative learning, we mentioned techniques that are on the Cross Academy site that are focused on group learning, and so forth.

John: The title of the book begins with “Engaged Teaching.” How do you define engaged teaching?

Claire: That’s a really good question and I think engaged teaching is a really interesting and important concept right now. You read things in The Chronicle of Higher Education… faculty are disengaged, students are disengaged, etc, etc… I’m not sure I believe that exactly. I know we’re tired, right? [LAUGHTER] I know that we’ve dealt with some things through the pandemic, and it’s taken a toll. But I think the engagement is still there, and I think to be really effective teachers starts with being an engaged teacher. One leads to the other. Being engaged can get you to be effective. So I think of engaged teaching as two things, it’s a foundation and also a process. And the foundation is an intellectual foundation. And that involves the knowing what, the knowing why, and the knowing how, and that’s how each of our chapters is structured. Every chapter you’ll read there’s a “what this topics’ about,” “why this topic is important” (largely drawing on the research), and then “how you can do this particular thing in practice.” So that’s the foundation, the intellectual part of that. And the process is implementing that in key areas of teaching and the key steps that we have to undergo. And that is developing our own knowledge. It means planning a course, it means creating a positive learning climate and choosing and using the appropriate instructional methods. And it also involves continual improvement of our teaching practice. So it’s going through each of those phases of teaching and thinking through the knowing what, the knowing why, and the knowing how.

Rebecca: When I think about engaged teaching, and as you’re describing things, Claire, I also think about reflective practice and how they’re tied together. And the idea that you have to observe what you’re doing to be fully engaged, or take time to reflect on that, to really dig into the research or to know what techniques you want to look into, or to recognize that you’re struggling with something.

Claire: Right, and I think that’s a key point. And I think the idea of reflective practice is kind of an overarching idea of the book. But we also have a chapter on that, on being a reflective teacher and using reflective practice in your teaching. So absolutely, they are definitely related.

John: For our listeners who have not yet picked up a copy of the book, could you provide an overview of the different sections of the book?

Claire: Sure, part one is about foundations of teaching and learning. And in that we start with engaged and effective teaching, and what engaged teaching means, and how that can lead you to effective teaching. We also think through pedagogical content knowledge, and that’s a specialized kind of knowledge that faculty have that no one else has and it’s really important to develop that, and we think about how to develop that. We also talk about student learning, which I think is really important and it’s something we don’t always have formal instruction on in our graduate programs, or prior to teaching our courses. But we think it’s really essential to understand what your views of learning are, and how students learn, and what can be challenges to student learning, and then how they can overcome those challenges. So it is a very foundational: “Here’s teacher knowledge, here’s student learning, and here’s some things you need to know.” Part two is about planning, and that involves thinking about learning goals, objectives and outcomes, everybody’s favorite, right? But those are more and more essential in today’s society [LAUGHTER] they say. We all have to usually do those for all kinds of reasons. For accreditation purposes, because we have to post our syllabi, and other things, and because it is just a good idea to do. The research shows that it helps improve student learning. If you have this kind of clear path laid out and know where you’re going, it helps you know how to get there. We also, in that section, talk about assessing and grading, and we talk about visual elements in teaching which is, I think, an under-thought-through aspect of teaching, but I think it is important to the planning process. And that could be from your syllabi to your slide decks to your online LMS or whatever. There’s a lot of visual content that we share with students that I think we can improve and really think through and do a good job on. Part three is about the learning climate. We think about student engagement and motivation. We talk about community and how to build community in classes, and we also think through and talk about how to promote equity and inclusion in teaching. Part four is about instructional methods, and we cover three big ones there: interactive lecturing, discussion, and then also collaborative learning. And then finally, in part five, we focus on improvement. And we talk about reflective teaching and assessing and evaluating student teaching from beyond student opinions of instruction, right? Some other ways to go about it. We do talk about student opinions of instruction and some of the challenges with those, and some of the benefits with those, but also thinking beyond that, and other ways to assess and evaluate teaching. And then our final chapter is on the scholarship of teaching and learning, and how we can go that extra step in collecting data, understanding data, and sharing that information with other people.

Rebecca: So basically, the textbook that none of us had when we started teaching. [LAUGHTER]

Claire: That was kind of the idea. Yeah, absolutely. I teach a course on college teaching, and this is what I would want my students to know.

John: And it’s everything from the basic theory of course design, implementation of the course, and looking back and seeing what worked, and what didn’t work, and what you could do better. It’s pretty much everything faculty need to do to become an effective teacher, or an engaged teacher.

Claire: Maybe not everything, but we definitely try to cast a wide net and cover a lot of important topics that we hope will benefit people from thinking through a little bit more.

Rebecca: I really love that this particular text includes an introduction to the scholarship of teaching and learning too, because it’s an area that many of us might want to engage in, but are never really exposed to necessarily, at least early on. You might stumble upon it [LAUGHTER] as opposed to it being like formally introduced.

Claire: Right, right, and there’s so much good work in that area. I mean, that field is really growing, and they’re just more and more articles being published, and I think it’s wonderful because so many times teaching is very isolated. We go behind our closed doors, or we sit behind our screens, and we teach our courses, and it stops there, and our students go out, and that’s wonderful, and carry on. But we may have faculty teaching the same courses at other institutions who never hear anything about what we’re doing, and if we can contribute to that knowledge then we can all get better. It helps us all level up just a little bit to be able to hear what other people are doing, and what’s working, or what’s not working, and to have that data I just think is really great. So I hope people will look at that and think, “Gosh, I could do this. I could go out and do an article on my teaching and share that with others.” I think that would be a fabulous, fabulous outcome.

Rebecca: Can you describe to our listeners, maybe a couple of your favorite teaching techniques or other nuggets from the book?

Claire: That is such a hard question, it’s like choosing your favorite child. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: All right, just an example, just an example, it doesn’t have to be your favorite. [LAUGHTER]

Claire: No, no, I’m gonna give you a couple. I have used, I believe, every single technique we have on the Cross Academy site, and so I have personally field tested them all, and I think Elizabeth has as well. And there are some ones that I turn to over and over and over again. Quick writes are one, I think background knowledge probe is another one, case studies I use quite often. There are two that I turn to, I would say, more often than others. And one is the digital story, and that’s where students create videos, and in these videos they describe how their own personal lives connect to the course content. And I like to use these early in a course to help students introduce themselves to each other, and also because it puts them in a mind frame of understanding, “Oh hey, I do have important knowledge and experience that relates to this course,” and that’s pretty good. And I have seen students just produce really, really wonderful, fabulous stories, and it’s really heartening. They share things and it’s just really powerful to see these. So I do love that one. Another one that I really love is a personal learning environment, and that’s where people have digital resources that they can use to learn more about their course content later on going forward. And it’s basically they create a concept map that’s got nodes and ties to the resources that they could use, and it could be people, it could be websites, it could be books, it could be journals that they’re going to consult going forward. But I often like to end a course by having them develop a PLE where they can say how they can continue to learn about the course content going forward. So those are two of my favorites, I think.

Rebecca: Those are good favorites. I like those two.

Claire: Yeah I like them, they’re good. And they work well both online and on site. So they’ve got some flexibility that way.

Rebecca: Just mentally noting like, “Yes, yes, that would be a really good way to end my class.”

Claire: Right?

Rebecca: Yes, maybe I should update my syllabus. [LAUGHTER] Re-writing the assignment in my head as we’re talking. [LAUGHTER]

Claire: Yeah, it’s one of my favorites, and they get really detailed with them. And they have all these mapping tools you can use like Popplet, or Buble.us, or whatever the newest programs are and they make just beautiful illustrations, and get really complicated maps, and do have very clear content sources that they can seek out in the future. And I think that’s great. And I love seeing the people that they choose. It’s really fun to see.

Rebecca: I imagine anything that doesn’t say “just Google it” sounds great. [LAUGHTER]

Claire: Yeah, although sometimes Google does pop up on one of the resources in the nodes. They do mention Google and that’s fair, right?

Rebecca: As long as it’s not the only node. [LAUGHTER]

Claire: No, it’s not. It’s never the only one. So I’m teaching this college teaching course, and I had them do a PLE for this course and they have all kinds of people who were out there talking about teaching. They have all kinds of books that we’ve discussed in class and journals that focus on college teaching, conferences that are related to college teaching. It’s really elaborate and intricate. I never really specify, you could specify how many nodes and ties they have to do, but I never do and they have not yet disappointed. They’re always really very thoughtful and well done, and really nicely mapped out resources.

Rebecca: I’m sure as the instructor that gets to look at all of them your own really expands. [LAUGHTER]

Claire: It does, right, right? Yeah, that’s a good point. They have great suggestions. They really do.

John: I really liked the way you described bringing students into the discussion though, by thinking about how it applies to their life and building the relevance and salience of the material, and then preparing them at the end to become lifelong learners. So you’re really bringing students into the conversation in the discipline in a way that a lot of classes don’t.

Claire: Right, yeah. I think it’s really important, and so I’m teaching this course that I’ve mentioned a couple of times now, online this semester. And students are really great and really open, and there are a few things that I’m doing there that I think are interesting. One of the things that I do is, instead of having them submit assignments, they submit everything through the discussion board, and so they all see each other’s PLEs, they all see each other’s digital stories. It’s sort of like a gallery approach to assignments and I love it, you know? And nobody’s complained about it yet. So I think that’s good. I will say I’m teaching graduate students, I might have a different approach if I were doing undergrad. But at the graduate level, they seem very willing to share their information with each other. And they always say that they learn from looking at each other’s posts, that they always think of things that they would not have thought about if they had just been submitting online. And so I do think it’s very important to have the conversation, and the students involved in the direction. Another thing I think is interesting is that I do a questions and comments section on each module. And that’s all it says, if you have any questions or comments, post. They have no reason to post there, and the first time I tried that I thought, “No one’s ever going to use this,” but they do. They get in there and they post, they post thoughts about readings, they post questions to each other, they respond to each other’s questions. And I don’t get very involved in that unless there’s a question that hasn’t been answered, then I’ll answer it. But mostly, that’s a self sustaining thing where students are just self managing the board and helping each other out and talking to each other without the instructor telling them to, and without a lot of monitoring, so that’s fun. So yeah, students are fabulous. I love involving them. I love hearing from them, and I love giving them a space where they can share and talk to each other.

John: And it sounds like they’re quite engaged.

Claire: They are, they’re great, they’re great.

John: The use of a discussion board for students submitting assignments reminds me of an earlier discussion we had on a podcast with Darina Slattery. She called the activity E-tivities, where all the work in her course… it was also, I believe, a graduate course in education…, was done through discussion board submissions. And she also described some of the benefits that students receive from sharing each other’s work and that collaborative environment. So it seems like a really good technique that I should try too. [LAUGHTER]

Claire: Right, It’s fabulous. I love it, I love it. I recently was revising my course with an instructional designer. He was like, “You know you’ve got all your assignments set up as discussion boards, right?” It’s like, “Yeah, yeah I know.” He’s like, “Do you think they’re going to be nervous about that?” I said, “Well, they don’t seem to be.” [LAUGHTER] They seem to be fine, just sharing away no one’s, like I said, ever really expressed discomfort either during the class, or through the SOI, it has only ever been very positive. I loved seeing what other people were doing, I learned from other people, it was great to be in that kind of dialogue with other people. And so it is an unusual approach, and I guess maybe it’s good to prepare people for it. But they seem to respond well, at least as far as I can tell.

John: But it’s also preparing people who are going to be teaching to work in an environment that’s collaborative so they’re not in their silos making the same mistakes that tens of thousands of people have made in the past, and being able to learn from each other and to share with each other. So, that seems like a really productive strategy.

Claire: It is a great strategy, at least for me and my students. I’m not saying it works in everybody’s class or for everybodys’ students, but it has been wonderful for me. The other thing I do in this course is that each week they create an assignment that’s called “create.” They have to create something, and it’s something for a final teaching dossier that they do. And so each week they produce something, like they might do a teaching philosophy, or they might outline a class session, or they might do something else. And one thing I’ve done this semester is ask them to offer each other improvements, right? Give everybody a constructive criticism. One compliment, one suggestion for making it even a tiny little bit better, because they then assemble all this work into a final portfolio. And so they’re helping each other out throughout the semester. I’m starting to see their portfolios come in, and it does make them stronger. They are doing really great work. They are all very constructive. They’re very kind to each other, and I had to nudge them a little bit at first and say, “No, you need to help them get it better, It will help their final grades if you can help them now.” And once they understood that they really locked into that and really started trying to help each other on their final projects, and that’s been really interesting and good to see as well.

Rebecca: I’ve been able to do something similar in using chat software. So right now I’m using Google Chat. But I’ve also used Slack to submit and share work.

Claire: Mmhmm.

Rebecca: And I find that my students are much more comfortable sharing in that environment where they can have written feedback and share written feedback, because they can contemplate what they say more carefully. And also, it makes a record of it, and they don’t lose it if we have a conversation about it. It’s like documented feedback. [LAUGHTER]

Claire: Yeah!

Rebecca: …or they can go back and reference, and those are things that students have said that they appreciate about an environment like that is that they’re nervous about speaking up about it, but they’re less nervous if they can plan a little bit more about how they approach it or talk about it in these chat environments. Which is funny because I think of chat as something being like, quick, [LAUGHTER] but they treat it more like a discussion board.

Claire: Right, right. Well, I’m doing it on the discussion board so I think it’s similar to what you’re doing. They do seem to appreciate it, they really do. And I think they’ve benefited from it, and I think through the process of offering constructive feedback, they see things they can improve in their own writing as well. So they’re helping somebody else out, and they’re helping themselves out, and I think that’s really fabulous, and it’s so exciting seeing their final projects come in, and how they have taken them and improved them over the semester. It’s really gratifying.

John: I’m having students do something similar, where they’re providing feedback on each other’s work. And in our last class meeting, one of the students said, “I wish the comments contained more constructive criticism.” And hearing it from another student, I think, has helped quite a bit in improving the quality of the feedback, because I asked them to provide constructive feedback to each other, but they were very reluctant to do that in the first round or two. But when other students are saying, “You know, I wish we could get more of this type of feedback.” They picked an example of that, and it seems to be making a difference.

Claire: Yeah, absolutely. It’s so gratifying. You’re just like, “Yeah, y’all are doing it, this is great.”

Rebecca: Along those lines, John, today in my class, we did an electronic whiteboard activity. I teach web design so we were critiquing a website. So I gave them a link to look at, and then to use sticky notes essentially to provide feedback. And then what I did was ask them, “Was this actionable feedback?” And then they were like, “No, not really. I don’t know what this means, I don’t know what this means.” It’s like, “Exactly,” [LAUGHTER] and I heard all kinds of clicks go on. So I think moving forward, as we moved on in the class period today, it was amazing how much better and more clear [LAUGHTER] the comments were, once they realized how vague they were when we took this thing that was outside of us to look at.

Claire: That’s great.

John: So now this book, Engaged Teaching, was written during a period of pandemic. And also I believe there’s been some developments on the K. Patricia Cross Academy during this period. Did the pandemic influence the development of these two projects?

Claire: That’s a great question, John. I think the answer is most certainly, yes. And on the Cross Academy side, I think it’s a very clear connection. We knew that we wanted to develop videos on how to do them online, eventually. So we had our 50 techniques, and we thought, “Yeah, you know what would be really good, and helpful and useful, is if we eventually, down the road sometime, created short videos on… here’s how you would do this online, either asynchronous or synchronous.” And we were kind of going along our merry way and the pandemic hit, and we realized that needed to happen a lot faster than we had originally planned. And so we sort of front loaded that, and got videos out really, really quickly, all things considered. And it was challenging because we do our filming in California, and we couldn’t travel. So there was no going there to do videos, we couldn’t be in a room with a bunch of other people trying to film those videos because, at that time, at least originally, we weren’t real sure how the spread was happening. And we didn’t know a lot about how to contain it, and I don’t think it would be great to be mask on those videos anyway. So we went to voiceovers and did a lot of work through voiceovers and accompanying footage through that, and so that shifted as well. I think as far as the book goes, I think it shifted our focus just a little bit to that concept engagement a little bit more, because we started to realize how important engagement is for faculty, for the life of faculty, for successful teaching, for all of those things. I think maybe initially it started out as the foundational textbook, and then I think we realized the importance of weaving the engagement piece through that, and thinking through, what does it mean to be an engaged teacher? And how do we engage in this work at any time, right? Especially when we’re struggling and we’re tired, and we’re doing things we don’t know how to do. I think that just became a lot more prominent. It was always there, but I think, like the online videos, the plans were there, they got frontlined. With the engagement, it was always there, but it got spotlighted or forefronted and a lot more

John: Is there some type of foundation funding the development of the K. Patricia Cross Academy? Or where does the funding and support for this come from?

Claire: So the funding for the Cross Academy has been 100% private donations, and anonymous donations to this point. So it has been completely funded by the generosity of people who wanted to support this work, to make this project an open project, and not a paid subscription or anything like that. We wanted it to be open and we found people who thought this was a good idea and were willing to support us from that. We could always use more funding, right? And so in part, this book can help with that because all the royalties that we receive from the book are going directly to support the K. Patricia Cross Academy. We’re supported by the SocialGood Foundation, and all proceeds are going directly to the SocialGood Foundation. The SocialGood Foundation is earmarking them for the K. Patricia Cross Academy, and so all of the money will go directly to support the Cross Academy for helping us continue to develop content, blogs, and videos, and continue sharing that information.

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

Claire: Yeah, that’s a great question. And there is always something next at the Cross Academy. We are continually trying to develop that site, and what is in the works right now is a new phase where we are developing an activity bank for college faculty to work through. And these activities will help faculty reflect on their own current views on the different aspects of college teaching in the book that we’ve just published, discuss their ideas with other faculty, and create teaching materials that can help them in their own classrooms, and also develop products that could help them in promotion, and tenure and merit reviews. So that is coming I hope soon. I guess it’ll be 2023, but that is the next phase that we are working on.

Rebecca: That sounds awesome.

John: It does.

Claire: We’re really excited about it. I hope it’s going to be useful for people and really give them the opportunity to engage with engaged teaching a little bit more, to engage with the Cross Academy in ways that can help them improve their teaching… and students’ learning by extension.

John: Well, thank you. It’s always great talking to you, and you’ve given us a lot to think about and our listeners a lot to think about. And we strongly encourage people to pick up a copy of Engaged Teaching. It’s a great book. I haven’t read through all of it, but I’ve read through a big chunk of it in the last few days since my copy came in.

Claire: Well, thank you, and thanks, John and Rebecca for having me. I have totally enjoyed being here, thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. It’s been lovely.

Rebecca: And we look forward to seeing the next round of materials that come out because I know we’ll want to share them.

Claire: Great. Thanks very much.

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

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

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

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231. Include Instructors in Inclusive Instruction

Posted in active learning, diversity, equity, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, professional development, race, social justice, student course evaluations, teaching, universal design
March 16, 2022

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

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

Show Notes

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: I am drinking ginger peach black tea.

Rebecca: And I have Golden Monkey today.

John: Back to an old favorite.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chavella: Yes. [LAUGHTER]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: You too. Thank you.

[MUSIC]

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

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

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

[MUSIC]

198. Active Learning Initiative Revisited

Posted in active learning, classroom community, equity, evidence-based practices, higher education, learning, pedagogy, teaching
July 28, 2021

In episode 12 of this podcast, Doug McKee joined us to discuss the Active Learning Initiative at Cornell. In this episode, Doug returns to give us an update on this initiative and some initial findings on how this initiative has affected student learning. Doug is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics and an Active Learning Initiative Project Lead at Cornell University.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: In episode 12 of this podcast, we discussed the Active Learning Initiative at Cornell. In this episode, we get an update on this initiative and some initial findings on how this initiative has affected student learning.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Doug McKee. Doug is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics and an Active Learning Initiative project lead at Cornell University. Welcome back, Doug.

Doug: Thank you, Rebecca. So glad to be here.

John: We’re happy to have you back. It’s been a while. I was looking back to see when our last episode was and it was in 2018. It seemed like it was just yesterday in the before times, or at least in that sense of how time seems to have been compressed the last year or so.

Doug: It also seems like it’s been like 20 years.

John: It does.

Rebecca: Yeah, at least those couple decades for sure.

Doug: But I’m glad to be back.

John: Our teas today are… the last time we asked you I think you said “I hate tea.”

Doug: I did. I remember that.

Rebecca: What kind of comment do you have about tea today?

Doug: Well, I can’t say I’ve acquired a taste for tea. I don’t mind Lipton tea out of a can. But I’m not drinking that today. Today, it’s ice water.

Rebecca: That’s a good healthy choice.

Doug: Yeah.

Rebecca: And the basis of tea.

Doug: Right. I’ve been listening to this other podcast. And they always start with “What are you drinking?” And it’s four hosts. And three of them are always talking about what kind of craft beer or liquor they’re drinking. And it’s the healthy one that drinks the tea.

Rebecca: See, this is a very healthy episode,

Doug: Right. It is.

Rebecca: I’ve got my English afternoon today, John.

John: And I have ginger peach green tea.

Doug: Ooh, nice. It sounds nice. Are you really drinking hot tea in the summer? Is that really a thing?

John: I do. All day I’ve been drinking iced tea, though. And so I switched over for the podcast, just because it’s what we do.

Doug: Got it.

John: When you will last on the podcast, we talked about the Active Learning Initiative at Cornell. And we thought this would be a good time to get an update on how things are going. And for those people who are not listening to our podcast back in 2018, could you just provide some information on that project and how it came about?

Doug: Sure, I think even the people that were listening back in 2018 might need a refresher. The Active Learning Initiative is a university wide project at Cornell, it was inspired by a similar project that Carl Wieman started at University of Colorado, and then brought to the University of British Columbia called the Science Education Initiative. And the idea was that if you want to improve teaching, instead of trying and getting individuals to improve their teaching, and instead of trying to do it at the university level, the right level was the department. And so departments would write proposals and compete for money, and they would promise to incorporate active learning methods, different evidence-based methods to improve courses. And they would use the money to hire outside people, usually postdocs in that discipline that really knew the material, but also knew about modern pedagogy to do the heavy lifting. My experience is when you tell faculty to make changes and use active learning, you get three kinds of pushback. You get, “I don’t know how to do it.” Well, this postdoc is the person that knows how to do it, and they can help with that. You get, “I don’t have time.” Well the postdoc is going to do the heavy lifting. And you get “It won’t work in my classroom. It only works in other people’s classrooms.” And a big part of the Active Learning Initiative, certainly as we’ve implemented it in the economics department is concurrent evaluation. So at the end of the process, you really have hard measures of the impact of the program. Now the program started, I think, in 2017, at Cornell with three departments, then in 19, they added six departments, and that was when I joined Cornell, and so one of those was economics. And then more recently, they added nine more departments. And they’re getting proposals together for phase four right now. Now, in economics, we said we’re going to transform our eight core classes, the details are always a little messier than the theory. But we’ve transformed six classes so far, and we just started working on the last two. The big stated goal is to change how we teach these big classes. And seven of these eight classes are required for the major. So we’re really completely changing the experience that students have going through the program. The second goal, which is not as explicit, but really important, was to train faculty. And we’ve worked with eight different instructors during the process so far. And over the next two years, we’re going to add five more. The two classes that we still have to work on have three different people teaching one and two teaching the other one. And that’s been, I think, a pretty good success. So the faculty we worked with have been pretty happy and learned a lot from the process and continue to use those methods. The third goal, that was fairly unstated, is changing the culture. So what we want is a much more teaching focus and quality of teaching focus in the departments. And I think we’ve been doing a pretty good job on that and instilling this kind of continuous improvement idea. And then the fourth major impact that we’ve had, I think, was not something we really saw coming. And that is that, in the process of doing all this work, we’ve developed these assessments of learning and gathered all this data about what’s happening in the classroom and who these students are that are coming in. We’ve collected a huge amount of data. At the same time, we’ve spent a lot of time reading the literature and learning all about how much we don’t know. And it’s managed to enable all this research. And so I was talking to Rebecca, before we started recording, saying that a big part of my job is now actually like doing research using this data. And it’s been super exciting and fulfilling. And John, you asked me earlier, again, before we started recording about the Teach Better podcast, which is a podcast that Edward O’Neill and I hosted for a long time, and we haven’t had any new episodes posted for a couple of years. And it’s not because the band is broken up. But we’ve just been busy with other things. And I would say that the time I would spend writing blog posts and recording podcasts is now writing papers, and presenting research at conferences. So that’s been pretty exciting.

Rebecca: One of the things that you mentioned, right at the start of talking about this program, are the different push backs we get from faculty, and so you addressed two in how the postdoc helps with the two. The last was, “I can’t do this in my class, you can do it in other classes.”

Doug: You show them research from physics, and they say “This is economics.” You show them research from economics, and they say, “That’s from a very different kind of an institution.” You show them research from economics in a very similar institution, and they say, “Well, I teach my class very differently.” And that’s hard.

John: There’s always some explanation that people can come up on why their class is somehow different than everyone else’s. What have you done to try to reach some of those faculty to help keep the initiative spreading?

Doug: I have the answer that I find really compelling that never work. And that is, there’s this really wonderful meta analysis by Freeman and a whole bunch of other co-authors about the impact of active learning in STEM. They go and they collect lots of really serious research, high- quality empirical methods, that shows our big learning gains from transitioning from a pure lecture environment, to an environment where students are active in the classroom. And they find that there are large, statistically significant effects in eight different disciplines. And when they test the hypothesis that the effect is exactly the same in all eight disciplines, they can’t reject the null hypothesis. In other words, the size of the effect in physics and chemistry and biology and math and engineering… they’re all pretty much the same. And so if they’re the same in all those disciplines, shouldn’t they be the same in economics, too, because surely economics is closer to some of these than physics is to biology. And I find that really compelling, but no one else does.

Rebecca: Alright, so what does work then?

Doug: Well, what does work is being really nice and saying, “Can we just try it? And surely there are things that you’ve wanted to change in your class for a while and haven’t had the resources. And my job is to help you improve your class. And I’ve got some ideas too, and I’m going to lay them out, and we’re going to try.” And they’re like, “Okay.” I mean, so much of it is just plain old social skills. And like, “trust me” and building that level of trust. And they go and they talk to their colleagues that have worked with me in the Active Learning Initiative. And “Yeah, he’s not so bad. Like “he seems at first like an arrogant jerk, [LAUGHTER] but he’s okay, he’s pretty reasonable to work with.”

John: And the chance to make some of those changes they might have been considering, with some support to help move that along, could be a useful incentive, too.

Rebecca: You never know when that option is going to come along again, right? [LAUGHTER]

Doug: Well, that’s true too. So if Carl Wieman was here (he’s kind of the godfather of teaching in physics), what he would say is “Don’t even try to convince them that these methods work better for student learning, because a lot of the faculty, they say they care, but they don’t actually care that much. Tell them it’s fun, and that it’s much more fulfilling to have students doing things and interacting with them during the class than just standing up there and giving the same old lecture every year.” And he says that’s really effective. I have not had great success with that. [LAUGHTER]

John: One thing that actually worked better than anything we’ve ever tried here in the teaching center was this pandemic.

Doug: Right. That’s totally true.

John: People learned they needed to try doing things in different ways and we gave them lots of workshops and talked about the importance of active learning and gave them lots of things that work in a variety of modalities that they would never have considered otherwise because they were comfortable with what they were doing. But when people didn’t have a choice in terms of restructuring their classes in some way, they were much more open to trying evidence-based approaches than we’ve ever seen before and we had many more people attend a workshop during a pandemic than we ever did and many of them have said, “I’m never going back to the way I was teaching this class before.” Did some of that happen at Cornell?

Doug: It for sure happened. And I’ve talked to colleagues all over the world that have said exactly the same thing. That is absolutely 100% true. Just the other day I was talking with an instructor, we’re going to be doing a bunch of things with them to their class, and the conversation started with, “I tried these three new things in my online class, and I really want to bring them to my in-person class.” But you two, in the teaching center, interact with lots of faculty every day, for a brief period of time. But with me, I interact with a very small number of faculty for a very long time. We did not suspend the Active Learning Initiative for the last year, but we were originally a five-year project. And we decided to stretch it to six years and go into like a lower energy mode, while we focused on staying above water

Rebecca: …as was necessary for just about everybody.

Doug: Yeah.

Rebecca: You have all these new departments joining the initiative. Do these departments interact and support one another? Are these like completely separate pockets?

Doug: Yeah, so that’s interesting. The postdocs for all the departments meet regularly and do training together. There’s not a huge amount of interaction between the instructors across departments, or even the instructors that run the department initiatives. That’s something I think fell by the wayside during the pandemic. But we’ll probably pick up again, as things hopefully normalize, because there’s huge benefits from it. We’ve certainly run into lots of things that these newer departments are running into now and they can benefit from our experience. And then they come in with really fresh ideas that we haven’t thought of.

Rebecca: The other thing you mentioned, too, is all this data you’ve collected. Can you talk a little bit about what that data has started to tell you?

Doug: Yeah, so the process that we follow when we transform a course starts with documenting the learning goals for the course. Learning goals are not topic. How we define learning goals… because I understand in the ed world, people get very militant about their definitions and differentiations between learning goals and learning objectives and other kinds of things. But what we call learning goals are things that we want students to be able to do by the end of the semester, and we can break it down such that it’s probably two to three pages long. And then we develop an assessment of those learning goals. We also write down, in the same way, these are the skills we expect students to have going into the class. Now when we have a sequence, the skills that they have at the end of intro are prerequisite skills for the intermediate level course a lot of the time. And so we’ve developed, I think, 10 assessments so far. We have two math assessments, one at the intro level, and one at the intermediate level, because we add calculus. We have our intro micro assessment, we have stats, we have a whole bunch. So we have test scores on these things at the beginning of the semester, and at the end of the semester. So we have all these assessments. At the same time, we ask students about attitudes at the beginning of the semester and at the end of the semester. So do you think about economics every day? Do you feel like you belong in this economics course? We have like four pretty standard questions that we asked at the beginning and the end of the semester. Often when we give exams, we have exam wrappers. So how much did you study for this exam? How much of the material have you seen before? That sort of thing. And then at the end of the semester, we have our standard course evaluations, then we also ask students there: Did you feel like you were part of a community? Do you feel comfortable asking questions? Do you like the other students in the class? …those sorts of things. And so with the assessments at the end of the semester, we can tell how the distribution of learning outcomes changes. And we always have a control semester where we don’t do anything we just measure. And then we make all the changes after that, in a different semester, so we can compare. And what we found is that it often takes more than one semester for you to see learning gains. So you do all this stuff and you look at the results. And sometimes there aren’t very strong results. But you note what worked and what didn’t work. And you can look at outcomes by learning goal. So you can say like, “Oh, this learning goal we did a lot better on but not this one.” And so you can refine and then that refinement process, we’ve been able to actually see improvements in learning. We can use those same tests to see if there are gaps between kind of mainstream students and students from underrepresented groups. So we compare outcomes of males and females, we compare outcomes by race. And what we found is those gaps declined as we incorporate more active learning methods. We found that… this is a kind of a big one that I did not see coming when we started this project… so, we knew clickers were going to be a big part of this and like having activities that students work on in class, that’s like the bread and butter, and we have all different kinds of activities we do and I could talk for hours about that, but the thing didn’t see coming was how useful assigning students to small groups at the beginning of the term and having them work together in those groups inside and outside the classroom. And it actually was even more helpful during the pandemic with the online classes. So that’s been pretty cool. And just that treatment has radically increased the sense of community among our students. So we’ve been really happy about that. So those, I think, are the big results.

John: So, have all those core classes switched to the use of persistent groups.

Doug: Yes, but the extent to which the groups are used differs across courses. In my courses, it’s incredibly intensive. I have them sit in those groups in the classroom, I encourage them to work together on problem sets outside class, we do two-stage exams where they take the exam individually and then they take it again, in their same small groups. And they have a semester long project that they work on in those same groups. Probably the least intensive, we have is our big intro micro class, students are assigned to groups, they work together in those groups in discussion section, but not in the lecture. Because with 200 students, and a 350-seat lecture hall, it’s not too bad. But if you’ve got 440 students in a 450 seat lecture hall, it’s a little harder to manage that.

John: Yes, it is. I often teach classes that size. And I’ve generally just done ad hoc groups rather than persistent groups, but it is something I’ve considered switching to.

Doug: Well, in the pandemic, I had lots of colleagues that tried the ad hoc groups, ‘cause in Zoom, you can just press a button, and boom, everybody’s in a randomly assigned group. And you don’t build any social capital with other students in the class, you’re like suddenly in a room, and everyone’s got their camera off. But if you know everybody in your group, then you turn your cameras on, and you’re like “Yay, another person, Hello.” It’s pretty different. And in the classroom, I think there’s a similar element. There’s this other piece, which is in the classroom, people tend to sit in the same place. There’s a lot of inertia there. But I also think the random assignment gets people talking to people they wouldn’t otherwise talk to. And it assures that nobody’s kind of left out. So I think that works pretty well.

Rebecca: That was one of the things that I wanted to follow up on with the persistent groups is that sometimes you have the one student who feels left out or doesn’t feel included or doesn’t participate or doesn’t contribute. And so how do you handle that if that same team is doing everything together from tests to projects.

Doug: So in my classes, when they do everything together, in the two-stage exams, there’s a pretty big payoff to getting everybody’s input. And so I’ve never seen students as engaged in a classroom as they are, when we do these two-stage exams, it’s about as high stakes as you can get. On the projects, there’s a peer rating component, where at three points in the semester, they have to rate their teammates and say, on a one to three scale, are they contributing a lot? Are they not contributing very much? Are they contributing nothing? …and they rate them on effort level and dependability. And then the first one is just informative. You learn what the average rating you got from your team is, and you can do something about it. And then the next two, it’s actually a pretty big part of your grade. And what happens is, the students either improve, they get the message that they have to contribute, which is great, or they don’t, but then the other students are like, “Well, at least they’re getting what they deserve.” And so they’re pretty happy, because so much of it is about fairness and justice, that they’re like I’m willing to do the work, I just think it’s not fair if they get the same grade as me because they didn’t do the work. I mean, every once in a while you get a group that just doesn’t work very well. And these are always different. Like, it’ll be like, you’ll just somehow have like the three guys that happen to know each other. And they’re like, let’s all just give each other great ratings and not do any work. And then there’s the fourth person who ends up doing all the work. And then you talk to the person, you’re like, “Look, don’t worry, I’ll take that into account when I make your grade for the class.” Now, we actually had an instructor this semester, who had a really creative solution to this, which is at the halfway point in the semester, they surveyed the class and allowed people to bail out of their group and go into a new pool and get reassigned to a new group. And I think like 20% of the class decided to do this. And it was pretty interesting. I haven’t looked closely to see if our community measures were higher in that class. But I’m intrigued. I might try that in my class.

John: I had something similar in my econometrics class this spring, I tried using persistent group, some were working really productively, and others just were not working. And I was getting some pretty regular complaints from people. I talked to them and said, “Well, often you’ll be working at some point in your life with people where you need to forge a good productive relationship,” but eventually it got to the point where I said “Okay, anyone who wants to switch out of their group is welcome to and we’ll just re-form some new groups after this and anyone who wants to stay could.” And the shifting helped the people who were really productive and were frustrated that some of their colleagues were not quite as productive were really happy to start working with other people who were in a similar position, and I think there was some really positive complementarities from those people. The remaining people in those groups may have sunk down a little bit in terms of their performance in the class, but they had the option of becoming a bit more active and working harder, and they just chose not to take it.

Doug: And some students will do that. And look, as important as I believe econometrics is, some students, they’re like, you know, I have other ideas about what’s important in college, and maybe it’s different classes. Maybe it’s the social aspect, and like, “Who am I to judge?” But, don’t expect an “A” if the social part of college is more important to you.

Rebecca: There’s also always the group too that when you start talking to all of them, they all think they’re doing something different. It’s really hard to get a read on who’s doing what, and this person thinks this person is not doing anything, and this other person thinks they’re not. Those conversations happened together, but a little intervention and clarity and communication can go a long way. And I’ve had some really dysfunctional teams become functional, just with a little intervention early on, when you realize that they’re all talking past each other and are all quite unhappy.

Doug: Do you have them identify their role and write down like, when they submit a group project, say who did what? And would you recommend it? Because I don’t do that. I’ve always wondered if I should do that.

Rebecca: I’ve gone back and forth. Sometimes I have projects where they have defined their roles. I do it in sprints, or break it into pieces. And so they might switch roles in each round or whatever.

Doug: Which they should.

Rebecca: Yeah, I do also, I tend to ask a question on the team evaluations, which I do multiple times throughout the semester that ask who contributed the most to the group? And why or what did you learn from each colleague, and those tend to be really informative, and reflection papers.

Doug: One more thing I want to add to this part of the discussion is, this is really important, but we always make sure not to isolate women or underrepresented minorities in groups, because when you do that, they, in general have a pretty bad experience. And we’re not going for that /we’re going for good.

John: In Episode 182, we had Olga Stoddard on the podcast, who talked about a study where she and some colleagues had done in an MBA program where they had persistent groups. And the groups that had only a single female ended up evaluating the contributions of a female participant much lower. And in fact, they rated themselves lower as well. And there was some really substantial gains in their perceived participation, when they represented a larger share of the group, when it was a majority female group. They’ll be following it up with some research on individuals from other underrepresented groups.

Doug: So when I first started doing these peer ratings, I had three categories. So in addition to effort and dependability, I had collegiality, because I was trying to capture like, is this person… they’re putting in effort to show up on time… but they’re just a jerk, and like you should get penalized for that. And what I found is that the male students all gave the female students low collegiality ratings, and the female students all gave the male students low collegiality ratings, so it was just like incorporating sexism into the grade, and I didn’t want to do that. So, I just removed it altogether. It didn’t help.

John: One of the things that I’ve been doing based on, actually something our Dean suggested when she gave a workshop on group activities, was having groups put together some type of a group agreement on how they would resolve conflicts and so forth at the very start of the semester. And that seems to have really significantly reduced many of these issues, and providing some time during the semester for them to talk over any group processing issues they may be having. So that if they are facing challenges with people contributing, they have a chance to work that out amongst themselves and just talk about that a little bit before the problem becomes more ingrained. And it seems to have been helpful.

Doug: That’s super interesting, I do something not as good, which is at the beginning of the semester, I do this exercise in class where they have to write down what they think are like the five behaviors that are consistent with a well functioning group. And then I’ve got mine. And then we do the big word cloud. And we talk about it like listening to what everyone in the group has to say, being nice, giving people the benefit of the doubt, things like that. I guess it’s more proactive rather than reactive. But I think there’s probably a role for both.

Rebecca: I’ve mentioned before in the podcast, too, that I’ve been doing an activity called a retrospective at regular intervals throughout the semester, which is like a group reflection. I’ve been using virtual whiteboards and sticky notes, to do it with some basic questions like “What should the group keep doing? What should the group stop doing?”

Doug: Oh, interesting.

Rebecca: “And what should the group start to do?” And that was, I found, really productive and the amount of team issues that I’ve had since I started doing that has been greatly reduced.

Doug: I’m writing this down, sot I can do it too. I like that idea a lot.

Rebecca: It’s worked surprisingly well. I’ve been using Miro, which is a virtual whiteboard. And they actually have a number of templates for different retrospectives that you could use as a starting point.

Doug: You like that better than Jamboard?

Rebecca: Yeah, it has way more features but I also teach design, so we need fancier things, and it needs to look nice and you can make it nice in there. [LAUGHTER]

Doug: I used Jamboard last semester and it was great. The breakout rooms actually were able to communicate a lot better with each other when they could all write on a Jamboard.

Rebecca: Yeah, my use of whiteboards virtually has greatly improved collaboration.

Doug: Right. I’m not sure what to do in the classroom now.

Rebecca: I know. [LAUGHTER]

John: I used Jamboard in all my classes and I was thinking, should I ask students to do this while they’re in a big classroom? And I’m kind of thinking, yes.

Rebecca: Yes.

Doug: Maybe, yeah, maybe… because the alternative is like one person writing on a piece of paper, and everyone else leaning over their shoulder. And it’s not as good.

Rebecca: Oor wasting a lot of paper by using a lot of sticky notes.

Doug: Right.

Rebecca: Because you can do the physical version of it, but…

Doug: But it’s got to be big enough. In a class where you’ve got 200 students, you don’t really have enough whiteboard.

John: Could you tell us a little bit more about the impact of these changes on student learning.

Doug: We see improvements in student learning, but it often takes more than one semester of refinement to get there. And I think that’s a really important lesson: that you have to be patient when you make these changes.

Rebecca: Hey, we’re new at something and you have to have practice. Is that what you’re saying, Doug?

Doug: Right, but how many times have you run into someone who said, “I tried clickers and it didn’t work in my class?” Like, of course, it didn’t work. When you got on the bike, did it work the first time you tried to ride it? No, of course not. We’ve managed to reduce achievement gaps in some classes and we’ve really increased the sense of community among people. I think, actually, those two are pretty strongly related. We’ve moved from a real laser focus on increasing average learning to a wider range of outcomes: more attitudes, more gaps, we spent a lot of time thinking about how to lift the bottom of the distribution, like, “Who are these people that are scoring in the bottom quarter of the class? And why?” So yeah, I would say those are the main results we’ve had.

John: And by building an environment which creates more of a sense of community, it’s more likely I think that persistence towards graduation and degree will increase. Have you looked at any data on that yet, in terms of student persistence as a result of some of these changes?

Doug: Well, at Cornell, most people end up getting their degree. So that’s a way in which I think like an Ivy League college is pretty different from a lot of other colleges. Does active learning work in the classroom? Yes, and that’s true no matter where you are. But issues of retention, we actually spend a lot of time thinking about retention. But when we say retention, what we’re talking about is how much do you remember of what you learned in the class after the class is over? How much do you retain in terms of the knowledge, and we’ve actually been analyzing a fair amount of data and collecting a lot of data on this. And in some cases, students forget a lot. In other cases, there are for sure cases where they retain a lot. And so we do a lot of following up students after the course is over, and then giving them the test, the same end of semester assessment again, and we’re in the midst of an NSF funded research project right now, to see how much active learning matters. So we’re following up with students in our kind of baseline courses, like one, two, and three years later, and following up with the students who’ve taken the same course but with active learning, and we’re seeing if the retention is different, I’m really excited about that. What we’ve seen so far, with different work, is that if you apply what you’ve learned in another course, or in an internship, your retention is far higher. So that’s a really great result, and we’re really happy about that and it’s intuitive. We have another result, which is that if you take a class where you learn a different set of methods for answering the same questions. So we see this, if you take a stats class, and then you take a machine learning class, where you learn a different set of methods for doing similar kinds of things, you actually perform much worse. Those methods that you learned, they just get substituted out of your brain and then new methods are plugged in. And it’s not good. There’s evidence for this in psychology, and even a name for it. It’s called adaptive forgetting. And I think there’s like real, pretty serious implications here for our teaching, that we need to do a better job kind of connecting these things together, so that this doesn’t happen. And then the third thing that we’re looking at is, are there systematic differences by gender and by race in retention. And the data is too preliminary now, but it looks like there might be. And that’s pretty scary and we don’t know why. And we really need to get to the bottom of that. But the first step is to identify the problem. And then the next step is to kind of hypothesize ways to fix the problem. I think we were identifying a pretty serious problem there.

John: And you do have some control measures there in the more traditional classes that you can compare that to to see what types of interventions may be best in reducing some of those gaps.

Doug: Yeah, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.

John: We always end with a question, what’s next? And it sounds like you’ve got lots of plans for that.

Doug: So I feel like the Active Learning Initiative is chugging along and we have a process and we’re applying it and we’ve saved our macroeconomics courses for the end because there’s less consensus about what macro is then the other courses, and so that’s fine, but I’m not a macroeconomist, but it’s important and it needs to be done. So I’m pretty excited about collecting and analyzing this retention data that I was just talking about. I’ll give one more project that I’m excited about that we have going right now. We came up with this math assessment and we learned that the math assessment, if you give it at the beginning of the semester, in both our intro classes and our intermediate classes, it’s strongly predictive of how well the students do in the class. And so in particular, if you do badly on the math assessment, you’re much more likely to perform poorly in the class itself. And so some students, they just come in, and they’re behind on day one. And this semester, we are working jointly with colleagues at George Washington University and at the Copenhagen Business School. And in all three sites, we are trying something different to try to help these students, we’re all going to give the same math assessment at the beginning of the term. And we’re going to try different things to actually help these students succeed. And it’s going to be a little bit of a let… well, I was gonna say, let a 1000 flowers bloom, but it’s really like three flowers bloom… We’re gonna hope we can actually find a solution to a problem we identified. So that’s what’s next. That’s what’s on the agenda for the fall.

Rebecca: Maybe you’ll even find more than one solution.

Doug: That would be great. They’re pretty different in terms of how intensive they are. They go from: here are some online resources that you can work with, all the way to, why don’t you hold off on taking your intro class and take this full semester math for economics course, and then take intro, and then the Cornell treatment is actually an intermediate level treatment, the expensive treatment should work. But we’re gonna formally show that, but these other two… we don’t know. And so we’re looking forward to finding out. And we’re looking forward to helping a whole ton of students that would otherwise have a really bad experience in an economics course, and then never take another one.

John: And that was actually one of the things I was thinking about in terms of retention, that the retention isn’t only at the institution, it’s also persistence to that degree in that major, and we lose a lot of people in economics, and a lot of it is related to math ability.

Doug: Yeah, that’s right. I think it’s obscured by the fact that we get a lot of students that fall out of the hard sciences. So it seems like we’re getting a lot of students that are continuing, but they’re not really. we’re losing a whole bunch of we’re gaining some.

John: Thanks, Doug. It’s great talking to you. And I’m looking forward to seeing you at some economic conferences as they start to pick up more in person again.

Doug: I know, wouldn’t that be nice? I’m looking forward to it. The virtual conferences have been really good, but they for sure missed out on the social part.

Rebecca: And the travel part.

Doug: I don’t miss the travel that much.

John: I’ve been able to attend many more conferences, but it just doesn’t feel the same.

Doug: No.

Rebecca: There is something to be said about moving yourself to a different space, so that you can focus on what’s at hand, whether or not the travel and all the logistics associated with that are pleasant or not. There’s something about just moving yourself from the normal everyday to some other way that can be helpful in focusing.

Doug: …where the cats and the dogs and the kids can’t walk in on your session.

Rebecca: Indeed. Well, thanks so much, Doug. It’s always great to hear how things are going. And I hope we’ll get a future update as the project continues to move along.

Doug: Oh, yeah, I would love to.

John: Well, thank you. And I hope we do see a return of the band of the Teach Better podcast once things settle down.

Doug: Well, the crazy thing is, you always hear about these bands and their last tracks? And I’ve never really understood like, why didn’t they just put it on the album? What is this with the lost tracks that get released much later? We have two episodes that have never been published, and they’re really good.

John: That’s the easy way to bring it back.

Doug: So someday, we’ll release like the… [LAUGHTER] like the hidden tapes.

John: …the basement tapes. This been super fun you guys. It’s so nice to catch up.

[MUSIC]

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

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

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196. The Coffee Shop

Posted in active learning, evidence-based practices, higher education, learning, pedagogy, professional development, support network, teaching, teaching centers
July 14, 2021

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

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

Shownotes

Transcripts

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

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

[MUSIC]

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

Margaret: : Thank you.

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

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

Rebecca: Today’s teas are…

John: Are any of you drinking tea?

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

Rebecca: Well, that sounds good.

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

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

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

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

Jodi: Really? I could’ve…. [LAUGHTER]

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

Margaret: Yes. [LAUGHTER]

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

Margaret: They let me stay on.

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

Jodi: Absolutely.

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

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

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

Margaret: Nice.

Jodi: Those both sound tasty.

BRANDON: They do sound delicious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jodi: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

John: Absolutely.

BRANDON: 100%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: We look forward to it.

Margaret: Thank you for having us.

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

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

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

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188. Student-Ready Courses

Posted in active learning, engagement, flipped class, higher education, K-12, learning, mastery learning, math ed, online learning, pedagogy, peer instruction, STEM, teaching
May 19, 2021

College faculty sometimes complain that many of the first-year students who enter their courses are not “college ready.” In this episode, Natalie Hurley joins us to examine strategies that can be used to ease this transition and help ensure that our courses are “student ready.” Natalie is a New York State Master Teacher and a 2018 NNSTOY STEM Fellow who teaches high school mathematics in the Indian River Central School District in Watertown, NY.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: College faculty sometimes complain that many of the first-year students who enter their courses are not “college ready.” In this episode, we examine strategies that can be used to ease this transition and help ensure that our courses are “student ready.”

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Natalie Hurley. Natalie is a New York State Master Teacher and a 2018 NNSTOY STEM Fellow who teaches high school mathematics in the Indian River Central School District in Watertown, NY. Natalie was also one of our students here at SUNY Oswego. Welcome, Natalie,

Natalie: T hank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

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

Natalie: I am, I’m drinking a peach tea because it’s warming up outside and I want to feel that warmth.

Rebecca: That sounds right up John’s alley,

John: …and I am drinking a ginger peach green tea.

Rebecca: I knew there’d be peach. It’s almost like you guys coordinated. I have Irish breakfast today.

John: No Scottish?

Rebecca: I am almost out of the Irish breakfast. And then we will move on to a different container.

John: Move down the Empire [LAUGHTER] and head back to your English breakfast and afternoon.

Rebecca: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

John: Okay, we’ve invited you here to talk about the transition between high school and college. Could you first tell us a little bit about the courses that you teach?

Natalie: I teach high school math. And I have a pretty nice spectrum. I teach algebra I, calculus, and precalculus. I’m in my fifth year of teaching precalculus and calculus, and I have taught algebra I, eight years.

John: Excellent. What were your majors in college?

Natalie: So, I was a math major from the get go. And then I had this fantastic professor who helped me find my love of economics. His name is Professor John Kane, and he’s here with us too. [LAUGHTER] And then, once I started to find my love of economics, I picked up a minor in it. Unfortunately, it was too late in the game to pick up a double major, but the minor was great too.

John: And we did talk a little bit about you going on to grad school in economics. And I was a little disappointed that you didn’t, but then I thought you could do a lot of good in the school system. So, one of the things we want to talk to you about is the differences between your experiences in college and the way you teach your classes now. Could you talk a little bit about some of the differences between what you observed as an undergraduate student and the way in which you teach now in secondary school?

Natalie: Yes. So there are definitely a lot of differences. Although I tried to definitely keep that idea of college and career readiness, being wholesome in my classroom. I remember in college it was a lot of lecture style, a combination between very, very large classes of hundreds. And my math classes were usually pretty small, less than 20, generally. In my classroom, in a non pandemic year, I have somewhere between 15 and 20 students usually. Of course, now we’re doing cohorts. So I have a class as small as two and another class as large as 13… is my largest class… on Thursdays and Fridays. So I just remember, in college, a lot of lecture style: the teacher talks, you write notes, you can ask questions, but it’s very much like you raise your hand, if a teacher calls on you, you can ask a question. In my classroom, it’s more a conversation about math, whereas I’m leading them to discover the math, hopefully on their own, with a little bit of questioning from me to lead them there. There’s a lot of… in a non-pandemic year, think-pair-shares, or working in groups, or talking it out with their partner, or somebody that they sit near… things like that, that’s a little bit harder to do these days, especially when I only have a class of two in there sitting six feet away from each other or more.

Rebecca: Everything’s a think-pair-share. [LAUGHTER]

Natalie: Right. So yeah, and as I grow, and I become more seasoned, it becomes more student centered and less about me than it had been before. So I want to put the students in the center, whereas when I was there, it was very much the teachers up there telling you how to do it. And then this is how you do the calculus. And then this is how you do calc 2, this is how you do calc 3, and they just show you and you find your study groups, and then you work with each other after class as opposed to in class. So that seems to be some of the differences. I remember in college is a lot of rote memorization: know these words, be able to regurgitate this proof, things like that, where just now, in my classroom, and really the focus of high school math, and really all math through the Common Core standards, is that deep understanding, getting to the core and understanding vertically, what number sense and number theory is throughout all the grade levels.

Rebecca: It sounds like you’ve incorporated a lot of evidence-based practices into your own practice, which we encourage all of our faculty, even at the college level, to do as well. We hear a lot of faculty complaining about students not being “college ready.” And maybe that’s because there’s still a lot of lecture and memorization, and we want to keep changing that. What are some ways that we can become more “student ready” and bring students in?

Natalie: I think it’s very important that colleges understand what it’s like in the high school, how teachers are teaching, what they’re teaching. I’m in my ninth year, and the next year, we’ll start to move into the next gen math standards. And then that’s going to be the third set of standards. And I think it’s really important for college professors at all levels to be able to understand what did these standards look like for these kids? And how do I need to change what I’m teaching to adapt to that? I recently had a very informal discussion with the master teacher program and SUNY professors at SUNY Delhi about their math and science curriculum. And there was just a lot of surprises on both ends about what’s being taught, what isn’t being taught any more… emphasis on the calculator… standards now are being written so that there’s a lot of calculator use and students are losing a lot of their number sense, because you don’t need to know how to add and subtract, multiply and divide fractions when you get into high school, because you have a calculator that’s going to do it all, which turns into a lot of button pushing. But that’s definitely going to have a trickle down effect into… or trickle up effect, I guess… in college, when these students get there and they’re so used to being fully dependent on calculator and technology use… which is great if you’re a college that also promotes that. But some colleges may also still say, “Hey, we want to limit technology.”

John: Since you were in college, I think much of our teaching has changed. I know in my own department, most of us were doing a lot of lecturing when you were a student. And there’s been a pretty steady transition away from that. And that’s been true in many departments, including our math department.

Natalie: That’s great to hear.

John: But we still see a lot of lecture. And one of the things we’re hoping is that perhaps the experience of the transition to remote instruction has encouraged more people to try some new approaches to teaching and learning.

Natalie: We have definitely seen that in the high school, a lot of teachers who were behind the ball, as far as utilizing technology in their classrooms, it’s been forced to become great at it… literally overnight. So I guess if there’s a silver lining to all of this, that is definitely key right there. I think something that’s extremely important in high school is making connections to real world, making everything very real life, how am I ever going to use this in real life and making sure that that is evident in the student learning. And I don’t teach in a college, I haven’t been in a college in 10-15 years. But I think that if you wanted to be more student ready is also connecting all of your curricula to career readiness. Students want to know why am I taking this class if I’m going to be a librarian, or if I’m going to be a social worker. So just being able to bring those connections to them, could also help colleges be more student ready.

Rebecca: Just that relevance alone is more motivating to get students excited about topics. So finding ways to connect to students, no matter the level, high school or college, is a really great way to bring them in and bring them along.

John: One of the challenges I know in economics we face, is with students saying, “I’m just not very good at math,” or “I have trouble with graphs.” And I suspect maybe you might have seen a little bit of that, too. How do you address that issue of a fixed mindset concerning student’s ability to engage in mathematics?

Natalie: In my calculus and precalculus classes, and you’ll be even surprised to hear it that I do hear that there. But it’s extremely prevalent in algebra I, that idea of “My mom wasn’t good at math, so I’m not going to be good at math.” “I’ve always had math support, AIS,” or “I’ve been able to get through because I’ve always stayed after with the teacher.” I definitely still hear that, but the idea is to kind of break that mold by saying, “Hey, listen, this is a new year. This is a new teacher, this is a new curriculum, maybe this is going to be the one for you.” I find a lot of students struggle through geometry. So as soon as I bring up geometry, it’s like, “Oh, no, I don’t want to.” And I say, “Listen, let’s connect it to algebra, then. Do you feel more comfortable making the connections to algebra?” …or I don’t even know. I don’t know how to tell them that you can be better. Maybe you had a bad teacher, maybe you had a teacher who didn’t make things relevant for you, or just some bad experiences, but every year’s a new year. I’ve seen all sorts of success stories of students who truly find their niche late in high school math. So in my class, I’ve definitely adopted the idea of a growth mindset. And I’ve been studying on best practices to help do this. And part of that has been through standards-based grading. I’m kind of a beginner, a novice, of standards-based grading… more of a cafeteria, I’m choosing which aspects of it that I’d like to implement versus which ones don’t work for me, yet, as I learn and grow, which is definitely not the high school or college that I went to, to implement things like re-quizzes and retests. And it was hard for me to even start with this idea. Nobody else in my department was doing anything like this. And to be honest, as I was starting my career, I started my career right as common core was being implemented. So there was a ton of work in developing all the new curricula. I started in an eighth grade and moved all the way up and I’m like, “Wait, you want me to make two tests? four tests? two quizzes? three quizzes? four? And you want me to give them to these kids and grade them and change their grades and all of the clerical work. But now that I’m nine years in, I’m ready for it. And I find that the students have such a better… I guess they feel better about themselves when they go in to take a quiz when they know that there’s going to be redemption. One thing that I do is, if their test grade beats their quiz grade, I let the test grade replace the quiz grade in the gradebook. If you can show growth, by the time you get to the test… and that idea actually comes from college. If your grade on the final is better than your grade in the class, some professors will do something like that. Or if your grade is high enough, you don’t even need to take the final or I don’t know if anybody’s still doing things like that. But that kind of way, it takes the stress of testing and quizzing, and it takes it off of the grade and puts it more onto the learning. And, however, I do understand that that practice might not be making my students “college ready” if their college professors are not following that, which probably they are not. However, it’s something that I feel I need to do in order to focus on the learning that needs to happen.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that we’ve been working really hard to do at the college level is to incorporate some of those practices as well, to encourage learning, and that it’s about test taking and the testing effect as a way of remembering and learning and practicing rather than some moment in time that somehow reflects all learning that has ever occurred, which is not really relevant or accurate.

John: And you would be happy to know that many people in our math department are doing mastery quizzing and mastery learning approaches where they allow students multiple attempts to demonstrate mastery.

Rebecca: One of the things that I think is somewhat problematic for the transition of students from high school to college is that we don’t have these kinds of conversations very often. They’re not in place unless we go out of our way to talk to local high school teachers about what’s going on in local schools and vice versa, where high school teachers are asking us what’s going on at the college level. Can you talk a little bit about how your Delhi experience evolved in ways that you could encourage others to have those same kinds of conversations?

Natalie: I believe it was somebody from SUNY Delhi reached out to the Executive Director of the New York State Master Teacher program, if you haven’t heard about it, it’s a STEM initiative to retain teachers in math and science. And it’s a four-year fellowship that you have to apply and interview and be selected to join. But, it ends up creating a very strong network of teachers statewide that are actually affiliated with SUNY, every region has a SUNY campus that they are affiliated with, Up here in the North Country, mine is Plattsburgh. And since our program has moved more to an online format, we were able to all participate with SUNY Delhi through this conversation. And I think that just leads to more ideas for the future or to somebody who has an in with some SUNY people. I think we all do professional development. I do it as a high school teacher, and you guys do it as professors. But then, where can we find the middle ground that can maybe mesh some professional development and share some best practices between our two groups?

Rebecca: Sounds like an excellent idea.

John: That is a practice that I think we should do more of. One of the issues that we have is that in general, high schools provide a lot of support for students. And often some of that support comes from parents who help encourage students to be successful in school, and then all of a sudden, people go away to college. And sometimes that doesn’t work quite as well, and we lose a lot of people. Do you have any suggestions on what perhaps colleges could do better to help retain more students?

Natalie: That’s a great question. And I think as we grow through the years, you’re noticing a lot more of, shall I say, helicopter parents or parents who are very, very involved in their children’s lives, and so much to the fact that they actually can become bulldozer parents and literally take roadblocks out of their children’s way so that they never experienced any kind of struggle. And that, of course, is not anything that me as a high school teacher, or you guys as college faculty can do, other than just encouraging parents to step back. Students should be very autonomous. I think that, if anything, we’re going to see out of this pandemic. Another I guess silver lining is the students are becoming more autonomous. They have to when their parents are working and they’re only going to school two days a week and they’re responsible for their own learning the other three days a week. They’re also learning skills, like do I care for online learning? So when I get to college, should I steer towards classes that are online or steer away from classes that are online. So these are definitely going to be skills. So you guys might want to look out for when you’re screening students or as advisors, “Hey, how did you do when you were fully remote? Were you able to get all of your work done? Did your mom have to come home and sit down with you and work with you? Or were you able to get up in the morning, eat your breakfast, and then get right started on your schoolwork?” I make a joke to my seniors about this time of year that if they are still being woken up by their parents, they are not ready for college. You will be home by Christmas if your mother is still waking you up to get you in the shower and get to school on time. Students are going to have a lot of free time when they get to college. Their lives are managed for 40 hours a week, an hour bus ride in and back, somebody tells them when it’s time to eat lunch, then they go right to sports practice and come back. They’re so busy when they’re in high school. And then when they get to college, and they have class that are for 15 hours a week, that’s a lot of extra time for these kids to have to manage. And then when they start to find out, “Oh, nobody’s gonna call my mom, if I don’t go to school?” That’s the kind of mentality that these kids are going to. And I ask my students often, “What do you think is going to be one of your biggest struggles?” or “What do you think is going to be a biggest struggle of your peers? …and it is time management. The students are used to doing a lot of their work in school, either in the class or given class time to start assignments, to do assignments, or they have a study hall where somebody says, “Okay, get your books out, get to work.” And now they’re just going to go to class, they’re going to learn for an hour, hour and a half, and then go back to their dorm and have to start studying on their own. And even that, just the idea of needing to study, a lot of students can very easily get through high school without studying, without ever learning how to study. They just are good students, they know how to sit and behave, they learn well, they do their assignments, and that’s enough. I was a victim of that. I was always above average just by doing exactly what is expected of me. And then when you get to the bigger pond and you become the smaller fish, that can cause a lot of struggle for students, that idea of time that’s not managed, that they need to learn how to manage on their own.

Rebecca: I think you’re highlighting a lot of great themes here. And we certainly experience as college faculty, but your students are right: time management is the number one struggle of our college students. [LAUGHTER] They already know that it’s a problem. We know that it’s a problem. High school teachers know it’s a problem. But we don’t actively necessarily all collaborate on finding solutions to that problem. We just expect overnight students are somehow magically going to have autonomy and know what to do with it. [LAUGHTER]

John: And that’s especially true for first-gen students who haven’t had family members talk to them about those challenges and those issues, and who don’t have that sort of support. And suddenly, they have all this free time. And they don’t have any tests until weeks away or months away. And they just had these big assignments due so they don’t have anything they have to do right away. But one of the things that we know makes that worse is online instruction. Because there’s a lot of research. I did some about 17 or 18 years ago that found that freshmen and sophomores just did dramatically worse with online courses. And we had a guest on our podcast several months ago now, who found the same thing in a much larger study… that juniors and seniors and older individuals, if they’ve been successful in making it to that stage of college, they tend to be relatively successful at managing their time effectively. So online instruction is much more challenging for freshmen. And one of the things that I know many faculty are concerned about is the fact that all of our students coming in next year will have spent at least a year in some sort of remote or online instruction. And the quality of that varies quite a bit across school districts. And I think that is going to be a challenge we’re going to need to address. Do you have any thoughts on how we can help students be better at this?

Natalie: You are definitely correct, there are going to be a lot of gaps to fill, based on how students have received instruction, in how much instruction, we were given guidance that perhaps we’d only get through 80% of our material. And as you know, at the end of the 2020 school year, some of the learning immediately stopped in mid March with the “do no harm” idea of you can’t do harm to any of their grades, whatever their grade is when they left is what their grade needs to be. So we saw students who had very high averages that said, “You know what, it’s good enough. So I know you can’t give me anything less than a 98. So I’m not doing anything for the rest of the year.” And that was a very real situation that’s not going to be reflected in a transcript that you receive as a college advisor or as a college applicant when these kids are applying to school. I’m hopeful that students could self assess where they’re at, that if a college is going to have a lot of remote opportunities, and they are good at online learning, absolutely, go there, that’s for you. And if not, then that might not be for you.

John: I think we can also refer back to an earlier podcast we did with Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan, who talked about the importance of structure in all of our classes, that providing students with clear directions, with giving them more expectations, and a couple of other podcasts that we had with Betsy Barre, she discusses the importance of sharing information about the time that’s required for various tasks. So giving students more detailed instructions and giving them more guidance on how much time they should be expected to work on things, perhaps, may help.

Natalie: I completely agree, I remember the rule of thumb was a three-credit level class would have about nine hours, the total amount of work, including class time for that class. And I try to drill this into my students heads as a pre-calc and calc teacher that you’re going to be doing a lot of work outside of this class, which is not what they’re used to. They’re used to, “I’m going to go home, I’m going to do 15 minutes worth of homework, and it’s going to be graded based on effort. So I get a free 100 in the gradebook if I did it, and nobody’s gonna care if I did it correctly, I could do the whole thing wrong, I could copy from my friend, and there we go, I get the credit.” And that’s just not college readiness, or career readiness, for hopefully most careers. But I would love to see some kind of, even in high schools and then have it trickle right up to college, some kind of bridging from each course… ninth grade, these are our expectations, 10th grade, you get a little bit more strict restrictions, and then all of that being an idea of we’re bridging the gap from 12th grade to college. And as well as college professors and faculty looking back and saying, “Okay, this is where they’re at when they’re coming to us. And so we can pick it up from here.”

Rebecca: Yeah, that ramping is so important. And just acknowledging where students are at, and meeting them where they’re at, and not having some false expectation of where we wish they were, which is very different. And I think what John was talking about, like providing some time allotments and things, but just even providing students with a sample of what their outside of class time should just generally be looking like, maybe you are spending three hours outside of class studying or six hours outside of class studying. But what are those six hours look like? What does studying look like for this class? What are the kinds of exercises that would be really helpful. And faculty have a vision of what that should be, we just often don’t communicate it.

John: And often when faculty do, though, they communicate what worked for them, which is what had worked for their professors before them, which is not always what would work for a typical student.

Rebecca: What do you mean? Highlighting, John?

John: …and repeated rereading, and focusing on learning styles, but there’s a lot of things out there that faculty may encourage students to do that is not really always consistent with evidence. And going back to your point earlier, Natalie, about providing the relevance of things, one of the problems I think that faculty have is we got into these things, because we’re just really interested in the questions of the discipline. And the things that interest us now are based on having studied the discipline for a long time. And it’s a little harder, often, to connect with the types of things that would interest a student who’s just coming out of high school or is in a sophomore or junior position in college, because they don’t have that same network of concepts to make the topics that we find interesting as interesting to them. That’s something I think we definitely need to work on.

Rebecca: I know one thing that I always struggle with in the design classes that I teach is I’m constantly trying to get students to think about audiences other than themselves. But then when you start to put things in perspective, you realize they don’t really know much beyond themselves. They know maybe what an audience younger than them might experience or have expectations of, but they have a really hard time envisioning what a professional world might be like, because you just don’t have any experience in it. So we often come to the table with so many assumptions that we think that they have, and they just don’t have the life experience to match it.

John: We’ve talked a little bit about how instruction was affected during the pandemic, how did your classes transition?

Natalie: I saw this, the pandemic, as a way to be able to spread my wings and try and implement some different teaching strategies that I had thought about, but I wasn’t totally sure if I wanted to dive right in in one given year. And one of those ideas was the idea of a flipped classroom. I had never felt confident to be able to create a flipped classroom that I felt students would be responsible for. That being, watching the videos at home and then us just working on problems together in class. And to be honest, that’s pretty much what has happened. I have students who will have to watch videos on the two days, three days that they’re not here, and they have to, and I’ve figured out now how to assess that they’ve watched the videos, and to make sure that they are responsible for that learning. It’s not totally flipped. But I do have to provide instruction to these students three days of the week that they’re not around. And I did that in a couple of different ways for each one of my preps, because I didn’t want to get so solid in just one way was “the way,” and I wanted to try some things out. So for calculus, I teach calculus fully synchronous. My students who are at home Google meet live with the students that I have in class in front of me. We’re able to talk about problems as a bigger class instead of just the five who are in front of me. And that’s worked out quite well for us. Granted, class is at 10 o’clock, so it’s not too super early for these students. So, precalculus, I do kind of more HyFlex. They have the opportunity to come to the live session if they want to, or I do make videos for them to watch on their own. One thing that we had to keep in mind this year was that some of these students are responsible for younger siblings while parents are at work. So we needed to be a little bit more flexible in how we set up our classes. And when I had the conversation with my calculus students, they said, “Nope, we could totally do synchronous.” And if they needed me to make a video, I can make them a video. And then algebraI, I do completely asynchronous, the videos are already set up. There’s no live session. When they come in the next day, or whatever day follows watching the videos, I check and make sure that they watch their videos, give them a little bit of credit, just for doing what they were supposed to do. And, to be honest, I have become very, very graceful compared to how I ever was in the first seven and a half, eight years of teaching. My department very rarely ever accepts late work. Math is a sequential subject, you need to do the work today so that you know what’s going on tomorrow in class. This year, I’m just happy it’s getting done and getting done with integrity. So I’ve become so extremely graceful with students who are getting work done after due dates, right before the quarter ends. It’s not great, but they are also learning a very important lesson in “it’s a lot easier if I just do a little bit every day instead of trying to cram it all in at the end of the semester, or at the end of the quarter.” So, hopefully, that idea can trickle up to college as well. It’s not very easy to dig yourself out of a hole, especially in college.

John: You mentioned with your recordings that you were verifying that they actually watched the videos. How do you do that?

Natalie: With my algebra I, the videos obviously match their note packet, they have guided notes that matches very nicely. So the next day I just come in, check, they’re going to show me a front and back with all of the notes filled in. For precalculus, I feel like I shouldn’t have to check their notes, that they should be responsible enough for that level to actually watch the videos, I did get a sense that they weren’t watching the videos, mostly because I was bringing things up when they came to class, and I had a lot of blank stares looking at me. So I started using a program called Edpuzzle. They have to sign into it with their Google account. Lots of teachers in my school use this. And I was able to see who was actually watching. And it was funny, I had a student come to me and he goes, “I’m going to make a guess that 1/3 of the kids are actually watching the videos.” And as soon as I started counting up the number of students who actually watched the videos, it was about 1/3. So that gave a very stern talking to about what my expectations were in that they’re not going to have the best understanding and knowledge if they’re just practicing the homework assignments, that it needs to be the full package, coming to class in whatever shape or form that looks like, be it coming to the live session or watching the videos. But all of it needs to be done in order to be successful in precalculus.

John: Do you embed questions in the videos?

Natalie: I am just getting my feet wet with it. I just started using it. So no, I haven’t gotten that far. But I did hear that you can and you can do a little checkup and it will not let you get through unless you do the question. So is that something you guys have used?

John: I haven’t used EdPuzzle. But I have been using PlayPosit this year. And I embed questions in it and it is required as part of the grade in my econometrics class and in my introductory microeconomics class, and I’m probably incorporating it in more classes as I go forward. But students actually have responded really positively. They discovered that when they watch the videos, it’s really helpful, because when there was no grading involved or no questions, the level of use of the videos was dramatically lower. So this provides just a small incentive, it’s a trivial part of their grade, but it’s enough to induce them to watch them, though. I’ve been really pleased with it. One advantage of Edpuzzle though, is that It’s free, as far as I understand, whilel, I do have to pay for PlayPosit.

Natalie: Yep, it’s free. And we’re a Google school. So they are able to sign right in. And it was easy for me to use, I could see all the students, I could see how much of it they watched. So that was pretty cool.

Rebecca: That’s great. As I’m hearing you talk about how your teaching has transitioned, it largely matches how faculty at the college level have also had to transition. So in some ways, we may have been brought together unexpectedly. [LAUGHTER] So there’s a lot more college faculty also using a flipped classroom model, and using more class time to solve problems and work on the more complicated things. Because often the video lectures or that kind of part of the material is foundational. Some of it might be memorization things, it might be terms and things like this, and then you put it into action in the class, and you can have guidance and coaching. So what’s really interesting is that the pandemic may have brought these two experiences together, and that bridge might be more present than it has ever been before.

Natalie: Exactly, I used to think that there was no way for my students to learn, if I wasn’t the one who was telling them and showing them. If I wasn’t up at the front of the board, doing it with them, doing it for them, then they weren’t going to learn… there was no way they can learn this on their own, and boy, was I ever wrong. Even though I could do 10 problems with them up at the board, whereas they could do three working together in a small group or in a pair, it’s so much more valuable to listen to them have those conversations, and to hear them explain these things, in their own words, or what’s very powerful too, is when I hear my words come out of their mouth, as they’re explaining it to another student. So that’s totally cool to hear that. And I think that’s the direction of education. The prep work is more important than what the teacher role is in the classroom. So the role of the teacher plays planning and prepping for a lesson is so much more powerful than what the teacher is doing in the classroom at that time as far as leading instruction.

Rebecca: That design of experience is so powerful, just generally. I think one of the things that I know I have always struggled with using a flipped classroom model, but I’m definitely getting better, the more and more I do it, is really scaling back on how much can actually be done in class, when students are working through problems and they’re not having quite as much coaching. You’re really letting them struggle and fail and try again. That takes time. It’s not like something that can happen automatically. So we might be used to going through more examples, but less examples, but more depth can be really powerful. And your right, students explaining to other students is an amazing thing to see. But it also helps them articulate or realize where they don’t understand, which is something that you don’t necessarily recognize when someone’s explaining something to you. Because when someone explains it to you, of course it seems obvious, until you have to do it yourself.

Natalie: Absolutely.

John: One of the things I was thinking about is I have to create a video on log transformations in econometrics tonight, and that reminded me of all that.

Natalie: Do you want one of mine? I can grab it right off Edpuzzle. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Can you imagine that, though, like sharing back and forth between high school and college and sharing resources? We should do more of this.

Natalie: Oh, absolutely. Why are we always reinventing the wheel for ourselves, when there’s so much already out there?

John: When you first create a flipped classroom model, it’s a lot of work, creating those videos, maybe embedding some questions in them. And doing that is a tremendous amount of work upfront. But it’s taking this stuff that’s relatively easy for students to learn and shifting it outside of the classroom. So that when students are in class, they’re able to focus on the things they have the most trouble with. Because, as Rebecca said, you can provide a really good lecture on how to do something, but if students haven’t wrestled with it, they’re not going to learn it as well. I know for many years, I was doing an awful lot of lecturing, and I’ve cut back to very, very little now other than when I’m recording lectures, and I’m seeing students struggle with materials, but then when they are assessed on it, there’s much more balance in their performance. Because before there were always some students who would pick up on everything you did… people like you, Natalie, and people like those who are faculty. We were able to learn the stuff by listening to people tell us how to do it and figure it out on our own. But that doesn’t work well for a lot of students. And when they’re there explaining it to each other, they learn it much more deeply than they ever would by trying to do the more difficult parts on their own. Because in the traditional model, we’d give them the basics and show them how to do things. But the only time when they really got to apply that was either when they were working alone, doing homework, trying to struggle to solve some problems. or on a high-stakes exam. And those are times when perhaps they need the most support and the flipped classroom model can really address that really nicely.

Natalie: Yep, I absolutely agree.

John: We always end with the question: “What’s next?” …which is a question I think everyone in education is wondering.

Natalie: I think what’s next is filling in the gaps. There is going to be a lot of gaps for a lot of years. And we keep saying I can’t wait till next year, I can’t wait till it’s back to normal. But pandemic aside, I don’t think it’s going to be normal for a long time, we’re going to have a lot of students who need a lot of support for a lot of years, and it’s going to affect me. And then it’s going to affect college faculty, as the students get up there, addressing where the gaps are, how can we fill them? How can we give these students the support that they need, even under just budgets that were being given that were cut in this past year or could be getting cut? We’re going to need a lot of support from each other, from our colleagues, from our administrators from the community… and I think a lot of understanding… these students are going to need understanding, we’re going to need understanding.

Rebecca: I really like the underscoring of this empathy towards one another, both between faculty and teachers, as well as between students and teachers. I think that’s a really nice note to end on. Thanks so much for sharing your insights, Natalie. I think many faculty will want to take the time and effort to reach out to some high school teachers and make some connections and start to figure out ways to bridge those gaps.

Natalie: Thank you so much for having me, this has been such a valuable experience. And I’m always grateful when anybody wants to listen to my opinion and share conversation with me.

John: Well, it’s great talking to you again, I very much enjoyed working with you when you were a student here, and it’s nice to see just how successful you’ve been. And I suppose I should mention that this came about because one of my current students had listened to the podcast, had shared it with people on Facebook, and then she said, “And you know, you really should invite one of my former teachers,” and so we invited you.

Natalie: That is so awesome. I feel very honored that that student thought that I had something great to share. And it’s been so great to be back in SUNY Oswego, among other Lakers, and of course, a professor who was a great mentor and led me down a path of success.

John: 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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186. Super Courses

Posted in active learning, attention, authentic learning, engagement, growth mindset, higher education, learning, motivation, pedagogy, self-regulated learning, syllabi, teaching
May 5, 2021

Students often see our classes as boxes that they need to check in order to graduate. By reframing our courses around fascinating big questions that students can connect with, we can help our students recognize the value of these learning experiences. In this episode, Ken Bain joins us to explore examples of courses that do this well.

Ken is an award winning teacher, the founder of the teaching centers at Northwestern, New York, and Vanderbilt Universities. He is the author of two very influential prior books, What the Best College Teachers Do and What the Best College Students Do. His newest, Super Courses, was released in March 2021

Shownotes

  • Bain, K. (2004). What the Best College Teachers Do. Harvard University Press.
  • Bain, K. (2012). What the Best College Students Do. Harvard University Press.
  • Bain, K. (2021). Super Courses: The Future of Teaching and Learning. Princeton University Press.
  • Andrew David Kaugman, Books Behind Bars
  • Deci, E. L. (1972). Intrinsic motivation, extrinsic reinforcement, and inequity. Journal of personality and social psychology, 22(1), 113.
  • Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (2001). Extrinsic rewards and intrinsic motivation in education: Reconsidered once again. Review of educational research, 71(1), 1-27.
  • Perusall
  • Hypothes.is

Transcript

John: Students often see our classes as boxes that they need to check in order to graduate. By reframing our courses around fascinating big questions that students can connect with, we can help our students recognize the value of these learning experiences. In this episode, we explore examples of courses that do this well.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Ken Bain. Ken is an award winning teacher, the founder of the teaching centers at Northwestern, New York, and Vanderbilt Universities. He is the author of two very influential prior books, What the Best College Teachers Do and What the Best College Students Do. His newest, Super Courses, was released in March 2021. Welcome, Ken.

Ken: Thank you very much. Glad to be here.

John: We’re really glad to talk to you. You visited Oswego a few years back and people are still talking about your visit.

Ken: Oh, wonderful. I had a wonderful visit.

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

Ken: No, my doctor won’t let me do that, and I haven’t had a good cup of tea in… oh my goodness… many, many years.

Rebecca: Oh, that would make me so sad.

Ken: Yes, indeed, it does. Me too. I can’t drink tea… anything that has caffeine in it.

Rebecca: Ah, total bummer.

Ken: Yes, it is. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I have about the strongest caffeinated Irish breakfast tea you can have. [LAUGHTER]

Ken: Oh, my goodness. Well, the last cup of coffee that I had was in 2002. I remember the date. That’s because it….

Rebecca: Oh, no…

Ken: …a traumatic experience, to go cold turkey.

John: Actually, that’s how I started drinking more tea. I had to cut out caffeine, so I started drinking herbal tea.

Ken: Well, I do drink herbal tea from time to time. I just don’t happen to have a cup right now.

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

Ken: Oh, wonderful.

John: It’s really good.

Rebecca: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss Super Courses. Could you tell us a little bit about the origin of this book project?

Ken: Well, my wife and longtime collaborator, Marsha Marshall Bain, suggested that we do a course around the Invitational syllabus, as we’ve come to call it, what we used to call the promising syllabus. And we began collecting those syllabi from around the world and began looking at them. And in the midst of that endeavor. Peter Dougherty, who is the longtime director of the Princeton University Press, contacted us one day and said, “Would you come down to Princeton, and I’ll buy you lunch?” So that sounded like a great invitation. And we went down. And he asked us what we were working on. And I told him and he said, “Oh, you’re looking for super courses.” And that triggered a whole avalanche Of reconsiderations of what we were doing, and we shifted the Invitational project over to the super course project, and began looking for courses that offered what we had been calling a natural critical learning environment. And we began that project back in, I guess, late 2007.

John: Maybe before we talk about your new book, you can talk just a little bit about the concept of an Invitational syllabus, since that was the origin of this project.

Ken: Oh, sure. It’s the idea of inviting your students into the class, rather than requiring them to come. And rather than focusing upon topics, it focuses upon big and enticing questions, so that the Invitational syllabus begins with an intriguing question, an important question, a beautiful question that students find so enticing, that they say, “I want to be a part of that.” And it becomes a self-motivating experience. So that’s part of what we meant by a natural critical learning environment, is the creation of that self-motivating experience where students would pursue things, not because someone was threatening them with a bad grade, or because they were just looking for credit, but because they became deeply interested in the question.

Rebecca: Can you expand a little bit upon the idea of the natural critical learning environment beyond just the Invitational syllabus?

Ken: Sure, we now have identified, oh, I guess, about 20 some odd elements of what we call a natural critical learning environment. And the first and most foundational of those elements is that it’s organized around those intriguing questions. And its intention is to foster what the literature calls deep learning, that is learning in which students think about implications and applications of what they’re learning and the possibilities of what they’re learning. It’s learning where students look behind the words on a page and think about all of those implications and applications and possibilities and how things are connected to each other. So that’s the foundational element and the chief goal of the natural critical learning environment is to create an atmosphere where students can, and will likely, pursue that deep approach to learning and they develop what we call deep intentions to learn. But, how do they do that? How do we get them to that point? So, what is the natural critical learning environment? Well, it’s an environment where they can try, they can come up short, and get feedback, and try again, without penalty, without any kind of situation where they are punished for coming up short. In other words, if you think about it, it’s the kind of learning environment that we expect, as scientists and as scholars. We try out things, and if they don’t work, if the data doesn’t confirm our hypothesis, we modify it and try again. And we’d be terribly insulted if our first effort out of the box was… and people would say, “That’s nonsense. That’s crazy. Go away.” We try things, get feedback, and try again, and so that’s what the natural critical learning environment does. It’s also an environment where students can work with each other. People learn in community arrangements, where they work with each other to grapple with the problems. And they learn… and this is another key element of the natural critical learning environment… they learn by doing. Sometimes that means learn by teaching. And by teaching, we don’t mean necessarily that they stand in front of a mirror and deliver lectures. In fact, the teaching that they develop often doesn’t even include lectures, it includes a way of fostering very deep learning on the part of other people by creating dialogues, creating exchanges around big questions that move students toward a deeper understanding and a deeper application.

John: Going back to that question of the big questions, because that’s an important part of the approach. I think you talk about that both at the level of the course as a whole in the Invitational syllabus, but also when you’re devising individual components of your course. Could you elaborate a little bit on what faculty should think about when trying to select those questions?

Ken: Yeah. And it’s more than selecting them. It’s framing them, and framing them in a way that will intrigue students. Now, some of the best super courses we came across were questions that sometimes began with questions that were much larger than the course and much larger than the discipline. But in the course of students pursuing those big questions, they discover that “Well, I need to learn chemistry to answer this question,” or “I need to learn history,” or maybe “I need to learn both,” because many of the super courses were multi-disciplinary, built around a big and complex and interesting fascinating question. And then the students would devise ways of trying to answer that question. And the professor would build an environment where they could progressively tackle those questions. They can run from the very simple to the very complex, one of my favorites, and one that I’ve talked about so much, and actually written about, going all the way back 10, 15 years ago, is one that we do mention, briefly, in this new book, but it’s joined by other really exciting examples. First, that old example, it comes from 2006. And there was a professor at Princeton at the time, he was a political historian and political scientist, and who wanted the students to examine the impact of that period we call reconstruction, in period from roughly 1865 to 1877, and to ask themselves, what kind of impact did that period have on subsequent political and social developments and political institutions? Now, as a historian, that’s a very intriguing question to me. [LAUGHTER] But I don’t think you will find many undergraduates who are just dying to pursue that question. So she didn’t ask that question initially. Instead, she built a course around a question that she knew was already on the minds of her students. Now you think about what was on the minds of students in the fall of 20006? …A big question. When I ask American teachers these days, they often can’t remember. [LAUGHTER] I recently did a workshop in China, and in far southwestern China, and they got it immediately. They remembered. But, the question was, basically, “What in the world happened with that disaster we call Katrina?” Now, there’s a lot of evidence that that question became the dominant question in American politics in 2006, 2008, and helped determine the outcome of the election in 2008. You look at Mr. Bush’s numbers of approval, they fell off the cliff after Katrina. So what caused that disaster? So she organized a course, she called “Disaster: Katrina and American Politics.” And students signed up immediately. It became an extraordinarily popular course. Well, how do you get from there to an examination of political history? Well, it happened on the first day. She went into the class, and the first question she asked her students was, “When did the disaster begin? Did it begin in August of 2005, when the storm surge hit New Orleans? Or did it begin in 1866 with the beginning of reconstruction in the Crescent City?” And with that question, she transformed their interest into her interest, and it became the driving push of the whole course. But let me give you another broader example of the book, A guy by the name of Andrew David Kaufman, who teaches at the University of Virginia, about a dozen years ago, organized a program he calls Books Behind Bars. His field is Russian literature, late 19th and early 20th century Russian literature. And that literature is quite famous for asking big questions, questions about: “What’s my purpose in life? What’s my destiny in life?” So what he does in this course, is the help students go into a maximum security correctional facility for young people, people the same age as the UVA students in the course. When they go into that prison, and they help those other young people confront those questions, by reading Tolstoy, by reading Turgenev, raising the questions, and then struggling with them in a class that they do for them once a week, ensure they learn Russian literature, by teaching Russian literature, and not by lecture, but by creating an environment, a natural critical learning environment, where their students, the residents in the correctional facility, will learn just as deeply as they will. And it’s a transformative experience, for both sides, and it changes lives, and it’s self motivating. That makes sense?

Rebecca: Yeah, these are really powerful examples. And I love that both of them have really strong ledes with the course title.

Ken: Yeah. And if you’ll notice also that both have appeal to a sense of altruism. And we discovered that many of these super courses do just that, even in fields like physics and engineering. They do things to help other people. One of our favorites is a course that some high school girls in a high school in northwest Los Angeles, developed for themselves. And the only help they had was they were invited into this program and invited to come up with a project. And they live in a relatively poor neighborhood. They said, “Well, the biggest problem in our neighborhood is homelessness. And we see the homeless out on the street and in the park and under interstate 5 that runs near the high school. And what we want to do is we want to create a portable tent that is solar powered, so they will have heat and the cooking facilities and light and so on and so forth in their tent.” Now to do that, they had to learn engineering. So they organized their own courses, they organized their own sequence of topics that they would pursue. Now they have some guidance. The teachers over there kind of giving them hints or answering questions: “Should we pursue this next?” But they learned everything from electrical engineering to programming, and lots of things in between. But they also learned just the basics of being an engineer. That’s transformative. They created it, and therefore they took ownership of it. Now, the super courses, and the super institutions that we studied, immerse a lot of what they do in the research on human motivation, research pioneered by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. And they argue, in their well documented research papers, that human beings have three basic needs and that if you meet those psychological needs three basic psychological needs… we have physical needs that go beyond these… the three basic psychological needs. And if you meet those psychological needs, people are just naturally motivated to try to learn. You don’t have to stimulate it, it just occurs naturally. And the problem is often that the way we set up schooling for people doesn’t meet those needs, it actually counters those needs. And so we get classes full of uninterested students, students who are signing off and not really becoming involved. And to address that situation, many of these courses deliberately use Deci and Ryan’s work to build an environment, where, what shall I say, where people are just naturally driven to do what they need to do. Those three needs, by the way, are: a need for autonomy, that is, we like to be in charge of our own lives. We don’t like teachers being in control of our learning. We want teachers to help us with it, that’s different, but not to control that. And beyond autonomy, there’s also a sense of competence. So people, if they feel like if they don’t know something, they can learn it. And they feel that what Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset, that mindset that says, “I may not know this, yet, but I can learn it. I may not know calculus, yet, but I can learn it.” While the person with the fixed mindset says, “I’m not a writing person,” “I’m not a computer person,” “I’m not a whatever person,” and they give up. And they don’t try to learn and to push the envelope. And then finally, it’s the sense of relatedness, people like to be part of a broader effort, and an effort in the super courses that’s often larger than the classes itself, larger than the discipline… that they take on these large projects, because they believe that it can make a difference for themselves, and for other people whose lives they will affect.

John: One of the things that’s challenging, though, for a lot of faculty, is that we do have to assign grades for all of this. So we know ultimately, students are going to get these grades. And that tends to lead to more of a reliance on extrinsic motivation. What can faculty do to provide that sort of encouragement and to help create a growth mindset when students are going to struggle with some of the material at first?

Ken: Yeah, it’s to give them lots of opportunities to try, fail, receive feedback, and try again. Now, that seems really daunting to many faculty members. They say, “Now look, I have to two hundred students, I can’t do that, for all of the students.” But there are ways of doing that. And that’s one of the things that we explore in the book. It is difficult to describe, so I won’t attempt to do so in the conversations here. But, the courses develop ways for students to give feedback to each other. Sometimes they have students make an argument about their own learning, and then have each other to assess that argument and make an argument. And that second part that I mentioned, is really an important part of the natural critical learning environment, that it’s an environment where people deliberately learn to give themselves and each other feedback. So they set up the whole system of marks around that idea that students were going to give each other feedback on how well they’re doing. And they’re going to give themselves feedback. And that they learn to assess their own efforts and work through those. Often, in the course of the term, credit is often given for participating. That is, if you do the work, you get credit for. And only at the end, do you approach anything like a summative judgment that we usually call a final grade. One of the things that we do in the book is to explore the history of grading. And we do that to help people see that grading is, for one, a fairly recent invention in education. The idea of putting a number or a letter on someone else’s thinking, that didn’t emerge until fairly late and really didn’t become entrenched until the late 19th to the early 20th century, and that changed everything. So I want people to see this in that kind of context, that there’s nothing natural or automatic about having the traditional approach to grading. And so what people have done in the super courses, is find ways of saying “Okay, now you’ve joined a community, you’re going to be helping each other to learn and you have responsibilities toward that community and to help each other to assess each other, to give each other feedback… substantive feedback, not scores, substantive feedback to one another. And we’ll try to give you feedback as well, maybe as a group, maybe individually in smaller classes, but to give you that opportunity of trying, coming up short, and being able to try again, without that affecting your overall final grade. And then the final grade is based upon an accumulation of lots of things, and perhaps a final project, a final paper, a final presentation, or something of that sort, rather than just simply accumulating, you get 10% on this and 15% on this and 40% on this aspect of the grading.

John: How can we help students embrace the concept though, of productive failure, that process of trying something, making mistakes, and then learning from that experience. Because that’s something that many of our students don’t naturally come to, because many of them haven’t seen it before up to the point when we have them in class.

Ken: Yeah, exactly. And I think one of the keys is to provide them with very dramatic and enchanting learning environments, at the very beginning of their experience, so that the students say to themselves, “This is going to be different.” Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about… my favorite example of this category. It came from a program that was offered, again, in a secondary school. It is called city term. And it brought students from around the world together right outside of New York City, and they use New York City as their classroom. And the first Saturday in the program, they’re invited to go on a scavenger hunt. And they’re given a list of items that they might look for in New York City. One of them, for example, that they often use was: find the first wooden escalator. So students go off in groups, and there’s a teacher that goes with them, but the teacher doesn’t interfere, and just keep them safe. And beyond that the students go wherever they want to. It’s a wild and exciting adventure. And then at the end of the day, they end up in Central Park on a picnic, and they discuss with each other. “How did you find that escalator at Macy’s? What questions did you begin to ask yourself? Who did you talk to? How did you reason through the process?” And by sharing ideas with each other, what they’re actually doing is learning good research techniques. That’s a wild way of learning good research techniques, to say the least. But it’s something that the students will always remember. And they will latch on to that. And they will latch on to the course now, because that first experience was something that was quite dramatic to them. Now, we don’t all have the opportunity to use New York City as our laboratory or our classroom, and to take students on a scavenger hunt. But we can imagine creating a first assignment, and I’m reluctant to use that word “assignment,” because we found often that these courses don’t talk about assignments, they talk about opportunities, and invitations to students. It’s so exciting that it begins to break down all of their sort of stereotypes in their mind about what’s going to happen in a class. So in Andrew Kaufman’s Books Behind Bars course, they’re first asked to apply for the course. So they have to explain why they want to be in the course, and then helps to begin to break down barriers. And then the first day in the class, he begins to break down the barriers by first telling them about a three minute story about a young man who read a little short story by a guy by the name of Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy, and as we called him in the West, and about halfway through the story… in other words, about a minute and a half end of the story, the students began to realize that it’s a story about Gandhi. And it’s a story about an important transformation in Gandhi’s life as a result of reading a piece of literature. And so Professor Kaufman says to his student, “We want you to think about a point in your life, when a piece of art, maybe a piece of literature, maybe a painting, maybe a song, but some piece of art had a deep impact upon you and your thinking.” And the students began to discuss with each other. And they began to realize first, that this isn’t going to be a course where the teacher just talks to them and they take notes and then later take a test on whether or not they can recall the notes that they took. But it’s going to be a class that they will dominate, that they will do most of the talking and most of the thinking, and by creating a different kind of environment, you then can move to ultimately getting them to think about such questions as how are you going to assess yourself? How do you know whether or not you’re making progress, and whether or not you’re learning and you’re learning deeply. And the key point here is helping students to learn what it means to learn deeply, that learning deeply is not the traditional strategic learning… “oh, I learn this for the test. I’ll make an A on the test and I’ll make an A in the class.” No. it’s self-driven learning, where you begin to look behind the scenes, where you intend to look for ways in which this course can transform you and transform your thinking.

John: So essentially, I think what you’re saying is we need to help encourage students to develop more reflection on their work and on their learning process.

Ken: Yeah, I think so. I think that’s the key is getting students to think about their own learning, and help them with categories that will enable them to think deeply about their own learning… categories like deep learning, versus strategic learning, or surface learning. The strategic learner just wants to make straight As [LAUGHTER] and they’ll do whatever is necessary to make those straight As. The surface learner just wants to learn enough to pass the course, to be able to perform on an exam or write a paper or whatever it is that’s required of them. But neither one of those two leads to deep intentions, that I deeply want to understand how calculus works, and how it can help me in understanding the world in which I live, and how this applies to me, and my field and how it applies to my major, even though I’m not a mathematician, and how I can change the way in which I think. So developing those deep intentions. and fostering that deep development of intentions, becomes extremely important.

Rebecca: One of the things that you were just mentioning in terms of the strategic learners and the surface learners is how much many of our courses are probably structured with them in mind, rather than a deep learner in mind, and that we perpetuate these kinds of learners rather than deep learners based on our class structures.

Ken: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I think we began to break away from that, by the way in which we frame the questions we raise. You think about the example of Kaufman’s course. Or let’s take an example from physics. Eric Mazur, at Harvard, has pioneered a lot of the elements of the natural critical learning environment and super course. And the students in his course do not learn physics, by listening to lecture, boring or otherwise. They learn physics by doing physics. They do three big projects. And each semester of the course… it’s a two-semester course, some students take only one semester… but in either semester, they do three big projects and they’re massive projects. And they work with a team. Each student’s is in a team of about five or six students. And they work together to try to attack a problem. And each of the projects has a back story. For example, you’ve been contacted by a charity that was created in Venezuela, by a well known philanthropist and musician, who became quite convinced that music, and symphonic music in particular (being part of a symphony orchestra), is a transformative experience that can help very poor people rise out of their poverty, and to develop a different mindset that enables them to conquer some of the economic circumstances they face. It’s a program that now has about a million students worldwide who are engaged in it. But it has a problem, namely that some of the students are so poor, that they cannot afford to buy real instruments. Now, you’ve been studying waves and music is made up of waves. So, your team has been invited to create new kinds of instruments that can be made from things that you find in the junkyard. Now that new instrument has to be able to be tuned over to different octaves, has to stay in tune for a specific amount of time, but by creating these new kinds of instruments, you can help the young children. Now, that’s a compelling project. They learn physics and the physics of waves actually doing the project and demonstrating that they can do it. Another project is more fun than anything else. Do you remember the old Rube Goldberg cartoons?

John: I do. I don’t know if Rebecca does. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I know what they are. [LAUGHTER]

Ken: Ok. There was this guy. He was an engineer and he was also a cartoonist from San Francisco. He used to draw these cartoons, where you would attempt to do something very simple, like crack an egg, by a very elaborate piece of machinery, where balls would roll down ramps and would trigger gates that would open up other gates that would cause other balls to fall, and so on, and so forth. So it’s a very elaborate, unnecessary project. So on the Rube Goldberg project, so students are invited to create a Rube Goldberg type device to crack an egg… [LAUGHTER] something you can do very simply by knocking the egg against the edge of your kitchen counter, or your kitchen table. But no, you had to create this very elaborate project. Well, to do that, all of Rube Goldberg drawings and inventions were based on physics. That ball rolling down a ramp at this angle will acquire this speed, and it would open this door and would result in this hammer hitting this hammer that would cause this ball to roll down this ramp… and that would, etc, etc, etc. So you had to know the physics in order to create these absurd projects. But there’s a lot of fun in that. A lot of fun. And the first project they do, I think, is one was just strictly on fun. They build a racing car, and then race each other, like many of them did when they were back in the fifth grade. And they have great fun in doing that. Another one is one where they have to design a lock that other people can’t open. And they get points for 1. being able to keep other people out of their safe, and for being able to crack the lock of other peoples’ safes. So a lot of wild times. Now there’s a textbook that stands behind all of this. And the textbook is written by the professor. And it lays out everything that he might otherwise have said to them in lecture, and more. Now, how do you get students to read that textbook, 1. by creating these enticing projects, but another way you do it is by making reading of the textbook into a social experience. So Mazur and his colleagues created a program which is now available to everyone, called Perusall. And, using Perusall, students can read material together. So in the sense that, “Okay, we’ve got an assignment, we need to read to chapter two. We’re all reading it together, you’re reading it on your computer, I’m reading it on my computer. And as I read along, I may have questions. So I’ll highlight that text, I’ll raise the question.” It’s like writing in the margin, but everybody can see what you wrote. He organizes the groups into groups of 15 or 20 students apiece, and they can read each other’s comments and they can respond to each other’s comments. And to participate in the class, to be a participant in the class, what it means is that they will keep up with offering the comments to each other, and their comments on the text itself, making comments on what’s written there, to raise questions. to answer a question, so on and so forth. And what they found is that reading completion goes from 40 something percent at best, all the way up to 95 to 100% completion.

John: I’ve been using Hypothesis in my classes for the last three years, and nd it’s a very similar type too…

Ken: Yeah, there are several others out there.

John: And students really enjoy that, too. They enjoy seeing what other people are raising questions about. They enjoy answering questions for each other and posing questions to each other, and It seems to make the reading process much more engageing when it becomes this social activity.

Ken: Exactly. Well, that’s the whole idea. And then of course, behind that is this set of really intriguing, interesting, fascinating projects. And there’s a course at an engineering school in Massachussetts that offer a course, for a long time. They no longer offer the course unfortunately, but they offered it for over a decade, I think it’s called the “history of stuff.” [LAUGHTER] And the first day of class, the students go in and they see on the front table stuff. It’s the kind of stuff you might find by going down the aisles of Walmart [LAUGHTER] and picking things off the shelf, just a wild assortment of things. And they’re invited to come down and pick out one of those items. And then to begin to explore it, explore its history. Why was it created? What was it created out of? What materials? What kind of implications does its creation have for society? Does it just clutter up society and create a backlog of unrecyclable material that creates environmental problems of one type or another? Or exactly what is it? Students had a great deal of fun just exploring stuff. And the course ended up by looking at some of the history of technology through the lens of a well known American patriot, Paul Revere. But Paul Revere was also an expert in metals. And so they explore engineering of metals through the eyes of Paul Revere. And it becomes a way of mixing disciplines in a way that makes each discipline more intriguing and more interesting. Rather than “Oh, you study this, then you study that, you make no connection between the two.” Say, one more example?

John: Oh, sure.

Ken: There was a course we looked at in southwest China, and we went to the school, Southwest Jiaotong University, in Chengdu, and it was a course organized by a young woman who teaches physical education. And first day of class, the students are invited to think about what kinds of sports they enjoy doing. is in rock climbing. Is it soccer? Is it basketball? What is it? Now, can you imagine creating an exercise device that will make you a better soccer player, or rock climber, or whatever it is that you want to do… your favorite sport? And then the whole class goes to a sports equipment store, and they began to look at the equipment that’s already there. And then began to think about, “Okay, how can I create something better?” Now, as part of the team, it’s not just this PE teacher, but it’s also other people. Ah, you need someone from biology perhaps, to help them think about… “Well, what kind of exercising do the human muscles need? What kind of social environment do you need to create here?” So, you need other experts. And if you want to make this a product that can go on the market, maybe you need a marketing professor, who can help you devise a marketing plan of the new product that you’re creating. I told this story to my broker several years ago, and his response to me, was: “In Communist China?” And I said, “Yes, they have a market economy just like we do. And they’re interested in marketing and learning marketing. And they have marketing professors, just like we do.” And so they creates this environment where students learn by doing. And they learn by mixing disciplines, rather than keeping them apart. Much more interesting.

Rebecca: I love the move towards more interdisciplinary work….

Ken: Yeah.

Rebecca: …something that I feel really connected to, but it really gets people I think, more excited about different disciplines when they’re more intertwined, because we understand how they’re related to one another.

Ken: Yeah, exactly. So if you’re going to study the human brain, for example, how do you make it interdisciplinary? One of the professors, we studied taught in the medical school and taught medical students about the brain. But she was asked to create a course for undergraduates. This was at Vanderbilt. And so the course on the brain for undergraduates mixed every discipline you can imagine, together, because, as she argued, everything is connected to the brain. So you might be studying music, if that’s your interest, or whatever your interest might be. You might be studying ethics, if that’s your interest, and then you’re encouraged to think about what part of the brain handles ethical questions? What part of the brain helps you to appreciate and understand music? What part of the brain helps you to do this or to do that? So they’re studying all the aspects of the brain, but they’re also studying all these other disciplines, from Holocaust studies to a wide variety of other things, and raising deep ethical questions along the way. And she offered this course for 10 years, and it was a transformative experience for most of her students, the overwhelming majority of them, breaking down stereotypes and prejudices and helping them to also think more deeply about how their brain operates.

Rebecca: Sounds like there’s a lot of classes I should sign up for.

Ken: Exactly. I thought at one point, I was talking to some high school students about where they want to go to school. And I said, “Well, it’d be wonderful if you could go to a school that would mix all these super courses together. Because they’re strung out all over the world.” Maybe there’s a way of doing that virtually I don’t know.

John: Or maybe, as a result of your book, and other similar work, perhaps more faculty will start doing this type of thing and more of their courses.

Ken: Yeah, and perhaps, in designing a curriculum that includes professors from a wide variety of different disciplines, and students from each of those disciplines, working together in small groups, to tackle problems of physics, and then later tackle problems of the brain or tackle problems of history, or tackle problems of well, you name it… and have a opportunity to sort of tour super courses around the world. That would be a wild experience.

John: I still remember examples that you used here when you spoke at Oswego. And I remember examples when I first read your first book on what the best college teachers do, a while back, in large part because you weave in narratives, along with the theory and the reasoning behind these concepts. And I think the use of narrative helps makes the story much more interesting and helps raise curiosity and makes things much more memorable. Is that something faculty should strive to do in their own classes?

Ken: Yes, I think so. And the professor, I was just mentioning at Vanderbilt, I think, did that and created a course that was part history and part neuroanatomy and part philosophy and part literature and part music, but they’re all around narratives of one kind or another. Yeah, I think so. I think creating that narrative. Human beings love stories. And if we began to understand things, in terms of stories, then it becomes much more memorable to us. And we remember what we learn. And if you think about learning, it contains at least these three major aspects: we’ve got to encounter new ideas and procedures, and so forth, but we’ve got to encounter new material, there’s the encountering part. And the second is the making sense of it part where we relate it to other things that we’ve learned. And then the third aspect of it is retaining it long term. So we remember what we remembered, what we learned. And I think encountering all of this in stories, makes it much more memorable. But I think what the super courses do is they have students read stories to learn physics or history or other kinds of things. But they don’t tell them those stories orally, for the most part, they do not use lecture, to do that first aspect, that is of introducing the material. Usually, that’s all that happens in the classes, you’re introduced to the material and lecture, and you never get around, you never have time in class, for those second aspects of the “making sense”part of and the things that you might do to retain it. So super courses are built in a way that they spend their time working on those other aspects. Because the first one, the one of conveying the new information and ideas to the students, that can be done with reading, with films with other ways. But the part of struggling with meaning, with the teacher and with each other, that’s much more complex, and that requires a different kind of approach. And that’s what the super courses offer.

John: This project began with a collection of syllabi, and we should probably note that those syllabi do make it into the book as an appendix. So, not only do you have the stories of how these classes work, but it provides faculty with examples of how these things are implemented. In an Invitational syllabus.

Ken: We took excerpts from some of the syllabi, not all of them. But from a few, to give people illustrations of what we’re doing: one from math, one from the sciences, and one from the humanities.

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

Ken: [LAUGHTER] Good question. Well, I have on my agenda, and I’ve been working on, a book aimed at parents. And the working title of the book sort of summarizes the whole idea of the book. Although the working title is 11 words long, andt hat is way too long. But we’ve got to find a way to achieve the same thing with a shorter title, but it’s: How to Help Your Kids Get the Best Out of School. Now we chose those words carefully, because the first task is defining what we mean by the best. And, in part, it means learning to learn deeply. So how do you help your kids to do that? And we chose one of many words we might have used for kids. We said “kids,” ‘cause it’ss short and to the point. We’re trying to shorten bold type as much as possible. And I’m working on that with a colleague, Mindy Maris, and we have a due date with Harvard press of 2022. So, that’s coming up rapidly. So we’ve got a lot of work to do over the next year and a half. But we’ve already done quite a bit of work in organizing that, and so forth. So that’s the next major project.

Rebecca: That sounds like an exciting addition to the collection that you’ve already have out, and rounds out the offerings.

Ken: And then somewhere in the far distant future I play out entirely, I would love to take all the we’ve learned and how to understand the best in any field. And that was a process in itself. How do you define the best and how do you collect evidence that something is better. I’d love to do a book that might be entitled: What do the Best Coaches Do? [LAUGHTER] and describe good coaches in a wide variety of different sports. But that would be my swan song, if I ever get around to it.

Rebecca: Thanks so much for joining us today and sharing some insight into your newest book. I know that a lot of our listeners will be looking forward to reading it soon.

Ken: Well, I look forward to hearing feedback from your listeners. And as we said, toward the end of the book, we hope that at some point, every reader will say “I wouldn’t do it that way. I’d do it this way.” But when they say that, we hope that they will base that judgment on strong evidence that that presents, whatever alternatives they come up, presents a better learning environment than the one we describe in the book. But, we hope this idea of a super course, is something that is organic, it continues to grow. And five years from now, somebody will summarize something about super courses today, meaning the super courses, 2027 or 2030. And may describe a much different book than the one that Marsha and I wrote. But it’s an organic process. And we’re looking forward to the conversation w e hope that the book stimulates.

John: Well, thank you. It was great talking to you again, and we’re looking forward to sharing this with our listeners.

Ken: Thank you.

Rebecca: Thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it.

Ken: Oh, my pleasure. My pleasure. Anytime.

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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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183. Student Workload

Posted in active learning, assessment, edtech, engagement, evidence-based practices, feedback, higher education, hypothesis, learning, online discussions, online learning, pedagogy, retrieval practice, teaching
April 14, 2021

College students throughout the country have reported substantial increases in their workload during the 2020-21 academic year.  Few faculty members, though, intentionally increased student workloads during this challenging year. In this episode,  Dr. Betsy Barre joins us to explore some reasons for student perceptions of increased workload.

Betsy is the Executive Director of the Center for Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University. In 2017 she won with Justin Esarey, the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education’s Innovation Award for their Course Workload Estimator.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: College students throughout the country have reported substantial increases in their workload during the 2020-21 academic year. Few faculty members, though, intentionally increased student workloads during this challenging year. In this episode, we explore some reasons for student perceptions of increased workload.

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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&hellip

John: &hellipand Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Dr. Betsy Barre. Betsy is the Executive Director of the Center for Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University. In 2017 she won with Justin Esarey, the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education’s Innovation Award for their Course Workload Estimator. Welcome back, Betsy.

Betsy: Thanks. It’s great to be back.

John: It’s great to talk to you again. Our teas today are:

Betsy: So, I’m not drinking tea. I’m having many cups of coffee today. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Well, it’s still warm&hellip

Betsy: Yes, that’s right.

Rebecca: &hellipstill warm, and still caffeinated. [LAUGHTER] I’m drinking Irish breakfast today.

John: And I have ginger peach green tea.

Betsy: Nice.

Rebecca: &hellipan old favorite. So we’ve invited here today to talk about your recent blog post that addresses the impact of pandemic instruction on student workload. Can you talk a little bit about how the pandemic has affected student perceptions of their workload?

Betsy: Yeah, sure. So this issue has cropped up for many of us. I’m sure anyone who’s listening to this podcast has&hellip maybe in the spring, but particularly in the fall… and I think that’s really interesting to that in fall it became an even bigger issue than it was last spring&hellip that we started to hear from students in our online courses, and in our blended courses&hellip not just online&hellip that workload was overwhelming, perhaps even double. And we heard it at Wake Forest. We started hearing it anecdotally. And then I would talk to my colleagues at other institutions who, of their own initiative would bring it up, that they had heard it anecdotally as well, we saw on Twitter folks talking about this. And then we at Wake Forest did an all student survey where we didn’t ask about workload&hellip we probably should have. But it was the number one thing that came up in their open ended comments when we coded those. And so it just reinforced this idea that clearly this is a universal challenge. And it was a challenge across our schools to, so it wasn’t just our undergraduate students, We were hearing in our Divinity School and our law school and our business school. And so something was going on. And it was really intriguing to me, because clearly students felt like the workload was overwhelming. But, and this is what we’ve all said. It’s not as if all of us just sat down and said, “We want to give students a lot more work this semester.” So I was fascinated by it, talked to a bunch of people about it, was thinking about it. I know you all have been thinking about it, and just decided to write some of my thoughts in a blog post. One of the great things in the response to that blog post is lots of folks have come up with other ideas that I think are just as plausible too.

Rebecca: Do you think faculty believe that they’re giving more work to their students?

Betsy: That’s actually a really interesting question, because that sort of premise of my blog post is that, and this was Jody Greene said “No one sat down to give more work to students.” But since I’ve written it and talked to some faculty, there are some faculty who are like, “Yeah, maybe I did, maybe I did give a little bit too much work.” And that’s worth noting. But there are just as many faculty, maybe more faculty who say “Actually I have given less work this semester, and I’ve tried to dial it back and lower the stakes than I have in the past.” And so the fact that there’s that large body of faculty that think they’re doing the opposite, and then the student perception is something different. It’s really interesting.

Rebecca: One thing that you just said, Betsy, about the lower stakes piece, raises an interesting question, because a lot of professional development about going online and using effective teaching practices talks a lot about low-stakes assignments and the ability to check in on things more often. But maybe they’re smaller assignments. Do you think that’s happening more?

Betsy: Well, I think it’s a good thing that it is. And my guess is, that’s part of what’s causing the problem or the challenge&hellip maybe it’s not a problem, but just is causing this sort of disconnect… is that our faculty, particularly many of our institutions, in the summer did a lot of professional development around good online teaching practices, and just good teaching practices in general. And also really emphasized&hellip at least at Wake Forest&hellip we really emphasize this is a pandemic, our students are struggling, let’s lower the stakes on things, let’s be understanding. And so one way to do that is by having smaller low-stakes assignments, so instead of a big midterm, you have multiple weekly check-ins. But of course, our students can interpret that as, “more work,” because if you’re just counting work by counting the number of assignments, then it is, by definition, more work. So, instead of one midterm, you now have five short assignments, that’s five times the amount of work. And so instead of counting in terms of how much time the assignments take, they could be counting and just the overwhelming number of assignments seems like more work. And I think that’s what’s going on, or at least part of what’s going on. And I’ve said to some people that this is actually a good sign that change did happen over the summer, because we didn’t hear as much about this in the spring. People kept their one midterm and their final&hellip at least I didn’t hear about it as much, maybe you two did, but I didn’t hear as much about it in the spring. But then they redesigned their courses in the fall. And the fact that we’re all hearing about this suggests that people actually did things differently. Now, again, it still could be better, but that’s kind of a good sign to me. Now, the question is, how do you dial that back? And how do we communicate with students about it&hellip all really complex, but I do think it’s that breaking big assignments into smaller assignments is part of a contributing factor here.

John: . And we know that students tend to do a lot of cramming, they tend to do mass practice, but we know that spaced practice is more helpful and that we know the benefits of retrieval practice. And that’s something I think that most faculty development centers emphasized with faculty. And I know at our campus, we had more faculty participate than we’ve ever seen. We had more people participate in professional development workshops than we generally see over a four- or five-year period. For the people who were resistant to professional development in the past, they were learning about the benefits of retrieval practice and space practiced, and learning about the benefits of using low- stakes exams, as you were just talking about, and I agree that that’s a good thing. But we know that the practices that students use to study tend to be mass practice, they tend to do repeated rereading, and now they’re being asked to retrieve information. And we know that students believe that that’s less effective, and it’s certainly more work for students.

Betsy: So your point about retrieval practice, and we know students believe it’s less effective to be engaging in this continual retrieval practice, I think is really interesting. And I think that’s what we’re seeing when our students say, “We have more busy work.” So it’s not just that there’s more work, but that’s actually more busy work. And part of what’s going on there is that they think that that practice that they’re engaged in is not valuable, if you are giving assignments that are about practice. And as students see it as busy work, that’s part of us communicating the value of this work, and helping our students understand how they actually learn, and how it will help them on the later exams, I think is really important. That’s not the only challenge. I think busy work isn’t the only kind of challenge. It’s also, I think, for those of us in the humanities, I think what we’re seeing is that the new tools we have available to us make it easier for us to hold our students accountable for doing all the reading, when typically, they wouldn’t do all the reading. And typically students wouldn’t say it’s busy work, but there’s more reading that they have to do than they ever had to do before. And so that’s one hypothesis as well. But I think another point about the busy work and the retrieval practice, moving one exam to 10 short assignments is, and I talk about this in the post as well, is that there is a sense in which that could be adding to your work, in that they have to keep track of it all. And I think our students are not used to having to keep track of so many assignments. So typically, as a faculty developer leading a teaching center, I may have a faculty member come to me that wants to redesign their course. And I make all these suggestions, and they do it and it’s fine. And the reason it’s fine is because, yes, it’s a little bit more work and a little bit more stressful for the students. But it’s only one course. But I think what we saw is that all of a sudden, our students were moving from five courses where there were three assignments to five courses where there are 15 to 20 assignments or more. And that was even more compounding the exponential growth that they felt. So I teach with lots of small assignments, I always have. Students would sometimes say this is more work than in a typical class, but they weren’t upset about it. They didn’t feel overwhelmed by it. That’s because again, it wasn’t five of their courses that were doing it. So it is a really interesting question of when we go back post-pandemic, do we want all of our courses to work this way? And how do we help our students readjust to this is the new workload? or this is going to be the new experience of the new workload? Or do we not want to do that? And I think that’s an interesting conversation for all of us to have moving forward.

Rebecca: I know one of the things that I’ve had in conversations with students, just anecdotally, but also in some of the formal research that I’ve been working on related to students with disabilities, is the time management piece and just trying to manage and organize all the moving parts that are on all these different platforms is complex, but also that moving with more materials online has resulted in more reading and writing&hellip

Betsy: interesting.

Rebecca: &helliprather than other modalities that we might typically use in a face-to-face class like face-to-face conversation, which to them seems really much more time consuming. And it may actually be more time consuming, especially if you have a particular kind of disability.

Betsy: Right. So there are a couple of things to say there. So I did say one of the things I noticed is when you read student concerns about this, they will often say things like “It took me this much time to do a discussion post.” And that’s, I think, really revealing for all of us to understand. We often think, “Okay, the discussion posts are going to take the place of the discussion in class.” But right now, I’m just talking to you two, and I’m not thinking very hard about what I’m saying. And in fact, if you created a transcript of this, which you guys probably will, I’ll be embarrassed to read it, because I don’t think it’s as coherent as I want it to be. And if I were writing a discussion post, I would think very carefully about how I formulate my thoughts and my arguments, and even proofread. And it’s gonna take a lot more time, if I’m actually writing it out. And I think that’s really important for us to acknowledge that discussion posts and a discussion are not a one-to-one replacement. Or if we want it to be a one-to-one replacement, then we need to tell our students, we expect you to treat it as if you’re not actually writing something that’s meant to be thoughtful, we just want to hear your opinions about this. So that’s one piece. But then in terms of your point about disabilities, I think it’s really interesting in that all the best practices for Universal Design for Learning, we can revisit, and I didn’t talk about this in my post, but I should have, so thank you, Rebecca, for sharing this wrrinkle. Because I think it’s an important part of it is that giving students options for how they can do this work will also empower them to do things that they think are most efficient for their time. So if they can do a VoiceThread or make a video, or one of the activities that some of our faculty have found very successful as an asynchronous replacement for discussion, is to just put students in groups and tell them, in your own time, you get together, have a Zoom discussion about the material, record it and send it to me ,that you’ve had that discussion. So they actually have a discussion. It’s just sort of asynchronously done. But in general, giving students options, it’s not going to solve every problem, but it does empower them to have choice, because there will be some students who prefer to write than to speak. But there may be something like “I’m tired of writing, I want to actually just speak.” And then in terms of the material, I think there was this recent meta analysis that just came out like last week about video versus text, which was really interesting. And as a humanist, I’m sad to see this, but it’s not surprising that sometimes video can be better for student learning than a text can be. Because I often think, “Oh, I’ll just give them something to read, and that will be the replacement for a lecture.” But maybe sometimes there’s a way in which they’d rather watch somebody talk about that material, rather than read about it.

Rebecca: Or by extension, just listen to the material, like in a podcast or something.

Betsy: Yeah, podcasts are a great opportunity. And we’ve heard students say, when I’m walking around campus, or when I’m working out, and it allows them again, to expand their schedule where they have more time to do things and no screen time, which is something they really appreciate because there’s so much Zoom fatigue, that being able to listen to something where they don’t read online and then have to watch online, they can just listen to it is a real relief for them. Absolutely. Unsurprising you all like podcasts.

Rebecca: Anything that gets us off the screen, actually, is something that I work a lot to do with my design students, because whether it’s a pandemic or not, we spent a lot of time on the screen.

Betsy: Yeah, fair enough. So you’re an expert at this. Yeah. You’ve thought about this. That’s great. Yeah, for sure and I think we need to think about that more.

John: But I know even for people who are teaching asynchronously before, some people have started using new tools. On our campus, for example, people who used to give students readings as a basis for discussions now are having students use hypothesis for the discussions, which means students actually have to open the reading [LAUGHTER] and actually respond to the text, which can take a lot more time than just skimming over the abstract and responding to it. And similarly, I’ve been posting videos for 20 some years in my classes, but now I’m doing it where there’s questions embedded in it, which means they actually have to watch them now for a small portion of their grade. So I think some of the tools that people are using may provide more learning, may provide more engagement, but also is going to take a lot more time than how people use them before. And you noted in your blog post that many students would be able to get by and coast to get the grade they want without doing a lot of the things faculty assume that they did. [LAUGHTER] But again, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. But it does require more time on average.

Betsy: Yeah, it’s a complicated question. It’s a self report, so it could be even lower than this, but just general self report on how much time students spend each week studying, it’s about 15 hours a week, on average, prior to pandemic, and that is for a full-time student. So imagining 15 credit hours they’re studying, it’s one to one, and many faculty assume or hope that it’s more than one to one. [LAUGHTER] But students are very strategic, they’re learning an important skill and figuring out what does need to get done and what doesn’t need to get done to be able to be successful in a course. And so certainly I appreciate that. But I think recognizing this disconnect is important because it helps us understand why faculty didn’t think they were giving more work, but students actually did have more work because faculty were mistakenly assuming that students were spending 30 hours a week studying when really they were only spending 15. And so being aware of that now helps us have a much more honest conversation about well, what do we expect the standards to be for students, and there are differences across different institutions and different programs. So our graduate professional programs are for folks who are working full time, have different sorts of informal expectations, I think, than others. And so it’s worth it for all of us to come together and to talk about that. But I will say I do think it’s just important to say&hellip I probably said this in the post… but we do know that the more time students spend on a task, the more they will learn. So it’s not just like we’re piling on the hours because we want to punish them or we think that’s just really what rigorous teaching is. It’s that actually we know you’ll learn more if you spend more time thinking about a text or practicing the problems, as you said, John, that this will help you learn more. So you obviously don’t want to expect so much that they can’t do other things they have to do in their life. So that’s the tension. I think my recommendation always be if you have to have a full-time job, you shouldn’t be a full time student, because that’s like too much work. So thinking about how do we calibrate the courses that students taketo how much time they’re actually able to put into it is really important. So yeah, I do think that that’s happening. It’s not the only thing. Again, I also think there are faculty who probably expect too much as well, because we’re not good at estimating how much time it takes for students to do things. I think Hypothesis is a great example. I use Hypothesis in my class, I love it. If you’re a humanist and you haven’t used, or if you have assigned readings and you haven’t used Hypothesis or Perusall go look it up and find it. It’s pretty amazing. But I think that remembering that, yes, it will make them read. So that’s extra time because they’re actually gonna have to read and they’re gonna have to read carefully enough to have good questions. [LAUGHTER] So they can’t skim it, as you said, John, but then all the time it takes to actually read everybody else’s comments, really remembering that and that’s where I as a newbie to online, that was like an aha moment for me when one of my colleagues who’s an expert in online teaching was like, “It’s not just the time it takes for them to write their own discussion posts, it’s also they have to read everybody else’s. There’s extra reading that’s involved.” It’s not just the text itself, but it’s also reading everybody else’s responses and so putting them in groups where they’re responding to fewer people or reading fewer people is a really useful tool. Again, I think probably all of these hypotheses are going on. And it’s worth us being honest about all of them, instead of saying, “Oh, it’s definitely the students,” or “it’s definitely the faculty,” it’s like we’re all in this together, and let’s figure out how we move forward.

John: A nice thing, perhaps, would be to give students information about how much time these tasks take. And it would be nice if there was a tool for that, [LAUGHTER] which I believe that you have created.

Betsy: So yes, we have a tool that actually we made pre-pandemic. But one thing I want to say, because a lot of people have used this tool, and I think sometimes people use it in ways that are asking you to do more than it was intended to do. And that it is very much an estimator. It is not meant to be a calculator, that is the exact amount of time that your students are going to spend on something. And it’s very broad. It was essentially just something that I was interested in creating as I was thinking about how much work I assign students in terms of reading and writing. And the original version of it is very much tilted towards reading and writing. So oftentimes, we hear from STEM folks like “What about problem sets?” And that’s and that’s just the Wild West in terms of how much time students spend on that, it’s much harder to get a handle on it, so it’s not there. But there are places in this estimator where you can add a new assignment that isn’t captured by reading and writing and just give your own estimates for how much time you think students will spend. And the main value of this estimator, I think, is that I found that many of my colleagues, myself included, are just not good at the head math required, we just keep adding these assignments, and we think we have a good sense, but literally sitting down and writing out like “Okay, they have to go to the library to get the source.” Well, it’s gonna take him some time to walk to the library and walk back&hellip like literally things like that, realizing how much time you’re asking your students, and then adding it up can be really valuable. And I would do it sometimes on the back of an envelope, but it was chaos. And so I thought, why can’t we just have a calculator that does that, So we have an old version of the calculator, we have a new version that my colleagues in online education at Wake Forest, Allen Brown, helped us work on to add in discussion posts and video lectures and other things so that it’s a little bit closer to what asynchronous online courses might involve. And it can be a tool for overall assessment, but also individual assignment assessment of like, how much time might it spend for them to do this type of reading or to do these types of videos. And if you disagree with what the estimator says, my favorite feature of the estimator is, you can manually adjust it. So you don’t have to get in arguments with us. Whatever your own assumptions are, you can go in there and put that in, and you’ll still be surprised with what the total amount is probably, at least I often am, that I’m giving more than I realized and I have to go back and make some hard choices. So hopefully, it’s a useful tool for everyone. But as John, you said, one of the best things about it is that allows us to better communicate with our students about what we’re expecting as well. And we’ve heard from so many students who have found it super helpful in the courses that have done this, both students who are struggling, but also students who are crazy overachievers, and who will spend 20 hours on a one-page paper. It’s a real relief to them. Even if they only spend four hours when they’re supposed to spend one, at least it’s four, and not 20. So it helps them manage their time as well.

Rebecca: One of the things that I’ve done, at least on longer term projects, that has worked really well for me and my students is having them keep a timesheet and asking them to divide out tasks. And I pose it to them so that we’re in the design field. So it’s to help them think about how they might price something in the future, so they know how long it takes them. So that’s how you get the buy in. But what it helps me do is see how long it takes them to do certain things. And realize it’s like, “Why did you spend this amount of time doing this thing that was really not important, as other thing was much more important?” And then you can coach the group on those sorts of things, which can be helpful. And along those same lines, one of the things that I run into, and this may fit more into the idea of problem sets or things like this is how much time students will try to problem solve a technical issue that they just aren’t problem solving in the right way at all. And so they could spend hours trying to do something that if they just asked a question… [LAUGHTER] &hellipit would have taken two minutes.

Betsy: Like ask for directions…. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yeah, so I’ve been reminding my students, especially since the fall, when we’ve been doing much more online,that, if you’re spending more than 15 minutes trying to solve this technical problem, A. take a break, you’re just going in circles, maybe come back and try again. But if you’re spending much more time than that, then that’s a good clue that you need to ask for help.

Betsy: That’s really smart. And really, I think, super helpful. And I think getting feedback from our students about how much time they’re spending is not just good at the individual level of coaching. It also is great formative feedback for adjusting our own expectations. Again, and it corrects the estimator, maybe you put it in the estimator, and has happened to me too. And I realized&hellip because one of the things about the estimator, it’s best about reading, usually, in terms of its reading estimates, but one of the central insights from the reading literature is that the difficulty of a text is just as much about students’ vocabulary as it is about the text itself. So I would guess “this is a pretty easy text for my second year students at Wake Forest.” And then if they’re all taking a lot longer, what I realized is that actually, I misjudged their familiarity with these concepts that would be in this book. That this book is actually harder than I thought it would be. So I need to up it in terms of the estimator to say “Actually, there are more new concepts than I realized that the students are engaging with and it’s going to take more time.” So asking the students is just as important as you communicating with them. It’s a two-way street for sure to get that formative feedback. I also think telling them about time management and struggling with time management. I’ve seen some really good strategies. I know our learning assistant center, who works with students, has some good counseling that they do with students about how do they create a master syllabus or kind of a calendar for when they’re going to do things. And I also saw somebody, I think, shared it on the POD listserv, but a strategy of creating a Google calendar with basically time slots for all of your activities in your course. And then students import it into their Google Calendar and move those around. So you would set it up like two hours for reading this text. And then they could move it in their calendar. And so that works for them. But they basically see the blocks of time that they need to set aside. And if they did that for every class, it would be even better, they could see “Oh, wow, this is 40 hours in a week, I need to set aside time to do this work.” And frankly, we should be doing that even before the pandemic. But we’re learning this lesson now of how to help our students manage time and due dates, and all of that, because it is a little bit more. And again, I also want to emphasize too, not just all the cognitive load of multiple assignments, but learning new tools also takes time. This is kind of your point about troubleshooting, Rebecca, like, if a student has never used the video function on Canvas, they may find themselves spending 45 minutes trying to get the video function to work, when that’s not in any of our calculations of their assignment. We’re assuming they’re just going to record the video and upload it. So being mindful of the time it takes them to learn a new tool in this scenario is also really important.

John: You mentioned the issue of reading tied to students prior knowledge and vocabulary. But that’s going to vary a lot across students. So I know a lot of people, when they include estimates from the calculator, will say this is an estimate of what this is, your mileage may vary and keep track of how long it takes you to do these things, and use that to adjust your future estimates of the time requirements for these tasks.

Betsy: That’s a nice idea too, to say you students adjust. So that’s really smart. I like that a lot. For sure, it varies across students. And especially, I mean, even thinking about students with disabilities is an even more interesting challenge. And there is an interesting question, I’ve had some good conversations about to what extent, if we’re putting that estimate… the average&hellip in the syllabus does that create problems for students who may be slower, they think that there’s a deficit. So you need to be thinking about how you frame it, I think is really important. And to be up front that saying it is expected and that is the normal course of things that we’ll all have different rates and this is a ballpark average. You can even put a range&hellip might be an idea too&hellip of ballparks there, but recognizing and saying it’s totally understandable that there’ll be jeans taking a different amount of time, because again, prior knowledge, not just ability, it’s all sorts of other things. How often have you read in the past? How often have you worked with technology in the past? Any of these things, they’re gonna make a difference.

Rebecca: One of the things that conversations about perceptions of workload lead me to is I wonder what the perceptions of learning are?

Betsy: Yeah, I think this is a great question. Because when we think about how students got “got by” in the past by doing less work, what they meant by “get by” was successfully complete the course and get the grade that they desired. If we actually ask them about how much they learn, I don’t know. I mean, that’s a really interesting question, would they say, “Oh, well, it takes more to get my A now&hellip” so that’s duplicating the workload&hellip “But, oh, by the way, I’m also learning more.” It’d be interesting to see. I mean, it depends on f the primary issue here is that students doing less work before and now they’re doing all the work we expected of them, then I think you would expect a lot more learning. But there could also be these issues of the pandemic, I’m in crisis, I can’t work as quickly. If those are the issues, or I’m overwhelmed by the multiple assignments, and I can’t keep track, then there may not be as much learning happening. So my guess is there’s probably equal levels of learning, it’s totally a guess. But in other words, that there are challenges to this moment that students learn less. But there are also things that we’re doing better than we have in the past that make up for that. But I hope that we get some good empirical data on some of this and think through it, because I do think that these strategies, while they are more work, are also probably likely to lead to deeper and lasting learning as well, if the students are able to do it. There’s also the challenge of students who just give up, and then get overwhelmed, and they’re just completely behind. And then they have no motivation to even do a little bit. And so we want to be mindful of that too. But if they’re able to keep up, I’m hopeful at least, that these things should, at least from the research, they should lead to more learning, but who knows.

John: In terms of student reaction, though, student perceptions of what’s most effective is often passive learning and repeated reading. Fluency illusion makes it seem that you’ve mastered the material without being confronted with some type of evidence that you really don’t know this stuff quite as well. And that all the techniques that we’re actively encouraging in teaching centers are giving students more feedback more regularly about what they know, and what they don’t know. And that doesn’t feel as good. And there was a study at Harvard about a year and a half or so ago, where they surveyed students on how they perceived their learning, relative to the actual learning gains they receive across both lecture-based classes and classes that relied on active learning. And there have been a lot of such studies where in general, the students believe that active learning is not as effective yet the learning gains tend to be significantly greater. So there is a bit of a disconnect between what students perceive as being effective and what actually is effective, which also can lead to that perception of busy work that you mentioned before?

Betsy: Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. I think, and this would be a whole other podcast you probably all have done all these podcasts thinking about this issue of student perceptions about learning. I think part of it is what they’re used to. There’s a lot of things that are going into helping all of us understand how we learn and what works and what doesn’t work. And so I think there is a hope for us to try to sort of bring them along with us, I guess I would say, I guess the valuable insight from the studies is that we shouldn’t take for granted that if students say they’re not learning, and if they aren’t learning, that we need to recognize that they may be. And so part of our job is to help them understand, with hopefully concrete evidence that we can show them, “Look, you’re actually learning here in significant ways” &hellipto help them understand why we are choosing these approaches. And it’s not just because we don’t want to teach or we’re lazy, or what are other stories people tell about active learning, moving forward. So I think part of the way we bring them along is to also acknowledge that sometimes there may be assignments that are not useful, and that there may be sometimes things that are overly burdensome in terms of time. And so instead of just always being “You’re wrong, students, you’re wrong here, let us tell you how it is,” to say, “Okay, let’s listen to our students” and say, “Actually, that assignment, it took more time than it was worth. And so we’re going to think creatively together about things that will work for you.” But also acknowledging that there’s a long literature on how people learn that should inform it, and not just perceptions that make a difference.

Rebecca: I think when I’ve even asked students about some of those things like “What do you wish you had more of?” &hellipthey do realize that when you have those little assignments to hold them accountable, and help them practice, I had students asking for more. In the fall, I had students saying “We had a few of those, those were helpful. We wish we had more of those.”

Betsy: Yeah, there’s no question. We saw that in our survey, too. And that’s the reality of anytime you do a study, it’s an average. On average, students think they’re learning less, but they’re always going to be students who, “Oh, I’m aware, I’ve seen this happening.” And they’ll be students who sort of totally missed the boat. But yeah, we saw that for sure. We saw students who appreciated the check-ins, but the number one thing that we saw from our students on various questions was that they wanted more opportunities to work with each other, which, normally, they don’t like that. And there’s literature, right? It’s like, “Oh, I want to be taught by a teacher and not my peer.” But in the pandemic moment when they don’t get to connect with their peers, like socially. So our students are back on campus at Wake Forest. But there’s lots of restrictions on what they’re allowed to do with each other socially. So especially for some of our first-year students who hadn’t made friends yet, this was their opportunity. Classroom collaboration was their opportunity to make friends. And so yes, it was tied to their learning. But they also really just appreciated it and said, “I want to be able to work more, they helped me understand the material more.” So they were calling out both the sort of friendship aspect, the social aspect, and saying, “Oh, it helped me feel more confident in the material, because I could ask questions.” So I certainly think it’s not a universal story, that students are upset about these kinds of active learning and small stakes things. But it’s more universal. I think that they feel like there’s a lot more work. And so that’s what’s so interesting. Rarely do you have a finding or experience where so many people are in an agreement about this. And so it’s just such an interesting thing that I have not met a person who said, “I felt like I had less work.” That’s kind of interesting. But there was one student in our survey, I think I quoted this in our blog post, that was really interesting, where she said, “The courses are easier, but they’re emotionally more difficult.” So the online courses are easier, but it’s emotionally more difficult and more difficult to try hard for. One of my hypotheses was that being in a pandemic makes our capacity to work lower. And so I think that’s part of what that person was getting at. Everything feels like more work, even if it’s the same amount of work. And I am guessing that it’s both that and also maybe a little bit more work too, that’s going on, I’m going to be curious to see what happens in the spring. We’re gonna do our survey again. And we did have some interventions where we talked about this, but there’s no mandates about what people are going to do. So we’re going to ask our faculty, again, what they’re doing. And then we’re going to ask our students and see if things got better. And hopefully, that’ll make us understand maybe which hypotheses are more or less likely to be true? Who knows?

Rebecca: If anything, at least, this is something faculty and students all have in common. We all feel like we have more work.

Betsy: Yeah, well, [LAUGHTER] and actually, we didn’t even mention this. And I didn’t mention in my blog post, because it was already too long, is some of this switch to low-stakes assignments also increases the workload for faculty. You don’t have to assess it all, but many of us are just used to that, so we look at everything and grade everything. And so certainly, we heard a lot on our faculty survey of “I cannot sustain this for another semester.” So, this semester, we may find that many of them have shifted back to fewer, larger assignments. So I’m not sure. We just heard some anecdotes, but I could see that happening too, for their own workload sake as well.

John: In addition to the trauma of the pandemic and all the issues associated with that, I believe you also mentioned the fact that many students signed up for face-to-face classes and just being in an online environment is going to make them less happy. And if you’re not as happy in that environment, it’s going to seem like more work.

Betsy: That’s right. Yeah. And this is where I had a throwback to my own time tracking that I did. Maybe five or six years ago, I did time tracking of my own time and I was fascinated because I wasn’t very good at predicting what I was spending my time on. If I didn’t like being in a meeting, I felt like it dragged on and on and on. If I was reading a book that was really exciting. I thought it was like this [finger snap]. But actually, if I went back, “Oh, I was actually spending a lot of time” or even just working on a design project, I would just lose hours staying up till however many hours in the night because it’s exciting to me, it doesn’t feel like work. And so my guess is that there’s some of that going on, too. And I will say in our survey, there was a group of students who were really unhappy with online learning in general, not specific teachers, not specific strategies&hellip that they did not want online. And so those students, obviously, if they had that much anger and sadness about being online, I can’t imagine that they would be excited and enjoying&hellip like, just another 15 minutes of online would be a slog for them, you know, and so I’m sure that things are slower, because they’re not enjoying it, because they didn’t choose it. And I think that’s a really important thing for all of us in higher ed to be thinking about is that, just because there are some students who are unhappy with online right now doesn’t mean that online itself is the problem. It’s partially giving our students autonomy and choice of how they experience their courses. And there are some of our students who just really want to be in person. And those students are probably also the people who really want to be socializing with their friends. And they aren’t getting any of that right now. And so they’re doubly upset, triply upset, like many of us, and that’s not a good position to be in to enjoy your work&hellip the work is really work. I’m sure that some of that’s going on.

John: I spent a decade working on our faculty assembly one semester. [LAUGHTER]

Betsy: I like that. Yeah, there you go. That’s true, right. Sometimes there’s something that just drags on. Time is tricky like that. Some of our students also commented on just sitting in their dorm rooms all day on their computer screen all day, and leaving to get takeout food and coming back. And they’re in singles, often&hellip a lot of them are in singles, because we de-densified our dorms, like it’s just not a great mode of existence. And so anything they can do to get away from the screen, as Rebecca, as you said, that I think is a really valuable strategy for all of us to try to incorporate into our courses.

Rebecca: I’ve noticed this semester, in my classes, I have really good engagement. They’re synchronous online, I can see people contributing. But there’s a lot less camera use this semester than there was even last semester with some of the same students. And maybe it’s the winter slog, “Oh, the winter won’t end.” But it’s just also just being on screen and feeling almost like you’re in performing mode. I think it’s some of that, too. I’d like to turn my screen off sometimes.

Betsy: I was just gonna say that for those of us that are in committee meetings all the time with our colleagues, like we’re still with screens on all day. And yeah, I absolutely think that there’s just an exhaustion and awareness that there’s another semester of this, we don’t know when it’s going to end. &hellipreally tough, certainly.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking what’s next?

Betsy: Well, if I knew what was next for the fall, I’d be a millionaire right now. Who knows what’s next for the fall? I think that’s the biggest challenge for all of us, as we’re thinking about higher ed, in the near term, at least is what’s going to happen in the fall. But I do think with respect to the topic of this podcast, we often talk about when the pandemic ends. It’s going to be like a trickle, I think. There’s not going to be a sharp ending to it. But whenever we start talking about the future of higher ed in a serious way, I do think there’s going to be a very interesting question about how much do we expect of our students outside of class? And what is an appropriate workload? What is the nature of a credit hour? All of those kinds of questions should be on the table because I know for a fact that many of my faculty, even when they go back to in-person are going to want to keep using the strategies. They’ve read the research that we presented to them this summer, and they see that it’s valuable and that their students are learning and so it’s not as if the workload is going to decrease dramatically, I’m guessing, when we go back to in person, so we may need to have larger conversations about that in higher ed.

Rebecca: Thanks so much for joining us, Betsy. It’s always a pleasure.

Betsy: It was great to be back. I love this podcast. Thanks so much.

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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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181. Capstone Experience

Posted in active learning, authentic learning, collaborative learning, engagement, higher education, learning, motivation, pedagogy, project based learning, teaching
March 31, 2021

Imagine a course in which the faculty member is a coach who guides students through a real-world project with messy data and the problem-solving that comes with it. In this episode, Dr. Kathryn Berkow joins us to discuss how a course with no content can provide students with a rich learning experience full of analysis and insights. Katy is an Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems at the University of Delaware. She is also the host of the On Cultivating Student Engagement in Higher Ed podcast.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Imagine a course in which the faculty member is a coach who guides students through a real-world project with messy data and the problem-solving that comes with it. In this episode, we explore how a course with no content can provide students with a rich learning experience full of analysis and insights.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Dr. Kathryn Berkow. Katy is an Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems at the University of Delaware. She is also the host of the On Cultivating Student Engagement in Higher Ed podcast. Welcome back, Katy.

Katy: Thanks so much for having me on again.

John: We’re really happy to talk to you again. And our teas today are:

Katy: I’m having a decaf Earl Grey.

Rebecca: …good classic. I’m having a Scottish afternoon tea, which is my new regular.

John: And I am drinking vanilla almond tea. It’s a black tea from the Republic of Tea.

Rebecca: I really like almond teas.

John: This is my first, it was a gift from my son.

Rebecca: So we invited you back Katy to talk about your capstone course that you offer. Can you tell us a little bit about the course?

Katy: Absolutely. I love talking about this class. It’s one of my favorite courses to teach and I teach it every spring. And so having the break in the fall teaching my other courses gives me a lot of renewed energy for this capstone. It’s a senior capstone experience for our business analytics minors in their final semester as they prepare for their next steps after graduation. And the students have a variety of majors and a variety of perspectives in the class. And analytics is only their minor focus. And so in course design I have had, I would say, two influences. I have a colleague who designed a similar capstone for our management information system students that relies on semester long projects with an external sponsor. But also, before coming to the University of Delaware, I worked in the financial services industry as a quant analyst. So I worked through lots of long, larger scale, analytical projects. And so I modeled the course after my colleagues set up quite a bit, but I adapt it from my own professional analytical experiences. So when I first started teaching this course, I shied away from saying what I’m about to say, but now that I’ve seen enough students through the course to know that they learn so much over the course of the semester, I feel very comfortable sharing this: there is no content in this particular course, and I think that’s what makes it so much fun. So we spend the complete semester working on a large scale, real, unwieldy project that is truly representative of the type of projects students will face in their professional careers as data scientists. The students work on the project throughout the semester, they report to me or my co teacher as their manager every week. And we provide feedback on performance, suggestions and resources for how to move forward. When the students are stuck, we’ve usually seen something like that before. And we can brainstorm together how to get unstuck. And sometimes all the students need is confidence that the direction they’re planning to go in is a good one. But because there’s no content, the projects can really unfold and be the focus for all of us throughout the semester, and each student team gets a unique experience. So the two important things that I really want students to know after finishing this course, are: one, that there’s no perfect answer to a complex problem… there are only a degrees of good, better, better than that… when it comes to analytical solutions, which I’m sure is true in so many areas; and number two is that each unique problem needs its own thoughtful solution. We’re not trying to teach students in this class how to think about every problem, just how to think analytically now that they have the analytical tools. Not what to do in every situation, but how to think through each complex new situation they face.

Rebecca: Do students in this class all work on this same project, or do you have small groups working on projects.

Katy: So each student team is working on a project throughout the semester, and this semester, for example, I’ll have 42 students in the class working on nine distinct projects.

Rebecca: Do the students define their own projects, or do you have a predefined project.

Katy: So I create the projects for them with community members. Because there’s no content in the course, the project is the critical design component. So each year, I start getting ready months in advance curating these projects for the semester. In the past, we’ve worked with our own athletics department on a variety of projects, a large retail banking institution, a service provider of home repairs, a few local nonprofit organizations, and lots of others. And so the variety is exciting, because the students all have different interests as well. And I tell these organizations that all I really need from them is a sufficiently challenging research question. I mean, everybody’s got lots of questions, but we have to really hone in on one theme, and then enough data to support finding an answer to that question, perhaps. It’s not been too challenging to get project sponsors interested, because I’m offering free analytics. [LAUGHTER] And so I might contact someone through a friend of a friend and say, “Here’s a few naive questions, I think we might be able to help you answer if you have the data,” and people generally seem excited to have an introductory conversation. So, for example, some of the organizations that we’ve worked with want evidence of program efficacy. They might have survey data or some measurement of before and after metrics on the students or participants in the program. And we can use that data to answer questions. Others have said we want suggestions for how to price the seats in our new stadium which is super open ended and they’ll provide some data about ticket sales, for example, and so it’s a very open ended data-driven question but it’s not standard. And sometimes those non standard questions are even more fun. So I write up a project description after a couple of meetings, discussion, thought with the project sponsor. That might be two to five pages, it’s not a lot of information, and then I get the data into a format that students can work with, which sometimes is me doing nothing to prepare the data. I do want the students to struggle a little bit with formatting the data since data cleaning is a big part of learning to be a successful data analyst, but I provide lightly processed data and a project description to the students as their starting point. So, I ask them what project they’d like to work on after introducing the projects to them on the first day of class and I try to fit students to a project that they’re most interested in, but really sometimes i’m surprised that some projects are more popular than others and it’s not the ones that I expect

John: Paul Handstedt has a book called Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses for a Complex World and what you’re doing sounds very much like what he’s advocating. Giving students really challenging problems where there’s no clear solutions, is a really good way of helping them pull together all the things they’ve learned. So in a sense the content is really everything they’ve done up to the capstone but you’re giving them an opportunity to apply it in ways that they’ll need to, if they’re going to be successful in their career

Katy: Absolutely. Completely. Because I did read that book and really felt inspired and I think I was already doing this style of course at the time, but it made me feel like I was headed in the right direction, that giving students this opportunity to try solving a problem that has no answer and most of the problems they try to solve in their careers don’t already have answers or we’d just be using those existing solutions. And so it is really good practice I think for whatever’s next especially in the field of analytics. Ee don’t know what the technology looks like or the methods are going to look like as we move forward and so they really need to be able to think critically about ethical concerns, methodologies, how to work with their data in a really honest and skilled way that can be applied to lots of wicked problems.

Rebecca: So, it sounds like in a process like this, which sounds similar to kinds of courses that I also teach, you act more as a coach rather than more of a traditional teacher, kind of coaching them along on how to respond to the data, respond to what’s happening in the moment. Is that correct?

Katy: Absolutely, and that’s something that I love about this class. I know a lot of your guests have talked about removing themselves from the sage on the stage position and becoming the coach or cheerleader in an active environment and that is one of the things I love most. When students are excited and driving the questions, I get even more excited to talk about what those answers might look like with them.

Rebecca: Do students have the opportunity to talk to your community partners or is it always through you?

Katy: So we staged the course in three sections and we have three presentations associated. So, the students will get started, spend maybe three weeks or so working with the data, getting to know it, generating some questions and some initial discovery points, and then they’ll present those results to their sponsor. And actually teaching online has been much easier for the project sponsors because they can easily attend presentations and provide feedback. Usually in that first round, the discovery period, the students present something and the sponsor can say, “Oh, let me explain that.” It’s sort of a back and forth where there’s a lot of sort of correcting any misunderstandings or answering questions. Phase two, the students are working toward what I call an initial solution. This solution might be a basic model that makes some assumptions that are maybe not appropriate, but just to get started. And it underscores what I love most about the class which is the idea of iterative solution. Presentation three is going to give them an opportunity to refine the solution, completely abandon what they did for presentation two, or improve it in a way that makes it more realistic, more robust, more an answer to the project sponsor’s research question. So, absolutely, the students get to interact with their project sponsors during those presentations where they are leading the show, they’re having the conversation, they’re hearing the direct feedback as though the project sponsor is their manager in that moment. And then I can sort of serve as a liaison, saying “I think what you’re saying is this,” “maybe we can put that on our to-do list,” and sort of just offering the support to both sides, to help everybody come together for a solution

John: How do you assess the contributions of individual students in the group project?

Katy: This will be the fourth time we offer this class and this has evolved quite a lot. A few things have remained the same. Those presentations I mentioned are a clear part of assessment in the class. But each week, I require that each team submit a status state. And that will be a highly detailed list of achievements toward answering their research questions, and also a list of highly detailed to-dos for the next week. So, even though it’s not a class in project management, they’re getting that scope of accountability for moving their project forward. And I require that each student’s name appear next to achievements, and next to to- do items. And that gives me an opportunity to really see what’s happening. But we also have weekly meetings. The students, instead of meeting in a classroom setting where the entire class is together, I’ll meet with each group for maybe 30 minutes. If they need more time, certainly, we can have an office hours setup. But 30 minutes is usually plenty for us to discuss anything from the status update, for them to get feedback from me, and for me to say things like, “It doesn’t really seem like we’ve done enough this week, what’s going on team?” …just like their manager would say in real life, maybe they haven’t had a chance to have that really, in-person accountability conversation before. The need for that is very rare. Most of the time, I’m saying things like, “Wow, I’m so blown away by what you’ve achieved this week. How can I best assist this week with your to-dos? What do you want to talk about in this meeting?” but those are the three components. I recently transitioned to specifications grading, which has been a ton of fun in this particular class, because the senior students are so independent and really prepared to graduate, that this gives them a lot of flexibility. So I require excellence in answering the research question as the C-level component. So the team grade is the C, do a great job on this project. And then I can add in individual components that will scale toward a B and an A. So for this semester, for example, the students will earn a B if they complete a data ethics module where they have to think and write about some ethical dilemmas in data science. They write reflections on visiting speakers who are analytical professionals that we have come to class via zoom, and they evaluate their own performance. And then to earn an A, I ask that the students take on a particularly challenging component of answering their team research question. And I don’t give a lot of guidance there except to say, discuss it with your instructor so that everybody’s on the same page. So I can help them determine what is sufficiently challenging to be truly deserving of an A, because every project is so different, I don’t want to spell out what they need to do. But an example would be if you’re working toward a C in the class, you could work with a team member to generate a model that answers a particular, say, sub question of your focus. But if you’re working toward an A, you need to be maybe developing that model on your own. The one thing that I do promise students is that there will be no surprises. I know it sounds like there’s some looseness in the specifications. But we’re talking about it every week in our meetings. And if students are not on track to earn that excellence, C-level grade, then they know about it with plenty of time. And I’ve really never had to give students much more motivation than “Hey, I haven’t really seen much from the team this week. Let’s talk about those to-dos for next week.”

Rebecca: It sounds like those meetings are really important in terms of processing learning, not only just moving the project forward, but also just processing “what are they learning?” …and how might they move that forward in the future, not just in their projects? And you also mentioned some sort of self-evaluation or reflection, can you talk a little bit more about that component?

Katy: Oh, sure. At the end of the semester, I ask them to do this performance evaluation of themselves in much the same way that I have to write one in my role and have done in the past. It gives them a little bit of practice self reflecting. I’m not really judging performance based on their performance assessment. I’ve already seen what they’ve done in the meetings. When they speak with confidence about something complicated, I know that they’ve learned a lot. So I really just ask them to be honest, and say, “What do you feel like were your greatest growth points? What do you feel like you still need to work on as you head into a professional role as a data analyst?” And I also ask for feedback about the course. {What were the elements that you felt contributed most to your growth this semester, and what things didn’t contribute anything?”

Rebecca: What have your student responses been to working on these projects.

Katy: So ever since the first time the course was offered, the students have expressed sincere appreciation for the help in making a transition from student to professional. It seems like by the time this course pops up in their schedules, they are really ready to start becoming more independent, and squeezing into a seat in a classroom just doesn’t feel comfortable for them anymore. So they express that this course and other capstones like it that are problem based really give them an opportunity to be in the driver’s seat and have more independence in their senior spring. Many also have said that they’ve learned the skills of analytical thinking, data cleaning, planning, modeling, but now they’re seeing for the first time how those things go together in a sequence and on a complete scale over much more time. This isn’t just a week long project where everything is abbreviated and if they’re going into an analysis role this is going to be what their career is like. So, I couldn’t be happier than to hear those two things. It makes it feel like a success. But, I’d also like to add something really selfish here. I get so much personal fulfillment from teaching students, at any level, but this class really gives me the opportunity to stand back and coach as you said earlier, Rebecca, rather than be that sage on the stage in front of the class with the slides. And I just get so much enjoyment from seeing students take off, watching them steer the ship for the first time, getting their answers. I also teach them at sophomore levels, the intro course, and so i’m lucky enough to see them again at the senior level and just saying that it makes me feel really proud is such a dramatic understatement because seeing them ready to leave the University of Delaware and become professionals… it’s really really fulfilling in a selfish way.

Rebecca: My experience with classes like that, too, is that students really appreciate the opportunity to try out this pretend career for a moment. [LAUGHTER] It’s a safe place to try that rollout and understand where they fit in the bigger picture or what specific role within an area or field might be a good fit for them in a way that an internship doesn’t, because it’s maybe a little more flexible or you have more of that direct contact with the faculty member during that process instead of just in the work environment. I’ve had students that have said that in those scenarios they’ve really appreciated that opportunity to fail without repercussions.

Katy: Yeah that’s a great point. It’s like we’re the coach but we’re also the bumper in the bowling alley… that we’re just trying to keep them on track and rolling forward. And I think what you said is true, especially as I think about what their roles might look like… different positions as data analysts… maybe they’re the best at doing the analysis, building the models, or maybe they’re the best at communicating the results and being the liaison between people who are super analytical and people who are not super analytical. So, this class, just as you said, gives them an opportunity to try on the different hats that might be available and see where they fit best in a comfortable supportive environment.

John: When you mentioned watching your students grow from seeing them as sophomores to seeing them as seniors, I have very much the same experience. I used to teach a wider variety of classes but in recent years, since i’ve been working in the teaching center, I primarily see them just as freshmen in a large intro economics course and then I see them generally as juniors and seniors in any econometrics class and in a capstone course, and seeing the change in them and seeing how they become confident with their material and seeing the work that they’re able to produce is really impressive. It’s a really nice feeling.

Katy: Absolutely and when you’re talking to people from other universities or if you’re talking to a panel during accreditation, it’s really, really nice to be able to speak to the entire scope of the educational process. When you see them one time as sophomores, or even one time as seniors,you only get that point in time feedback, but when you get to see the whole development process it just makes you so proud of what the students are learning and you have just such appreciation for all that your colleagues do along the way as well. It just makes it feel like there’s a symphony happening here and that you can see it much more clearly.

Rebecca: So, Katy, you’ve talked about this is the fourth time you’ve taught it. So, the first two times I believe were in person, then you had a time that started in person that shift out not in person. I imagine this time is remote.

Katy: Absolutely.

Rebecca: So, can you talk about that transition or transformation?

Katy: Sure. Last spring we were in person for five weeks and then we transitioned online and I was actually having one of my group meetings with students when the email came out. So, the email came out announcing that we were closing maybe at like 4:55 and we were meeting at five. So, I corralled the team into my office and I said “What’s going on? Just read it out loud. Let’s get this out in the open.” And it was so helpful for me to see the students processing the information live because I was processing it too but thinking in the way that they were thinking in that moment was so helpful to me. One student, for example, raised this question of “But i’m supposed to be on spring break when they say we’re coming back to school…” And i’m just like “Uh huh, let’s take it one day at a time. this is obviously new information for all of us.” But that’s how she was processing and the next student said “Are we going to not have a graduation?” …and I don’t know the answer to that. I said “Well I don’t know if this is going to be two weeks oor three months or longer, but we’re just going to take it one day at a time.” it was just so fascinating to hear what was happening in their minds. One of the questions that came up was “What’s going to happen in this class?” …like they felt almost more concerned about this class than some of their other ones transitioning online. And I said, “Well that you certainly don’t need to worry about. I feel less concerned about transitioning this particular class online than I do my other ones. Because all we do is have conversations. We have conversations together in this small group, we have conversations as a class where we’re listening to a speaker, and we have conversations with your project sponsors. And we can do all of that on Zoom.” I was lucky enough to have had some experience with Zoom beforehand. And so I just felt really confident that there might be one or two things I had to think through, but that most of the things that we were doing could easily be achieved via Zoom. So it was the other classes that were more, I’ll say, traditional in delivery format that I was worried about. So this, I feel like the students are getting exactly the same experience, they just don’t get to shake their project sponsors hand, which, you know, is a little bit disappointing. The networking component is really nice in person, but it’s not necessary. And I think meeting in these small groups, I still get to know the students just as well, and really can serve in the capacity of whatever they need, whether it’s mentor, thinking about helping them to find a job, or just project mentor, whatever is needed, I can do via zoom, because it’s in this sort of small group protected setting. And so it has been maybe the greatest challenge to transition other courses, not this one. So I really feel good about how this one has transitioned online,

Rebecca: I was shaking my head up and down the whole time you were talking, Katy, because I felt the same way about my project based courses. And in some ways, some of the logistics got so much easier being online. There’s some classes that I do that were project based, for example, our Vote Oswego project that I do with a political science faculty member in the fall, we do things with our classes together, it was so much easier to find a space we could all fit in on Zoom, we could easily get in and have the space to go into small groups without getting too loud. And some of those logistics actually were really fine online. And then even with some other projects that we were doing, having our community partners join us more easily, in a lot of ways, by being on Zoom, rather than having all the logistics of going to campus in person and finding a time that’s going to work, because there’s all the travel time involved and what have you as well.

Katy: Absolutely. One of our visiting speakers comes from Denver every year, just to be with us. She happens to be a graduate of the University of Delaware and loves spending time with our students and giving back in that way. But when I had to call her and say, “Hey, we don’t need you to come all the way to Denver anymore, we’re going to be virtual,” maybe that was a relief. [LAUGHTER] But now it just opens the door. I’ve heard a lot of your guests say it opens the door for so much flexibility in the future to just bring in more voices into the classroom and have an opportunity to learn from just a variety of different people because the commute time is zero now.

John: Going back to your point about students being a little anxious of how the course was going to proceed, I had a very similar experience with my capstone course compared to another more traditional type class. I met with them on the Monday before the shutdown began, and it wasn’t announced and there had been no discussion, at least that I had heard of on campus. But it was pretty clear that campuses all over the world were shutting down. So it was pretty clear we were going to as well. And I said “We should be prepared that this might be our last time meeting in person.” And they said, “Well, what are we going to do? How are we going to keep doing all these meetings and keep going?” And they wanted to make sure the class would be successful. I said, “Well remember how I told you, if you couldn’t be here sometime, you could just come in on Zoom? Well, that’s what we’ll probably be doing in the event of a shutdown.” Most of them had laptops there, I said, “Go to the Zoom website, create an account, [LAUGHTER] just so you’ll have it there, because you may want to create your own sessions for work within your groups.”And they downloaded Zoom to their smartphones and to their laptops. And I said,”Let’s just try connecting and just make sure you mute your microphone so we don’t get any feedback issues.” And they were pretty relaxed about it. And nothing really about the course changed other than the fact that they were meeting over a computer. They were doing all the presentations, they were doing all of their group work in breakout rooms instead of gathering tables around. And actually in a lot of ways it was easier because when they were meeting in small groups in the physical classroom, they were all looking over the shoulders of the people who were actually doing the writing at the time. And it was just so much easier for them just to share the screen and discuss it from wherever they were and have a much clearer view.

Rebecca: I think it’s really interesting that both of you are talking about how concerned the students were about being able to fulfill that particular class or that particular project and I think it really attests to probably their commitment to that project. And Katy, in your case, it might be just because it’s somewhat high stakes, right? There’s a client or a partner involved that you want to satisfy and it feels really satisfying to do real work for real people. And I’ve had this experience as well with community based projects that students just are all in on those kinds of projects, and just don’t want to see them fail at all.

Katy: That’s true. I’ve never had a problem getting students motivated. I told you once in a while, I’ll say like, “What’s happening this week?” and then you hear there were some tests or something like that. But honestly, the students are highly motivated all semester, because they’re getting to interact with those project sponsors during the presentations. And they’re going to be accountable to that person’s face or group of people during the presentation. And so sometimes I worry, as we get closer to the end of senior spring, that students are going to lose their motivation, and it really doesn’t happen. You know, they’re tired by the end, they’re ready to be done with the project, because this might be the longest project they’ve ever worked on. But they really deliver. And they always really impress me, I don’t feel any stress at the end of the semester with grades, because they, number one, they know what’s happening. We’re very clear all semester long about where their grade is headed, but also because they’re driving it. And this is a group of students who’s elected to have a minor in addition to their major studies. And they’re just highly motivated. Most of the class is earning an A by the end because of the excellent work they produce.

Rebecca: Sounds like a really fun class to teach.

Katy: I have so much fun. The hardest part’s the project. Once the projects are made, the rest is easy. I just show up and ask questions.

Rebecca: Mm hmm. I love my projects classes,

John: Is there any type of artifact that the students create that they can share with potential employers as a demonstration of what they’ve learned.

Katy: I would say I always encourage the students to include their project on their resume. But I do ask students to sign a nondisclosure agreements for their project sponsor. Tthat makes everybody feel more comfortable. Sometimes the data is sensitive if it’s got, for example, young children participating in a program, and other small businesses might not want to share their data. And so I have the students sign something. But I tell them, if you’re interviewing, you can certainly describe your involvement in the project in a loose way, you can talk about the specifics of the modeling you did, and how you contributed to the client’s end goals without saying, “Oh, I worked for this specific company.” And they also do create an executive summary. So that’s an artifact. They share their presentation slides, of course, with their customer, and they create an executive summary. But the goal of that artifact is to deliver information to their project sponsor, and not necessarily to serve as a portfolio. When I offer this class in the graduate level, where I have professional students who might be working, I don’t also ask them to work on a project for another organization. They collect their own project from publicly available data, and they generate a description of what the impact they could have studying this publicly available data might be. They create a digital portfolio using a WordPress blog. And then that’s something that they could really share as an artifact. So if it happened to be publicly available data they were studying, then they could certainly share that with a prospective employer.

Rebecca: It’s also a great opportunity at that capstone level to have conversations about the way that the profession works. Whether it’s nondisclosure agreements or copyright or whatever it might be related to what you’re doing. These are important times to have those conversations before the students graduate and move into their professional lives.

Katy: Absolutely. Because the data in our classes is often either… I’ll call it simulated, which is just made up by me, as an example, or some publicly available data that’s already in a nice format. So, it’s good for them to have the exposure to working with data that is just in a different format, because it comes from a different place. Or to see that not every dataset looks the same as the one your teacher might have curated in your sophomore level introductory course,

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

Katy: So Monday is the start of our semester at the University of Delaware. So what’s next for me is diving into nine really exciting projects this semester with our seniors this year. So I’m really excited about that. But for the course overall, there’s going to be a big change coming up. And that is that I mentioned we have minors in business analytics in the course. We recently added a major in business analytics. So I think the exciting thing to look forward to is that we’ll have an even greater mix of students coming up either next spring or the following spring that will include people who have had even more training in analytics during their time in the University of Delaware, and it’ll increase the variety of solutions that we can provide to our project sponsors. So that’s really exciting, as is being part of a growing program. But in addition to that, I’d like to concur with many of your other recent guests who have said that they’re focused on what the future looks like in their classrooms. Certainly what’s next is going to involve some changes. And it seems like there are lots of opportunities to reimagine our courses when we have the option of being in person, but also using the new tools we’ve learned for engagement and flexibility. So in the broader sense of what’s next, I really don’t know, but I’m thinking about it a lot.

John: Our students got an interesting email. For the first time since I’ve been at Oswego, we had about a foot of snow and it was coming down pretty quickly and instead of getting a notice that classes were canceled, they got a note that all classes will take place remotely today. [LAUGHTER] So one change is, I think, for those students who used to look forward to the occasional snow day in upstate New York, those days are probably gone pretty much everywhere.

Rebecca: It’s not just the students that look forward to those days. [LAUGHTER]

Katy: Absolutely, I agree. But you’re right, that’s a big change. And we’re seeing that at the University of Delaware as well, our winter session courses were not affected by snow.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much, Katie, for joining us and sharing other great stories from your classroom. There’s so much to learn from your practice and I’m glad that you were able to join us again.

Katy: Well, thank you so much for having me back. I really enjoy talking with both of you. But also I enjoy learning so much from all the guests that you talk with on your show.

John: And I really enjoy your podcast as well and am looking forward to hearing more episodes. And this sounds like a really great project you have there.

Katy: Thanks so much. Yeah, I hope everyone will check out the On Cultivating Student Engagement in Higher Ed podcast and I’m hoping to put out a second season this spring.

John: And we will share a link to that in the show notes.

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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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180. Google Apps

Posted in active learning, classroom community, collaborative learning, collaborative writing, creative commons, edtech, engagement, feedback, higher education, learning, pedagogy, social presence, teaching
March 24, 2021

Cloud-based collaborative software can support active and engaged learning in both synchronous and asynchronous contexts. In this episode, Dr. Kathleen Gradel joins us to explore how a variety of Google apps can facilitate collaborative learning. Kathleen is a Professor in the College of Education at SUNY Fredonia. She is a recipient of a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and a SUNY FACT2 Award for Excellence in Instruction.

Transcript

John: Cloud-based collaborative software can support active and engaged learning in both synchronous and asynchronous contexts. In this episode, we explore how a variety of Google apps can facilitate collaborative learning.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Dr. Kathleen Gradel. Kathleen is a Professor in the College of Education at SUNY Fredonia. She is a recipient of a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and a SUNY FACT2 Award for Excellence in Instruction. Welcome, Kathleen.

Kathleen: Hi, John. Hi, Rebecca.

Rebecca: Hi.

John: It’s good to see you again.

Kathleen: It’s good to be here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:

Kathleen: I am drinking diet pop. That would also indicate where in the country I’m from, because I’ve just called it pop.

Rebecca: I picked right up on that, Kathleen.

John: …and I am drinking Spring Cherry green tea. As we’re surrounded by about a foot and a half of snow, I figured the spring cherry would be a nice mood to set here.

Rebecca: When you said it, I was like, you need to dial that up a little. [LAUGHTER] I have my Scottish afternoon tea in my T-rex mug because I need it today.

John: And Rebecca is holding up the T-rex mug by the microphone so you can all see it.

Rebecca: Yeah, it was for you guys.

John: We’ve invited you here to talk about some of the ways you’ve been using Google Apps in your classes. In a prior discussion, you recently mentioned that you were using the new Google assignment tool, which now has LTI integration into learning management systems. Could you tell us a little bit about the Google assignment tool? …because that was new to us.

Kathleen: For Google Classroom aficionados, it’s still fairly new. But it was a feature that the classroom people just totally glommed on to. And it gave a whole lot of functionality for distribution of assignments and built- in feedback, which was inherent to the classroom kind of stream, but added a little more LMS-ish stuff to the Google Classroom. So now it’s available to the rest of us. I saw an announcement early on that it was coming. And I was, “Oh, this is so exciting.” And I sent the request to our LMS administrator, I usually get a “Oh, no, that’s not going to work or won’t work yet or won’t work now,” but because it’s considered part of the education suite, the first answer was not “No.” So that was great. Because it already existed in Classroom and Classroom was part of our education apps suite. It looked like a possible. And then the second thing is, but usually these integrations don’t work very smoothly. And they tried it and I, of course, was the guinea pig. How exciting. And my first reaction was, “Oh, no, it’s not working.” And I’ll explain to you that the one glitch that I see happening with it, but this is what it does: it automatically, especially in our LMSs, if you had a template of something in a Google Doc, and wanted to distribute it, one copy to each recipient, each participant, each student, you could do it any number of ways. But it’s not a simple click, it wouldn’t work that way within most of our LMSs either. We’re in Moodle, you’re in Blackboard. So we’d have to think about how do we get that template out to students, so they could use it and then submit it as a “assignment” within our LMSs. So when I share this with faculty, they went like this: “this is like magic.” And I said, “Yeah, it does feel like magic.” So what happens is, once the integration is there, depending on the name of whatever your resources or activities are in your LMS, you add it. And then in the background, you have your instance, whatever your assignment is, it could be a table that students fill out, it could be writing prompts, it could be almost anything. And as soon as you click to distribute it, it goes out to everyone who is in that section of your LMS without you’re doing anything. When they open it, it automatically renames it using their name, whatever name they have in your LMS and it becomes editable by them. I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, I certainly have, people don’t rename their files. And then they forget how to share them to you when they’re ready to share their wonderful work. So what happens is the student or whomever interacts with their own doc, they click to submit it, in the little assignment screen. And then they’re actually asked to click “Submit” twice. As soon as they do that, they no longer have editing rights to that doc. You then automatically get it and have commenting and editing writes to the doc. They don’t have to share it with you, which is usually the downside for using Google Docs. My experience with students is they forget to do that. So there’s always that extra, “please share it with me: or whatever. So it eases the distribution part. And it’s almost like playing take a turn or play tennis. So it’s my serve, your serve, my serve, your serve. So as soon as I serve it to them, they then get it and I don’t interact with it till they send it back to me. So It really does feel like ping pong or tennis. My husband says I’m horrible at both. But I’m pretty good at this, because I get a signal that it’s in there by taking a look at my assignment in the LMS. They also, as soon as I give feedback, get an email reminder. And it appears in their dashboard as graded or they’ve gotten feedback. So that whole back and forth thing that happens, with practice, it works well. To gear somebody up to that level, often, that exchange sometimes takes a few extra steps. So I love that. The other piece that is really cool is it has a built in commenting. So I can create boilerplate, g eneral kinds of feedback, click on it, and then it will paste it right into a commenting bubble in my Google Doc. So if you’re like me, I have a lot of instances of where I go like this. “Could you give me an example of that?” or “Great start, can you finish this item?” Those common ones, I can put them right into individual feedback. And I can also use it for overall feedback. And I can grade with it, I can grade as well as give feedback within it. And, at least in Moodle, the integration ties right into the gradebook.

Rebecca: Now you’re talking magic. [LAUGHTER]

Kathleen: So for formative stuff, it makes all kinds of sense as most any interaction in a Google Doc would be, because we thrive on that. However, if I want to give them 10 points for that instance, and offer them opportunities to upgrade, it feels like a very natural prompt.

Rebecca: There’s a built in rubric option as well, right?

Kathleen: You’re right, Rebecca, yeah, you can either import one, or you can create one right within the assignment. So I think from the instructor side, or from the facilitator side, the ease of use is dramatic, especially if we want to keep students not thinking they’re in a different world because they’re in Google versus the LMS. So because it launches so well from the LMS, and because they’re actually viewing what I call their dashboard, but the view of the activity is embedded right within your LMS. It doesn’t just look like an external link sitting there that they will click to go to Google Drive. So it has that look and feel of just being part of it, which I think is a piece that sometimes helps ground students in thinking, “Okay, you want me to be in Moodle? Here I am. Oh, no, you’re setting me to Google Drive.” And so keeping that focus, I think. is helpful for both of us, the instructor and the students. We’re experimenting with how it would work with groups set up in the LMS, and distributing to groups. One of our biology instructors is is playing around with it, and one of our business people is experimenting with using one single assignment for the entire semester as a reflective journal. So what she’s doing is creating what would be a template, which has virtually nothing in it, just their name, and the name of the assignment is in the Google Doc. And then she’s providing weekly writing prompts within the LMS. This week’s reflective journal writing prompts are these three questions. So she’s not putting them into the Google Doc, she’s asking them to bring them over. And then they’ve done the first one already. They add their input, they click to submit, she gives them feedback, and then because of this really cool feature is able to change the grade within the assignment itself. So initially, the first assignment was 10 points, when she goes back into grade, she can actually grade the second week and up the points to 20. And give them both feedback and their cumulative grade right there. So she has a good pedagogical reason to do this, because she wants them to like in week three, go back, “Okay, now look at what you were thinking in week one. Let’s reflect on that, and see where you stand with that same thing.” So she doesn’t want to have to have them go refer to different docs. And I said that iterative use of a doc is “Oh, wow, super duper.” It’s great that this tool can help her to do that. And they’re not having to submit one after another after another.

John: If students are engaged in large writing projects, it sounds like that could be used to scaffold the project too, where instead of submitting things in stages, they’re just building it as they go at each stage, when they add more to the document.

Kathleen: Right. And a lot of us do have that submit your idea, then come back and do a elevator talk, five bullet points, and then come back and do an intro piece. I think you have to be strategic about where does that sit in the LMS. So that’s one thing that this business professor has thought about is, rather than embedding it into one week, or one module, she’s taken that assignment, she’s put it in our Moodle at the top in a separate section that she set up as common assignments, so that they know to go there to get it not to the particular week. So I think thinking about where it’s going to fit. Because it’s a unique bird.

John: I could see that working with Google docs, could it also work with Google sheets or Google Slides as the base document?

Kathleen: Yes, one of our math instructors is going to do it with this sheet. Now, when we first introduced this, only about a month ago, I tried it out with my graduate class in the fall, a group of people that were I would say, not technically very savvy,and very distracted because they are graduate students, and they’re working and they’re worried and everything else. So adopting a new tool is not their cup of tea. So I tried it with them, and they didn’t miss a beat. When we introduced it to the campus, some of the questions were, “What would be the right Google tool to use with this?” And it was such a wonderful discussion, because we really have some good decision making about “Well, what is the right thing to do? Did you really want to share that whole Google Sheet with everyone? Did you really want them to have their own? Did you really want to collect data, put it into a viewable Google Sheet, rather than whatever?” So teasing through some of those: “What do I want to do? How do I want to do it? And why? With what level of access?” That was a very, very healthy discussion. Ultimately, you start with the end in mind, what do you want to end with? Do I really want an individual something coming in from every student? If I don’t, then maybe this is not the right choice. For example, I can still easily share templates with groups of students or with students by just posting a forced copy link, and have them make a copy and do the routine kind of sharing. It really depends on how I want to use the activity.

John: For those who are not familiar with that really powerful forced copy link, could you just explain to people how they might do that with the share link that they might otherwise have view or edit or comment access on?

Kathleen: This is where you have to buckle your seatbelts because it’s always done better visually, John. So, let’s see how good I am at painting a picture. So I always say, look up at your browser window, when you have your Google doc open, look at your omni bar. And then you see that very long, long, long series of letters and everything else that is the url for that Google doc. When you look at it and go all the way to the right, you’ll see that the last four letters, this is where four letter words really come in handy. The last four letters in that string, are e-d-i-t, edit. So what you want to do is put your little mouse at the very, very end, by the T, and delete those four letters, replace it with this four letter word, copy, c-o-p-y. So then you take that, I usually just take it, do a Ctrl-C (copy). I open up a new tab to make sure it works. And I paste it in there. And when I do that, automatically a screen pops up that says “Do you want to make a copy of this, blah, blah, blah, whatever the name of the doc is, or whatever it is doc, slide deck, whatever.” And when you click to do that, it makes an automatic copy of whatever that original looked like. And then what I usually do is I shorten it. So I take it to bit.ly or one of the other shorteners. And I don’t have to do that, but then it makes it a little bit easier if I’m actually going to display it. One caution to that is, if you’re dealing with teacher educators whose internet service is delivered through most of our regional BOCES, the BOCES do not like short urls, because they will actually ask you to plunk it into their lengthener, because they want to make sure that they’re not being sent to somewhere that is not as desirable. They want to be able to see where they’re going. So for some of our teacher educators, we say, “Just a reminder, you’re not getting somewhere and it says we don’t like short urls, blah, blah, blah.” The forced Copy Link, though, I can’t tell you how many people have said, “You have changed my life.”

John: I used that just this past Monday night in a class to give students a template for a document that we’re working on. And they would just kind of amazed by that. They asked how they could do that, because it was a really nice technique.

Rebecca: What you’re describing Kathleen are so many things that I’ve done in my classes that the workflow would be much easier. I was just doing an assignment this semester with my students where they’re doing an online digital sketchbook really using Google Slides. And the first assignment is “Give me your URL.” I have to make sure I have commoent privileges, and then you have to resubmit it if I don’t. And then the next week now we actually start the sketchbook. So each time it was an assignment, and I have them just resubmit the same URL each time in the LMS. But this workflow that you’re describing would be much more efficient. And I’m sure there’s many other examples where that workflow would make sense as well. So that’s really exciting to me. Are there some barriers that students face [LAUGHTER] or that faculty face using this technique that we should be aware of?

Kathleen: I’ve run into a couple of things. Number one, this does not feel like Google for people that are or Google people. People that have glommed onto Google, and they know the things that Google will do, this feels like it can’t be working in the LMS, I can click and go to Google and do all those things I would want to do. So, there literally is I’m not sure this is working. The other thing we’ve experienced, regardless of being hardwired or on WiFi, is when you click to submit, there is a delay. When you click to access, there’s a slight delay. And so when I’m presenting on this, I say something like this, “Remember, it’s magic. And sometimes it takes a second or two for the magic to work. So we’re all going to cross our fingers.” And by then it’s loaded. I think it is just the crossover between the LMS and Google world that’s happening, and all the scripting behind it. So that’s the one piece, because with some of our click happy people, it may not feel as fluent as they want it to be. The other thing we’re running into is students are reporting that they can’t see where to click to submit. So right now, there are very few examples of Google assignments, the standalone version out there. As far as demo videos, most of them are how this works in Google Classroom. So if you’re trying to use a ready made demo video, rather than creating your own, there are not many instances of it. I think the problem is that people don’t have their viewing window wide enough or deep enough and they’re just missing the bottom of the screen and they’re looking for a place to submit. It uses an iconic blue button to submit but then it also resorts, and we’ve all seen this in Google, that little blue link button, and you have to click twice: the blue button and then the blue link. So I think those are things that probably they’ll fix as time goes on. I think they’re getting used to this not living in classroom, because that doesn’t exist in classroom. So those are the two things that we’ve seen so far.

Rebecca: It sounds like some of the same problems that students may already face using an LMS across screen sizes, because they’re not fully responsive in terms of design in working in different browser window sizes. That’s a problem that I think students face regularly on different screen sizes with our LMSs. I face it as an instructor in Blackboard all the time, where I have multiple screens open. So I have one that I’m grading kind of narrow and I also can’t find the submit button because I have to scroll to get to it.

Kathleen: Now, I don’t think those are horrible things to deal with. And I also think those are good things for users to learn. Because this is not the only time they’re going to run into it, as you point out. So I don’t mind getting through those hurdles. The other hurdle is this. I don’t know about your campus, but ours, even though we’ve been at Google campus since way back when, getting help from our ITS folks, as wonderful as they are getting help on the Google side, especially on something as new as this tool… not there. So the students end up asking the instructor, which I think is great, because our early adopters are hitting on it, are playing with it, whatever. But a more naive instructor may assume that students can get the help that they need, not just about this app, but plenty of the Google stuff. There’s help at Google. But because it’s pretty new, not the depth and breadth of help that would exist, will exist probably, in just three months from now.

John: Several years back, I think it was about six or seven years ago, I was teaching a collaborative course with someone in Mexico where we had students from Oswego working with students from Mexico. And they were collaborating by using shared Google documents. And one of the things that the students universally at the end of the course said is that one thing I’m taking away from this is how easy it is to work with other people either synchronously or asynchronously when you have these shared documents. Could you talk a little bit about some of the ways in which Google facilitates collaborative work?

Kathleen: First of all, I have to admit, I never use the Google search tool. DuckDuck is my favorite, because I don’t have to worry about ads being generated based on what I search for. So I love everything else about Google, though. And that’s the primary thing, which is ease of collaboration, whether it is a small group, a larger group, or just the student and me. I’ll give you a couple of examples. So with our freshmen, I was involved in the relaunch of our freshman seminar until we grew it enough so that it would be embedded in all the majors. And most of the students came in and said: “Yay, we’re Google.”

Kathleen: I think they really thought the search engine, and some of them had used Google d ocs before, but primarily, for example, to do their senior paper. So they could go back, it was automatically saved. They knew those features. They didn’t know a lot of the other features, including looking at feedback, using the feedback, and making changes in their work, whether the feedback came from a friend, someone in a study group, or their instructor. So what I often try to do is tease students into the value of using that input within slides, within a Google Doc, for the greater good… for either the good of the group or the good of their own selves or to earn the grade they want. So, from an academic perspective, having something where you get a chance to basically brainstorm live with other people doing something is very cool within the safety of a zone. So I was never a basketball player, I was always a manager. The joy of zone defense is that we have a canvas, and we have a canvas that is going to automatically capture all of the things that we think about. When you think about Google that way, for me, it opens up the world beyond “what do we just say in this last two little seconds that just evaporated into thin air?” So I can capture a whole lot of things in a Google something that is our joint work, including chat, including commenting, including live edits, if that makes sense and if I’ve given people permission to do it. So I usually started with the freshmen using Google Slides, because the zone is very limited. Everybody gets a slide, or three slides. But they’re there’s until we say, “Okay, now, we want you to go in and look at the next person’s which is the next slide, and use the commenting tool to plus them or to ask them where they got that image or whatever.” So teaching them some reasonable conventions around academic collaboration and sharing made so much sense within the Google environment because it was kind of controlled, and it was within a zone. And the way that we did that is by having them build their own memes. And that’s a feature that I wanted to talk with you about as well, because Google has changed their mindset about how the Explore tool which is a built-in find it and use it kind of research tool within Google. When I search for an image within a Google slide, right within the slide, and I bring it into the slide, my choices of images will only be Creative Commons licensed images, images that are licensed for some level of reuse. For me, this is a way to ease in, to scaffold students into, some very complex digital literacy concerns that I want them to get acquainted with, but not become masterful at initially. So I said, “So freshman year, we need to build some memes for next year’s class: ‘How do you survive freshman year? What’s the first-year student gonna do?’” Well, the first thing they did, 99% of them was leave the slide deck, go out to the big world of Google search, bring in images of athletes that were licensed, of the minions which are licensed, of Disney which are licensed and they put them in there. And I thought this is exactly what I wanted to happen. They didn’t follow directions. That was okay. So the prompt for their peers was to go in to their friend’s slide and ask them: “Where did you get this image? And can you make sure you put the link to it in the speaker notes underneath the canvas of the slide?” And then we darkened our screens, and we talked about it. I said, “Where did everybody find it?” Well, they googled, you know, blah, blah, blah… Well, hmmm… let’s pull up some of them. So, give me one. And I would say, “Oh, quick close the door, because the Disney cops may come and get us. What are we going to do with this one? Mickey Mouse? Minnie Mouse? I love them to death. These are licensed images, you have to pay to use them. Alright, give me another one.” I did a few together. And I said, let’s go back to the drawing board and take a look at what you found and talk to each other. Where did you get them? Now let’s try another way. So let’s go in, insert the image from within the slide deck. Now go to your friend, show them what you did, go to the image itself and let’s take a look at the license. Now most of my students were like this: “Why are you doing this to us” initially? Three weeks later, we have some new people join our class. And I said the main thing, “Can you help our new students understand how you got that license and confidence that the Disney cops or the whatever cops aren’t gonna come and get you and we are being good digital citizens. And we did it by putting our heads together, collaborating. They were like this, “You won’t believe what we did.” They explained it. Now, the first hit on it was very, very, very problematic. Because they had always done that. They always just searched in Google. So I was trying to capitalize on the Google tools, which is feedback within the slide deck. And also ways to then go back and use that feedback and say, “Oh, I did it. Now I can resolve it.” That practice of using the feedback to inform your practice and then get rid of the prompt but I know I can open it up again. So for me that’s a learning process. So that’s an example of using the slides where the canvas is limited, but the potential is great. So it doesn’t have to be a picture. And lots of times I asked students to build things using, for example, Google Slides to create content that the course then uses. So they end up with a joint product that they’ve each contributed to. But they each get authorship, ‘cause I make sure that they put their names and then I will often ask, “Let’s look at the licenses, which license do you want to pick for our products? Do you want to pick one that people can use this and change it, use it just period, use it and make money off of it?” “Oh, no they shouldn’t make money.” But that kind of process where they build together and then we use it for a purpose is so easy with some of the Google tools.

Rebecca: I love that you’ve described this iterative process of learning how to give and receive feedback and use the different collaborative tools in Google because I think we tend to just assume that our colleagues and our students know how to collaborate with us in these digital environments. But we often need to introduce how and that there are different ways: you can use the suggest mode, you can use the comment tool, you can type right in. So I love that you have such clear boundaries and scaffold them through that process. I found the same thing to be really important in the work that I’ve done with my students, and copyright… it’s so important in the design world, in what I’m doing, so we do some very similar kinds of exercises, thinking about this copyright piece of it too.

Kathleen: And the live chat piece can be very helpful. A lot of students will say, “I don’t really want to come to your office hours, but can you visit me in my doc? Can you take a look at my doc?” And I’ll say, “Absolutely. Want to join me there during office hours?” Well, they’re not attending office hours, they’re in their doc. So we go in, and I will do commenting for different purpose. But I’ll open up the chat stream, which they’re of course way familiar with. I’m almost 70. They’re totally into chat, not necessarily with their instructor. So I’ve had some interesting conversations within docs and within slide decks, sometimes I’ll be in there and I’ll be chatting and somebody will say, “Can you believe all the hard work we have to do in this class?” And another student will say, “Hey, Gradlel’s here.” [LAUGHTER] It’s kind of interesting to use the things for the purpose that you want them to be used at that time.

John: One of the things I’ve been doing with group work in synchronous classes is I’ve been sending them to breakout rooms, and creating a Google slide deck and assigning them to create something, often something different on each slide for each group. But the nice thing about it is, while they’re in the breakout rooms, I can have the slides open with a panel on the side, and I can see which groups are working and which groups aren’t. And then I can choose to go visit them just to check to see how it’s going. And sometimes they’re talking about something entirely different. Sometimes they’re actively discussing it and just haven’t put anything down yet. But it’s a nice way of monitoring what’s happening in the breakout rooms in real time, especially for things that might take a little bit longer. And that’s another really nice feature about doing this in a synchronous online class.

Kathleen: That’s a really good example. And I bet, John, you do this before you start something as serious as that, is make sure the introduce that practice in a lesser valence activity, I find that the middle school person in all of us comes out, when we’re first acquainted with the thing, like I’m going to go in and change the font to all pink on your slide and see what you do. So I’ve seen a lot of that. So that zone defense conventions or whatever is important to get them underway with it. I think your example is a great one, starting things out synchronously, and then building on it asynchronously where you can actually capitalize on individual contributions, as well as group contributions is an important thing for them to learn using the tools. So respecting who’s done what, when, where that thing is in the learning curve, and where my contribution is, and taking ownership of making it the best it can be, taking feedback to fix it or whatever. So, I think that is a great example.

Rebecca: I think one of the things related to that, Kathleen, that I’ve shared with students that they’ve been amazed by is that you can see the history of a document. They just have no idea. How did you magically know that I was the one that did X? [LAUGHTER]

Kathleen: Right.

Rebecca: So you know, you can capitalize on the magic of that initially to just know who’s doing what, but just so that they can see especially if they’re collaborating in a small group, they can see what’s happened since last time they were in the document can be really helpful.

Kathleen: We have, in education, we have a literacy technology class, which is kind of laughable because that should be embedded in every class, but I teach it. They will be in small groups to do certain products. And I point out the ways that I will know and they will know how they have met the accountabilities by both the setup of the Google doc where I asked people to do a visible initial for some of their contributions and I show them the revision history and I also ask them to do constructive peer reviews of different sections. So we have the comment stream working. And so all those things, when you think about it, can fit so well into that learning cycle that we often have difficulty capturing when we’re not in a tool like a Google doc. So all of those things, I think it’s so important for them to learn that there are things that are going to help them work with other people, be responsible, and end up with a product that they can share of theirs and/or others, and then correctly attribute the work. So I think it’s that “got to do it 21 times until you get kind of good at it.” So we have a lot of opportunity in a regular length semester to do that, using various tools. The other thing that happens with at least my students is they think it is just tool specific. And that is what is a really nice feature of a lot of our Google stuff is the actions are very similar across the different things. So across sheets, across slides, across docs, the basic actions, commenting, making copies of, and finding out who did what, those are all the same kinds of things, even though they look different.

Rebecca: in my classes this semester… and I did this last semester, too… I invited students to use the comment tool on my syllabus, which I provided as a Google doc. And that was really interesting. And I encouraged them to ask questions about things on the syllabus or indicate things that they were excited about. And there was a healthy mix of both. I told them that they had to make a comment. So it was a healthy mix of students making positive comments about things they were excited about, as well as asking rich questions by requiring them to make a comment of some sort. If they didn’t have a question, they had to provide something. And what’s been really interesting is that they seem to think that that’s still an open invitation, which is great, I’m still engaging, I get the notifications, little questions come up about assignments, as things become more relevant to them as the semester has been going on, which has been really interesting to continuing to have a conversation about the course. But that was one way that I introduced commenting as a way of using this collaborative environment from day one. And it’s worked really well.

Kathleen: And it also showed the value of joint thinking around something that kind of looked like a finished product. Because our syllabi did look pretty finished. I think that piece too is kind of underneath the surface and showed how brave you were too, Rebecca. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Well, I also know that, since the pandemic, I’m even more aware of how quickly things can shift and change. But in the kinds of classes that I teach, I tend to be really responsive to where students are at. And so what’s on the schedule may very well change. And so I just keep it up to date. And I use the syllabus as the place to do that. So everyone has a complete copy of what we’re doing. So it is something that’s regularly revised, at least parts of it.

John: I know a number of our faculty have moved to a liquid syllabus approach where they’re creating a website and letting students know that it will be revised based on circumstances and based on how things are going, where they’re asking students regularly for feedback. And certainly putting it in a Google doc is a good way of doing that.

Rebecca: My advanced students this semester, through our brainstorm process. decided they were all going to work together on a project. And so that really kind of threw some things in my syllabus out the window, because the structure I had in place wasn’t gonna work for that. I was open to their idea. So now we’ve had to go in and edit and adjust as a result of their proposal. But I think it’ll be a really exciting opportunity for those students.

Kathleen: One group of honors students a couple of years ago… and our Honors Program is across years. So I had freshmen all the way to seniors. And I asked them to construct the syllabus. And there were 15 students in the class… 15, 17… something like that. And I just set them at it, because we were going to use a project-based learning approach anyhow in the course. And I wanted an assessment of what our baseline was. Thank goodness for Google docs. However, what they did is they created their own, they divided into little groups on their own, then they created separate Google docs, and then had this problem of how do we merge them. And I was very, very happy to see them using Google docs in their small groups so efficiently. And it gave great context, as we got to the point of how do we make this into one, not only by building consensus, but also creating a joint product that now is that five armed tree octopus. How do we do that? So it was perfect. It was a whole course on digital literacy and digital growth, so it was a perfect baseline. And we couldn’t have done it without Google. There’s one other kind of hint or maybe pandemic smart suggestion related to Google, and I’m not sure that this is possible on all campuses… I know it’s possible within your own private instance of Google… is turning offline mode on. Notice I said that slowly so I didn’t trip over all the words. Having the ability to work on a doc that sits on my stream on my home computer and then sync back to drive as soon as I log back on, I have found to be a very powerful solution given just people’s reality of being able to access and fight for bandwidth at home and wherever they are. Our campus took a long time to turn that on.

John: I actually don’t know if it’s available here, because I have it turned on on my personal account. And I’m prevented from doing it on the other, I think it may be turned off at our campus, I’m not positive,

Rebecca: I have it turned on on my app. But I don’t know if that’s different for my campus account

Kathleen: Before we started the actual podcast where we’re talking about some of the challenges with respect to Google on our higher ed campuses. And that would be one is taking a feature that has a whole lot of potential functionality, and convincing whoever it is you need to convince on your campus that that needs to be toggled on, and the rationale for it. I think it took a very, very long time. And then when they turned it on, they didn’t tell anyone.

Rebecca: Well, the big rationale there is the word equity.

Kathleen: Yeah. and then, thankfully, they had done it before the pandemic hit. And the reason I’m saying thankfully, is because there was a sufficient, let’s call it herd mentality, not herd immunity, herd mentality, so the people could help each other in the absence of direct support from an already overstretched IT department. So the more we have little worker bees around able to do things and help each other, I think the better off we are. So, there were enough people that had turned certain things on, not turned other things on, and their fear, rightly so, is that the floodgates would open and the individual user wouldn’t know to not do that, and then have everything on their local drive rather than up in Google. So that’s a piece, though, that I have found to be very helpful, especially when I get students in our area. Well, you’re remote, too, you’ve a lot of rural areas. We have folks that literally have very limited stable internet access. So let’s recognize that, and then it doesn’t mean that you can’t still work, you can’t do certain things, but you can resync when you get back on.

John: And whether that’s enabled on your campus or not, you do have that option with mobile devices, and many of our students are working with mobile devices. I used to use that when I was traveling. And I might not have network access if I was on a plane or if I was on a train, or just in a place where there was a dead zone, and it’s really convenient. We’ve talked a little bit about using Google slides and Google docs. But one tool that both Rebecca and I use quite a bit is Google forms. One of the nice things I like about forms is when you’re having students submit a variety of things, they automatically get stored in a folder, and you can share the spreadsheet created back with the whole class, so they all have access to the work of the rest of the class in a really convenient format, without ending ability. Could you talk a little bit about some of the ways in which Google forms might be used effectively?

Kathleen: Well, I like your idea, especially when people are doing independent or small group projects that are housed in Google. Actually, they could be housed anywhere, let’s pretend they were doing padlets or anything else that generated a url. Just by collecting those through a Google form, the work is done for you. It’s done for them. As soon as they submit, it’s done for you. And then you have your master spreadsheet, which you can then easily adapt. So you can either share the whole thing with them to view or filter certain data out of the spreadsheet or make instances of it so that different groups can use different things. Again, have in mind, what do you want to end up with, and what level of access do you want students to have. So if anyone wants to collect joint data on anything, don’t share the spreadsheet with more than two people that you trust.

John: Specifically, the way I used it was I have students doing a podcast project and they submit their audio file, they submit a transcript, they submit an abstract. And also they answer a question about whether they want it posted publicly or not. So all the podcasts are shared within the class, but only some of them make it out into the rest of the world. And it’s their choice. And sometimes students will have multiple submissions, because they may have a few drafts with feedback. And I’ll just delete any first drafts of that and then make a copy of the spreadsheet and share that with the whole class, where that way they can get all that information from all the students either on individual pages or in just the spreadsheet itself.

Kathleen: Right. So the more complex the contribution, the more forms is a tool of choice. I also use it as a hook. So we think of forms as a survey tool. It actually has a quiz function built into it now. Originally, it didn’t. On a broader scale, though, just finding out what people know before they step into new content can help them get grounded: “Oh, I’m not the only one who does or doesn’t know this stuff or has done this stuff before” So, it can ground them. Most essentially, for us as instructors. It can drive what we end up doing the next class or for the final assignment or whatever. Ad I also think that we need lots of opportunities for students to take a look at what are the data telling us, regardless of whatever topic it is. So I will often create a Google form where they, at the beginning of a synchronous class, or even before coming to class, or in an online class or remote class that may tease into “what’s your experience with this? And what’s your favorite thing, or whatever the thing is.” And I usually start with easy things like “what’s your favorite app, and why?” Because they always want to tell, and then it’s the data are all collected automatically. And in Google forms, I don’t even have to go to the spreadsheet, the beautiful charts are automatically created. So I can actually, without anything, just click, show them, or I can share it so they can see, especially if I have made sure to not ask for students’ names. And we can use that as a pivot to what we’re going to do next. So that piece in that learning cycle… before, during, after… it’s perfect for things like muddiest point, like “What was the thing that was most confusing about this class?” Instead of having just a conversation, even though we may have a conversation, that’d be something visual that people can look at and say, “Wow, most people’s said the most confusing thing were my directions. Let me work on that. What would have helped?” I think there’s also this thing of, we’re asking people to put skin in the game. And that’s part of my whole mindset, I want you to put skin in the game during… I will too. I’m also going to listen to you. And here is an example of how I’m going to do it. So forms has been my favorite tool for that purpose. I’m also showing them they can use it in different ways, not just as a quiz, not just as a collector, but also as a way to gather information and then use the information for certain things. Do I have students create quizzes using Google forms? Yes, I do. If they’re going to build content, they’re going to want to know what their content users think of it, or what they learned from it. So instead of going to an external tool, I will usually drive them right back to Google to do it. Google forms is one of my favorite go-tos. And most students have used it.

Rebecca: I’ve used it a lot for self assessment, as well, for students, there’s a lot of great opportunity for scales and things like that, as they’re looking at their own work. Or in my advanced classes, where we run more like a design studio, I have them do like little performance reviews at different points of the semester to kind of mimic what the professional world might be like. And that’s worked really well. It gives me a great way of seeing where everybody’s at all at once at a quick glance, I can have one-on-one meetings with students. They also have like a little checklist of things to be paying attention to. So it works on a lot of different levels. So I found that to be really particularly useful. We use it for accessibility purposes for the work that our students design with a little checklist and going through and checking each thing and marking whether or not it passes certain tests as a self check before they submit their work.

Kathleen: That’s very nice. For my online classes, I use a holistic rubric. And I just use a scale function in Google forms. That is the last thing they do at the end of the module, they self assess on our five criteria that I use across every single module. And I ask them to point out the things that they think they really did well on, the things that they ran into as problems, and how they tried to address those problems. Then I use that information when I give them feedback. I also want them to get in that process like you… self reflection, we’re gonna live and die by it as we go forward. So again, that practice, and your right, forms is the way to do it.

John: And you mentioned the muddiest point, I often will use that generally as some sort of an exit ticket at the end of the class. But, a nice thing about using that is, if you teach a large class, as I used to a decade or so ago before the pandemic began, where I didn’t want to get students turning in three or four hundred sheets of paper for me to scan through, you can just put up the form with a QR code on the screen or a bitly, a short URL that they can type in, they can do it right from their mobile device. And it just takes a couple minutes. And you can quickly scan through the spreadsheet just to see what sort of patterns there are. And you can then address that the next time the class meets and it allows you to scale that technique to a larger level without putting a lot more work on yourself or on the students.

Kathleen: Thanks for mentioning QR codes. The first time that I put a QR code on a slide deck for my freshmen students, they didn’t know and I said you have seen these on bananas and ketchup bottles and other stuff like that and on billboards and whatever. But we never saw it on anything for school. And all they wanted to do is get their phone out. And here’s a slide deck in front of them. But I loved it because as soon as it’s in their device, they have it. So I usually, even though that url is there, it was way cooler to just scan the QR code. And sometimes I would go to slide two, and they wouldn’t see the QR code. “We didn’t get the code.” “Okay, now this happens to also be in our LMS” …and I loved it because if they’re flipping through that slide deck while we’re using it in class… if I told you to do it, you wouldn’t. Thank you for doing it. The lure of the QR code, right?

Rebecca: Do you have any other Google favorites that you want to share before we wrap up today?

Kathleen: Just a couple of teasers. People don’t think about these. But some students say to me, the only way I learn well is by YouTube. Well, thank you. I’m on YouTube. So here we go, haha. And you’re going to be on YouTube in this class, too. But one of the things that I encourage students to do is build their own playlist of things. And lots of times that feature they use all the time, but they don’t use it for their academic work. So I actually ask them to build playlists about certain things for each other to use online for survival, your best way to get through a tough book. What are your best study skills? And then in content areas, when they’re doing specific things related to their major, I ask them to find, rate and vett pre-existing videos and put them into playlists, and then do an infomercial that tells people why this list of videos makes sense. So I asked him to use pre- existing content, but get better at using it and vetting against things like duration, captioning, and transcripts that don’t have a lot of errors and then stuff like that. So, trying to get them to use a tool that they say they like an awful lot. I use playlists as well. And of course, have playlists that are built into the courses. But I really want them to do though, is build their own because that shows that they’re actually using stuff that they would normally use anyhow, but putting it into more of a package of purposeful use, and then share, share with each other. So another collaboration, I think the other couple of things that are underused…alerts, Google scholar alerts, and alerts, when at the beginning of a semester, if I know that they’re going to have a long-term project, let’s generate keywords. Right off the bat, I want you to read a couple things, generate some keywords, and I want you to create a Google scholar alert for yourself for these things. If you do it today, I promise you, unless it’s something really obscure, you will get some things coming to your email box that will help you as you move ahead. Again, it’s not to become a master at it, they’re going to need to do that over time in order to be effective. But I think it’s way different than kind of the scatter approach to let me search in Google and look at the five like… ‘cause I know you’re only going to look at the first five things anyhow. So at least now you’re going to get some regular stuff in that are key things that are key to your interests or your priorities. I also have used and asked you this to use the custom Google search engine. Most students do not understand that that little search bar everywhere is a custom Google search tool. So when they are creating content, I ask them to create often, not often in a class, but at least in every course, as they share content, I asked them to create a custom Google search tool for their users. And they’re in awe that they’ve created their own little search bar. And it has in it only the things that they put into it. And I use this as an example of how they need to be very careful, because think about the very few things that you’re allowing people to search and get results from in your custom Google search. Does that say anything to you about what happens when you use Google? What’s happening to what not being exposed to you? What is happening to what’s being exposed to you? This constant reminder about data and tools, data and tools. And for elementary teachers in particular, who are working on differentiating content for students with very differing ability and skill levels, that’s been a really functional thing. So I asked them to do a lot of background work to do good selection of resources. And then when they tailor the stuff for their students, for example, using the custom Google search engine helps them kind of put a icing on top of the cupcake. So, that’s been kind of interesting. And I think the other piece is Google Maps and Google are underutilized. And on our campus block, despite all kinds of reminders that we do have several GIS courses and we have other courses that would use Google Earth and Google Maps within our Fredonia identity, if we have those available. So people that are committed to using those tools actually go back to their personal, which is not what our campuses want to encourage. So I think that we have a long way to go in the Google world to advocate for tools that are functional and explain that functionality to the people that are making decisions.

John: One other tool that I know we’ve talked about before that you’ve used is Google jamboard. Could you talk a little bit about how you’ve used that?

Kathleen: I’m going to say 10 years ago, I scrambled around I was like, “Where can I find a flexible, viable online whiteboard that doesn’t make me sign in and pay at least something or that will allow lots of users or that has a limited number of tools so the learning curve is short. And now we have it. So Google jamboard, not the one you pay $5,000 for that sits in a room, not that jamboard. But the Google doc version basically, is a wonderful addition to the suite. So jamboard is a Google Doc that facilitates typical online whiteboard functions. But otherwise, pretty much acts like a Google Doc, I can share it, I can unshare it, I can share it to individuals or groups of users. I can capitalise on the functionality of the device because of the app that works. on that device. The mobile app of jamboard is slightly different, and really cool than the desktop version, or the one that would run on your computer. Similarly, on Chromebooks, there’s a slight difference, because it’s paying attention to the device that it’s on. So, for example, writing is often difficult depending on the type of math you have, and if you don’t have a stylus. So on the mobile version, there’s an option to choose to convert your scribbles to text and it will automatically convert your entry to a readable text version. So, there’s some really nice device specific nuances that you don’t often see with a tool like this. So what’s also neat… easy to duplicate, easy to export. And for people that really want to have custom, not just the blank whiteboard, you can either use templates that are readily available as backgrounds, you can easily create your own background, bring it in, and then that serves as the frame for people to contribute to. Otherwise it works pretty much like any kind of regular online whiteboard. There’s sticky notes, there’s doodling tools, there’s writing tools, not a lot of colors, but enough to play with. John, you mentioned breakout rooms… perfect solution for some of our breakout rooms for our synchronous meetings, because you can easily click to duplicate right within that one jamboard. If you have five breakout rooms, dup, dup dup dup, and then you say you’re in jamboard one, you’re in jamboard two, breakout room three has number three, and everyone has access to them, you can then click to turn off editing, and then use it as a piece for people to talk about on and on. They can’t use a commenting function per se, but you can build it into the instructional flow. So it can be as great as brainstorming, or it can be as structured as the old four corners activity that we do in cooperative learning, like go to corner one if you are a high end user, go to corner for if this is a brand new thing to you. So you can do that with sticky notes and other things in a structured kind of way, or you can have people generate concept maps or move things around or have it so that the range of generation to addition, like generating from scratch or adding to, or subtracting from, is very easily done. And without a lot of time commitment on your part. I encourage people to try it. Don’t overuse it, just like any tool. Like “Oh no, we have to get creative here.” We don’t want that kind of a response, right? Again, though, a great way to capture the ideas, then that URL is shareable in any way. Also, you can capture everything, bring it down as a image file or as a PDF and use it in other ways. So I’ve used, for example, a jamboard… I call it a stream, but a jamboard frame and started one-on-one instance one meeting, and then we can come back to it on the second meeting. See where we were in our thinking, for example, at the end of the last frame, somebody’s points for that. I actually use that four corners thing a lot in jamboard, use that as a reference point as we move into the next class activity or the next meeting. I’ve done it with faculty and faculty development, they think it’s really cool. And they want to play an awful lot, which I don’t mind because it is pretty engaging…and another way to collaborate, very different than the typical text kind of contribution… which is a good way to trigger people whose brains don’t quite work in a text linear fashion.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for so many great ideas and a wide range of thinking about Google in the classroom in a way that maybe folks haven’t thought of before. We always wrap up by asking what’s next?

Kathleen: What’s next is trying to figure out what will happen to changing grades in a google assignment in the LMS gradebook. We’re experimenting with that, as far as the people that want to use a single thing and change the grade base. That’s a piece that we’re working on. And the other thing for me, at least, what’s next is following up with people that are doing some really great fun things with jamboard and trying to get a kind of informal community of learners around using that tool, because we have everything from biology to business [LAUGHTER] playing with it and I think those examples are going to really be important to hook other people in the disciplines that aren’t quite so much of early adopters. So for me, those are the two next steps.

John: Well, thank you. I’ve learned a lot from you over the years with all the workshops you’ve done at the SUNY Conference on Instruction and Technology, and just from other conversations and working with you on various committees and things.

Kathleen: Thank you. Both of you are excellent at this, and great ideas. Nice to talk.

Rebecca: Thanks for coming. We appreciate it.

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

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

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179. It’s Been a Year

Posted in access, accessibility, active learning, classroom community, covid-19, edtech, engagement, evidence-based practices, feedback, flipped class, grading, higher education, inclusion, inclusive pedagogy, instructional communication, learning, online learning, pedagogy, professional development, teaching
March 17, 2021

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

Show Notes

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

Transcript

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

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our teas today are:

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

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

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

John: Well, there was one other time…

Rebecca: Oh, when you dropped off equipment.

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

Rebecca: Are you drinking tea, John?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Yes, that meets once a week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: …or sometime ever… [LAUGHTER]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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